Cognitive Design

I am often asked by clients and students, what can cognitive design do to help us with stereotypes? For example, consider the belief (and supporting mental models) that female drivers are way worse than male drivers.  Further, how can we differentiate harmful stereotypes from useful generalizations?

The first step, as is always the case in cognitive design, is to make sure we understand what cognitive psychology and neuroscience have to say on the matter.  Cognitive design starts with the best scientific model of the “workflow between the ears” that we can muster. Fortunately, there has been a lot of work on stereotypes lately. Take for instance the link that Gina Farag shared recently on Biases the Blind: The role of stereotypes in decision-making processes.  It is a treasure chest full of designable insights, including:

1. Memories are systematically dissorted over time to reinforce stereotypes. This gives them the full psychological power of true beliefs.

2. Susceptibility to stereotypes is a function of decision complexity, mood and energy level. That is, the cognitive load associated with trying to self-regulate stereotypes strongly determines how much harm they do.

This reinforces the follow-on steps in cognitive design namely, be sure to model the mental energy that goes into and comes out of the interaction and take the time to empirically develop a psychographic profile for your target group.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 11th, 2009 at 9:26 am and is filed under Cognitive Bias, Memory, Technique. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.