Cognitive Design

The mismanagement of cognitive dissonance is a root cause of many of our toughest problems in the workplace.  It has to do with what we think and do when confronted with two or more conflicting beliefs.  For example, we all make mistakes and therefore have to confront the conflict – I am a good person but I did a bad thing. And we get plenty of mixed signals – I should take more creative risks but I don’t think I will succeed.

Cognitive dissonance is especially powerful (makes us feel very uncomfortable) when the conflicting beliefs are about ourselves. To relieve the discomfort we may self justify or rationalize, for example making excuses for our bad behavior rather than owning up. This is a slippery slope and can lead to good people falling into unethical or unwanted behavior patterns.

As cognitive designer we need to be able to spot when cognitive dissonance sits at the root of organizational problems and then find productive ways to vent the discomfort associated with it.

The confessional is an excellent example of how religion has institutionalized one way of managing cognitive dissonance that appears to block the cycle of self justification.

The general idea is to promote takening healthy ownership of mistakes, giving people a constructive way to discharge the discomfort associated with cognitive dissonance and advocating apologizing as a virtue not a weakness. Figuring out how to do this is essential for a wide-range of workplace programs as diverse as ethics and innovation.

For background and practical insights into the nature of cognitive dissonance and self justification check out, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me).  Suggest you start here for a good 10 minute overview but if you are serious about cognitive design study the book.

Interested to hear from readers that have factored cognitive dissonance into the design of workplace improvements and employee development.

A large-scale longitudinal study by researchers at Ohio State University uncovered new findings in the psychology of money:

 ”… the more credit card and college loan debt held by young adults aged 18 to 27, the higher their self-esteem and the more they felt like they were in control of their lives.  The effect was strongest among those in the lowest economic class.”

Control and self esteem are deep and positive psychological states that create tremendous intangible value. By the debt clock it  looks like we have about a trillion dollars worth of it.

This study has strong implications for any cognitive designer working on finance-related applications.

Source: Student Loan Calculator

New York Times has an excellent article, Brain Calisthenics for Abstract Ideas, that describes successful application of perceptual learning to teaching K-12 math and science.

Our minds work best and learn automatically from rich sensory information. Perceptual learning  typically involves the modification of one or more of our five senses through practice to discriminate specific sounds, detect particular patterns, feel subtle changes in texture and so on. Perceptual learning is inductive learning and results from lots of exposure and practice. It can evolve into expertise such as music appreciation, wine tasting, judging the quality of fabric by touch and so on.

Our minds struggle with abstract ideas and concepts such as equations, fractions and the notion of truth.  Such things seems far from the rich sensory experience we are geared to process and are often taught in a top down fashion. Learn the abstract idea and then apply it to examples. Abstract learning is often deductive learning.

Ideally (at least from a cognitive design perspective), we would develop ways to teach and learn abstractions based on how our minds actually work best.  That is exactly what the NYT article reports. Here is one example for learning fractions:

“On the computer module, a fraction appeared as a block. The students used a “slicer” to cut that block into fractions and a “cloner” to copy those slices. They used these pieces to build a new block from the original one — for example, cutting a block that represented the fraction 4/3 into four equal slices, then making three more copies to produce a block that represented 7/3. The program immediately displayed an ‘X’ next to wrong answers and “Correct!” next to correct ones, then moved to the next problem. It automatically adjusted to each student’s ability, advancing slowly for some and quickly for others. The students worked with the modules individually, for 15- to 30-minute intervals during the spring term, until they could perform most of the fraction exercises correctly.”

By using the slicer and cloner to manipulate embodied fractions on the computer students engage in perceptual learning but end up understanding fractions as an abstract concept. They learn to perceive fractions not reason about them conceptually.

Students that used this method tested 3 times better than a control group and demonstrated retention over 5 months.

Care must be taken to design modules to stimulate our built in perceptual learning abilities (e.g. tuning perceptual abilities based on patterns in sensory experience) rather than just show random examples or visually illustrate the abstract concept.  A subtle difference and one that requires some skill in cognitive engineering and design.

The number one entrepreneurial opportunity in advanced countries around the world today is developing new services and experiences that produce lasting behavior change!

With rampant obesity, chronic illness, drug use, over spending, pollution, ethical lapses, wasteful energy use, poor educational outcomes and so on there is an unparalleled demand for solutions that produce positive and lasting behavior change for individuals and groups. The economic and social value associated with behavior change innovations easily swamps all the technology, life science and other sector innovation opportunities combined.

Behavior change innovations won’t come from computer programming, electrical engineering, physics or other atom-based sciences that have so successfully driven garage-based entrepreneurs. If they come from science it will be the neuron-based sciences such as cognitive psychology, behavioral science and neuroscience.  But we likely don’t need any new science, or perhaps no science at all, to develop the innovations necessary to make the lasting behavior changes we want.

Many ordinary people have successfully regained their behavioral balance – lost weight, learned to control their spending, take medications as prescribed, save energy and so on.  Not only can they positively influence behavior change in themselves but they guide similar changes in their family, friends, team members and sometimes communities.  They do this without making any grand scale changes to the healthcare system, environmental law or other institutions.  They work hard, learn from trial-and-error experience and persist until they find practical solutions for stopping, changing and avoiding behaviors.  Sometimes these solutions scale into new businesses that help millions of other people. The Weight Watchers and 12-step programs started this way.

Behavior change innovations are not born of technical or scientific work and built into businesses by entrepreneurs working in a garage. They come from folk psychological insights and learning from experience and are built into business by entrepreneurs working in their living room.

