Why Philosopher Don’t Get Fat
Avoiding unwanted behaviors – overeating, smoking, unsafe sex, inactivity, acts of dishonesty, drinking and driving, not taking your meds and so on all require self control. Self control or more broadly self regulation is a complex cognitive process. Cognitive design (or designing based on how minds work) should come to the fore when we are creating artifacts that require self control or that try to help people avoid failures in self control.
Fighting for self control often takes tremendous mental energy – overcoming habits, smoothing out emotional responses, focusing on the future rather than the present, channeling visceral responses constructively (e.g. cravings) or otherwise using our executive function to regulate our thoughts and feelings to make sure we stay in control or reach our goal. Many times we just don’t have enough mental energy to sustain the fight, or multiple fights, we face on a daily basis.
Designs that create mental energy and directly support the cognition of self regulation are an imperative.
Some new scientific insights on how to do that can be found in the work of Dr. Kentaro Fujita, an experimental psychologist at Ohio State University.
His work on Construal Levels and Self Control demonstrates that:
how we look at the world (construe or interpret situations) strongly determines our successes and failures in self control.
He has shown experimentally, that construing events in abstract, global and future terms (versus specific, local and present terms) leads to ”decreased preferences for immediate over delayed outcomes, greater physical endurance, stronger intention to exert self control, and less positive evaluations of temptations that undermine self-control.” All good stuff when it comes to avoiding failures in self control.
For example, if I look at marshmellow and construe (interpret) it as something that looks like a cotton ball or a cloud I am much more able to control myself (not eat it) than if I construe it as something “yummy for my tummy”. Higher level construals put more psychological distance between us and artifacts decreasing the chance that interacting with them will trigger a habit, visceral state or other cognition that I cannot control.
The lesson for cognitive designers is clear but still very general - the artifact must have features and functions that prime the executive function of the user. The goal is to induce mental states that promote higher level construals or interpretation of events to lower the amount of mental energy required for control. This can be done by triggering reasoning that involves more abstract categories (food instead of cake), big picture thinking (e.g. focus on the goal of exercising rather than the means of doing it) and more philosophical reflection (e.g. the deeper meaning of a situation). Of course, unless you are a philosopher, these are not normal habits of thought. Getting folks into this state via interaction with a program, product or other artifact is the task of the cognitive designer.
