Cognitive Design

According to a recent study  by scientists at Yale and the University of Colorado, how we rate a stranger’s personality can be influenced by the temperature of a cup of coffee (or other beverage) we are holding. Warm coffee means I will tend to be trusting and see the person as warm. Ice or cold coffee has the opposite effect.

 The temperature of the coffee is priming my emotions, not too surprising given the embodied nature of cognition.   Now we know why warm cookies, heated car seats, hot cocoa and a warm glass of milk all seem to be more than physically comforting. 

This finding offers tentative guidance for the cognitive designer intent on creating artifacts that generate a sense of trust, emotional warmth and soothingness:

Heat them up!

Scientific American has an interesting interview with Neurologist Robert Burton about his new book, On Being Certain: Believing That You’re Right Even When You are Not.  

His basic claim is that for every thought conscious or not,  there is an automatic and independent assessment of the accuracy of that thought.

“Once we realize that the brain has very powerful inbuilt involuntary mechanisms for assessing unconscious cognitive activity, it is easy to see how it can send into consciousness a message that we know something that we can’t presently recall—the modest tip-of-the-tongue feeling. At the other end of the spectrum would be the profound “feeling of knowing” that accompanies unconsciously held beliefs—a major component of the unshakeable attachment to fundamentalist beliefs—both religious and otherwise—such as belief in UFOs or false memories.”

And this automatic assessment of our own thoughts can feel very good, powerfully so:

“Fortunately, the brain has provided us with a wide variety of subjective feelings of reward ranging from hunches, gut feelings, intuitions, suspicions that we are on the right track to a profound sense of certainty and utter conviction. And yes, these feelings are qualitatively as powerful as those involved in sex and gambling. One need only look at the self-satisfied smugness of a “know it all” to suspect that the feeling of certainty can approach the power of addiction.”

The design implications of this are strong.  

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