Tag Archives: psychology

Cases

Please help us recycle easily

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We want to voluntarily participate in recycling but do so only when it is easy. Here are the two bin boxes available at a university in Seoul. Unfortunately, their colors and their names are not matched: the left one has a blue cover and its green panel says “recycled” whereas the right one has a green cover and a blue panel says “disposable.” The mismatch among name, cover color, and panel color led me to give up choosing one for my empty coffee can. Instead, I threw it away somewhere else. Indeed, behaving in a sustainable way requires huge mental resources. Therefore, things need to be designed carefully in advance.

DML_Bin box_01

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Reference

White, K., Hardisty, D. J., & Habib, R. (2019). The elusive green consumer. Harvard Business Review, 11(1), 124-133.

People say they want sustainable products, but they don’t tend to buy them. Here’s how to change that.

Cases

How can we learn and acquire skills?

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20131014_Stellan Ohlsson @ SKKU_Skill acquisition (2)

Stellan Ohlsson, Professor in Psychology at University of Illinois at Chicago visited COGENG (Cognitive Engineering Lab) at SKKU and gave a speech on skill acquisition. He introduced his own work of learning from errors in which he argues that, in order to acquire or specializes in a certain skill (e.g., changing a lane to the left while driving), people should not only perform a certain task (e.g., turning the steering wheel to the left) but also detect and correct errors (e.g., turning the steering wheel to the left only when a car behind approaches). According to his constraint based approach, a skill is acquired only when a certain action with a negative outcome is unlearned (e.g., turning the steering wheel to the left slowly so that being hit by the car behind).

Certainly, there are many more ways to acquire skills. According to his review paper published in 2008, there are at least nine different ways of how people acquire skills.

1. Internalize direct instructions

2. Generalize from specific examples

3. Analogize to prior skill knowledge

4. Reason from prior declarative knowledge

5. Encode results of heuristic search

6. Strengthen positive outcomes

7. Unlearn actions with negative outcomes

8. Discover short cuts in execution histories

9. Accumulate statistical information

Cases

What happens when the men’s room sign is pink?

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20130315_Washroom @ Ewha Women University (2)

Blue is for boys and pink is for girls. This color-gender association is strongly established in many countries. In a women’s university in Korea, however, signs for men’s rooms and for ladies’ rooms are both colored in pink. My friend said that they use the same color to avoid any possible gender discrimination. Interestingly however, pink signs confuse men when searching for men’s room. Indeed, “men” needs to be written down on the door of men’s room.

20130315_Washroom @ Ewha Women University (3)

This raises a series of interesting questions.

  • First, does the different colors discriminate different genders?
  • Second, if this is the case, should we sacrifice our color-based convenience in order to promote social justice?
  • Third, if color-based convenience needs to be replaced with other coding systems, what are the other ways that do not discriminate gender? For instance, if the shape-gender association is a good candidate (below), how could we UN-learn the color-gender association and then learn the shape-gender association?
20130315_Washroom @ Ewha Women University (1)

Reference

Scarpina, F., & Tagini, S. (2017). The stroop color and word test. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 557.

The literature on interference in the Stroop Color and Word Test, covering over 50 yrs and some 400 studies, is organized and reviewed. In so doing, a set of 18 reliable empirical findings is isolated that must be captured by any successful theory of the Stroop effect. Existing theoretical positions are summarized and evaluated in view of this critical evidence and the 2 major candidate theories, relative speed of processing and automaticity of reading, are found to be wanting. It is concluded that recent theories placing the explanatory weight on parallel processing of the irrelevant and the relevant dimensions are likely to be more successful than are earlier theories attempting to locate a single bottleneck in attention.

Cases

Do people like an unexpected design of a product?

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burger king

We often meet a product with a unique form and find it difficult to guess how it works. Examples include a donut-looking tape by 3M, a burger/fries/coke-looking USB key by Burger King, or a chocolate-looking mirror by Meiji, a Japanese chocolate manufacturer. One of my Japanese friends even pointed me a website in which a designer keeps posting his/her design prototypes (Prototype 1000).

I wonder whether consumers like a product more when its form and function are inconsistent than when they are consistent.

Prototype1000

Noseworthy, T. J., & Trudel, R. (2011). Looks Interesting, but What Does It Do? Evaluation of Incongruent Product Form Depends on Positioning. Journal of Marketing Research, 48(6), 1008–1019.

Marketers struggle with how best to position innovative products that are incongruent with consumer expectations. Compounding the issue, many incongruent products are the result of innovative changes in product form intended to increase hedonic appeal. Crossing various product categories with various positioning tactics in a single meta-analytic framework, the authors find that positioning plays an important role in how consumers evaluate incongruent form. The results demonstrate that when a product is positioned on functional dimensions, consumers show more preferential evaluations for moderately incongruent form than for congruent form. However, when a product is positioned on experiential dimensions, consumers show more preferential evaluations for congruent form than for moderately incongruent form. Importantly, an increase in perceived hedonic benefits mediates the former, whereas a decrease in perceived utilitarian benefits mediates the latter. The mediation effects are consistent with the view that consumers must first understand a product’s functionality before engaging in hedonic consumption.

Cases

How to make a minimalist product?

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 Samsung Multi function printer

One of the most distinctive current design trends is minimalism. Examples are ranging from electronics such as Apple’s iPod, LG’s chocolate phone, and B&O’s BeoSound system to interior accessories such as Muji’s fan and the humidifier at Plus Minus Zero (by Naoto Fukasawa). Since some of those minimally designed products made a huge commercial success, we need to understand how consumers respond to minimalist products, the products with the minimum number of design features such as colors, shapes and buttons. 

Bang & Olufson speaker

Simplicity has been discussed in various areas. For instance, John Maeda (2007), a computer scientist and graphic designer argues in his book, The Laws of Simplicity that simplicity needs to be accomplished in graphic design as well as in organizations, business, and technology. Wallace (2006) also attributes the success of Apple and Google to their simplicity, urging marketers to deliver selective distinctive benefits in today’s visually overloaded environment. However, it is also true that many European designers complain that, mostly US, consumers are not ready to embrace the value of simplicity. Don Norman in his blog argues that simplicity is highly overrated. Then, when functionality is not sacrificed, does minimalism truly increase consumer preference?

Shin and Joo (2019), “Less for more, but how & why? – Number of elements as key determinant of visual complexity,” International Association of Societies of Design Research 2019, Manchester:UK. 

Although designers aim at “less for more” when developing a product, they struggle with how to achieve simplicity and why making a product simple improves the commercial value of the product. To answer the two questions, we performed one experimental study. In the study, we searched for which of the six different types of lowering visual complexity is effective and examined whether authenticity mediates the effect of visual complexity on commercial value. Results show that three out of six types of lowering visual complexity (e.g., irregularity of arrangement, amount of material, incongruity) deemed to be more commercial value. Results also show that decreasing the amount of material is the only way to enhance authenticity, which in turn increases the commercial value of the product.