Talking design ethics with David Dylan Thomas
We caught up with the content strategist, speaker, and filmmaker about his new book, Design for Cognitive Bias.
It all started with a talk that Iris Bohnet gave at South by Southwest a few years ago called Gender Equality by Design. Her point was around the idea that a lot of racial and gender bias comes back to pattern recognition.
Let's say you're hiring a web developer and the image in your head is a skinny white dude. That's coming from a pattern that you've seen in movies and TV or the offices that you've worked in. If you're explicitly asked if men are better at development than women, you would say that's ridiculous.
But when you see a name at the top of a resume that doesn't match ‘skinny white dude’, you automatically start to give it the side-eye.
Watch Iris Bohnet's SXSW talk
When I saw that something as terrible as gender bias and racial bias comes back to something as simple as pattern recognition, I decided I needed to learn everything I can about cognitive bias. So I studied one cognitive bias a day for a year and launched The Cognitive Bias Podcast.
The first time I really thought about putting my UX knowledge and my cognitive bias knowledge together was when a friend of mine asked me to speak about bias at a panel for city workers about accessibility.
I was later invited to Copenhagen to deliver a longer version of the talk, and it struck me that it was really all about design ethics.
When I talk about design, I'm thinking of anybody whose job it is to help other people make decisions. You might be using visual cues, user experience principles, or content strategy to do it.
If your job is to help people make decisions, you're better off if you understand how people make decisions. And that's what cognitive bias is all about.
Are you making anything? Are you involved in the making of anything? Are you involved in the planning or budgeting of anything? And do any of those things help people make decisions? Yes? Okay, this book is for you.
It's a fascinating story. Tricia was 14 years old when she came up with this platform, called ReThink. She was really disturbed and upset by cyberbullying and hate-posting, and how in some cases it had led people to suicide. So she decided to do something about it.
And it was simple, really. If you're about to post a message that the platform detected could cause harm, it would pop up an intervention saying something like: “this looks like it might be harmful. Are you sure you want to post it?”
She did her first experiments with adolescents, who notoriously don't think before they act – that part of their brain literally hasn't finished forming yet. Over 90 percent of the people who saw the intervention didn't send their message.
I find that to be a really powerful example for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it tells us that all is not lost, 90 percent of the people out there aren't evil, they're just thoughtless. And as soon as you remind them there's a human being on the other end of that communication, they change their behavior.
The other thing is that it takes just two sentences to stop them. We’re losing our minds over social media, and it takes two sentences. If a 14-year-old can figure this out, we have no excuse.
It's very hard because it requires trust. Trust is hard. There's an example I give in the book about some folks who are trying to build a new taxonomy. We kept hitting all these roadblocks – roadblocks that didn't make any sense until we eventually figured out that we were dealing with two warring camps inside the same company. Once we understood our job wasn't to build a taxonomy so much as it was to broker a peace between these two warring camps, then it all unfolded.
Getting to that point requires someone to eventually sit you down and tell you: “Hey, look. This team over here really got screwed over the last time we tried to do a taxonomy, so they're really super suspicious.”
People don't talk about that stuff at the kickoff. Trust builds over coffee and sitting around after the meeting to chat a little longer. That's how these things usually come out. It's all very human and messy and social.
Once you get that information, you can start to empathize: Okay, well of course you're not incentivized to do research, you're not incentivized to listen to this presentation, or whatever. I need to understand what's really motivating you.
If you're talking to someone and you need to change their mind, first of all, stop trying to do that. Instead, walk into the room and try to hear them. Try to really understand where they're coming from. They’ll appreciate that. You may not change their mind, but I can guarantee you that if they don't feel heard, they definitely won't change their mind. If you shut down their dignity, if you shut down their agency, they're not going to listen to anything else you have to say.
But if they feel heard, that’s like opening the door – now it's possible for them to consider other points of view because they know that their point of view is being valued.
Once they feel seen, you can give them the tools to come to the desired conclusion on their own. That's even better than you convincing them. If I convince you of my idea, when the going gets tough, you can just abandon it, because it's not really your idea. It’s different when you have ownership of that idea. If you feel something is your idea, you’re gonna fight for it – tooth and nail. ◆
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