Cognitive Design

The best communications and media turn on excellence in cognitive design. So I am always on the look out for scientifically grounded work on the psychology of advertising, marketing and new media.  One very useful source for designers is Media Effects. Also just read an announcement that a new version of  The Psychology of Entertainment Media has been released.

I am reviewing these materials and looking for others to include in my cognitive design class for the Summer of 2012 at Northwestern.   Interested to hear from readers that have good design-oriented references on the psychology of new media.

Emory university reports on a recent brain scanning study that reveals we are using different cognitive processes to make decisions involving sacred value versus those that involve cost-benefit logic. Sacred values run the deepest and involve as sense of self and culture as determined, for example,  by ethical principles, national identity or belief in God.

This is important for designer involved in creating behavior change. As the authors point out:

“Our findings indicate that it’s unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people’s behavior when it comes to their sacred personal values, because they are processed in an entirely different brain system than incentives.”

Sacred values require special handling.

The psychology of money has many twists and turns.  The nuances may seem academic to some but they are fundamentally important for those of us that design incentives and rewards, financial products or educational materials about money management. That’s why I am always on the look out for new scientific research into how we think about money and wealth.

For example, Psychological Research recently reported some interesting findings:

“People generally like assets and dislike debt, but they tend to focus more on one or the other depending on their net worth,” says Sussman.  “We find that if you have positive net worth, your attention is more likely to be drawn to debt, which stands out against the positive background.” On the other hand, “when things are bad, people find comfort in their assets, which get more attention.”

These findings contradict our normal assumptions and are strong enough to guide design decisions. For example, a person in debt may take out a loan to buy a consumer item when a person with net worth may forgo it.

TV devices are being reinvented. They are now internet connected and can run apps just like your phone or iPad. Furthermore, with on-board gestural interfaces, cameras and microphones, they can listen, see and to some degree understand. According to Wired, Smart TVs Abound at the recent international consumer electronics show.  The questions for cognitive designers is do smart TVs offer a new platform for applications or is it redundant?

In cognitive design we seek to discover deeply felt and unmet psychological needs and create experiences that satisfy them.   Learning to discover deeply felt psychological needs is not hard if you know where to look.

Spend some time watching individuals or groups as they make decisions. Often the process pushes deeply felt psychological needs out into the open.  For example, it is fairly easy to spot those that try to maximize a decision by searching for the best option from those that are satisficers or are happy with the first option that works.

Maximizers have a need for certainty, one that often cannot be met within the time and resource constraints of everyday life.  This can leave them dissatisfied with the choices they make.  After all, how can they know they really have uncovered and selected the best option?  This lack of satisfaction can have many side effects. It can lead to a lack of commitment (e.g buyer’s remorse), an attempt to re-open a decision and a lot of stress.

Research at Florida State University (FSU) further reveals the psychology of maximizers:

“Because maximizers want to be certain they have made the right choice,” the authors contend, “they are less likely to fully commit to a decision.” And most likely, they are less happy in their everyday lives.”

They point out that maximizers are likely to second guess themselves even after burning a lot of mental energy in search of the best option.

This creates a serious challenge for cognitive designers. What can we do to reshape the decision experience to increase the satisfaction and commitment of maximizers with the outcome?

The FSU researchers provide some insight when it comes to consumer choice:

“Maximizers get nervous when they see an ‘All Sales Are Final’ sign because it forces them to commit,…”

And it is not just about buying things. If you are trying to use a consensus-based decision model at work, you need the commitment of maximizers on your team.

What can we add to the decision experience that meets the psychological needs of those that seek certainty? It won’t be certainty and admonishments to “chill out” miss the point. What can we do?

Emotions play a huge role in how our minds work. They shape and sometimes determine how we learn, make decisions, solve problems, change behavior and interact with others.  Decoding emotions is critical step in cognitive design no matter what application you are working on.

Emotions are visible through actions, body-language (especially facial expressions) and words.  Learning to read emotions in people and animals is not only good cognitive design, it builds emotional intelligence.   A well-known observational technique plays off the assumption that our biology determines how our facial muscles react when we experience a basic emotion such as surprise, fear, joy, disgust, anger, contempt and sadness. I frown when sad, my eyes widened when surprised and so on.

Of course it is more complex than that. For a deeper dive, check out Humintell’s microexpression recognition training, especially the tab on The Science.

Over the years of use I have noticed individual differences in how emotions play out on faces, perhaps due to context or something more fundamental.  For instance, some people narrow their eyes when surprised or smile when angry. While I could never prove they were in a base emotional state and exhibited a facial expressions that conflicts with the standard view, my experience supported it.  And the closer I looked the more variation I found.

