Wishing Reveals Deep Cognitive Needs
Wishes reveal what we want to be true – something we long for or even covet but don’t really expect to happen. When we wish for something we think about it or even plan for it but don’t ever intend on taking action. Wishes are different cognitive creatures than beliefs, expectations, feelings, goals and wants. Designers sometimes miss that point.
Wishful thinking is a cognitive bias or logical fallacy that is driven by interpreting things as we want them to be rather than how they are. In its most naked form wishful thinking means wanting something to be true and therefore it is true. Catching people in acts of wishful thinking can provide interesting insights into their deepest cognitive needs.
Wishes, no matter how fanciful, can play a key role in how we think and feel and are therefore a useful tool for cognitive designers. This is true for children and adults.
Wishing is fundamental to how our minds work.
Many products, services and influential old sayings turn on a promise of wish fulfillment. For example, “I wish I could be a millionaire without having to work hard and take risks for many years” enter the lottery ticket. “I wish I could lose weight and feel better without increasing my activity and having to constantly watch what I eat” enter the fad diet. ”I wish I could fly an airplane without having to train and acquire a license” enter consumer-level flight simulator games. Or what about the Genie that will grant you three wishes?
Buy-ology a new book based on a recent multi-year $7M brain scanning study on the effectiveness of various marketing tactics puts some science to my point. It revealed that ads that “offer wish-fulfilment do the best”. This is no accident. For a feisty review of the book, and neuromarketing in general, check this blog post.
Making a wish come true can transform a life. Just visit the home page of Make-a-Wish Foundation and read some of the stories. Even enabling people to pretend a wish has come true can produce a powerful psychological effect as is evidenced through increasingly popular Adventure Travel and wildly popular massively multi-player online fantasy games.
Wishes have a very special mental energy signature. They take very little mental effort to make, generate energy (emotions and meaning) even if they don’t come true and can release a life-changing flood of energy if they do somehow come true.
Understanding what our customers and employees are actively wishing for is as important as understanding what metaphors, mental models, heuristics, symbols and stories shape their thinking and feeling. Wishing is a fundamental human expression and is therefore an essential input for many cognitive design tasks.
The question is how can you reliably and cost effectively discover what someone wishes?
