Susan M. Weinschenk's Blog, page 27

The Brain Science of Empathy — Guest Paul Zak

We were thrilled to have Paul Zak on this HumanTech podcast episode, and the conversation ranges from research on human attachments, sex with robots, and virtual reality.

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You may want to check out Paul’s book, The Moral Molecule:

HumanTech is a podcast that explores the intersection of humans, brain science, and technology. Your hosts Guthrie and Dr. Susan Weinschenk explore how behavioral and brain science affects our technologies and how technologies affect our brains.

You can subscribe to the HumanTech podcast through iTunes, Stitcher, or where ever you listen to podcasts.

Technology in Education

It’s start of the school year time in the US, so we thought we’d do a podcast episode on technology and education.

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HumanTech is a podcast at the intersection of humans, brain science, and technology. Your hosts Guthrie and Dr. Susan Weinschenk explore how behavioral and brain science affects our technologies and how technologies affect our brains.

You can subscribe to the HumanTech podcast through iTunes, Stitcher, or where ever you listen to podcasts.

The Ethics Of Persuasion — A Conversation with Nathalie Nahai

For this HumanTech podcast episode, Nathalie Nahai from the UK joins us for a conversation about whether and when it is ethical to use persuasion techniques in our apps and our websites to get people to take certain actions.

Listen to the podcast and also check out Nathalie’s book: Webs Of Influence.

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HumanTech is a podcast that explores the intersection of humans, brain science, and technology. Your hosts Guthrie and Dr. Susan Weinschenk explore how behavioral and brain science affects our technologies and how technologies affect our brains.

You can subscribe to the HumanTech podcast through iTunes, Stitcher, or where ever you listen to podcasts.

Making Sense Out Of A Mess — Information Architecture with Guest Abby Covert

How do you make sense of out a mess of stuff? Our guest for this HumanTech podcast episode, Abby Covert, has some interesting ideas about how to do just that. I thought that Information Architecture (IA) was about creating order out of lots of data, but it turns out that is not true!

Listen to the podcast and also check out Abby’s book: How To Make Sense of Any Mess.

Your browser does not support the audio element.

HumanTech is a podcast that explores the intersection of humans, brain science, and technology. Your hosts Guthrie and Dr. Susan Weinschenk explore how behavioral and brain science affects our technologies and how technologies affect our brains.

You can subscribe to the HumanTech podcast through iTunes, Stitcher, or where ever you listen to podcasts.

The Science of Vacations

Have you ever gone on a vacation and not enjoyed it as much as you thought you would? In this HumanTech podcast episode we talk about the research on vacations and give you some tips for how to get the most enjoyment out of your time off.

 

http://humantech.theteamw.com/episodes/021_vacations_mixdown.mp3

HumanTech is a podcast at the intersection of humans, brain science, and technology. Your hosts Guthrie and Dr. Susan Weinschenk explore how behavioral and brain science affects our technologies and how technologies affect our brains.

You can subscribe to the HumanTech podcast through iTunes, Stitcher, or where ever  you listen to podcasts.

The Behavioral Science of Elections

What makes for a persuasive campaign and message? In this HumanTech podcast episode we talk about current and past election campaigns, and which persuasive principles work and why.

 

http://humantech.theteamw.com/episodes/022_politics_mixdown.mp3

 

HumanTech is a podcast at the intersection of humans, brain science, and technology. Your hosts Guthrie and Dr. Susan Weinschenk explore how behavioral and brain science affects our technologies and how technologies affect our brains.

You can subscribe to our HumanTech podcast through iTunes, Stitcher, or where ever  you listen to podcasts.

Would People Rather Give Themselves a Shock Than Sit And Think?

Dr. Timothy Wilson is a social psychologist at the University of Virginia. He joins us in this HumanTech podcast to talk about research on how self-stories affect our behavior, and his new research on the things people are willing to do to not have to just sit and think. And you’ll also hear how Dr. Wilson’s first book, Strangers To Ourselves: The Adaptive Unconscious, dramatically changed the course of my career.

You can subscribe to our HumanTech podcast through iTunes, Stitcher, or where ever  you listen to podcasts.

http://humantech.theteamw.com/episodes/023_timwilson_mixdown.mp3

And here are some links to Dr. Wilson’s books if you want to check them out for more information:

Redirect, by Timothy Wilson, 2011 –  If you want to know how to make permanent and lasting change in your behavior, or the behavior of someone you know, then this is the book to read. Wilson covers the recent, and often very surprising, research on interventions and therapies that result in people actually changing. Permanent behavior change is hard to come by. This book tells you what does and doesn’t work based on research.

