Why do we see reasons when they aren't there?

I read a great article from the journal Cognition from 2009 but I am finally getting to it. The overall objective is to investigate if there are cognitive explanations for the development of supreme being beliefs. This is actually quite a large research area these days.

They started with the fact that kids often see teleological (purposeful) explanations for natural phenomenon. For example, “the rock is pointy so people won’t sit on it.” Obviously, this is not true; there is some natural erosion-related reason for the rock to be pointy. But kids, even through much of elementary school, make teleological assumptions about the world.

Adults don’t do this, right? This study examined whether there are conditions where they do. They found that when mental workload is high, time pressure is exerted, or when scientific knowledge is low. This is an OR not an AND. Even college science majors do it when in a rush. Alzheimer’s patients do it often, so apparently the teleological instinct sticks with us for our entire lives and scientific knowledge and effort suppresses it. But it’s there, ready to show itself when attention is low.

It wasn't a speed/accuracy tradeoff kind of thing because it didn't happen in a variety of control conditions. And some people made teleological assumptions even when they had plenty of time and knowledge (e.g. Creationism).

Why is it an adaptive cognitive heuristic to attribute teleological explanations as a default? I suppose that it is better to be safe than sorry. If there is a purposeful reason for something, guessing at the reason could help. But if there isn’t a purposeful reason, imagining one doesn’t really hurt in the short term. In the long term, it leads to things like religion and can degrade complex decision making processes. But we evolved before this was the case.

What to work on?

We all have a limited amount of time to improve our abilities. So which should we focus on, the things we are good at or the things we are bad at? The answer may surprise you.

Here is the strategy that works best for work-related skills (in general of course, there will be exceptions). Work on the skills that you are good at and make them world class. Then find other people who are world class at the skills you lack and bring them onto your team. Most things are done in teams now and having world class team members in all relevant skills will maximize your performance over a similar team where everyone is pretty good at everything.

This is another reason why social networking is so important. The best team members may not be within your immediate circle of colleagues. You may need to reach out to find real world class talent at something. First stop – hfes.org.

Lies, damned lies, statistics, and headline writers

If you read the details on the recent study that came out about cell phones and cancer, there is a "slight" chance that cell phone use "might" increase the "risk" of certain "rare" types of brain cancer in "heavy" cell phone users. But what were the headlines?

“Cellphone cancer threat raises concerns”

“Cell phones and cancer risk: How much radiation from yours?”

None of these are lies, but they are pretty inflammatory given what the study actually found. Anything to sell a paper, I guess.

Updating my model

It is some scholars’ nightmare to find out that a model they have been using for decades turns out not be exactly correct. You have to rethink all your conclusions and see which ones are still true and which ones aren’t. If a lot of them aren’t, it can jeopardize all the teaching and research and publishing you have done over the years. Plus it hits your self-image a bit.

Something like this happened to me today. I always knew that I was using a simplified version of how the brain is wired to explain human cognition, emotion, and information processing. The world is too complex to be an expert in neuropsychology, human factors/usability, productivity management, and innovation. I have a wider range than most, but still I need to set a reasonable scope somewhere.

I won’t suffer you with the details, but think of it this way. My model starts with the fact that each of the 100,000,000 neurons in the human brain is connected to tens of thousands of others. What makes our brains so complex is that while many of the connections are local (memory to memory, emotion to emotion), we also have a rich set of connections that go between areas and allow us to make complicated associations.

I was reading an article from a PhD candidate in neuroscience from Columbia who was citing recent research by Tom Bartol of the Salk Institute. And what I learned is that there is a much bigger gap between the end of a dendrite and the associated axon it is connected to. As a result, a lot of the neurotransmitters that make brain activity go get lost in between and can activate the wrong neuron.

The reason this is important to me is that it changes the way information spreads through the brain. It adds a much bigger random component than we thought. It makes focused attention harder and increases the chances of things like daydreaming and ADD. It increases the frequency and types of errors that we should expect people to make. But it is good for creativity and innovation.

This doesn’t change any of my conclusions (thankfully!). It just increases the probability of some things and decreases the probability of other things. While most of you probably couldn’t care less, this really blows my mind. And as an open-minded version of a scholar, I love when this happens. Not only did I learn something today, but I learned something fundamental. I feel like contacting all of the students I have ever had in a theoretical human factors course and sending them an update.

A new tool for dealing with being sick

This new web site has an interesting value proposition. The idea is to encourage everyone to upload when they are sick. It would provide two values to users:

1. You could search to see which of your friends are sick, so you would know who to avoid, send cards to, make soup for, or whatever your preferred response is.

2. You could view maps that cluster the illness so you know where to avoid going to places like the mall where you are likely to catch the illness from strangers.

And for public health professionals, it would be a good monitoring and research tool. They could identify outbreaks quickly and for those types of outbreaks where existing data is pretty weak because many people don't go the doctor (e.g. the flu) they would get a new tool for tracking outbreaks more comprehensively (assuming enough people use the site).

