The Snowball effect on behavior

I’ve read about the snowball effect on behavior, but I was wondering if there was a grand unified theory of it somewhere. 

Here is my personal example from last night.  I bought a six-pack of Lagunitas IPA.  This goes against at least five heuristics I usually use when purchasing.

1.  I like IPAs a lot.  But I am a price-optimizing beer drinker.  I generally stick to IPAs when I am out and all beers are expensive.  At the liquor store, I go with something inexpensive. If I go with an IPA, it would probably be a less expensive brand.  
2. There other IPAs that I know I like. Since I drink beer for the taste, sticking to brands that I know I like makes sense.  Buying an unfamiliar brand only makes sense when it is the only one available of it is less expensive and activates heuristic number one.  
3. Lagunitas sponsors “This American Life”, an NPR show that I listen to on the weekends.  I generally don’t let sponsorships impact my purchasing – seeing this as information that has nothing to do with the quality of the product.  Therefore, being influenced by a sponsorship makes you a sucker.  In fact I often overcompensate for my anti-sponsorship self-identity by intentionally avoiding products that I see using sponsorships for their marketing.  
4. Lagunitas has a funny slogan for their “This American Life” sponsorship – “Putting the pub back in public radio.  Similar to my anti-sponsorship self-identity, I also have an anti-slogan self-identity because this is another marketing gimmick that has nothing to do with the quality of the product.  Again, it makes you a sucker.  And again, I overcompensate by avoiding brands with funny slogans.
5. Lagunitas is currently a trendy brand.  Although trends can get started because of legitimate quality-based features of a product, they often are not. And when they do, it is often a characteristic of the product that I am not interested in.  So I also avoid trendy brands.

I tend to be a very meta-cognitively aware person.  So when I purchased the Lagunitas yesterday, I could feel myself breaking each and every one of these heuristics. But it didn’t feel like breaking five.  Once I broke the first one, it made it really easy to break the other four.  “In for a dime, in for a dollar.”

I see examples of this all around me.  “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” really means that when you are there you can break all of your personal values.  When your diet gives you a “binge” day, you don’t just eat one rich food item, you go all in.  When people cheat on something, they don’t go back to their honest self immediately after, they take on a new norm and/or start down the proverbial slippery slope. 

So I call this generalization the snowball effect because in each case, breaking one rule/ethic/heuristic or whatever gives you the allowance to break all related ones.  At least in that scenario at that time.  You don’t throw in the towel and become a new person, but at least for that one activity you can ignore all of your typical constraints as easily as you can ignore one.

My research on neuroscience explains this to some extent.  It is like transferring control from the prefrontal cortex to the amygdala.  You can’t just have them distribute the constraints where the PFC takes a few and the amygdala takes a few.  It is a discrete process – all or nothing.

Thoughts?  Counterexamples?  Counter-theories?

Did a social media campaign do a wonderful thing to save a boy's life? It's complicated.

On Boston Public Radio last night, there was an interview with Art Caplan, a bioethicist who is a regular on the show and who I consider to be really insightful.  The topic was this seven-year old boy in NC who was dying from complications of his kidney cancer.  A pharmaceutical company was in the middle of clinical trials on a drug that might be able to save his life. 

Even though the drug hasn't been approved and it might in fact not even work, there is a program called "compassionate use" that allows pharmaceutical companies to give dying patients unapproved drugs if it could save their lives.  The company refused the request, which caused quite an uproar.  The family started a social media campaign that brutally attacked the company, which eventually relented and gave the boy the drug.

Great example of the benefits of social media and grassroots campaigns you say?  Well, the story is a lot more complicated than you might think. 

The company developing the drug is pretty small.  Making the drug is very expensive, especially in the small batches required for FDA clinical trials.  What if they give two or three people who are dying of cancer the drug for free.  As a result, they don't have the funding to complete the clinical trial, the drug never gets approved, and thousands of people who could have had their lives saved now are fated to die painful deaths. 

Another important consideration is that the drug can't perform miracles.  Even if the drug works, the boy still might have soon died.  What if the story of the boy's subsequent death made it harder for the company to recruit participants for their clinical trials?  Even if they got some additional funding for the compassionate use, they still might not be able to get the drug through the clinical trial process and approved by the FDA.  Those thousands of lives again would not be saved.

