We all crave for simplicity in our lives. But if we closely observe, the way we do things is not always simple. A complex object can be confusing at times but too much simplicity is also very boring.

Consider how we read time. Majority of us own and prefer using an analog watch vs a digital one. A digital watch is precise, literal and simple. Whereas it takes months of learning to read time correctly from an analog watch. (Two rotating hands – shorter indicating hour and longer one indicating minutes. In some cases, also a third one for seconds) But we still prefer using an analog watch to a digital one. Why?

A digital watch is a literal object that just states information without any room for individual interpretation. It instructs. It only showcases the present time.

An analog watch on the other hand allows us to derive and therefore construct the information in our minds. The visual, spatial and auditory information combine to help us interpret the past, present and future of time.

When the watch indicates 12:20, the space created with the hands helps us make a visual interpretation of the ’20 minutes past 12’ or ’40 mins remaining for 1o’clock.

This also aids  our sense of control over the time that is passing or has passed, and we all know how essential this is to human beings, the lack of which is a source of stress. The simplification afforded by a digital watch, leads to a loss of control or power.

This is an illustration of a scenario where an object with higher perceived complexity, an analogue watch, is more meaningful and therefore more pleasurable than its simpler version, the digital watch.

Been considering Botox recently? Well, feeling good about the way you look might come at a cost! One that might significantly reduce your social circle. Recent research in Embodied cognition shows that the feedback generated by the facial muscles is not just essential for experiencing emotions but also for perception and understanding emotion in others i.e empathy

Let’s first talk about the subjective experience of emotions. In 1988, Strack et al. made participants hold a pencil in their teeth (doing this activates the muscles we use to smile) while rating cartoon clips for funniness. The group of participants that was being forced to smile in this way actually rated the cartoons as being funnier than the group that was not asked to hold a pencil in their teeth. People’s facial activity therefore, was found to influence their affective responses or subjective emotional experiences.

Coming to empathy – in 2011, Chartrand & Neal published a paper in which they put forward that we use facial micro-mimicry to empathize with others. This means that if a person is wincing in pain, an observer would also tend to do a ‘micro-wince’, and this tightening of muscles is what leads his brain to understand that the other person is in pain. The way that we understand others’ emotions, therefore, is by experiencing it ourselves. They hence devised a study where they recruited participants that had had Botox treatment in the last two weeks, asked them to look at photographs of human eyes and match them to the emotion they thought that person was feeling. Botox is a neuro-toxin which is used to temporarily remove frown lines. It has a somewhat paralyzing effect on facial muscles. These participants were significantly impaired in their ability to accurately identify and match these emotions when compared to a control group that hadn’t had the treatment. These participants couldn’t mimic the expressions they were seeing and hence their brain wasn’t interpreting the emotions accurately.

The proponents of embodied cognition believe that cognition is deeply dependent on the features of the physical body of an agent. And this physical factor plays a causal role in most cognitive processing. The state of your body at any time influences how you think. So the next time someone says, “Smile and you’ll feel better”, maybe it’s actually worth giving it a shot.

Image Source: http://migraine-ista.blogspot.in/2012/03/botox-2nd-round.html

No one goes to bed skinny and wakes up fat. But it is possible that one becomes 20 pounds heavier in just one year.

There are times when we know we have over eaten and know we should have stopped eating way before we actually did… the days when we feel the belt buckle really dig in! And then there are the very rare occasions when we know we have not eaten enough. But most days we have very little idea whether we have eaten 50 calories too much or 50 calories too little. Infact, most of us wouldn’t even know if we have eaten 200 or 300 calories more or less than the day before.

This is the ‘Mindless Margin’. Coined by Brian Wansink (PhD) in his book “Mindless Eating” he explains that Mindless Margin is the margin or the zone in which we can either slightly over eat or slightly under eat without being aware of it. And this plays a major role in us gaining those extra pounds.

It takes 3,500 extra calories to equal one pound. It doesn’t matter if we eat these extra calories in a week or in a year. They will add up to one pound. Just 10 extra calories a day – one stick of Doublemint gum or three small Jelly Belly jelly beans – will make us a pound heavier one year from today. Just three Jelly Bellys a day!

Good news is that this can work in reverse as well. A few less calories everyday can lead us to gradually lose weight without us feeling terribly deprived!

However, since it is the “Mindless” margin we cannot judge it for ourselves. But we can definitely apply this knowledge to our loved ones. Slightly smaller food portion sizes or slightly smaller plates might just do the trick. Being aware of this mindless margin kind of defeats the purpose. The trick is to shave off those margins without the person being aware of it.

