when product usability conflicts with industry usability

The new Google Buzz highlights and worsens a significant usability challenge in the social networking space. On one hand, it makes sense for Google to add social networking functionality to its suite. If users have a need to these tools and capabilities, it makes their product more usable to integrate them into popular programs like Gmail. It also made sense for Facebook to integrate twitter-like microblogging functionality. LinkedIn and Twitter are doing this too. All of these additions makes each of these systems more powerful and more able to satisfy the diverse needs of diverse users. In theory, you can get all the social networking you need in just one system.

The problem arises because social networking requires you to use the same systems as your friends/colleagues/coworkers/etc. So if some of your friends are on Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc, then in order to socially network with them, you also need to be on all of these and check them all and use them all. For example, to make sure my friends can read this blog, I announce new posts on Facebook, LinkedIn (when relevant) and Twitter. And sometimes I post the blog on Facebook in the first place, and then would have to announce it and link to it here.

In the end, every time an individual system enhances its usability, it makes the entire industry less usable because of all the cross posting and cross linking. If a third party creates a way to consolidate all of this in one place, then I need to learn and use another one!! Uggh.

Donating for Disasters

It is remarkable how generous we are. Despite the bad economy here at home, everyone I look there are collections going on for Haiti. At my condo building the mailroom fills up every week. At work, there are piles of food and clothing waiting to go.

But it is also remarkable how clueless many of us are about the best ways to give. Today, I saw a case of Cup O' Noodles in one of the collection sites. The size of this case compared to the amount of food it carried, suggests that it will probably cost more to ship it over to Haiti than it will be worth to the aid agencies. Same thing for the loose cans of Vienna Sausages, I suspect.

On the other hand, if you donate money to the UN, they purchase staples like rice in huge volumes (at steep discounts) and contract out for special nutrition bars that have a days worth of vitamins and calories in a small package. The gains in efficiency from ordering this way can feed a family of 5 for an entire day for the same price as one can of Campbell's soup shipped from the US.

So please continue to be generous. But don't use this as an excuse to clean out the pantry of things you don't want anymore. Be smart about it. Donate money to reliable organizations like the UN or the Red Cross. And if you have to give food, give something compact and calorie/nutrient dense, like dried beans or grains.

Words to live by

Words to live by from Bryan Caplan (at the bottom of the post):

1. Don't think less of people who sincerely disagree.

2. Do think less of people who insincerely agree.

3. Do think less of people who think less of people who sincerely disagree.

Better usability through supply and demand

The Boca Raton library has a new loan system for its best-sellers. They are charging $5 for a small set of really hot titles. It's good because most people don't need the new releases so fast, so they are happy to get other books for free. But if you REALLY want the new release, they are much more likely to be available (because the less passionate don't borrow them) and these folks are willing to pay. And it makes the library a little bit of extra cash at a time when they really need it.

This is a great example of using basic economics to improve the usability of a business model. I love it.

Not enough usability practitioners apply their expertise to improving business models.

Incentives to work and save

I always wonder how much of an effect incentives have on these models in the real world. I recognize the theory is legit - if my marginal income tax rate is at 90%, I am not going to do a lot to attract more business. But how much elasticity is there throughout the range? If my income tax rate goes from 20% to 30%, is it going to affect me at all? Especially since withholding is such an amorphous process. I am not sure most people really know what their marginal rate is at the point when they are making work v play decisions.

The incentive to save effect (paradox of thrift) idea I think is more about salience. Right now, everyone is in panic mode. But give us some time to chill out, and I bet most people go right back to overconsumption and running up the Visa bill. I just don't see our culture learning its lesson. Our nucleus accumbans always seems to win out. The chocolate cookies just smell too good to pass up.

Some great examples here of decision making biases in choosing health care options. It happens to the patients, doctors, health care providers, and more. Setting up the right incentives could solve a lot of our cost containment problems (a la Nudge or Freakonomics). But this also suggests that education will not solve the problem.

It is possible that health care panels could evaluate the empirical data and choose the coverage that makes the most sense for the most people, but this would require two tough calls:

1. How to keep politics out. This means no Congressional wrangling to compel choices for their special interests (i.e. Big Pharma), moral preferences (i.e. abortion), or constituents (i.e. skin cancer in Miami). But it also means no junk science either, which is hard because we are always working within confidence intervals.