A whole bunch of people rushed to judgment based on a very meager understanding of the situation.  They demanded justice for this little boy.  They demanded that the pharmaceutical company provide the drug.  Why would a "compassionate use" exception even exist if it weren't meant to be used to save the life a this dying seven-year old boy?

Granted, if I was one of this boy's parents, I would want the drug too.  I would probably go to great lengths to get it.  Because quite frankly, my son's life is more important than those anonymous thousands.

But that is why we don't make laws, policies, and regulations based on individual cases, stories, surface level investigations, and what feels right at the time.  I hope that the drug company gets the funding to complete the clinical trial process.  I hope that the drug turns out to work and it saves thousands of lives. 

But whether it does or not, this turns out to be a story that demonstrates how we should not be governing our health care system.

Unconscious links trigger behavior that we would never expect

Many of you know that I am fascinated by examples where people to exactly the opposite of what they think they will do (for example this recent post).  This fascinates me primarily for two reasons:

1.  It shows that what we think of as our conscious mind/executive control is really not what is in charge.  Most of our behavior is controlled by unconscious and even pre-conscious processes.  Then when our consciousness sees what we just did, it comes up with a logical explanation that might have very little in common with the real causation for it.

2.  Even better, when we ask our conscious false-executive to predict what we will do, it is often 100% wrong.  What we do turns out to be the opposite of what our conscious brain thought we would do.  It is not hypocrisy (although it does seem like it).  It is just that the two processes are not connected. 

There is an unconscious part of our brain that runs our daily lives – perceiving the world, making decisions, taking actions.  And then there is the conscious part that is blissfully ignorant of what is really going on, imaging the world the way we prefer it to be (or for depressed people, the opposite), imagining ourselves the way we want to think of ourselves (generally much better than we really are), having idealized impressions of things and people we like, corrupted impressions of things and people we don’t like, and other myths, illusions, and falsehoods.

I am currently reading Jonah Berger’s 2013 bookContagious.  He is a prof at Harvard Business School who does research on these inconsistencies, with the motivation to find out what causes ideas and behaviors to catch on.

One of his examples is a perfect demonstration.  He presented college students with one of two health-related slogans.  Both of them promoted eating 5 servings of fruits and vegetables a day.  One mentioned dining hall trays in the slogan and the other did not.  When they asked the students which was better, the students responded that the one about the dining hall trays was too corny and would not work nearly as well as the other one.  But then they tracked what the students did when they were eating in dining halls that had trays.  The ones that saw the tray slogan ate more fruits and vegetables than the others.  Jonah used a solid research method that controlled for the other factors that could explain the difference.  So basically, the students thought the tray slogan was worse, but it actually was better.  And not only in general, but on the very students that rated it as worse.  All it took was placing an unconscious link between trays and fruits/vegetables that would be triggered in the dining hall.  He has tons of examples like this in his trigger chapter.  A very enjoyable read. 

Happiness is a perspective. And even a choice.

I know I go off topic now and again, but I want to comment on something today that just seems off topic.  But really it is a core part of user experience.  Watch Alain de Botton's Ted Talk.   It is truly brilliant. Not because he says anything that blows our mind with new information or insight.  But because what he says is something we have known our whole lives, but we never appreciate how important it is to live it, not just to know it.

His basic message is about success and how we define it and how we measure it.  Historically (I'm talking thousands of years here), we lived in small tribes where everyone pretty much had the same experience.  There were a few leaders here and there.  And some people were stronger or better hunters and gatherers.  The shaman got a little more respect than the rest.  But most of the time, for most of the people, your basis for comparison was people just like you. And so your instinctive benchmark for success was not too far off from what and who you were.

But now, we have too much access to the lives of others. Mass media started this trend. We got to see the "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous."  We could see the yacht and mansions.  We could see their glamorous lives.  And we could be jealous. But it wasn't too traumatic because they are unusual.  We knew that they were a small minority.

Now, social media compounds the problems. For several reasons.  One, we follow our favorite celebrities on Twitter and get their day-by-day lives in all their glory.  They don't seem like those glamorous teen idols anymore.  They seem like regular people who just happen to be more successful than us. So now we have a more personal kind of envy.  They aren't a magical and mysterious minority.  They are people we could have become with just a few small differences in luck, placement, and effort.  It is real jealousy now.  The kind that hurts.

