19 cognitive biases you can use to improve learner engagement.

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19 cognitive biases you can use to improve learner engagement.

We humans are a wonderful species, able to adapt and create and love and dream. And yet, our evolutionary path has left us with a whole bunch of faulty ways of thinking, making judgements, and predicting outcomes. Some of these come from survival instinct, others from the need for social acceptance, others from the desire to simply have an easier life. But nearly all of them have been used by advertisers, marketers, salespeople and others, to manipulate the unwary and gain advantage.

So, in this issue of the LPI newsletter, we’re listing 19 obscure but clever psychological tricks to help L&D professionals get ahead in the battle to improve learner engagement and attention.

Taken from the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in the 1970's, these cognitive biases, effects, and heuristics are only a handful of the 188 so far identified!

Let’s delve in…

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1. HICK'S LAW

Hick's Law says that the more options you are given, the longer you will take to make a decision. It's common sense if you think about it - the brain must process more choices and weigh up the value of each one, resulting in a more effortful experience.

Does your LXP/LMS list hundreds of course, activities, and resources? Are you showing users long lists that they have to scroll through? While you may think this shows how busy the L&D team has been, the learner will get overwhelmed and may simply not choose anything.

In practice: Find places where many choices are displayed and try to reduce them. If you can't reduce the options, make it so the user can collapse/hide them, or allow the user to filter them.

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2. IKEA EFFECT

You've struggled with the instructions, lost several screws and an Allen key, but you've built it!

As you stand back proudly from your new bookshelf/cupboard/wardrobe, you now value it way more than if you'd just bought it pre-assembled. That's because you partially created it. That's the IKEA Effect.

The recent surge in popularity of home-based meal providers such as Gousto and HelloFresh profoundly illustrates this principle.

In practice: Think of situations where learners can build or contribute something by themselves. For example, give them a way to customise their learning environments to suit them. Make them feel as if they’ve built their own personal portal by allowing them to change colours, designs, layouts, content etc. If they feel like it’s their personal workspace, and that they’ve designed and built it themselves, they’ll return to it more often and engage more.

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3. INVESTMENT LOOPS

You might say the entire pension industry relies on this cognitive bias! It's when people invest time, money, information, or effort into something they believe will benefit them in the future. However, the Investment Loop is more familiar to UX designers as it's a method used to build habit-forming products.

The idea is that, by setting up cycles of recurring triggers, actions, and investments, users will want to come back for more.

In practice: Look for places in your learning portfolio where users can create expectation triggers, such as sending a message to a colleague, setting a personal or shared goal, or creating a reminder. By setting themselves up for receiving a future response or reward, the likelihood of users coming back is greater.

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4. LABOUR ILLUSION

You know that little "circle of doom" you get when Windows is about to crash? Nobody wants that - but there is an interesting little effect that comes out of it: The Labour Illusion. Even if your learning system is capable of serving up content in microseconds, making users wait for something they requested while showing them how it is being prepared creates the appearance of effort. And guess what? Users are usually more likely to appreciate the results of that effort. This is also called the "KAYAK Effect" (based on the travel booking site that used that tactic).

It's really down to an extra two or three seconds but it creates the illusion that your system has taken the user's query seriously and has worked hard to return quality results. In fact, many app designers purposely add an artifical delay to their systems so that users trust the results more.

In practice: Introduce an artificial delay when returning search results and show messages during that time of what the systems is (supposedly) doing. "Scanning for content"...."Now doing a deep scan"...."Preparing your results"...

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5. PEAK-END RULE

Ah, this is a classic. People tend to remember just the high points of any experience, and the end, rather than evaluating it as an average of all the micro-experiences. You could run a very average learning event over 2 hours but if you sprinkle in some peaks of delight and finish with a bang, people will be more likely to remember the entire event as positive.

The peak-end rule is a psychological heuristic in which people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak (i.e. its most intense point) and at its end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience

The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact,' by Chip and Dan Heath

The Peak-End Rule is so powerful, it can even override any negative experiences, as long as they are minimal.

In practice: Create engaging peaks and a stimulating exit point in your learning content. For example, remind people of how much they’ve achieved, what they’ve learned, or provide an extra reward that they weren’t expecting.

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6.?ZEIGARNIK EFFECT

Named after Lithuanian-Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, this effect describes our tendency to better remember an unfinished or interrupted task over a completed one.

Zeigarnik’s findings revealed that participants were able to recall details of interrupted tasks around 90% better than those that they’d been able to complete undisturbed. These results suggest that a desire to complete a task can cause it to be retained in a person’s memory until it has been completed; and once completed, it is gradually forgotten about.

In practice: Progress bars are your friend! Encourage learners to return to your platform by reminding them of unfinished work and incomplete tasks.

