(This is turning into a marathon: parts one, two, three and four precede this one. I can’t guarantee your sanity should you choose to read that lot.)
Joshua Porter: Leveraging Cognitive Bias in Social Design
“Rationality be damned…”
We (humans) work on limited information to make a decision – the Bandwagon Effect.
Heuristics
Heuristics are a shortcut to making a decision. They’re useful (else we would likely never make a decision, make a decision very, very slowly and/or go insane in the process) but they are subject to cognitive bias.
Design-related biases
- Including Not Invented Here (which I loathe; hey – I have a bias against it!)
Representation bias
- leveraged by Freshbooks to go after the type of audience they want
- Yelp.com’s reviewer of the day
- these are power users that are showcased as being representative of the wider community, even though they’re not
Loss aversion
More people would take a bet on a 50% chance of a win than a 50% chance of loss, even though the result is the same!
Losses loom larger than gains [as illustrated by the LHC switch-on this week, and the focus on the infinitesimally small chance of earth-swallowing black holes]. For instance, here is OpenID described in terms of gains and losses:
“Log in anywhere with your domain!” – gains
“Don’t forget another password!” – losses
Any feature described in terms of future savings is probably better described in terms of an immediate loss.
Ownership bias
People value things more when they have a sense of ownership, and this is reflected in the names of many online services: Youtube, MySpace, myhotel. Also, Flickr is littered with “you” descriptions.
This ownership bias is a factor in the 9x effect (mentioned during Joshua’s workshop), where sign-up is actually nine times harder than we think.
On Slide.com, sign-up is deferred until later; the user gets to make something first, creating a sense of ownership (and the need to avoid losing that which they’ve created – more loss aversion).
More to come. Yes, really.