And we also get to see the posts of our ever growing network of social media "friends," colleagues, and other people who have no claim to the magical and mysterious nature of celebrity.  But of course, they mostly post the good stuff.  Or maybe we just read the good stuff.  Either way, we are now comparing our lives to their posted lives.  When we think about our own lives, we can cover it all.  Not just the great view of the sunrise on the commute to work, but also the annoying line at the coffee shop.  The good email and then the five stupid ones. 

Our friends have these too, but we only get exposed to the meaningful ones because that is all they post.  If you think about it, you know that they have the annoying stuff too.  But we don't really waste our time thinking about trivialities like that.  So we blindly scan the Facebook news feed and quickly scan through all of these cool and meaningful posts.  And unconsciously, our lives seem to have so many more of those irritating annoyances than everyone else has. 

You are probably thinking about it now, and knowing that it is not really true.  But the problem is that we do this unconsciously.  And so we unconsciously feel dissatisfied.  Inadequate. Unfulfilled.  It is because of this subtle unconsciousness that makes it insidious.

There is a reason that income has only a very weak relationship with happiness (at the individual, cultural, and national levels).  The quality of life of your comparison group goes up even faster than yours does. 

I have gone beyond Alain de Botton's talk a little, but this is his main message.  Take some time, maybe even each morning when you wake up or each night as you evaluate the ending day, and rethink your goals, your status, what is really important to you, and what you should reasonably expect to achieve. 

If you have your calibration right, you should be doing just fine.  Because when it comes down to it, our lives are objectively pretty good.  Many of us (myself being among the worst) just need to do a better job of appreciating it.

Sometimes, a comic says it all

Very short one today.  This comic has DM heuristics

• closure
• confirmation bias
• loss aversion
•  what other ones do you see?

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3300

Face it - we are all hypocrites

You all know that one of my favorite topics to read, learn, teach, and blog about are inconsistencies in thinking. 

For example when our conscious mind sees what our unconscious mind just did and comes up with a perfectly rational-sounding justification for it that has absolutely nothing to do with why our unconscious mind actually did it. 

Or when we do something that afterwards we realize is inconsistent with how we prefer to define ourselves, and so we come up with a totally illogical (to others) sounding rationalization for how it fits.

Or when we semi-consciously engage in self-deception so that we can do something that we know we really shouldn’t.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I read this article and the research study behind it.  They asked people of various political profiles how likely they are to engage in behaviors that we typically associate with one political view.  In this case, they looked at climate change and energy efficiency. 

Libertarians and Democrats reported that they were more likely to engage in energy efficient behaviors like purchasing efficient appliances, light bulbs, insulation, solar panels, and that kind of thing.  But Republicans turned out to have already done more of them (with the exception of the light bulbs).  Libertarians turned out to be the most inconsistent – most often reporting that they are likely to do these things but least likely to actually have done any of them.

fast reasoning requires working memory, slow reasoning does not

You know that I have been research a lot of the latest findings in reasoning, intelligence, and working memory skills.  A great article by one of my favorite casual authors in this area, Scott Barry Kaufman, recently published a short piece that I found really interesting. 

He reviewed some research (so I am reviewing the review - a little derivative of me) that investigated the direct relationship of working memory on fluid reasoning.  What I really liked about the findings is that the answer is "it depends."  Anyone who follows me on social media or has taken any of my courses knows that I believe this is the answer to every good question.

In this case, the influence of working memory on fluid reasoning depends on the time allowed.  When people are under time pressure, they fill up their working memory to do the reasoning quickly.  So much of their fluid reasoning ability depends on their working memory capacity.

But when people have plenty of time, the relationship disappears.  People don't need to fill up their working memory when they can just refer back to the original source while doing their fluid reasoning.

The implications are important.  This means that if we are designing for contexts where there will be time pressure, we need to create good visual designs that integrate information together to reduce the amount of work the user has to do him/herself.  Training on good visuospatial skills can also help.

Another recent study in Psychological Science found that mindfulness training can also help.  Here, mindfulness improves your ability to resist distractions.  By not filling up your working memory with irrelevant information, you have more left over for your reasoning task.  In this study, mindfulness training increased working memory capacity (probably not really the capacity itself, but how much of it was available for the task) and thereby increased performance on GRE reading comprehension tests.