Strangers to Ourselves: The Adaptive Unconscious, by Timothy Wilson, 2004 – This is the book that actually got me started seriously on the topic of the unconscious. I had read Blink (Malcolm Gladwell) and although that was an interesting book, I wanted more depth and detail. Gladwell referenced Wilson’s book so I started reading it and light bulbs went off for me. This is a great book with lots of interesting insights and strong research.

HumanTech is a podcast at the intersection of humans, brain science, and technology. Your hosts Guthrie and Dr. Susan Weinschenk explore how behavioral and brain science affects our technologies and how technologies affect our brains.

The Next 100 Things You Need To Know About People: #119 — Games Can Enhance Brain Flexibility

When my son was about six years old, we were shopping in Target. He saw a group of ten-to thirteen-year-olds playing video games on the demo machines, and was fascinated (video games were not part of his life at that time), so he stopped to watch. Not wanting him to get too interested, and also being in a rush to get my shopping done, I said something like, “You don’t want to play video games. It’s scrambling their brains.” I started walking to the checkout lanes and then realized he hadn’t followed me. I turned back to where he was standing at the video game section and found him staring intently at one of the boys playing the video games. “What are you doing?” I asked. My son turned to me and said thoughtfully, “He doesn’t look like his brains are scrambled.”

I was pretty strict with my children about video games. We never owned a game console, and I limited their video game time to “educational” games. My daughter never did become a fan, but my son did when he went off to college and beyond.

Now, looking at the research, I realize I may have been wrong about games.

Games can increase perceptual learning — Some of you may be parents who appreciate gaming, and others may be parents like I was, who thought that games were not a good way for children to spend time. Research shows that playing games isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There are benefits: training in action games can increase the speed of perceptual processing and something called perceptual learning. It’s possible to train the senses—vision, hearing, motor skills—and improve their capabilities, especially with action games.

When people play games, it can increase how quickly they’re able to process sensory stimuli. It can increase the ability to filter out extraneous sensory stimuli and focus on one perceptual channel.

Brian Glass (2013) cites research studies showing that when people who are new to games are taught how to play action games, they can process visual information faster as a result, even outside of the gaming context.

Even adults can create new neuron structures — For many decades, it was assumed that the brain has the most flexibility and neurons at birth and that it’s basically downhill from there. There’s the old adage about not consuming too much alcohol, lest it kill the finite number of brain cells you have. Along with this idea came the theory that brain structures become more rigid over time—that as people get older, their brains can’t be rewired. This has all turned out to be untrue. The adult brain has neuroplasticity—its neural structures can change and keep changing and learning. The skills learned from  gaming are an example of neuroplasticity.

Strategy games increase cognitive flexibility — In addition to the perceptual learning that action games provide, research shows that strategy games can also improve cognitive flexibility. Cognitive flexibility is the ability to coordinate four things:

What you’re paying attention to
What you’re thinking about
What rules to use
How to make a decision

The more cognitively flexible you are, the higher your intelligence and psychological health.

Cognitive flexibility is trainable — Glass took women who were not gamers and had them play games for an hour a day for forty days. One group played Sims 2, another played StarCraft with one base, and the third group played StarCraft with two bases at different locations. Cognitive flexibility was measured before and after the training. The two groups playing StarCraft raised their cognitive flexibility scores more than the group that played Sims 2. And the group that managed two bases increased even more than the group that managed one base.

What do you think? Have games improved your perceptual skills and/or cognitive flexibility?

Here’s the research reference:  Brian Glass, Real-Time Strategy Game Training: Emergence of a Cognitive Flexibility Trait, PLOS, August 7, 2013.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0070350

If you liked this article, and want more info like it, check out my newest book: 100 MORE Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People.

The Next 100 Things You Need To Know About People: #118 — You Can’t Trust Memories

How accurate are memories? Did you see the movie Inside Out? In the movie memories are stored as round colored balls. And the balls can be retrieved and played back. This seems intuitively right. You think back to when you were last at a family gathering or an annual work celebration. You run the event back in your mind, and it almost seems like you’re watching a movie. We think that memories are like digital recordings of specific facts or events. But that’s not how memories are stored or retrieved.

The latest research on memory shows that memories are formed from particular neurons firing. Your brain is being rewired every time you form a memory. But your brain is also firing when you retrieve the memory. And every time you retrieve the memory, it may change based on new information and new memories. You re-create the memory when you retrieve it, so it’s subject to new neuron firings. Each time you retrieve the memory it changes a little more, especially for this type of “autobiographical” memory.

Anything that’s occurred since you first created the memory may affect the original memory. For example, you remember that your Aunt Kathy was at the family reunion last August, but actually she wasn’t at that reunion, she was at the holiday party in October. The memory has been altered and you probably aren’t aware of the alteration.

