Lone Gunman

The advanced radar sys­tems that are slowly mak­ing their way into mod­ern cars are already advanced enough to drive our cars for us and save thou­sands of lives a year, says Robert Scoble as he dis­cusses the safety sys­tems cur­rently avail­able in Ford and Toy­ota models.

The fea­tures Scoble describes (and Ford’s Global Chief Safety Engi­neer, Steve Kozak, demon­strates in the two embed­ded videos) are excit­ing, but it’s this that caught my eye: that accord­ing to cus­tomer research the gen­eral pub­lic isn’t ready for the advanced dri­ving sys­tems that already exist.

There were nearly 6,420,000 auto acci­dents in the United States in 2005. The finan­cial cost of these crashes is more than 230 Bil­lion dol­lars. 2.9 mil­lion peo­ple were injured and 42,636 peo­ple killed. About 115 peo­ple die every day in vehi­cle crashes in the United States — one death every 13 minutes. […]

Why haven’t they just made my car totally drive itself? Because cus­tomers just aren’t ready for it, says Ford’s Kozak in the video. He explains how the 2010 Ford Tau­rus uses this tech­nol­ogy in a much dif­fer­ent way from my Prius due to cus­tomer research that showed Ford most peo­ple just aren’t ready for assisted dri­ving tech­nolo­gies like exist in my Prius.

I’d love to get my hands on that Ford research.

Lec­tur­ing stu­dents on the fact that gen­eral intel­li­gence can be improved and that cer­tain races and gen­ders are not nat­u­rally more intel­li­gent than oth­ers (in-line with cur­rent research) can improve test scores–especially for mem­bers of the groups typ­i­cally thought of as hav­ing lim­ited intelligence.

It’s not just the­o­ret­i­cal: the find­ings were applied suc­cess­fully to schools in New York City, show­ing that “real­iz­ing that one’s intel­li­gence may be improved may actu­ally improve one’s intel­li­gence”.

Despite a lot of evi­dence to the con­trary, many peo­ple believe that intel­li­gence is fixed, and, more­over, that some racial and social groups are inher­ently smarter than oth­ers. Merely evok­ing these stereo­types about the intel­lec­tual infe­ri­or­ity of these groups (such as women and Blacks) is enough to harm the aca­d­e­mic per­fo­mance of mem­bers of these groups. […]

Yet social psy­chol­o­gists [have] taught African Amer­i­can and Euro­pean Amer­i­can col­lege stu­dents to think of intel­li­gence as change­able, rather than fixed — a les­son that many psy­cho­log­i­cal stud­ies sug­gests is true. Stu­dents in a con­trol group did not receive this mes­sage. Those stu­dents who learned about IQ’s mal­leabil­ity improved their grades more than did stu­dents who did not receive this mes­sage, and also saw aca­d­e­mics as more impor­tant than did stu­dents in the con­trol group.

In sug­gest­ing alter­na­tives to the sta­tus quo of high-status women delay­ing child­birth fur­ther and fur­ther, Robin Han­son notes that, unlike advanced pater­nal age, advanced mater­nal age does not cor­re­late with poor learn­ing and social out­comes in chil­dren (in fact, older moth­ers had chil­dren who scored higher).

In all cases, we find evi­dence that chil­dren of older moth­ers have bet­ter out­comes. Not only do chil­dren born to moth­ers in their twen­ties do bet­ter than chil­dren born to teen moth­ers, but chil­dren born to moth­ers in their thir­ties do bet­ter than chil­dren born to moth­ers in their twen­ties. How­ever, when we con­trol for other socioe­co­nomic char­ac­ter­is­tics, such as fam­ily income, parental edu­ca­tion and sin­gle par­ent­hood, the coef­fi­cients on mater­nal age become small and sta­tis­ti­cally insignif­i­cant. The only excep­tion is an index of social out­comes, which is pos­i­tively asso­ci­ated with mater­nal age, even con­trol­ling for socioe­co­nomic fac­tors. For cog­ni­tive out­comes, young moth­er­hood appears to be a marker, not a cause, of poor child outcomes.

That may be, but Han­son also states that women dras­ti­cally under­es­ti­mate their fer­til­ity in later life.

