Cognitive Design

Products and services that make it easy to give money in support of important causes (prosocial spending) make us feel good. I can give money to fight cancer in children when I make a purchase at the grocery store or send a text to help citizens in Japan cope with one of the biggest natural disasters of all time.

This is good cognitive design- adding specific features and functions to existing products to generate a specific mental state. Prosocial spending engages the psychology of generosity, it makes us happy and gives us well being. But how much lift do we get? How universal is the impulse to be generous?

A recent working paper from Harvard Business School found that the emotional benefits of generosity are significant and universal or occur across cultures. They looked at survey data from a 136 countries and did a causal study in two countries to conclude:

“In contrast to traditional economic thought—which places self-interest as the guiding principle of human motivation—our findings suggest that the reward experienced from helping others may be deeply ingrained in human nature, emerging in diverse cultural and economic contexts.”

This is a strong signal to cognitive designers. Enabling opportunities for prosocial spending - or other forms of generosity- will generate significant psychological impact for most groups.

When predicting outcomes most people tend to overestimate the chances of a positive outcome and underestimate the chances of a negative outcome. This optimism bias is at the root of gambling fallacies and shapes an array of predictions ranging from ill effects of smoking to corporate earning estimates and how well you will do on a test.

For cognitive designers working in the area of decision support, the overconfidence bias is a tricky issue. You want to mitigate its effect but not make your solution too conservative.

One way of mitigating its effects was recently uncovered by researchers at Duke University Health Center. Using brain scanning studies they found that the overconfidence bias is magnified when decision maker do not get enough sleep.

“The scientists showed, using a functional MRI, that a night of sleep deprivation leads to increased brain activity in brain regions that assess positive outcomes, while at the same time, this deprivation leads to decreased activation in the brain areas that process negative outcomes.”

This suggest making economic decision early in the day or when fully rested may help to avoid the effects of the optimism bias.

When we decide, solve a problem or learn something new, a cognitive bias is involved. Sometimes the bias plays a strong role in determining the outcome. Cognitive designers must be aware of the biases at play in an application and then created features and functions to either leverage the bias (e.g. buying lottery tickets) or mitigate the bias (e.g. employee hiring decisions). Over 100+ biases have been cataloged but I am always on the lookout for new ones.

For example, researchers at Brown University have a few studies that suggest we reason illogically when presented with weak evidence. They found:

We tend to except predictions with no evidence more readily than we do predictions that have weak supporting evidence.

Said another way, we tend to reject predictions with a weak case over those with no case! Normally we expect more evidence to increase the degree of belief. Why does this weak evidence effect work? The researcher suggest:

“Give people a weak reason and they’ll focus too much on it. Give people no evidence and they’ll supply their own probably more convincing reason to believe that the outcome is likely.”

This has important implications for cognitive designers especially those working on application involving persuasion. For the full article see When Good Evidence Goes Bad.

All cognitive designers and change managers should check out the work by Dr Neff, an associate professor of human development and culture at the University of Texas at Austin on Self Compassion. The site includes assessment instruments, exercises, research articles, videos and more.

The concept of self compassion is straightforward - having a mindful and open hearted or kind reguard for yourself especially when faced with your shortcomings. But according to the latest research it can have a big impact on how well we adapt to change. For example, a recent study showed that even a modest self-compassion intervention could significantly impact eating habits.

Including specific self-compassion interventions (positive self-talk, journaling, best/worse trait analysis, mindfulness training, etc.) in your next organizational change program could improve outcomes. This is especially true since our traditional approach to organizational change tends to emphasize what is wrong and implicitly encourages people to be self critical.

Interested to hear from readers that have used self-compassion interventions in change programs.

One of the major differences between cognitive design and related fields such as human factors is that cognitive design seeks to create specific mental states in people. In extreme cognitive design, the mental state (e.g. pride, humor, comfort or awe) is exactly what is being designed. So I am always on the lookout for precise theories of mental states with clear design implications. Equations are the best.

Take for example the work of Alastair Clarke on humor. As reported in ScienceDaily - we live in an information intense culture and face the constant risk of making errors or being deceived:

To compensate, humor rewards us for seeing through misinformation that has come close to taking us in. The pleasure we get (h) is calculated by multiplying the degree of misinformation perceived (m) by the extent to which the individual is susceptible to taking it seriously (s)

This equation for humor, H = M * S, has clear implications for designers.

Angry Birds is a strong candidate for the most successful game of all time. With nearly 100 million downloads it sees some 1.2 billion of hours of play every year! A masterful cognitive design on the order of lottery tickets. To understand which features and functions are generating the impact check out the excellent post on the cognitive teardown of the user experience.

I will quote some key findings from the post below but strongly urge you get the game, play it yourself and share insights into why it works.

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