It is likely that ordinary people have already cracked the code on many of our toughest behavior change challenges.  They have reaped the rewards that millions of others need. It is tempting to think about doing  a study to figure out what makes them successful and design programs to replicate their practices. This has been done many times with limited success. It fails to work (as many best practice transfer programs do) because it leaves behind the mental models, tacit knowledge and hard won passion and pride that is so essential to producing the change. What we need to do is enable such folks to become living room entrepreneurs so that they can infect others with the energy and tacit learning that holds the key to lasting behavior change.

How can we foster living-room entrepreneurship to drive the behavior change service innovation we so urgently need?

Organizations and individuals around the world are interested in increasing their capacity to innovate. New methods for innovation (or innovating innovation) abound and include for example, translational science, open innovation marketplaces, design thinking applied to business, citizen science and new financing mechanisms such as crowdfunding.

Our interest in innovation is long standing. One can see that by looking at the impressive history of best selling books with innovation in the title and by doing a Google trend search on the word innovation.  Innovating is very much a cognitive design challenge. Our ability to do it turns on understanding and supporting the skills, mental models and deeply felt psychological needs of innovators. Interestingly, most studies of innovation, especially at the organizational level, fail to take that into account. So I am always our the look out for well researched exceptions.

Take for example, the outstanding book, The Innovator’s Way (MIT Press 2010).  The authors define innovation as the adoption of a value-creating practice by a community. They review and debunk many current models and propose an approach based on eight essential practices.  They derived these practices from a study of cases of innovation in a wide variety of contexts including technology, product, organizational and social. It is easy and instructive to compare your own personal approach to the eight practices.

What is best from a cognitive design standpoint is that they emphasize individual skills, attentional factors, and the key conversations and decisions that drive innovation in the trenches.

This offers a treasure trove of insights for the cognitive designer looking for ways to support and accelerate innovation.

There is a lot of attention on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics or STEM education in the US these days. Declining US student enrollment and performance in STEM disciplines spells a decline in the nation’s technology-oriented innovation capability.

Reversing these trends requires a heavy dose of cognitive engineering and design.

We need to modernize the infrastructure, pedagogy and practices used to teach and learn STEM. So I am also on the look out for new models based on insights into the cognition of learning STEM.

For example, Seed Magazine has a recent article highlighting Globaloria’s STEM Games competition. The idea is that students learn STEM by developing their own video games.   This is an example of a broader trend of infusing art and design into STEM education to make it more exciting and naturally enhance innovation skills.  Here is a snapshot:

“Participants have research various STEM topics, blog about what they’ve learned, work in teams, produce video presentations, draw paper prototypes, design sample screens and graphics for game demos, and program webgames that teach others about science issues or mathematics concepts.  This year, 411 students signed up for the competition, and the games they created illustrate the power of CS-STEAM learning. These students never programmed before. But this method of combining art and design with science and computer science generated impressive results.”

Learning by constructing a video game and competing in a contest, that is outstanding cognitive design.  Note too that the learning goes far beyond domain knowledge in a technical field to include teamwork (virtual and on site), writing, drawing, project management and social media skills. All good stuff for success in the 21st century.

We behave differently when being watched.  When watched most people will more consciously follow expected social norms.  This ranges from not littering and begin polite to working harder on a production line.  Now, according to research reported in the Scientific Amercian, this effect is induced when we are watched by eyes staring at us from a poster.  

“A group of scientists at Newcastle University, headed by Melissa Bateson and Daniel Nettle of the Center for Behavior and Evolution, conducted a field experiment demonstrating that merely hanging up posters of staring human eyes is enough to significantly change people’s behavior.” 

They put the posters in a cafeteria and found that they caused twice as many people to bus thier own trays and otherwise clean up after themselves.  This is a statistically significant effect with strong implications for designers.

Source of Image: Sky News

The Economist and the global innovation marketplace Innocentive, have teamed up to offer a $10,000 prize to anyone that develops a novel metric for measuring tends in Human Potential.

More specifically, the metric or index should measure how well a region or a country is able to unleash and leverage intellectual energy for social and economic progress.

One example is the Gross National Happiness metric. Your metric does not have to be fully developed but you need to be able to explain how to collect that data to calculate it.

 The deadline for entries in June 20th and the winner will have expenses paid to present at the Ideas Economy conference on Human Potential in September.

The web, social media, mobile apps and online worlds/games have created a small explosion of new communication forms with unique cognitive impact. Tweets, blog posts, short homemade videos, cell phone pics, text messages, tags (like, friend, stumble, vote, etc.), emoticons, animations and avatar interactions are just a the few examples.

In addition to creating new communication forms, the mobile social web takes older forms to new heights. Take for example, the listicle.  A combination of a list with an article or more precisely, an article written as a number list, is getting a big boost on the web.  To see them in action check out some of the entries on Listicles.com:

• 8 Actors that Bailed on Superhero Movies
• 4 Reasons You City Might Ban Plastic Bags

 Or Cracked:

• 6 Things from History that Everyone Pictures Incorrectly
• 5 Ridiculous Gun Myths Everyone Believes Thanks to the Movies 

These have 4-5 million views each. Well-written listicles have strong cognitive design. They offer cool information (unique, interesting or even shocking) that can be important to us or just plain fun. All in an easy to consume package. We like lists because they offer high content with low cognitive load. You get a lot of information for very little work. By starting each listicle with a number, we signal the reader’s brain exactly how much info and mental work is in play. Interestingly, many start with the number of 7 plus or minus 2, or the number of items we can hold in short term memory at any one time.

I am interested to hear from readers that use listicles in organizational change or workplace communication efforts.  Want to learn to write good listicles and make some money? Check out Cracked’s writer forum.