Beautifully Biased Brains

Bad UX research does not stink. Anyone without training can create poor research and the output looks just as convincing to the untrained eye. This is the reason why UX research uniquely feels the push for democratization.

As companies increasingly embrace automated products and services, they need to understand how those things make their customers feel about themselves. To date, however, managers and academics have usually focused on something quite different: understanding what customers think about those things.

If you’ve ever felt that you can’t focus on a task when you’re hungry — or that all you can think about is food — the neural evidence backs you up. Work from a few years ago confirmed that short-term hunger can change neural processing and bias our attention in ways that may help us find food faster.

I think it is more helpful to talk about the underlying processes: spontaneous thought, or the decoupling of attention from perception, which is what happens when our thoughts separate from our perception of the environment. Both these processes take place during mind-wandering and daydreaming.

Psychology was focused on measurable, outward behavior then. I thought to myself: That’s not what I want to understand about my thoughts. What I want to know is: Why do they come, where do they come from, and why do they persist even if they interfere with attention to the here and now?

Smallwood learned that unhappy minds tend to wander in the past, while happy minds often ponder the future.

The human brain is hardwired to infer intentions behind words. Every time you engage in conversation, your mind automatically constructs a mental model of your conversation partner. You then use the words they say to fill in the model with that person’s goals, feelings and beliefs.