Fast and Slow (Design) Thinking
By Kate DowlerWe discuss the implications of Daniel Kahneman’s brilliant book Thinking Fast and Slow for individual and group creativity, and how behavioural science can be an important tool for innovators.
Daniel Kahneman’s brilliant book: Thinking Fast and Slow is a summary of his paradigm-changing work with Amos Tversky into human behaviour and decision-making.
There’s enough insight and learning in the book to keep you going for a lifetime, but here, in the first of our Thinking Outside the Books Series, are three of the most interesting themes, framed in terms of their implications for creativity and design.
Priming for Creativity
In its broadest form, priming refers to the influence of context and the framing of particular options on our perceptions, behaviour and decision-making.
One of earliest examples of the priming effect comes from research conducted by John Bargh and his collaborators in 1996 – from which the term Florida Effect was coined. In this experiment, two groups of undergraduate student participants were individually asked to complete a scrambled sentence task, which involved rearranging the order of words to form sentences. In one group (the experimental group), the words in their sentences included various words which related to the elderly, such as bingo, wrinkle, and Florida.
Unknown to the participants, a second part of the experiment measured how long each individual took to walk down the hallway as they left the building following the sentence task. The experimental group with the elderly keywords were found to walk significantly more slowly than the control group. Having been primed to think about the elderly, this task actually influenced their subsequent behaviour at a subconscious level.
In our daily lives, priming is happening all the time – the interesting question for creativity is how we can use it to enhance creativity and get to better outcomes. In its most overt form, studies have shown that simply giving people the instruction to “be more creative” gets to more creative ideas.
At a more subtle level, I wonder how specific details about the way we run creative sessions could be designed to enhance the behaviours and mindsets we want from the project team. For example, when looking to build empathy with a particular user group, could we supplement techniques such as role play and persona building with more subtle cues that prime people to be more creative by subconsciously getting into the right mindset. For example, the language we use when setting a task, the design of stimulus and materials, the food we eat, the pace of the sessions and what we wear.
The Power of One
A key theme that runs through the book is our tendency to place too much emphasis on information about a specific instance or individual, ignoring more general, base rate information and, instead, inferring the general from the particular.
A good example of this at work is in the charity sector, where campaigns often focus on the plight of a single individual. Individual stories tend to resonate more strongly than campaigns that focus on groups or communities and are often more effective from a fundraising basis – the identifiable victim effect.
On a related point, our tendency to be drawn to the specific and particular is, I believe, a key reason why the effective altruism movement is so difficult for many people to engage with. Effective altruism relies primarily on a System 2 approach to giving.
How does this play out in the creative space? Well, it demonstrates why archetypes and personas are so widely used as an effective approach to quickly develop understanding and empathy for a particular target consumer or user group.
On the flip side, a watch out is that people (project team, designers, clients) often get hung up on one interesting example or observation they made during a consumer session. Whilst there’s certainly validity in the power of one observation to inspire creativity, it’s important not to fixate on this example to the detriment of ignoring more general learnings and insights, and also not to infer the general from this single observation.
Designing for Memory
One of the most interesting concepts in the book relates to the role of the experiencing self, vs. the remembering self. We tend to forget many of the specific details about the experiences that we have, and the way we remember each experience can be quite different from how it was when we actually experienced it.
We can all relate to this in some form, such as looking back at experiences with rose-tinted glasses, or assessing past relationships on how they ended rather than how they were overall.
Critically, research has shown that the three most influential elements that determine the lasting memory of that experience are: how it starts, how it ends and the “peak” of the experience (whether good or bad) – particularly the last two. In contrast, these retrospective assessments are relatively insensitive to duration (how long particular parts of the experience last) – an effect known as duration neglect.
Kahneman illustrates the concept of duration neglect by describing a series of experiments he ran which involved participants holding their hand up to the wrist into painfully cold water for different durations. In one carefully controlled experiment, participants endured two cold-hand episodes. One involved 60 seconds of immersion in water at 14°C. The other involved 60 seconds of immersion at 14°C followed by 30 seconds of very slightly warmer water (15°C). This very slight improvement in the end state was enough for most (80%) of participants to choose the longer episode when asked which of the two experiences they would rather repeat – another 30 seconds of needless pain!
What does this mean for creativity? It suggests we should be designing experiences for our users, clients and customers that start and end well, and have a strong positive peak or “delighter” moment. Arguably, other aspects of the experience are not so important as long as they are not overly negative. Indeed, is the increasing emphasis on experience design misplaced – would we be better off focussing our efforts on memory design?
The chapter ends by challenging us to question whether our experiences only have value because we remember them – would a holiday be worth going on if you didn’t remember it afterwards? A particularly relevant question in today’s digital age where the planning and curation of memories increasingly trumps the focus placed on the experience at hand.
What are your thoughts outside the book?
I’d love to hear your thoughts on Priming, the Power of One, and Designing for Memory, and more generally how behavioural science has influenced how you approach creativity and design.
Drop me a line
