The mind is a wonderful and obscure thing

[eldan]

I'm sitting at the back of a class I've been particularly excited about promoting: How To Bring About Large-Scale Behavior Change. The instructor has a really strong cognitive science background, and the core idea underlying the class is that we (*) will do a much better of job of persuading people to respond to our messages if we understand and

Comments

[trochee]

this sounds neat, this class. I wish I could go sit in on it, and I would if I were in commuting distance. :(

thank you for sharing it -- I like that example, of how if something is "prototypical" in our mind [sparrows are more prototypically bird-ish than ducks], we think generalization is easier about it [disease will probably spread].

however, I do want to ask African or European swallow?

[eldan]

I hardly think the unladen airspeed of the swallow is relevant.

However, you're absolutely right that the difference in responses comes from a difference in how prototypical the two birds are, or in the language of this class how much they fit our "idealized cognitive model" of birdhood.

[chilimuffin]

There's a part of me that snorted at the phrase "Idealized cognitive model of birdhood," and yet I love it.

I want a class on "How to Bring About Small-Scale Behavior Change." I want to know how to be more convincing with my patients. Which is harder, convincing someone to vote a certain way or convincing them to start a compost bin? For me, I want to know how to talk someone into checking their blood sugar three times a day, and then worry about whether or not they're going to vote for heart healthy lunch legislation.

Or am I reading the "large-scale" thing wrong. Is it large-scale in one person's life, or large-scale as in multiple people?

[eldan]

I think you're reading it right - it's large-scale in the sense that the goal is changing society as a whole. The examples I can think of from the public health realm would be things like reducing smoking rates and increasing the use of condoms.

One of the other tenants of my first house in Cleveland was a medical researcher, whose work focussed on why patients don't comply with life-and-death instructions (e.g. "stop drinking because you've already trashed your liver") and how to improve compliance. I wish I'd talked to him more about his work while our paths crossed because it sounded fascinating.