I think the assumption is that when you are not feeling well, you are probably skipping a lot of your normal activities, but going online is one we still do. So while we are on Facebook, we can just click over to Sickweather and report in. Perhaps we would be encouraged because of the increase in get well cards and soup we would receive.

Optimism Bias. From cognition research to practical wisdom

This article in Time doesn't say anything that research hasn't known about for years, but it does it in a very accessible way. So I recommend to anyone that it is a good, short, skimmable, read.

The purpose of the article is to explain why we tend to have an optimism bias, from an evolutionary perspective and neurophysiologically. Then it discusses the effects of this bias on typical lifestyle choices, which is why I am recommending it.

The attached article on 20 ways to be more happy is a good addition. It has some practical steps (some easier than others) on how to evoke the optimism bias and get a little happier. Some of them are short term, but have really solid research behind them.

For example the finding that smiling and laughing are bi-directional has some strong research in support. Not only do we smile and laugh when we are happy, but even a forced smile or laugh can actually make you happier. Maybe not by orders of magnitude, but over time it can have an effect like mindfullness where the extra happiness because ingrained.

Some of them are harder. For example "Marry Happy." Everyone goes in thinking they are happy, but the stats show that unexpected things get in the way. Often disagreements on spending habits and saving habits, which never even came up beforehand.

But if you combine them, so think happy, smile a lot, be optimistic, and marry someone that makes you happy, they all support each other in one huge virtual cycle that will make you happy as heck and the rest of us jealous.

Simple usability and process errors are less excusable

I was at the local Shaw’s grocery store yesterday and I noticed a few design problems with the register that seemed quite foolish (easy and cheap to fix). The first was that when the cashier scanned in my green cabbage, the price per pound was wrong. It was correct on the shelf, so there is no excuse not to update the price database. One of their competitors has a policy that if it scans wrong, it’s free. Too bad I wasn’t there.

The second problem showed up when she had to take off the cabbage from the order. She couldn’t just hit a key (backspace, delete, cancel, whatever). She had to put it back on the scale and subtract it while weighing it again. I wound up getting an extra penny off because it weighed 3.32 pounds going in and 3.33 pounds coming out.

They were also out of a product that was on sale. This is a common inventory problem at low margin companies like grocery stores. But this was a house brand that was on sale for a whole month and only through coupons mailed to loyalty card holders. It seems that they should not have run out for all of those reasons. House brands are easy to order and have higher margins. The sale still had three more weeks to go, so it’s not like it was last minute. Loyalty card holders are the best customers so you really don’t want to dissatisfy them. And it was only a tube of ground beef – not exactly a rare type of product. This is Boston’s high end grocery store too!

And yet . . .

Philosophically I am a libertarian (small l), with government regulations needed to create a fair and transparent playing field. Why is this relevant to an HF blog? I suspect that the “fair” part comes from being an IE and the “transparent” part comes from being a specialist in usability.

But my decades of experience with what Dan Ariely brilliantly calls Predictably Irrational and conceptually (although not normatively) explainable human behavior, I can see places where the performance environment makes “fair and transparent” insufficient. In these cases, although the libertarian in me cringes, the government needs to regulate further. This especially happens when there are negative externalities, leading to a “tragedy of the commons” effect. In these cases, Pigouvian taxation can create a nice balance between freedom and liberty AND an efficient business environment. There are also cases where people behave exactly the opposite of what we are trying to achieve because of effects such as vicarious goal fulfillment. In these cases, we need smart defaults.

If these are concepts that are unfamiliar to you, or that you have never thought of as HF issues, you have just figured out why I am posting this. They are important in politics and in business. And we have a particular expertise in figuring out what the balance should be to optimize system performance. Given the sorry state of areas like health care (politically, financially, and in the field), the environment, and education, my conclusion is that the world needs human factors professionals to be more involved in these Grand Challenges.

I hope to post more about specifics going forward. I would love to start up some deep discussion, even heated sometimes to get that productive friction going.

Have a great Memorial Day weekend and I will see you on here again soon.

Marketing vs Usability

This article is a great example of companies find out there is something consumers care about, and the create a cheap/fake way of making us think they are giving it to us, but are really not.

Some people would say government regulations, but I would rather see a good reputation management system integrated into the shopping process. Admittedly, this is easier to do with online shopping, but with mobile apps gaining popularity we will be shopping in the store with our phones pretty soon.

The rep mgmt system would work pretty simply. You would find someone (nutrition expert or friend willing to do it) whose nutrition recommendations you want to follow. Then when you scan the item with your phone on the shelf, you would get the rating/review from that expert. It could be very simple. Instead of having to read an entire article like the one I linked to, each of those products could be rated and you would just have to trust the person you are following.

whole grain wheat 5 stars
white whole wheat 4 stars
whole grain white 3 stars
regular white 2 stars

And then you can pick which one you want based on the stars, the taste, and what you are in the mood for.