New findings in brain science

I spent two hours last night reading these two papers and then about an hour typing up my notes.  So if I spend another hour summarizing them for you, that would make four hours.  Wasted you say?  Perhaps.  But incredibly interesting.  If you have any interest in how the brain works, they are mindblowing (sorry, couldn't resist the pun).

The two papers cover the default network and where intentions come from.

The studies were deep dives into brain modeling and found some strong evidence that explains how our brains really work.  And if you have read any of my past blogs on this topic, you will know that it is nothing like the way it seems to us when are doing the thinking.  That homunculus we feel like we have inside our heads that is guiding our decisions, actions, imaginations, and thoughts is just not real.  It is an emergent property of lots of interconnected subsystems - sometimes working together and sometimes working at odds. 

I made extensive notes on these papers and learned a ton.  But I am going to distil the papers down to a few basic (and probably oversimplified) conclusions so that they might be of interest to anyone reading this.  I know most of you don't have my fascination with the details.
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The default network (DN) is the closest thing we have to an inner voice, but it is not what we refer to as executive control.  It turns out, these are in different areas.  Executive control (FPCN) is the part of the brain that mode-switches between the DAN, which is what links our sensory perceptions and the actions that need to be made operationally in real time, and the DN, which is where we do our imagining, moral reasoning, remembering, social interacting, future planning, and other deep stuff.

Then we also have a salience network that does the automatic stuff (see the next paper on the myth of intentions).  That mode-switches between reacting automatically and letting the brain think first. 

So what we have is one unconscious executive deciding if we should think or if we should just act preconsciously (i.e. without any thinking).  Then we have another unconscious executive taking the decisions that require thinking and deciding whether we should think unconsciously (i.e. thinking, but not consciously) or consciously.  Unconscious thinking is where we directly link the sensory information coming into the brain with responses that have been successful in the past and activate them. This is a much more fuzzy process than behaviorism used to claim, but sort of like that. 

Then if we think consciously, the DN is brought in. This is the first place where we have a sense of consciousness.  It has three different areas that all work together.  One DN area has a model of ourselves, our current situation, our past history.  We also use this to model people similar to us, assuming that they think and act the same.  We also have a second DN area that has examples of other people so we can predict what they might do/think/want/react. This is more abstract.  Then we have a core area that monitors our current state.  Who am I?  How am I doing?  How am I feeling? This part does moral reasoning (or skips it) and social processing.  The core actually has three areas, but that is too much information I think for now.

The DN is also where we do things unrelated to current needs.  Planning, wistful nostalgia, creative insight, daydreaming, predicting the future, telling ourselves stories, that kind of thing.

The paper also has some great insights into the origins of psychological disorders that are often based on a screwed up DN.  If your core is damaged, you might have a problem with moral reasoning (psychpaths).  If your DN gets active too often, you might exhibit obsessive behavior.  If your DN keeps turning on and off, you can exhibit ADD.  If your DN is too connected to negative feelings in your amygdala, that would be depression (or positive feelings would be mania). 

The paper also suggests how cognitive behavioral therapy can focus on the DN activities to change the way we process them.  It also talks about how mindfulness can help reduce the intensity of DN activity so we don't get affected by it so much and can just take it easy.

Of course, this is way way oversimplified.  But very cool stuff if you take my word for it.
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The paper on intentions is great because it turns out that our brains are run more like a distributed, agile, flat company than a hierarchical top down bureaucracy.  We have no CEO in charge.  Our workforce is fully empowered to make decisions in the field and act on them.  The C-suite only gets involved when we need to make globally relevant strategic decisions.

The example I usually use for this is why when you are carrying a very full cup of coffee it is better not to look.  Your muscles automatically adjust to small movements so that you don't spill.  If you consciously watch, your slower conscious brain sends a signal too late, after your hand has already adjusted, and winds up overcompensating - spilling the coffee over the opposite side.

The brain science part is that they found specific areas of the lateral prefrontal cortex and the neural connections between the anterior and posterior areas. What they showed is that the decisions are made by areas distal to conscious control.  When we think we are making a decision, it is often already made, by a distal part of the PFC, and what we are really doing is making up an explanation for why we think we did what we just saw ourselves do automatically.