July/August 2008 Atlantic Monthly
“Intrigued (and alarmed) by the new science of “neuromarketing,” our correspondent peers into his own brain via an MRI machine and learns what he really thinks about Jimmy Carter, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bruce Springsteen, and Edie Falco.”
When designing a behavior change program or product it is important to know what level of self-regulatory ability your target market has. How good are they at managing their own thoughts, emotions and behaviors when it comes to reaching a goal? In short, how much self-control do they have?
Self regulatory ability or strength is used when you try to avoid existing behaviors such as over eating, smoking, drinking, spending too much money or when you initiate new behaviors such as saving money, exercising or following a new safety procedure at work. There is a moment of truth when you either pass or fail in avoiding/initiating the old/new behavior. As designers we want to be sure that our artifacts don’t assume users have more self regulatory strength (self control) than they do. Such artifacts will lead to self-regulatory failures and agitate users. But how do we know what level of self regulation users are operating on?
A promising new tool, the Elaboration on Potential Outcomes (EPO) scale was published in the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. First introduced in a Ph.D thesis, by Gergana Yordanova, the scale uses 13-questions to determine a consumer’s tendency to reflect on and evaluate the potential outcomes of future actions. This in turn is correlated to their ability to self-regulate. This result may seem like common sense – people who think and care about future consequences will tend to have behavioral self control, but the EPO scale gives us a simple way to measure it in people and populations.
The questions are asked in three general categories, and quoted directly are:
“Generation/evaluation dimension:
1. Before I act I consider what I will gain or lose in the future as a result of my actions
2. I try to anticipate as many consequences of my actions as I can
3. Before I make a decision I consider all possible outcomes
4. I always try to assess how important the potential consequences of my decisions might be
5. I try hard to predict how likely different consequences are
6. Usually I carefully estimate the risk of various outcomes occurring
Positive outcome focus dimension:
7. I keep a positive attitude that things always turn out all right
8. I prefer to think about the good things that can happen rather than the bad
9. When thinking over my decisions I focus more on their positive end results
Negative outcome focus dimension:
10. I tend to think a lot about the negative outcomes that might occur as a result of my actions
11. I am often afraid that things might turn out badly
12. When thinking over my decisions I focus more on their negative end results
13. I often worry about what could go wrong as a result of my decisions”
Yes answers indicate higher EPO and a greater chance that the consumer will have self-regulatory success when faced with a choice.
The challenge is how can we as cognitive designers put the EPO scale to use to help make more effective change programs and products?
At the very least, it may be possible to factor in the 13-questions to any modeling we do to build a psychographic profile of the target group we are designing for.
Other blog post on EPO can be found as Look Before you Leap: new study examine self control on Science Daily and intellectual vanities.
