Cognitive Design

The PsyBlog has done a post outlining 10 key studies in social psychology all of which have immediate relevance to problems and challenges in cognitive design. Topics covered include:

1. Believing everything you read

2. Truth about self-deception

3. When rewards backfire

4. Groups fail to share

5. Thought suppression

6. The Chameleon effect

7. Other people’s expectations

8. Situations not personality

9. Gaps in self knowledge

10. Stereotypes

The post recaps each article and provides a link for further reading. You can even vote on your favorite.

The McKinsey Quarterly has an excellent article, Engage Consumers to Manage Healthcare Demand, that offers some insights for cognitive designers working on changing health-related behaviors.

The article looks at three approaches to changing behavior:

1. Education about health and preventative care
2. Encouraging increased role in selection of healthcare provider and services
3. Incentives and disincentive for health behavior change

Nothing new for readers of this blog. But they also point out:

* Effective education requires integrating information from multiple sources and customizing on the basis of an individual’s psychographic profile.

* Encouraging consumers to be more proactive about making choices about services and providers requires providing objective (third party) information on price, quality and availability

* Providing incentives must be targeted on behaviors that are open to incentives (not all are) and should be combined with support programs.

Such refinements reflect an increased understanding and willingness to meet the cognitive needs of the healthcare consumers.   We need another dose or 10 of that!

A major challenge in cognitive design is figuring out how to translate information into emotional impact. Designer Mathieu Lehanneur (see tab 36) offers one approach with his Age of World Jars:

Each ceramic jar is build from demographic data of nation starting with 99-year olds at the top of the jar and newborns at the very bottom. The shape of the jar reveals the demographic patterns of a specific nation or society.

Drake Bennett at the Boston Globe may be helping to popularize a key concept in cognitive design. In the article, Easy = True: How ‘cognitive fluency’ shapes what we believe, how we invest, and who will become the next supermodel, he reviews what has recently been learned about how cognitive load/fit strongly influences choice, perception, learning and other mental activities.

The key points made will be nothing new to readers of this blog. For example:

“Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names. Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process – even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it – can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities. Similar manipulations can get subjects to be more forgiving, more adventurous, and more open about their personal shortcomings.” 

My hope is that his journalistic reporting will help accelerate understanding and interest in the basics of cognitive design. Specifically, the concept of “cognitive fluency” may resonate much better than “cognitive load” or worse yet “cognitive ergonomics”. The New York Times has picked it up as an Idea of the Day.

What we see strongly determines how we think, feel and ultimately act. A common sense statement but when you understand the specifics you have a powerful tool for priming and influencing behavior change.

Take for example the research results in ScienceDaily on Play it Forward: Elevation Leads to Altruistic Behavior.  They demonstrate that if I see someone being helped it will cause me to feel elevation (a positive feeling of being uplifted) and that in turn causes me to help others.  To quote:

“The results of this second experiment were striking — the participants who viewed the uplifting TV clip spent almost twice as long helping the research assistant than participants who saw the neutral TV clip or the comedy clip, indicating that elevation may lead to helping behavior.” 

This suggests that cognitive designers able to create products, services, experiences or other artifacts that elevate, will produce not only a distinctly positive think-and-feel but will also trigger prosocial behaviors.

BusinessWeek has a special report on the value of design.   It covers a wide-range of topics including for example, designs importance for start-ups, the four basic roles design plays in value creation and even the role for design in curing our healthcare woes.   The concept of design used in the study is pretty conventional but it is worth a quick read if you are interested in a refresher on the business basics of design.

Ever wonder how people with 1000+ friends on Facebook, MySpace or some other social networking site manage it? Said another way (and I get this question frequently) from a cognitive standpoint, how many friends can we interact with meaningfully on a social networking site?

One answer, according to a recent post on Physorg Blog is approximately 150. The post draws on work that was done in the early 90s by Robin Dunbar:

 ”Dunbar reached the value of Dunbar’s number by studying a wide range of societies throughout history, including social circles from Neolithic and Roman times, to the modern office, and in non-human primates. The value of 150 is an approximation and there is no precise value, but Dunbar found that social groups larger than around this number tended to splinter.”

Research reported by FaceBook tends to support this number. Dunbar argues that this limit is imposed by the structure/function of our Neocortex.

One implication of this is that the current generation of social networking technology does little or nothing to amplify my capacity for managing relationships meaningfully. This presents a challenge to the cognitive designer:

How can the next generation of social networking software be designed from a cognitive standpoint to increase my social intelligence so that I can meaningfully manage 300 relationships?