2. To allow people to pay for uncovered procedures as much or as little as they want without making it an administrative nightmare. You can't do what has been proposed in the abortion debate (insurance riders) because until you know you need the procedure, no one would pay extra for such specific coverage. And then, it's too late. I kind of like the tiered solution that is being used now for a lot of prescription drug coverage. $10 copay for generics, $20 copay for branded drugs where there is no generic option, full price for branded drugs when there is a generic option. Or something to that effect.

Human Reliability versus Ease of Use

I just read the panel description for a panel from this year’s Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Conference. It was on the relationship between human reliability and usability. There were some interesting perspectives discussed. The panelists all see a mistaken perception among many practitioners that there is a disconnect.

Both groups would prefer a design that maximizes both safety and ease of use, but we all know that we often encounter tradeoffs between them. Usability practitioners want to make things easy as the primary goal. This means making things so simple that they become automatic and require little or no conscious attention.

Reliability practitioners want to interject more consciousness to prevent, or at least reduce, skill-based errors. This is important because skill-based errors are often the most pervasive when we are dealing with experienced workers or domain experts. We get so used to putting our jobs on cruise control that we are susceptible to errors that are more due to a lack of focused attention than to any error in judgment.

This leads to a layered design model that makes sure both objectives are considered. You start out considering them separately but with good communication so that you don’t develop totally different design approaches. And as the design gets closer to completion (i.e. higher fidelity), the two objectives get more fully integrated.

This is very important in domains like nuclear power plant design, air traffic control, and the military. But it is also important in situations like my previous post (e-commerce web sites).

Ease of Use versus Security

I read an article today ($ to read in full) that highlights the importance of context in design. They tested users of an online auction and the tough issue of security. Security is enhanced if you go through a rigorous registration process, but that time and effort often makes the system less attractive. Two key findings of this study are:

1. For users expecting to be using the system for a long time, they preferred the longer, time consuming process that added security.
2. For users that had a higher perception of the security risk, they preferred the longer, time consuming process that added security.

Of course, you are probably thinking to yourself, “duh.” But there are implications that seem to be missing from the design approach of many sites that I use.

1. For sites that expect users to be long-term focused, or can give them that focus during their marketing pitch, they should be willing to create a more security-focused registration process even if it makes the process longer.
2. If a site recognizes that it needs a more security-intensive and therefore longer registration process, they should start by explaining (briefly) to the user why this is important. We take for granted that people know about the risks of identity theft, zombies and worms, phishing, etc. But the number of people who fall victim to these scams suggests that the general public may not have a clue.

Bill Belichick is the model for management success

This is a great point - not about football but about the typical mid-level manager. Their incentives are not always about maximizing return or minimizing risk to the company. Often, their incentives are to minimize the probability that something they do will get noticed in a bad way by upper management. Just keeping their heads down is the best path forward. Unfortunately, this aggregates across the company into performance that is much lower than it could be. Companies need to encourage more Bill Belichicks.

Interesting post by Daniel Isenberg at Harvard Business Review. But I have to disagree in part.

There is a lot of evidence that incremental innovations yield more over the long term than breakthrough innovations, in part because there are so many more of them and that they are cheaper to develop and commercialize. BUT there are two big BUTs.

1. In the longer term, it is the breakthrough innovations that lead t...o real improvements in quality of life. So if we want to make a difference in the world, we need to have breakthrough innovations.

2. It is the pursuit of breakthrough innovations that create talented innovators. These people may be necessary to keep the stream of incremental innovators going. So if we all shift to "minnovation" as this HBS blogger suggests, we may reduce our innovation capability in the long run.

Breast Cancer Screening

I haven't seen the actual data, so I am not going to opine on whether women from age 40-50 should get mammograms or not. But just in the one day that this discussion has been going on, I have seen so many classic decision making biases I can't resist discussing those.

1.Comparing statistical evidence and anecdotal evidence. No matter what the debate is about, there is always a great story that illustrates the benefits of one side or another. This is true whether your side has any merit or not. Anecdotes are a great political tactic, but should never be used to set policy. And yet, I have heard so many stories of the "42 year old woman named XXXX whose life was saved because she had a mammogram. Not only is she thankful for the screening, but so are her husband, teenage daughter, . . . ." Of course that will happen when millions of women are screened. But it is irrelevant to the policy decision.

