Cognitive Design

 Designing to change behavior is the toughest challenge in cognitive design. This is especially true when it comes to designing products, services and communications to change health-related behavior including following the doctor’s advice to manage diabetes and other chronic conditions.

 A new article in the LA Times,  A Health Message Listeners can Relate To,   describes the effectiveness of using soap-opera themed stories to achieve changes in health-related behaviors.

Stories convey important learning without having to work at it (low cognitive load). They are fun to repeat.  Soap operas are the best structure to use for many health applications  because they engage us in social learning or learning by observing (or hearing about) other people’s behavior. We are automatically programmed (or hardwired) to do this. This is why we ask leaders to be an example (model behaviors for employees) and your mom worries about who you hang out with (vicarious learning from your peer group).  Further, soap operas by design “super size” (without lapsing into a parody) human drama giving them hard, deep and potential lasting emotion impact.

Because they have low cognitive load, invoke the powerful force of social learning and have over-sized emotional and psychological content they can be powerful devices for changing behavior.