As designers we constantly ponder ‘What is the ultimate measure of success for design?’ In my opinion its easy adoption by the end user, which basically means minimizing cognitive load in comprehending the designer/designs intent.

Affordance is one such concept that can help us better understand user-interactions with designed artifacts. Consider this how many times have you pushed a door that should be pulled open, or pulled a door that should be pushed open?

This picture shows a door giving mixed messages: The sign explicitly tells you to push the door open, but the handle implicitly tells you to pull the door open; because, after all, handles are for pulling on!

The property of an object, or an environment, which allows an individual to perform an action is known as ‘Affordance’. Affordances are catalysts for deriving a desired behavior/action.

The term ‘Affordance’ was first coined by the perceptual psychologist,  James J. Gibson in his 1977 article “The Theory of Affordances” and explored it more fully in his book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception in 1979. Gibson’s theory stresses that affordances are all “action possibilities” furnished by an artifact/environment, which may or may not be perceived by the user, but are dependent on the users capabilities. In 1988,Donald Norman in his book, “The design of everyday things” appropriated the term affordances to refer to “perceivable action possibilities”. It makes the concept dependent not only on the physical capabilities of an actor, but also the actor’s goals, plans, values, beliefs, and past experiences.

A classic example to elaborate the significance of Affordances: I once worked in an office where the entrance door opened only in one direction. However there were identical handles on both sides. Since handles afford pulling, people constantly struggled with the door. Had the designer replaced the handle outside with a flat plate it would have instantly solved the problem, because a featureless surface affords pushing.

The concept of affordances is not unique to any particular artifact or environment and also applies to a wide variety of scales. This emphasizes the universal applicability of the concept of Affordance across different design fields.

Image source:

http://chriselyea.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/PushPullDoors.jpg

http://www.betterimprovement.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/330.jpg

Mint WSJ featured us in the latest Lounge edition (March 10, 2012). Niranjan Rajadhyaksha has put together a fantastic piece titled ‘The new think tank’ on how dry intellectual pursuits are solving real life problems on the ground. Tara Thiagarajan a PhD in neuroscience from Stanford has built her analysis of poverty using the principles of physics, non-linear dynamics and biology. She is demonstrating how network theory can explain why people are poor. Kaushik Basu, a highly respected technical economist is helping the Indian government design efficient public policy using game theory. V Srinivas, a biologist is using auctions to ensure local communities have a stake in tiger conservation. The story also features how FinalMile is solving day to day complex behavioural problems using the principles of  neurosciences and behavioural economics. Read more here

You are sitting at your desk in your room surfing the internet. Suddenly you feel the urge to nibble on something. You get up from your desk, walk out of your room door and head towards the kitchen. By the time you’ve entered the kitchen you’ve forgotten why you stood up in the first place, and you stroll back to your room and get back to your desk feeling a little confused. We have all been through this common and annoying experience of arriving somewhere only to realize that you’ve forgotten why you went there in the first place. Maybe we didn’t pay enough attention, or too much time had passed or it just wasn’t important enough. But a team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame propose a completely different idea, that “Walking through doorways causes forgetting.”

Gabriel Ravandsky and his team seated participants in front of a computer screen running a video game. Participants had to walk up to a table, pick up a colored solid object and place it on another table. The object was invisible to them, as if it was in a backpack. The other table could simply be across the room, or on some occasions participants had to walk the same distance but through a door into a new room. From time to time, the researchers gave them a quick quiz, asking which object was currently in their backpack. The quiz was timed so that when they walked through a doorway, they were tested right afterwards.  And as the title indicates, walking through doorways caused forgetting: responses were both slower and less accurate when they’d walked through a doorway into a new room than when they’d walked the same distance within the room. For eg.: a Yellow cone would be recollected as a yellow cylinder or a blue cone. This effect was also observed in a real world setting where participants either walked within or inbetween different rooms.

The next task was to prove that this effect wasn’t just caused by ‘encoding specificity’, which states that memory is best when the context during testing matches context during learning. Participants therefore picked up an object, walked through a door, and then walked through a second door which would get them back to the first room. If matching context is what counts, then walking back to the old room should boost recall. It did not.

The doorway effect suggests that there is more to remembering than the time that passed, how hard you tried or how important it is. Radvansky and colleagues suggest we only keep information in hand until required and continually purge this information in favour of new things. One way in which this purging occurs is when we physically walk through a doorway as the environment in the old room is no longer relevant. Some other changes may induce a purge as well, for eg. a friend knocking the door, laptop battery running out, etc.