But some memories are accurate, right? — If I ask you what you were doing on July 21, 2008, you probably won’t remember much, and your memories may be vague, “Was that a weekday? If it was a weekday, I was probably at work.” However, if I ask you what you were doing when you found out about the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, you probably have a very strong memory of where you were and what you were doing, because that memory was encoded with a strong emotional charge — these are called “flashbulb” memories.

Ten years later — Within a week of September 11, 2001, several researchers joined together (William Hirst, 2015) in the US and sent out surveys about the event. They then sent out follow-up surveys to the same people eleven months, twenty-five months, and 119 months (almost ten years) after the event. They found that people’s memories of the event (where they were, how they reacted, what happened during the event) changed a lot in the first year, and included many inaccuracies. After the first year the memories stabilized—meaning they didn’t change, but they still contained many inaccuracies. At the ten-year mark the memories remain stable, but still inaccurate.

The researchers also studied also whether external events—how much people watched media accounts, talked to friends, or were personally affected by the events—had an effect on the memories or the inaccuracies. They found no effect. Flashbulb memories change a lot over about a year and then seem to resist change after that.

Memories can be erased — Did you see the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that came out a few years ago? It’s about a service people can hire to erase specific memories. When the movie came out there was speculation that this might be possible, but strong proof wasn’t in. Now, however, we know that it is possible to erase memories. In fact, there are several ways to erase a memory. They’re all based on the idea that when you retrieve a memory you’re actually not retrieving an intact memory and playing it back—you’re recreating the nerve impulses and brain activity you had when you first formed the memory. If you can disrupt the nerve firings, then you can’t create the memory—ever.

There are several ways to disrupt the firings:

1)   Particular proteins facilitate the process of forming a memory. If those proteins are stopped from being created, then you won’t form a memory. There are drugs that inhibit the protein.

2)   Xenon gas interferes with signal pathways in the brain, so if you breathe xenon gas it while recalling a memory it will erase the memory. Xenon gas is used as an anesthetic.

3)   Laser light can change genes and, in doing so, change a memory. The laser light turns genes on or off by stimulating or inhibiting proteins. Interestingly, this method of memory erasing, called optogenetics, is reversible. Amy Chuong (2014) now has developed a way of doing this that doesn’t require anything be implanted in the brain. It can all be done with light outside the brain.

And for those of you who do customer or user research… Uh oh… As a consultant I often do customer and user interviews and testing. During a user test of a clothing website, one person I was working with commented that he didn’t like the purple colors at the website. Half an hour later, when we were discussing his experience, he commented on how much he liked the purple color at the website. Another person I tested was using online banking software to send a wire transfer. The user experience of the product was poor. The person I was testing was so frustrated that she alternated between using bad language and being almost in tears. Half an hour later she said she thought the site was really easy to use. I told her she didn’t have to say that, that she could be honest about her experience. She looked at me in confusion and said, “I am being honest.” It had only been an hour or less, but even after that amount of time the memories of the experience are often different than the experience itself. Interviewing and user testing are one of the main ways to get customer and user feedback, but because they rely on memory, they are flawed methods. What’s a researcher to do?!

If you liked this article, and want more info like it, check out my newest book: 100 MORE Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People.

The Next 100 Things You Need To Know About People: #117 — Why People Spend More When They Use A Credit Card

Budget and financial counselors often advise people to withdraw cash each week and use it to pay for daily and weekly expenses rather than putting purchases on a credit card. The theory is that if you see the money leaving your wallet, you’ll spend less. The theory is correct, as several research studies have shown. But it’s not exactly using cash that’s important—it’s the transparency of the payment.

Lower the transparency = more money spent — Payment transparency refers to how tangible the payment is. The more real or tangible a payment is, the more transparent it is. Here’s what we know about methods of payment:

Cash is very tangible. You can touch it and put it in your pocket — it’s real—which means you don’t like to see it go away. It’s very tangible and very transparent.
Writing a check is a little less transparent than cash, but it’s more transparent than credit cards. When you hand over a check, you don’t get it back, like cash.
Credit cards are tangible since there’s an actual card, and if you’re using it at a store, you do hand over the card, but then the card gets handed back to you, so there isn’t a reinforcing sense of loss. Credit cards are less transparent than cash or checks.
Using a credit card online is even less transparent. If you have your credit card number memorized or if the retailer you’re purchasing from has your credit card information stored, then you don’t even have to touch the credit card. The transparency is lower than cash or handing over a credit card in a store. You’ll likely spend more.
Amazon’s one-click purchasing lowers transparency even further, since all you have to do is click the Buy Now button.
Subscriptions for products and services where you sign up once and then money is taken from your credit card automatically are less transparent than any of the other methods.

If you liked this article, and want more info like it, check out my newest book: 100 MORE Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People.