Cognitive Blindness

Inability to really know how others think and how their cognitive processes are different from our own.

Cognitive Blindness, Contributor, Cultural Bias, Cultural Differences, Ethnographic & User Data, Interaction Design, Product Design Strategy, Users

Dressed to Distract

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Dowd, M., (2010). “Dressed to Distract.” NYTimes. Retrieved on July 1st, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/opinion/06dowd.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage. Summary: Good looks are an advantage to any woman, man or child (and maybe even animal) in this world. Research tells us that babies will look longer at a good looking parent, and the “good looking” babies receive the same preferential treatment. The University of Alberta put together a research team to carry out a study in a supermarket to see if parents gave more attention to their more attractive children. Team leader, Dr Andrew Harrell, says that just as other animals do, “…we tend to parcel out our resources on the basis of value.” Debrahlee Lorenzana, a single mother of 33, was fired from Citibank in August for “looking too sexy”, she claims. According to her lawyer, the shape of her figure made the clothing she chose to wear too distracting for the males in her workplace. Lorenzana wasn’t like other women who chose to come to work in low-cut tops and tight pants, but because of her hourglass figure, any well tailored clothing she wore was “too distracting”. This specific case is interesting because normally the attractive people get better treatment and evaluations at work.…

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Cognitive Blindness, Conceptual Design, Contributor, Cultural Bias, Cultural Differences, Ethnographic & User Data, Interaction Design, Interface Design, Users

Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts

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Wright, A. (2009). “Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts.” The New York Times.  Retrieved on 30 June, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/technology/internet/24emotion.html Online presence is a valuable commodity in today’s digital market.  As companies seek to track exactly how their brand is discussed via the web and where these discussions appear, it becomes apparent that even a team of employees devoted to such research cannot tackle the shear size of the medium.  Thus, algorithms are being employed by marketing research firms as well as companies themselves to handle not only the amount of information present on the Internet, but also in what context it amasses. These algorithmic tools are applied all over the web, but are concentrated on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, as well as sites that allow large amounts of user-generated content. Theoretically, in this way a computer can track not only when a company is mentioned but also in what connotative context it appears. Differing from previous brand tracking, these new programs seek to determine subjective opinion as well as objective knowledge. By programming computers to scan the Internet for words that hold certain connotative meanings, marketers and brands can preemptively address user satisfaction issues as well as…

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Background Knowledge, Background Knowledge Errors, Cognitive Blindness, Contributor, Cultural Bias, Cultural Differences, Diagnostic Errors, Ethnographic & User Data, Interface Design, Mental Model Traps, Product Design Strategy, Users

A Curiously French Complaint

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Kirby, E. (2008). “ A Curiously French Complaint,” BBC News.  Retrieved on 2008/12/13. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7779126.stm Summary: This article focuses on the cultural differences between the French and British populations in regards to their medical care. Each culture has their own script of understanding, which people rely to set their expectations during a medical crisis. The author Emma experienced a cultural ‘shock’ during her first encounter with a French doctor due to her vastly different set of expectations. She visits a doctor in France due to the severity of a sore throat, where she is “diagnosed with a severe lung infection, mild asthma and had in my hand a prescription for six different types of medicine, an appointment at the local hospital’s radiology department and an emergency referral to a specialist in pulmonary disease (article).” Upon her return to Britain a few days later, she visits her family physician, who within a few minutes diagnoses her with only a ‘common cold.’ Her article then explains how the French expect a much more sever diagnosis to support their physical suffering. France is also the leading country of consumers who take prescription medications. While in England, there’s a more ‘keep a stiff upper lip’…

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Cognitive Blindness, Conceptual Design, Contributor, Ethnographic & User Data, Interaction Design, Interface Design

