Cognitive Design

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.