2. Ignoring the costs of false positives. For every cancer that is found (true positive) there are millions of false positives. These false positives are real women too. They go through the fear that they have cancer, the pain of a biopsy, the hassle of the procedure, etc. It's not just about rationing care to lower costs. There are emotional costs as well. And there are many more false positives than there are true positives (see next comment).

3. Ignoring base rates: I have also heard the testimonials of women who say "Yes, I was afraid for a few days and had to undergo the pain and hassle of a biopsy. But it was worth it to find my cancer. So the cost benefit analysis is clearly in favor of screening." But what this argument fails to consider is that millions of women go through the fear, pain, and hassle for every cancer that is found. And in many cases, the cancer would have been found and treated even without the mammogram so even the true positives are not really true positives.

4. Validity bias. The people being quoted or interviewed vary tremendously on whether they are experts on the topic. For some reason, a cancer survivor is seen as an expert on breast cancer diagnosis or statistical analysis. Sorry, but having cancer does not make you an expert. Not even on the pain and suffering part because each woman's experience is different and your pain, while real, may not be typical.

5. Sample size bias. Also in these interviews, people toss in the results of studies. But if one study looked at thousands of women and another looked at dozens, they are not comparable. And yet, the discussion doesn't account for this.

6. Availability bias. It's much easier to think of the extreme cases (where a woman's life was saved by screening) than the more typical cases (false positives, minor cancers that would have been caught anyway, etc.). So the debate focuses on these salient stories instead of the real evidence.

7. Confirmation bias. Once a person decides which side they are on, they completely ignore all of the evidence to the contrary, even when it is being presented to them directly in a one-on-one discussion. It's amazing how good we are at this.

There are more too. But this is enough for today. Can we perhaps focus more on intelligent policy development instead of emotion-based policy development so we can actually create useful and effective policies? Anyone? Anyone?

Viva La Difference Part Deux

Ok, here is the second part I promised. Should we take these differences into account in our public policy? It's one thing for free citizens to make free decisions about how to design a product or what products to sell or buy. But should people be forced to do so? The libertarian in me says no. But of course we should think about it before jumping to conclusions.

Let's take public school policy. The government has a stake in this because a stronger educational system would lead to stronger economic growth and a higher standard of living for us all. So lets say that boys learn better with blue textbooks and girls learn better with green textbooks. Do we mandate to textbook companies that they need to spend the extra money to create two colors of textbooks, and then mandate that school systems spend more to buy them (as the increased costs would invariably be passed on)?

One example of gender-based policy is the famous Title IX which mandates that schools need to have equal numbers of male and female athletes, regardless of the interest of students, fans, or revenue. This means if a school has 100 male football players, they need to support 3 or 4 female sports to make up the difference - since most sports have 25-30 players.

If men respond better to a blood pressure drug than women do, should we mandate the the drug company spends extra money finding a similarly effective drug for women?

If you are answering yes to some of these and no to others, I will repeat a comment from a previous post. Do you have some logical basis for the difference?

Viva La Difference!

I have been seeing a lot of research on gender differences recently. Not just in human factors, but in areas as diverse as education, economics, design, finance, nutrition, psychology, happiness, etc etc etc. There are two important overarching issues that this entire line of research brings up. Do we design differently for males and for females? And should government create regulations that compel systems to be designed differently for males and females when there is a public interest at stake. I will cover the first in this post and the second in another post.

First, should system designers create different systems for each gender? When it comes to simple things like apparel, it’s pretty obvious. Men and women have different anthropometry and different style preferences and there is no conflict. We have always had different clothing choices for men and women. Good thing too. I just don’t look very good in a dress and I can’t imagine trying to walk in heels.

But let’s think more broadly about this issue. There are biological differences that lead to different nutritional needs. Should our breakfast cereals be fortified differently? Different meal choices? And with health care we need different drugs. How far do we go with this? We already have drugs specifically targeting male and female diseases (breast cancer v prostate cancer being an obvious one), but what about making different versions of blood pressure medicine? How about different versions of Amazon.com to match different web navigation styles or background color preferences? When you log in (or using cookies) you would be automatically directed to the right version.

It gets harder when we talk about education. Boys and girls seem to learn better in single gender classrooms, but then their socialization might lag. A hybrid school may be ideal. More research would be needed to find out the best combination. But is this a direction we should pursue? What if boys learn better in an all boy classroom but girls learn better when it's 50/50? What would we do then?

