Cognitive Design

Check out Kelly McGonigal’s blog, Science of Willpower: Secretes for Self-Control without the Suffering. She is a mind-body psychologist and health educator at Standford. She teaches Psychology 205, a very popular course on the science of willpower.

Her blog is filled with posts that should be of interest to cognitive designers working on problems in self-regulation and behavior change. Take for example the post, New Research Roundup on Contributing Factors in Obesity. She looks at three factors including:

This article by Olivia Judson details several recent studies showing how the body shuts down when you sit down. Sit at a desk all day, or watch three hours of TV at night, and it doesn’t even matter if you squeeze in an hour of exercise. A full hour! Every day! It’s not enough to counter the metabolic disaster of being sedentary the rest of the day. That’s right, even people trying to do the right thing have the deck stacked against them.

This has clear and novel implications for anyone designing obesity management programs.

Research into what makes us happy and why has exploded over the last 10 year.  Books, conferences and even dedicated journals on happiness have been cranked out in ever increasing numbers.  It can be a little confusing. What do we really know about happiness? I have been careful on this blog to discuss only those results that have clear implications for design and are rooted in evidence.  After all, happiness is a major challenge for the cognitive designer.

PsychCentral recently reported on 5 Reliable Finding From Happiness Research. Although we have touch on them in other posts, it is an excellent summary highlighting:

1. Experience not things makes us happy

2. Relationships are the key to happiness

3. Once you reach a certain income level more money does not mean more happiness

4. Windfalls such as winning a lottery do NOT create lasting happiness

5. Half the factors that determine happiness are under your control.

Points 1 and 5  justify taking a cognitive design approach to happiness.  Points 2, 3 and 4 give general but important guidance to creating specific designs for happiness.

Many of the posts on this blog have to do with designing better solutions for healthcare. After all,  the delivery and consumption of healthcare is primarily a cognitive and behavior-change issue.   I was very happy to see the latest study from the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions. It is a survey of the activities, beliefs and needs of healthcare consumers from around the world, including the US. Although many of the results are contextual from a design standpoint, some do get to specific functional needs. For example, the summary of the 2009 study found:

* 7 in 10 say they would participate in a wellness program if they were given financial incentives, such as a reduced insurance premium or monetary reward

* 13 percent of consumers have visited a retail clinic this year and 30 percent said they would do so if it cost 50 percent or less than seeing a doctor in a doctor’s office

* 42 percent want access to an online personal health record connected to their doctor’s office

* 65 percent of consumers are interested in home monitoring devices that enable them to check their condition and send the results to their doctor

The study supports the conclusion that healthcare costs do change behaviors and consumers are willing to embrace innovations in self-care that meet their cognitive needs – personalization, control and convenience.

A major goal of cognitive design is to create artifacts that reliably cause a specific “think and feel” or mental state in the people that interact with them. The UK’s Design Council has taken on just such a task in trying to redesign the hospital environment to improve a patient’s sense of dignity. The program is bearing fruit including new designs for reclining day chairs, room screens, beds, gowns, washroom pods and other components.

My hope is to push behind these designs to understand if and how they modeled the cognition of dignity. In the meantime, you can follow the link above to videos on each of the results or just look at the photos on the next page.

(more…)

I recently found the Journal of Judgment and Decision Making.  Access to full content is free.  It covers many practical aspects of decision-making and provides designable insights. For example, in the new article, You Don’t Want to Know What You are Missing, the authors clearly demonstrate that when making a decision the more information we have about near-term benefits the less like we are to chose an alternative with the greatest long-term benefits. They put a sharper point to it:

“The present study reveals that, under the circumstances observed here, withholding information about local rewards from decision-makers can actually facilitate long-term optimal choice. “

Withholding information of course is just one option and might not be the best. Delaying it until longer-term options have been examined is an alternative.  No matter, this is just the type of insights cognitive designers seek and the journal appears to be full of them!

The cognitive science behind how and why consumers make the decisions they do has received a great deal of attention over the last 10 years.   Best selling book and several new fields such as neuromarketing and behavioral economics have emerged all of which hold important insights for cognitive designers.  If you have not folded these into your toolkit it is well worth the effort. I have found them useful not only to guide design for consumer decision-making but all manner of decision-making involving value.

For a quick introduction to some of the designable insights from behavioral economics, check out, A Marketer’s Guide to Behavioral Economics, written by Ned Welch in the McKinsey Quarterly.  Here are some of the key ideas:

 * Remove the viscerally pain in parting with money.The emotional pain caused by the thought of giving up something we value now, for some benefit in the future, even if it is a big benefit, is something we are not wired to do.  Ways to mitigate the pain of parting with money today include providng the option of delaying payment, categorize the payment in a more pleasant mental account (spare change, tax rebate or anything windfall-related) and use web/mobile phone based ways to make payment instant. 

* Use the power of default options to have the status quo bias work for you. Having employees opt-out rather than opt-in to a 401k plan or offering a base model with several premium features are typical examples. We tend to keep things as they are especially if it takes a lot of mental work to change them. 

* Avoid choice or other cognitive overloading. Too many decisions, too much to learn, too many open issues all mean I won’t decide to buy. 

* Make the choice to buy meaningful by properly positioning the product. If I can quickly and easily see the relative value of the article then buying it makes meaning for me.

In general, you want to be sure that the mental energy generated by making the decision is much greater than the mental work the consumer has to do to make it. Given a reasonable price and some need or want, tipping the balance of mental energy will make the sale every time!

The simple act of moving marbles up or down facilitates the recall and valence of emotional memories  or so claims a new paper, Motor Action and Emotional Memory in the journal Cognition. You can find a good overview of the work in this press release from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Test subjects were asked to push glass marbles up or down while recounting an autobiographical memory that was either positive (tell me about the last time your felt proud of yourself) or negative (describe when you last felt ashamed). Here is what they report:

  “When prompted to tell positive memories, participants began recounting their experiences faster during upward movements, but when prompted to tell negative memories, they responded faster during downward movements. Memory retrieval was most efficient when participants’ motions matched the spatial directions that metaphors in language associate with positive and negative emotions. “

The metaphors play a key role:

‘These data suggest that spatial metaphors for emotion aren’t just in language’, Casasanto says, ’linguistic metaphors correspond to mental metaphors, and activating the mental metaphor ‘good is up’ can cause us to think happier thoughts.’

It is not clear how strong these effects are, or if they will be reproduced by other experiments. No matter, small behaviors that may trigger big mental events are always of interest to cognitive designers.