Women Easier to ‘Read’ Than Men

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BBC Staff.  (2009). “Women’s Traits ‘Written on Face’.”  BBC News. Retrieved on 22 June, 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7884223.stm Summary: This article is about the findings of a Glasgow University and New Scientist study carried out by Dr. Rob Jenkins of Glasgow University and Professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire.  The study examined the extent to which personality traits could be identified from people’s facial features.  The results suggest that women’s personality traits can be more easily identified via facial features than men’s personality traits.  These results were surprising (Dr. Jenkins is quoted as saying “We did not expect there to be such a big difference between the sexes.”) and may offer some insight for future research on the link between a person’s physical appearance and his/her personality. Over 1,000 New Scientist readers participated in the study which consisted of a photograph (in which, like a passport photo, the participant is looking directly at the camera) submission and an online personality questionnaire listing four personality dimensions: lucky, humorous, religious, and trustworthy.  Participants rated how they believed they fit into the four personality dimensions, and the extremes of these ratings (for example, those who are “very lucky” and “very unlucky”) were identified and grouped…

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Cognitive Blindness, Contributor, Ethnographic & User Data, Interface Design

On Skin Color and Pain Empathy

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Mann, D. (2010). “Skin Color Affects Ability to Empathize with Pain.” CNN.com. Retrieved on 23 June 2010: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/05/27/race.empathy/index.html?hpt=C2 An article written by Denise Mann, Skin color affects ability to empathize with pain”, raises some controversial questions around race. According to Mann’s article Neuroscience research has demonstrated that humans are hardwired to feel another person’s pain. For example when someone stumps their toe or fall, people reacts in ways as if they felt the other person’s pain. A study conducted in Italy argues that people feel less empathy for some that has different skin tone. Researchers have found that one reaction to another person’s pain can be racially subjective. Can race really play a role in pain empathy? The study monitored people’s nervous  systems activity by tracking heart rates and sweat gland activity when they were watching clips of white and black hands being pricked by needles. The finding was that observers reacted more to the pain of someone with the same skin tone. The experiment was also used on a purple hand in which participants empathize with more than they did with a hand from another race. The author takes these claims and applies it to how medical practitioners may…

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Cognitive Blindness, Errors, Ethnographic & User Data, Pipsqueak Articles, Users

Cognitive Blindness: Super-recognizers

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Health Check, the BBC World Service’s weekly round up of global health stories, did an audio broadcast on super-recognizers—people with extraordinary abilities to recognize faces. You can listen to the entire story by Claudia Hammond at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8665805.stm This story deals with differences in ability to recognize faces. There are people who are so bad at it that it is a pathology—when a mother can’t recognize her child among the pupils in the day care center, it’s more than inconvenient. Then there are all those embarrassing moments when you meet someone at a party for what you think is the first time only to have that person insist that you’ve met before. And the far end of the continuum, there are the super-recognizers—individuals that never forget a face even after a very brief interaction. We only now recognize the fact of super-recognizer, because most of us are not too bad and not too good at facial recognition—we are mostly average. And our average ability to recognize faces limits our ability to spot people who could do better. We were experiencing cognitive blindness—inability to perceive cognitive differences in abilities of others. And super-recognizers, similarly, didn’t know that they were somehow different from…

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Cognitive Blindness, Conceptual Design, Errors, Interaction Design, Interface Design, Pipsqueak Articles, Scaffolding, Users

Error Opportunity Space

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Confronted with one “True or False” question, an individual has a very small error opportunity space: three. There are three possible responses: true, false, or no answer. “No answer” will always be wrong, a betting man should choose one of the possible answers. But unfortunately situations where the error opportunity space is so narrow are rare. And in the real world, dealing with real problems, these spaces tend to be very large. Note that the size of the error opportunity space, EOS, makes no representations about the consequences of getting the problem right or wrong (or partially right or wrong). When the stock market tanked on May 7th, people involved in that process had a very large EOS. A week out, experts and participants are trying to figure out what went wrong and how to limit similar incidents in the future—they are trying, in effect, to drastically reduce the error opportunity space. This is a job of product designers. By analyzing the goals of the users and the system’s constraining variables, we can come up with conceptual design, interaction design, and interface design that would address the problems that were exposed on May 7th. Coming up with a solution is…

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