I’m not really sure where I am going with this train of thought. Since most design stems from business needs, I suppose the choice comes down to whether the differences create enough customer demand that people will pay more for gender-customized products in each market. They would have to be willing to pay more to cover the added R&D, design, and manufacturing costs required to make two (or more) different sets of products in each category. For apparel, obviously the decision was made generations ago. These questions are just now being asked in these other industries. I am curious how far it will go.

Growing up in a recession

This is from the abstract of a very interesting paper just out of the NBER (www.nber.org).

“. . . we show that individuals growing up during recessions tend to believe that success in life depends more on luck than on effort, support more government redistribution, but are less confident in public institutions. Moreover, we find that recessions have a long-lasting effect on individuals’ beliefs.”

I have some thoughts on these three findings that I would like to share.

First, layoffs are more likely during a recession (obviously). And because of the fundamental attribution error, people who are laid off are more likely to blame bad luck rather than themselves for it happening (which is often true, but even if it isn’t). And since being laid off is such a salient event, I think it is clear that recession increases the population’s belief that luck is an important factor in life (I could provide more details on the development of long term memories and the generalization of memories to overall life perspectives, but I think you get the point). This will be more of a permanent belief for those who grow up in a recessionary environment because they don’t have existing “good times” schema to anchor the development of their societal beliefs.

The second finding also makes sense. When you think life has treated you unfairly (see #1), you are more likely to want “the government” to compensate you. Many people see government support as this vague entity and don’t realize it has to be paid for by the rest of us in taxes and slows economic growth to the detriment of the very job market they need to recover. It is kind of like wanted "life" to compensate you for the bad luck that it caused. And even for those who recognize that other people ultimately pay for government support, they owe it to us because our layoff was bad luck, not our fault.

And yet the reduced confidence in public institutions also makes sense. Even as we want the government to fix our problems and expect it to because it was caused by bad luck, the fact that the recession happens in the first place is evidence that the government doesn’t know what it’s doing.

Ironically, government is often the least efficient way to help the unemployed population recover from a layoff. But this combination of beliefs increases our desire to want it to.

The brighter side of religion

We often see the bad effects of organized religion. Fundamentalists of all persuasions cause trouble politically, socially, economically, etc. They make it into the news as terrorists, political oppressors, and other bad habits. But there is a good side as well. A new study found that

o religious people report better health
o they say they have more energy
o that their health is better
o that they experience less pain
o their social lives and personal behaviors are also healthier
o they are more likely to be married
o they are more likely to have supportive friends
o they are more likely to report being treated with respect
o they have greater confidence in the healthcare and medical system
o they are less likely to smoke.”

This was in a study of 300,000 observations in 140 countries, so it’s a pretty powerful sample size statistically. As a religious person myself, it is always good to see the positive side.

The tradeoffs of diversity

Robert Putnam, a pretty well known Harvard Professor and a someone with a tradition of having liberal views, was doing some research on social capital and found some results that disturbed him. He was tempted not to publish them. The ethics and incentives of this decision are a great topic that I will post on later.

But for now, let me focus on the research itself. What he found is not surprising really, but in the context of his research, it has some possibly disturbing implications for a liberal viewpoint.

It turns out that homogeneous populations (people of the same age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, etc) tend to interact more and better than heterogeneous populations. Men seem to know how to talk to other men than they do to women (surprise surprise!!). But also old people with old people and Catholics with Catholics. This leads to more trust among neighbors in the more homogeneous community.

And the effects on the neighborhood encompass relations among everyone. It seems that just being in a heterogeneous neighborhood reduces trust overall so we even trust people very similar to us less when we live among a diverse group. This difference in trust has broader implications. Trust leads to greater social capital, which increases the overall success and welfare of the community. Less crime, higher income growth, and overall community success. And when you look in detail at the research that shows that diverse teams make better decisions, it turns out that demographics is one of least effective kinds of diversity. Differences in experience, personality, approaches, and thinking styles are all more important. So taken together, demographically homogeneous groups will be more successful in the long run.

Where Dr. Putnam got worried is that this suggests we should stop integrating neighborhoods, schools, companies, and the country at large. Even immigration policy should be affected in countries that are still largely homogenous, such as Scandinavia. This was counter to everything he believed in from a more ethical point of view. Again, the ethics is a topic for a later post.