This doorway effect could have significant interventions in changing behaviour. How often does it happen that we’ve visited a mall and are in two minds whether we should buy a particular product or not. We decide we will get back to it later, and move on to other sections. You come home and realize you never went back to buy that product at all. In fact you simply forgot about it. May be having too many sections or rooms in a mall might not be a good idea. On the other hand  when you want people to forget what they were just doing and get alert to what is happening in the current environment that they are in, doorways could come to good use.

Image Source: http://churchandpomo.typepad.com/

We recently wrote a piece on Mumbaiboss.com on our take on how to solve some of the behavioral problems in Mumbai, like Spitting, Littering, Trespassing, Smoking in public places. We argue that the current approach to influencing behavior is built on fundamentally wrong assumptions.  And that a Behavioral Sciences based approach would be lot more effective in solving these long standing problems. Read more here http://mumbaiboss.com/2012/01/30/whats-the-matter-with-us/

Imagine a circle pushing a square. If you imagined the circle on the left attempting to move the square on the right, then, like most of us, you’re probably fallible to the left-to-right motion perceptual-motor bias. Fluency, or a sense of ease, affects judgements and hence the decisions we take. We’ve all felt that slight discomfort with some of the choices we are considering while making a decision. Consider the perceptual-motor bias concerning movement from left to right. We are more comfortable with motion towards the right than towards the left. Goals scored from the left-to-right in football, for example, are rated as more beautiful than the goals scored from right-to-left.

Developing this natural preference probably arises on account of our language being left to right dominant. The way we read, write and conceptualize time and events in space are all from left-to-right. Accordingly, movement towards the right feels natural, whereas there is a sense of unease when it comes to leftward motion. Sports fans, imagine the implication! A clever study by Kranjec et al. (2010) suggests that this bias might be strongly at play, excuse the pun, when football referees call fouls.

Read more..

Election Commission of India has ordered that all the statues of Mayawati and her party symbol, Elephant, be covered up during the UP elections. This is being done to ensure a level playing field. While the intentions are right, the outcome could be  just the opposite. We wrote about this in today’s Mint-WSJ. http://www.livemint.com/2012/01/12200230/Mayawati-pink-elephants-and-t.html Tell us what you think.

Feedback that does not Feedforward into new behaviour, is nothing but cognitive load.

The problem is, that there is a lot of this sort of Feedback or cognitive load.

This despite the fact that human beings are excellent recipients of feedback in their day-to-day lives. Look out for two people talking to each other, constantly responding to each other’s feedback emerging from body language, tone, gaze and so on. Or look out for drivers responding to each other in traffic situations. And so on.

What then is the source of this anomaly?

To my mind, the drawing of distinction between Designed and Organic feedback brings clarity to the anomaly.

We are good at responding to organic feedback, feedback that comes from environment, animals, human beings; unfortunately the reverse is the case for most Feedbacks from Designed Systems.

Designed systems like road signs, annual evaluation of employees, speedometer, and so on.

Most of these Designed Feedbacks are so poor at understanding and accounting for human behaviour, that they simply fail to Feedforward into new behaviour. Read more..

The blame game began in full force. The tragic incident at the AMRI hospital deserved it.

Some of them sounded as follows …

“When government hospitals don’t work private ones come in and of course they chase only profitability …. Where are the safety inspectors … Government is busy spending on commonwealth to bother about spending on health care … Safety inspectors are so lowly paid that they are easily bribable … The character and morality of the country has gone to the dogs … Doctors and staff were so selfish that they left the patients without any help … Police had asked for basement clearance in July … Fire department had warned the hospital authorities many months earlier”

Not sure what the helpless patients could have done to save their lives during the AMRI fire. But what could the staff have done? Why was the staff lax about safety measures? There must have been a safety officer. Why has he been careless right through?

The answer is not just in better compliance, vigilance and policing. Of course these infrastructural issues must be resolved for better safety.

In the meanwhile though, the bigger problem to solve is the overconfidence that seemingly safe environments breed in us.

The problem with safety is – The more safe you feel the more unsafe it becomes. Read more..

Our brain is ill equipped to correctly estimate speed of large objects. This error of underestimation leads to large number of trespassing deaths on rail tracks in Mumbai. We found this error and solved it with the Yellow Lines.

Interesting how Economist was able to draw the connection with our work,  in pointing out the errors that economists commit while predicting the growth of large economies.

PEOPLE are bad at judging the speed of large objects, especially those coming towards them. That is one reason why so many Indians die crossing Mumbai’s railway tracks. What is true of locomotives is also true of the world’s large, fast-moving countries. People struggle to wrap their heads around the size and speed of populous emerging economies so are taken aback by the impact as those countries come thundering on.

Read full article

Picture Source: Economist