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.