Cognitive Design

Placebos, or rituals dressed up as medical treatments that lack any active ingredients, definitely abate symptoms in many circumstances.  They can change how we think-and-feel about our illness or disease. Indeed, they are so effective at moving our hearts and minds we have explored their implications as a more general tool for organizational and individual change here on the cognitive design blog.

But an important question remains, do they go beyond heart-and-mind impact to create the underlying physiological changes that drugs with active ingredients do? Is belief somehow altering biology? The answer appears to be no, at least within the scope of a recent clinical study of placebos reported by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.  They studied the physiological impacts of placebos on Asthma patients and found:

 ”while placebos had no effect on lung function (one of the key objective measures that physicians depend on in treating asthma patients) when it came to patient-reported outcomes, placebos were equally as effective as albuterol in helping to relieve patients’ discomfort and their self-described asthma symptoms.”

Abating symptoms and relieving discomfort is a significant psychological impact.

This is a very important finding for cognitive designers. It demonstrates that designs (in this case a placebo) that create distinct think-and-feel effects deliver significant value even if they do not produce underlying changes in physiology. Placebos as “pure play” cognitive designs create real value!

Over the last 30 years or so  cognitive science has empirically shattered many of our basic assumptions about how the mind works.  For example, we traditionally viewed human memory as a passive observe-store-record device that objectively captured information about the world. Now we understand memory as actively being constructed (rather than recorded) from information, expectations and mental models. We dynamically create our understanding of the world, we don’t document it like a tape recorder.

To see how dramatically our understanding of what we hear is shaped by the expectations we have, take six minutes to experience Stairway to Heaven Run Backwards.

Priming effects or other features and functions that create expectations before perceptions, are powerful cognitive design techniques.  We make perceptions we do not have them.

According to research from Columbia Business School, we tend to artificially complicate our decision-making processes to match our expectation of hard a choice should be.  The harder we think a choice should be, the more complex we make the decision-making process. These artificial complications lead to poor decision outcomes and appear to infest a wide-range of life decisions about jobs, major purchases, choice of doctors and so on.  For example, I may pass on the best choice if it comes too quickly or easily when I expect the choice to be hard.

A release of EurekAlert sums of the key finding nicely:

“…. under certain conditions, consumers actually complicate their choices and bolster inferior options. Specifically, when an important decision seems too easy, consumers artificially reconstruct their preferences in a manner that increases choice conflict. The researchers conclude that when it comes to big decisions, people try to achieve a match between the expected effort of making a choice and the effort they think they should make in order to reach the decision. They term this the “effort compatibility principle”.?

Examples of preferences that shift to increase choice conflict included items such as size of the team you would work on when comparing job offers and if a doctor would make house calls or not when selecting doctors. These factors did not matter until a clearly superior choice was presented, making the decision “too easy” compared to the subject’s expectation.  Rather than select the best choice based on criteria they subject did prefer, they made irrelevant factors important to complicate the choice.

Whether this is the effort compatibility principle in action, or just represents we don’t really know what we prefer until pushed, the findings are important for cognitive designers.

Not only do we need to find and manage cognitive biases that may be at work to oversimplify or distort a decision-making process, we must also be on the look out for and manage expectation effects that can over complicate or distort a decision-making process.

We may be blinded to the easy win when we think the decision should be hard.

Source for Image: Retropolis Transit Authority.

Cold and lonely. Warm and secure.  Both appear to be deeply rooted (perhaps innate) in how our minds work, or so recent research reviewed in Hot Baths May Cure Loneliness reports.

And it is not just about the soothing effects of water. A warm cup of coffee, an ice cold conference room and a hot home cooked meal all reflect this mood-altering mechanisms.

Interested to hear from readers that have successfully used temperature in their designs or innovations.

Technology review has a provocative article on Lovotics (Love + Robotics) that introduces the “new science of engineering human, robot love.”  Looking beyond industrial, service and social robots, we have lovotics or devices designed for the emotion of love.   One is pictured below.

Check out this two minute video on its design and operation. Even if this may be a bit extreme, there is little doubt that robotic devices on many types are evoking emotional states in people. Human-robot relationship management is on the rise.

Interested to hear from readers on the cognitive design of human-robot emotional relationships.

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.