Now there is a small but growing body of scientific work that is focused on the variations in the facial expression of emotions.  A recent press release by the Association for Psychological Science highlights some of the work:

“Contrary to what many psychological scientists think, people do not all have the same set of biologically “basic” emotions, and those emotions are not automatically expressed on the faces of those around us, according to the author of a new article published in …”

The note goes on to claim:

“Some scientists have proposed that emotions regulate your physical response to a situation, but there’s no evidence, for example, that a certain emotion usually produces the same physical changes each time it is experienced, Barrett says. “There’s tremendous variety in what people do and what their bodies and faces do in anger or sadness or in fear,” she says. People do a lot of things when they’re angry. Sometimes they yell; sometimes they smile.”

The implications for cognitive design are clear.  General rules for decoding emotions from facial expressions are fine but they only go so far. In complex or high-risk situations the real value might be in the variations from those rules.

Source of Image:  Seven Basic Emotions

There has been a serious uptick in using cognitive psychology and neuroscience to improve  teaching and learning. The new field of educational neuroscience is burgeoning and has implications for practice.  For a good overview check out the latest edition of Mind, Brain and Education: Implications for Educators.  It is free online.

Be sure to read David Sousa’s commentary on the Impact of Educational Neuroscience on the Science of Teaching. It begins on page 37. He summarizes 13 key findings and their implications for how we educate. Cognitive designers will especially appreciate the findings on emotions, movement, working memory and the role of arts in stimulating learning and developing our brains.

After reading all the articles, it is clear that we have enough new science to reshape the practice of teaching and learning.

I am interested to hear from readers that are applying findings from neuroscience to change how they teach or otherwise facilitate learning.

Source of Image:  John Hopkins School of Education

The Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology offers world-class training for those interested in becoming designers, design thinkers and even design researchers and scholars. They just announced a new executive format for earning a Masters in Design Methods. Classes meet two weekends a month for 20 months for a total fee of approximately $51K.

“This program is for exceptional design, management, engineering, and other professionals who wish to acquire robust design methods and frameworks and apply design thinking to the development of products, communications, services, and systems.”

The idea is you can get world-class design thinking training and keep your day job. The program includes courses focused on cognitive design.  For example, The Brains Behavior and Design course draws on behavioral economics and cognitive science to equip designers with a toolkit for influencing consumer decision-making. You can download the toolkit for free.

Interested to hear from readers that are part of this program or other graduate training programs in design thinking that use the executive format.

The answer is yes according to a recent study, Time Discounting Predicts Creditworthiness. 471 subjects were tasked with deciding if they wanted a smaller immediate payment or a larger payment farther in the future. Subjects willing to wait for larger payments further in the future have credit or FICO scores that were on average 30 points higher than their less patient counter parts.

Your FICO score predicts how likely you are to pay a credit card bill, car loan, mortgage or repay any money your borrow.   This means how impatient we are shapes how we discount or value the future which in turn helps to determine how likely we are to default on a loan obligation.

While a 30 point difference (on average) is not a blow-out it is significant enough to change a credit decision.

This study helps emphasize the importance of understanding the psychology of impatience when we are designing financial, health and other future-discounted products and services.

Sometimes progress and success messes things up.   For example,  demand for a start-ups product or service grows so fast they cannot meet it. Quality slips and promised delivery dates are missed.  Or a successful company becomes complacent and arrogant because they dominate the market and starts making mistakes.

According to an interesting post by Dr. McGonigal on her Science of Willpower Blog, this can happen during the behavior change process. As we make progress our executive function exerting the self control becomes satisfied and our impulse for the old behavior can kick in. Focusing on the progress we have made actually sets us up for a relapse.  Indeed, celebrating success, the way we traditionally do with a minor indulgence, may be the worse thing to do.

What to do? One way is to reframe what progress means so it maintains emphasis on the executive function of self-control:

“Progress can be motivating, and even inspire future self-control, but only if you view your actions as evidence that that you are committed to your goal. You need to look at what you have done and conclude that you must really care about your goal. So much so, that you want to do even more to reach to it. This perspective is easy to adopt; it’s just not our usual mindset. More typically, we look for the reason to stop.”

The goal is to reflect on the why or reason for your self-control, not just the accomplishment.  Using your accomplishment to stay focused on the psychology of commitment avoids success-related relapse.

Clearly a good insight into how  minds actually work and it is actionable enough for cognitive designers working on behavior change challenges.  The post in the Willpower Blog is sneak preview of one of the chapters in Dr. McGonigal’s  new book,  The Willpower Instinct.  I have it on pre-0rder and will do a review.