There is also research that shows smarter people build more social capital, regardless of demographics. So perhaps the solution is to make sure we surround ourselves with smart people. Then we can be integrated. Of course, we quickly bang up against the limitation that not everyone is endowed with the gift of superior smarts. We could try to use immigration policy to let in lots of demographically diverse smart people (which is a good policy for all sorts of reasons). But we would also have to limit immigration for the other half of the curve – another illiberal policy.

So what is the answer to this conundrum? For ethnic and racial differences, maybe all we really need to do is wait a few generations. With the rapid increase in inter-racial mixing, pretty soon there won’t be such big differences among us. I see this in Miami to an extent I never would have dreamed years ago. Almost every couple in the city is mixed in some way. Then we just need to find better ways to communicate between genders and age groups. This is easier than with race and ethnicity because of course we grow up in families that have all different ages and genders so we get more used to it at ages when we are still malleable.

Until then . . . . Let’s just work hard on open communication and trust, even when your gut is not so sure.

Doing the right thing?

I have been reading a lot of research lately that are in different domains but have one common finding that seems to appear over and over again. When we do something that makes us feel virtuous, we feel entitled to go out and do something less virtuous afterwards. Sometimes this is harmless but other times it can be really serious.

A harmless example: When you eat something healthy, you are more likely to eat something unhealthy afterwards. So for example, research shows that when you select a healthy main course from a menu, you are more likely to order unhealthy sides, drinks and desserts with it. You are also more likely to eat unhealthy food in later meals. The problem here is that in the end, you wind up eating more calories at the end of the day then if you selected something neutral in the first place.

Another harmless example: When grocery shopping, when you put a healthy food in your cart, you are more likely to go to the less healthy food aisles and put unhealthy food into your cart. So for every apple you buy, you also get the Oreos.

But then there are the serious examples. Another study gave people ethics scenarios and had multiple choice answers for what the person would do. If they answered ethically for question A, they were more likely to answer unethically for question B. They mixed up the order of the questions for each person to cancel out the differences in the scenarios. So it seems that acting ethically makes you feel like an ethical person – like ethicality is your true nature. So then, you can act unethically and it doesn’t count because it’s not your nature it’s just a choice you made.

The same thing happened when people gave to charity. They were more likely to do unethical things afterwards. Apparently, giving to charity makes you feel like you are a “good” person. So now, you can do whatever you want. I suspect Bernie Madoff had a lot of this in him.

Some of these happen in the reverse also. When people started out behaving unethically, they were more likely to do an ethical thing later. Apparently, they felt bad about themselves and had to make up for it. They tried to see the original unethical act as the “choice” and the later ethical act as their “true nature.”

I am sure that there are some people who don't take advantage of this balancing game and are virtuous all the time. But what bothers me is that this is largely unconscious (the subjects of the studies didn't realize they were doing this). And it is so easy too. All you need to do is one virtuous thing up front, and then you can keep doing less virtuous things forever, always thinking about the virtuous thing as your "true nature" and rationalizing the rest. The human brain is set up to facilitate this kind of behavior, so it is much more common than you might think.

Most of the people reading this do it without even realizing. Even you!

Calorie listings on menus work

I just read a some follow-up research to the study I blogged about earlier. These researchers looked at what happens when you put nutritional information on the menu. They found it to be effective in several ways:

• When the calories listed were high, it increased the customer’s expectations that they would gain weight and/or get weight-related disease. This may seem obvious, but they compared it to a menu condition with a label of “low calorie” and a menu condition with the ingredients listed. These could have had the same effect, but didn’t.
• When customers discovered that their food had more calories than they expected, they ate less over the course of the day to compensate. So the calorie listings had real effects on behavior, not just perceptions or expectations. This is important because we often see people say they will do the healthy thing “later” but then don’t. With menus that list calories, there is a real behavior change.
• Customers that had intentions to eat right rated the menu items lower when they had higher calories. But other customers didn’t change their ratings at all. But they did eat less later.

So what does this tell us? Basically, it means that menus really should have at least the total calories listed. It may be too much to have other things (fat, saturated fat, sodium, sugar, etc) even though these would help people with specific health issues like diabetes. But because research has also found that people have high perceived correlations among food attributes (when we think something has lots of calories, we also think it has lots of the other bad stuff and vice versa), people with these conditions would stay away from menu items even if they are just listed as high calorie. The sacrifice here is that some foods are high calorie but are really healthy otherwise (e.g. almonds). But on most menus I have seem, usually the perceived correlations are right on target. The hamburger where they add butter to the bun, oil to the meat, and then stack on a few extra slices of cheese and “special sauce” is more likely.