The aver­age woman is born with around 300,000 eggs […] with just 12 per­cent of those eggs remain­ing at the age of 30, and only 3 per­cent left by 40. […]

It is clear that there’s a very rapid loss in the num­ber of eggs avail­able as women age and that the smaller pool of [older] eggs is also more likely to con­tain a higher pro­por­tion of abnor­mal eggs. […]

It’s impor­tant to remem­ber that even 30,000 or so eggs remain­ing at the start of your 30s is still a lot. In addi­tion, the quan­tity and qual­ity of eggs are just two fac­tors affect­ing fer­til­ity: […] lifestyle fac­tors such as stress, smok­ing and being over­weight can have an increas­ingly neg­a­tive impact on fer­til­ity as you get older.

The Design with Intent toolkit is a guide to help you design sys­tems to influ­ence a user’s behav­iour. The author, Dan Lock­ton, has sub­ti­tled the toolkit 101 Pat­terns for Influ­enc­ing Behav­iour Through Design.

Cat­e­gorised into the fol­low­ing eight ‘lenses’ (ways to look at design and behav­iour) the toolkit proves to be a fan­tas­tic resource for help­ing you per­suade through design.

• Archi­tec­tural (e.g. Seg­men­ta­tion and Spac­ing: Can you divide your sys­tem up into parts, so peo­ple only use one bit at a time?)
• Error­proof­ing (pre­vi­ously) (e.g. Choice Edit­ing: Can you edit the choices pre­sented to users so only the ones ou want them to have are available?)
• Inter­ac­tion (e.g. Par­tial Com­ple­tion: Can you show that the first stage of a process has been com­pleted already, to give users con­fi­dence to do the next?)
• Ludic (e.g. Unpre­dictable Rre­in­force­ment: What hap­pens if you give rewards or feed­back on an unpre­dictable sched­ule, so users keep play­ing or interacting?)
• Per­cep­tual (e.g. Fake Affor­dances: Is there any­thing to be gained from mak­ing some­thing look like it works one way, while actu­ally doing some­thing else (or noth­ing at all)?)
• Cog­ni­tive (e.g. Social Proof: Can you show peo­ple what other users like them are doing in this sit­u­a­tion, and which choices are most popular?)
• Machi­avel­lian (e.g. Anchor­ing: Can you affect users’ expec­ta­tions or assump­tions by con­trol­ling the ref­er­ence points they have?)
• Secu­rity (e.g. Peer­veil­lance: What hap­pens if users know (or believe) that what they’re doing is vis­i­ble to their peers also using the system?)

From the intro­duc­tion to v0.9 of the toolkit:

You have a prod­uct, ser­vice or environment—a sys­tem—where users’ behav­iour is impor­tant to it work­ing prop­erly (safely, efficiently), so ide­ally you’d like peo­ple to use it in a cer­tain way.

Or maybe you have a sys­tem where it would be desir­able to alter the way that peo­ple use it, to improve things for users, the peo­ple around them, or soci­ety as a whole.

How can you mod­ify the design, or redesign the sys­tem, to achieve this: to influence, or change users’ behaviour?

We’ve seen before how the cog­ni­tive flu­ency (how ‘easy’ it is to think of or com­pre­hend some­thing) of restau­rant menus, stock ticker codes and phys­i­cal exer­cises influ­ence how com­plex, risky and even beau­ti­ful we per­ceive them to be.

A recent Psy­Blog arti­cle pro­vides a sum­mary of a num­ber of cog­ni­tive flu­ency stud­ies and here are the ones I’ve not seen before (some of which I wouldn’t have even con­sid­ered to be related to cog­ni­tive fluency):

• A writer is per­ceived as hav­ing a higher intel­li­gence if his writ­ing is uncomplicated.
• Non-native res­i­dents of a coun­try are thought of more neg­a­tively than the natives.
• Flu­ent speak­ers are regarded as being more knowl­edge­able and intel­li­gent (although it was also found that hes­i­ta­tions in speech cause spe­cific words to be remem­bered more than others–the word(s) directly fol­low­ing the hesitation).
• A block of text describ­ing a prod­uct can dou­ble the amount of peo­ple will­ing to pur­chase that prod­uct if it is writ­ten in an easy-to-read font.
• Phys­i­cal (sen­so­ri­mo­tor) flu­ency causes pleasure.
• Cog­ni­tive flu­ency allows us to rea­son quickly and effortlessly.

The arti­cle con­cludes with:

Like math­e­mati­cians search­ing for the short­est for­mula to describe a com­plex phe­nom­e­non, we should all be obsessed with sim­plic­ity, because in sim­plic­ity lies beauty and the human mind, as we’ve just seen, finds it dif­fi­cult to resist.