Cognitive Design

I hate math. Google that phrase and you will find a large number of groups, sites, books, articles, posts and images that celebrate the hatred of mathematics in the US.   The obvious cause of this is that we teach (or try to teach) a lot of math to many students in the US. It is required.  For most people math (or the way it is taught) does not fit how their minds naturally work. There is a strong mismatch between how we think and mathematical reasoning. Forcing it, in public, for a grade leads to negative and sometimes even traumatic experiences and ultimately anxiety.  Such anxiety is why we hate math.

Resolving math anxiety is definitely a cognitive design problem (one of the more important ones) so I am always on the look out for new scientific studies that provide designable insights into it.

Take for example the interesting post on the BrainBlogger, Female Teachers’ Math Anxiety Effects Female Students, that suggests math anxiety might be contagious. To quote:

 ”A new study done on elementary school children suggests that a female teacher’s attitude to mathematics affects the performance of her female students. In the study, the more anxious teachers were about math, the lower the math achievement of female students. Moreover, girls who believed in traditional gender ability beliefs such as “boys are good at math and girls are good at reading,” had significantly lower achievement in math at the end of the school year than girls who did not and boys overall. This relationship between the teachers math anxiety and students performance was absent at the beginning of the school year when teachers did not have ample time with the students to affect their performance. It was evident only at the end of the school year. Thus, teachers with high math anxiety specifically affect girls’ math achievement, by influencing girls’ gender-related beliefs about who is good at math.”

Given that females teach most of the elementary school math in the US this could be an important source of the problem.  As the author states later in the post “more care needs to be taken to develop positive math attitudes in these educators.” I agree. But exactly how do we do that? Can we leverage anxiety into empathy?

For the record, I do not hate math.

Our brain consumes 20-30% of our total energy (25% of glucose, 20% oxygen). It burns energy 10 times faster per unit of tissue than any other part of the body. Energy plays a big role in brain function and cognitive performance.   The makeup of this energy is complex. There is brain glucose, a number of neurotransmitters, adrenaline and more psychological components such as feeling of mental fatigue and the ability to do cognitive work.  As designers we need to be concerned with how the features and functions of an artifact impact all aspects of mental energy.  So I am always on the lookout for new scientific studies that provide insight into how to leverage mental energy with design.

A good example is recent work at the University of Pennsylvania, nicely summarized by EurekaAlert!, that provides some evidence against the glucose depletion theory of self-control. To quote:

“Kurzban’s new analysis is consistent with the neuroscience literature, which strongly implies that the marginal difference in glucose consumption by the brain from five minutes of performing a “self-control” task is unlikely in the extreme to be of any significant size. Further, research on exercise shows that burning calories through physical activity, which really does consume substantial amounts of glucose, in fact shows the reverse pattern from what the model would predict: People who have recently exercised and burned glucose are better, not worse, on the sorts of tasks used in the self-control literature.”

This means that designs aimed at boosting blood sugar levels to improve self-control may not work.   It also suggest that using activity or exercise may work (likely due to the production of mental energy via neurotransmitters or increased in self-efficacy and other psychological effects).  

In general this implies that cognitive designs need to go beyond the biological effects of sugar to emphasize the production of natural brain drugs (neurotransmitters) and mental states that correlated to the psychological ability to do mental work (e.g. meaning).

Be sure to consider the new study, Money Giveth and Money Taketh Away: The Dual Effect of Wealth on Happiness.   Key findings for cognitive designers include:

 -  A correlation between wealth (or just the thought of wealth) and the ability to savor experiences

-   The ability to savor predicts your degree of happiness

So wealth blunts our ability to savor and therefore undercuts the mechanism that is the source of most of our happiness.

Getting to the full article requires a subscription. If you don’t have one check out the recap of the study on the New Brain Blog.

Organizations are keen on creating and keeping trusting relationships with employees, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders.   Trust makes everything far easier.  Sometimes trust is damaged or lost so we need “trust recovery” processes. A good example is service recovery for customers that did not receive the appropriate experience. Psychological factors play the dominant role in trust. This means trust recovery processes are primarily a cognitive design challenge.

So I am always on the look out for new scientific insights into the nature of trust that could be useful for designers. For example, How Implicit Beliefs Influence Trust, from the Wharton School of Business offers several designable insights.

“After a trust violation, some people are quick to forgive, whereas others never trust again. In this report, we identify a key characteristic that moderates trust recovery: implicit beliefs of moral character. Individuals who believe that moral character can change over time (incremental beliefs) are more likely to trust their counterpart following an apology and trustworthy behavior than are individuals who believe that moral character cannot change (entity beliefs). We demonstrate that a simple but powerful message can induce either entity or incremental beliefs about moral character.

 Concerning the simple but powerful message:

“… targets who have incremental beliefs may be particularly receptive to trust-repair efforts that include a promise to change. In contrast, targets who have entity beliefs may be particularly receptive to trust-repair efforts that include denials or attempts to deflect blame.”

The bottom line – cognitive designers doing work in trust should include incremental/entity beliefs in any psychographic profile that is developed and tune the design accordingly.

The journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking is an excellent resource for cognitive designers working on Internet applications of all types. High quality and readable articles reveal many designable insights and loads of psychographic information.

You can sample a free issues in December 2009 and February 2010.  For examples of material relevant to cognitive design issues check out The Theory of Planned Behavior Applied to Young People’s Use of Social Networking Sites or The Attitudes, Feelings and Experiences of Online Gamers - A Qualitative Analysis.

Knowing how someone thinks about time tells you a lot about their cognitive needs, tendencies and biases. So I am always on the lookout for new insights into the psychology of time that might be useful for cognitive designers.

Earlier I blogged on The Time Paradox, a must read for all designers interested in understanding how clients think about time. The chart below offers a provocative hypothesis, namely there might be a best (most strongly correlated to happiness) time style.

                  [Image Source: Time Paradox Surveys] 

Your time style includes an orientation – past, present or future and an attitude – positive, negative, hopeful, fearful, etc. Past positive and past negative styles are just that. Present fatalistic focuses on the now and believes fate determines what happens in life. Present hedonistic focuses on now and is driven by the pleasure principle. The transcendental future style is focused on an unbounded future (death is a new beginning).  The red dots outline the authors position on the ideal time style. Do you agree?

Another interesting claim about the psychology of time was recently reported in a Research Digest Blog post, Doubt Cast on the Maxim that Time Goes Faster as You Get Older.  A couple of studies are quoted that look at the factors that drive our perception of how quickly time moves. Findings include, for example:

“Age accounted for four per cent of the variance in how quickly participants said the last ten years had passed and just one per cent of the perception of time’s speed in general. By contrast, how busy and rushed people reported feeling accounted for ten per cent of the variance in subjective speed of time. Consistent with this, women reported feeling more rushed than men, on average, and they perceived time to go by more quickly.”

Feeling rushed creates tremendous cognitive load and psychological stress. Understanding the objective and subjective factors that drive it is important for effective cognitive design.