Eating in restaurants

I read some very fascinating research from INSEAD and Cornell Universities. To briefly highlight some of their findings:

• we significantly underestimate the number of calories in food we order in restaurants, even if we see the list of ingredients and even after we eat it. In one example, a 1000-calorie Subway sandwich was perceived as having only 585 calories.
• this underestimation is even larger for restaurants that have a brand image that promotes healthy food. The 1000-calorie McDonalds burger was perceived as having 750 calories – closer to the truth (although still pretty far off).
• when we order main dishes that we think are healthy, we are more likely to order less healthy sides, drinks, and desserts. Subway customers ordered sides with twice the calories as the McDonalds customers.
• these errors compound with each other: “Good Karma Healthy Foods” customers estimated that their “famous classic Italian sandwich” had 409 calories and were then more likely to order chips with it than customers ordering the same sandwich at “Jim’s Hearty Sandwiches” which they thought had 622 calories. So they thought they were eating less at Good Karma, but were actually eating more.

So when you put these four results together, you can conclude that people are even more likely to gain weight from eating at “healthy” restaurants than at standard restaurants. It’s that large soda and small-looking cookie that get you. Ouch!! They found the same result with customers who said they were trying to eat healthfully. Healthy eaters also underestimated calories and ate more sides and drinks in general, and even worse at “healthy” restaurants.

This is even more evidence that we need to have nutritional information on menus. Food descriptions are just not enough to allow us to make informed decisions. It is too easy for restaurants to generate a “healthy” brand image with images of salads and lean meats and then make it taste incredible with a slathering of butter. We will never know what we are eating and obesity will just get worse.

And for personal advice, next time you are ordering in a restaurant – just assume the meal has several hundred calories more than you think. And just because you are at a restaurant that bills itself as “healthy” doesn’t mean that everything (or even anything) on the menu is actually healthy.

How rational is irrational?

Behavioral economics bills itself as an alternative to the standard economics approach which assumes people make decisions rationally. Behavioral econ doesn’t say we are totally irrational, it just shows that the devil is in the details.

Let me illustrate with one of my favorite topics – the obesity epidemic. The rational economic model describes the decision thusly (I love that word :-D): When Joe is deciding whether to eat the jelly donut or to go for a jog, he evaluates the various tradeoffs (gain the pleasure of eating the donut along with the cost of extra weight or gain the advantage of losing weight along with the cost of jogging) and decides accordingly. Free will and the free market allow him to make the decision that best meets his priorities. All is good.

The behavioral economic model describes it somewhat differently. Joe figures he can get the best of both worlds by eating the donut now (gain the pleasure of the donut) and starting his diet tomorrow (gain the advantage of losing weight). But then tomorrow he is faced with the same decision, and can put off the diet for “just one more day.”

The problem is twofold. What seems like an obvious hypocrisy is made possible by the fact that there are two different parts of the brain that make these decisions without coordinating with each other. One part of the brain makes decisions about what to do right now (a more instinctive, emotional center that is dominated by sensory experience). This brain wants the donut.

A different part of the brain decides what to do in the future (a more analytical center that can delay gratification for higher level objectives like health). This brain agrees to jog.

The way the two brains resolve their disagreement is to eat the donut now and agree to jog tomorrow. It’s like two different people.

The second part of the problem is that the decision making process is recursive. The next day when we are supposed to go for the jog that our logical brain promised, our emotional brain takes over (because it is again a "now" decision) and says “hey, I never promised nothin’.” And our logical brain is limited to complaining about the irresponsible emotional brain and again promising what to jog “next time.”

Behavioral economics recognizes that this can go on forever, even with the best of intentions. The solution is to add some emotional component to the process that favors the long term benefits. So for example with 401(k)s, we can counteract the emotional brain’s desire to enjoy our money NOW by making it a real pain to opt-out of contributing to the 401(k). Stickk.com makes us give money to charity (which is emotionally painful, especially when you give it to an organization you DISAGREE with) every time we eat a donut. These are artificial situations, but they can be effective by recruiting the emotional brain to help us do what our logical brain knows is best.