Cog Sci/Psychology Snippet for the Day

[elainegrey]

It is entertaining that i get my cognitive science/psychology snippets from Harvard's Business School. Entertaining, and creepy, in that the folks who are studying how we think are the folks who want to make or save a buck.

I haven't read the paper yet, so i don't know how much evidence is behind "Human nature being what it is" (did research turn this up or is this just an assumption?) but this insight seems intriguing.

A new paper by Robyn A. LeBoeuf and Michael Norton begins, "Imagine that your computer suddenly crashes: the screen turns black, the power drains away, and you cannot bring it back to life. How might you determine the cause of this event?" Human nature being what it is, they continue, instinct is to pin the cause on something that equates with the outcome. If the result was a small outcome—losing an e-mail that was of no consequence—then we might attribute the crash to a lunch burrito leaking on the keyboard. But if the outcome had serious repercussions—a wedding invitation list lost permanently—then we decide the cause must have been a targeted computer virus. Furthermore, we ratchet up or down our response to the event based in part on where we assess blame. We tend to link cause with outcome because it prevents us from perceiving ourselves to be at the mercy of capricious and arbitrary forces: "What do you mean a leaky burrito ruined my wedding?" Understanding this reaction can help firms plan for the choices made by consumers after a product has failed them. Read "Consequence-Cause Matching: Looking to the Consequences of Events to Infer Their Causes."

By the way, are we assuming this is a laptop that you've drooled your burrito on? Because a hacker isn't going to do anything that drains the power away. Bad power supply is more like it. Or, fan died and you've overheated. (Have a colleague who, when his disk was encrypted, his computer started crashing, and just putting an external fan system under the laptop stopped the crashing.)