Self-delusion and serving sizes

This is one of my favorite examples of self-delusion.  How many potato chips do you take from the bag?  How much soda do you drink from the bottle?  If you even think about it at all, you would probably tell yourself you are having “one serving”.  Of course if you look carefully at that label, you will find it has 2 or even 3 servings in it. How many of you take half of a snack pack bag and save the rest for later?  I didn’t think so.

Gretchen Rubin lists many of the reasons we fall into this trap.  The first one is key.  How much is one serving?  I have no clue what one ounce of chips or nuts or hummus looks like.  Do they really expect me to?  If you know what the official serving size looks like, you would be shocked.  It is really just a few chips or nuts.  But instead we take a huge handful and then probably follow it up with another one.  And we tell ourselves that we are only having one “serving”.  This article at Health Castle has some good rules of thumb, but even these are just bare estimates. And the truth is that we don’t really think about it.  We just take whatever seems natural, which depends more on the size of our hand or the size of our serving bowl than it does on the food.

This is one of the reasons that those 100-calorie products have become so popular, even as they are ripping you off by giving you less food at a higher price.  You are paying the company to protect you from yourself.  I also like a prototype idea I heard Pringles was trying out.  Every 10^th chip (or whatever one serving is – I don’t even know) was colored red.  This was a signal that you have hit a full serving without wasting money and carbon footprint on more packaging. 

OSHA mystery writer

Some serious humor (oxymoron?) for a Monday morning:

There was an article in the June Industrial Safety and Hygiene News that was written by Karl Lody, “the pen name used by an OSHA industrial hygienist.”  I guess that means he doesn’t want (or is not allowed by his employer) to write under his real name. 

I can’t wait to read his articles in the future.  The first one has a line I love – “Karl’s Principle number 1: If it makes sense to you, it may not comply with OSHA.” 

I don’t think this is limited to OSHA – how many government rules and regulations make little logical sense?  They are watered down by special interests, written in complicated legalese, outdated by the time they are passed . . .

And yet one of my other favorite quotes is WinstonChurchill's “ . . . democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried . . .”   Perhaps our sausage making system of regulation is a mess, but what other system is better?

Unfortunately, I think this other Churchill quote seems to be gaining: "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."

This Week in EID – Episode 10

Some really interesting topics this week:

Embodied and Enclothed Cognition was a piece from one of David McRaney’s interviews over at You Are Not So Smart.  I love that podcast, too bad it is only once a month.  The interview I discussed in this post talks about the power of uniforms.  When you are wearing clothing that has a link to a particular ability or attribute, it has a powerful influence on you.  Imagine how different you might behave if you are wearing a doctor’s lab coat, a military uniform, a punk rocker’s outfit, or whatever.  It is unconscious, but influential nonetheless.

Entooled Cognition.  When you are holding a hammer, the whole world is a nail.  It seems this is more true than we thought.  Perhaps the reason we respond so quickly to emails is not that it is easy, it is that our hands are already on the keyboard.  Maybe we need to tie our hands down.  Or better yet, use speech-based interfaces and have our emails read to us while we are across the room.

The Ethics and Big Data Research post was written before I realized that everyone was going to jump on the Facebook research bandwagon.  And of course, my take on it was different than most because I was thinking as someone who teaches research ethics to future practitioners who might find themselves exactly where Facebook is today.  In fact, that is why we teach it.  Good thing too, it seems.

The Priming with Music piece was based on a really fascinating article I read that looked at some fundamental ways that music affects thinking.  The fascinating part is that abstract musical structures can prime your thinking to be abstract.  And detail-oriented music can have the opposite effect – leading you to think more detailed.  Priming is not surprising any more – just look at how many times I post about it.  But this kind of priming is much more fundamental and I think has broader and more powerful implications.  For good and for evil HF purposes, so be careful.

Self-Identity Resonance as a Design Criterion

Every once in a while, I try to read about research that diverges from my usual interests.  I find it gives me some interesting perspectives, often specifically applicable to user experience and human factors.  Last night was a good example.  I read a paper from a journal on psychotherapy that compared the effectiveness of interventions with patients of high or low self esteem.

The psychotherapy-related finding is that patients with either low- or high- self esteem responded well to therapists (or friends) who showed emotional empathy.  Communicating that “I understand that you feel bad” had positive results across the board.  We like it when people "feel our pain."

But cognitive intervention showed a difference.  Standard cognitive intervention has the therapist suggest reframing the situation, such as “if you  think about your situation this way instead, you can see that it is not so bad, or even get something positive from it.”  This resonated with patients who had high self esteem.  Their self-image was high, so gaining an advantage resonated with them.  The world was supposed to give them opportunities to gain from whatever came their way, even the bad stuff.

But the same therapy intervention was dissonant for patients who had low self-esteem.  Their self-image was that their situation was supposed to be negative.  So getting something good from it was not the way the world was supposed to work.  They rejected the therapy. They just wanted therapy (or friends) who would validate their low self esteem.  All they wanted was "You have every right to feel bad, your situation really sucks."  That's it.  They don't want to hear about how to feel better.

Of course, I wasn’t reading the paper to learn how to become a cognitive behavioral therapist.  But some interesting applications to human factors jumped out at me.  Users of any system are going to come in with a variety of psychographic profiles. They might have low self esteem or one of any number of individual differences.  We need to make sure that our designs are aligned with their self-identity, or at least does not create any identity-dissonance.  This is especially true for domains like warning design and risk communication when identity issues might be particularly relevant.  We can’t just give people the facts and expect them to react appropriately to them.  Even a logically consistent and rationale procedure will be rejected if it goes against some user identity trait.  

Because the paper was not about human factors and perhaps didn't even know what HF is, they didn't suggest specifics for warning design or risk communication.  We will have to figure these details out on a case by case basis.  But I think it is worth some real consideration, don't you?