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7.?DECOY EFFECT

This is a sneaky one. You’ll often see it used in pricing tables, where a free or low-cost option for a product has far fewer benefits than the others. The vendor wants you to buy the more expensive version, so they make the cheaper version less desirable. In fact, decoys go one step further: they are completely inferior to one option (the target) but only partially inferior to another (the competitor). For this reason, the decoy effect is sometimes called the “asymmetric dominance effect.”

In practice: You can use the decoy effect wherever you want someone to choose between two alternatives – simply add a third, less attractive option (the decoy). It won’t always work, but it often will!

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8.?BANNER BLINDNESS

Did you notice the ad above? People tune out content they get repeatedly exposed to, and they’re very good at ignoring things that resemble adverts or appear in locations traditionally dedicated to ads. The brain reacts when something is fresh, new, and exciting – and this is why advertisers try to make their ads look as bright and attention-grabbing as possible.

In practice: if you’re trying to capture learner attention but your messaging looks like an advert – don’t be surprised if it’s ignored. Avoid placing important messages along the top of the screen or along the edges – as this is usually where ads appear.

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9.?GOAL GRADIENT EFFECT

Motivation is a key component of engagement, so this effect is one of the most useful and important to the L&D professional.

The closer learners are to reaching a milestone (e.g. completing a task, reaching a goal, etc), the faster they work towards reaching it. Interestingly, even artificial, or estimated progress indicators can help to motivate users. Pretty much the entire gamification sector relies on this (and other) principles.

In practice: Progress bars! Badges! Percentage completes!! Give your learners a clear indication of progress to help them understand how close they are to completing a goal.

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10.?CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE

When someone struggles to do something that you think is ridiculously simple, you’re experiencing the Curse of Knowledge. You can’t quite believe that other people don’t know how to reset a password; set up a mail merge; create an Excel pivot table, calculate the rate of convergence of a Fourier series…

When we don’t realise that people have differing levels of knowledge, we’re in danger of presenting information ineffectively because we don’t empathise with them or take their point-of-view. It's actually very relevant to L&D, especially in the areas of coaching, mentoring, and peer-to-peer learning, as it can affect how one person shares knowledge with another.

In practice: This is a big subject! But, in essence, you want to contextualise your learning and provide as much meaning and specificity as you can. Avoid abstraction and vagueness, and never assume that the learner knows something because you do!

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11.?SURVEY BIAS

If you’re using a survey tool to capture learner feedback, you’ll want to be aware of this bias. It takes two forms:

• Selection bias, where the results are skewed a certain way because you’ve only captured feedback from a certain segment of your audience.
• Response bias, where there’s something about how the actual survey questionnaire is constructed that encourages a certain type of answer, leading to measurement error.

A classic mistake many survey designers make is to present 3 options for a question. Look at this for an example of what not to do:

Nearly all your respondents will choose "Somewhat" because it’s the least contentious and requires the least amount of effort to answer.

In practice: always present an even number of choices for survey questions and randomise the answers to keep responders on their toes. Again, this is a huge topic, so check out this article to learn more!

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12. COMMITMENT & CONSISTENCY

When learners are asked to do something, their first instinct is to perceive it as a threat. This isn’t because they hate your learning! It’s because they, like all humans, have a fight-or-flight response – and the larger the task you ask them to complete, the more they will avoid it.

The answer is to break down big tasks into smaller, less effortful ones. Once you do that, you'll be playing into the Commitment and Consistency effect.

The brain likes to be consistent with its previous actions. And if those previous actions are small and trouble-free, the more we are likely to repeat them.

In practice: Identify areas in your learning where users are asked to perform potentially daunting tasks. Then break those tasks down into smaller ones. It's part of the reason why multi-step forms can perform hundreds of times better than a big single-step form.

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13. REACTANCE

You want to improve engagement on your learning platform and increase interaction with your learning content. Are you providing enough freedom?

Reactance occurs when a person feels that someone or something is taking away their choices or limiting the range of alternatives. So, the idea is to avoid making learners feel like they are being forced down a certain route. This is why "Click next to continue" learning often fails to engage - there's only one route through the content and it's forced. It's why forcing people to choose an option in a survey before they can proceed often results in them choosing anything at all rather than what's accurate. Or when you bombard the learner with too many mandatory tasks or notifications - they'll feel like they've lost control of their freedom,?which can trigger an opposite response to what you want.

In practice: Cut back on the number of notifications, reminders, and forced paths in your app or platform. Give learners the freedom to explore themselves without too much restriction and don't jump on them too early with tasks.

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14.?DUNNING-KRUGER EFFECT

This effect occurs when a person’s lack of knowledge and skills in a certain area cause them to overestimate their own competence. Conversely, it also causes those who excel in a given area to think the task is simple for everyone else (see Curse of Knowledge).

You'll spot this bias if you're using assessments or feedback in your learning programmes. You'll also likely encounter it from senior people in your organisation, who 'step in' on L&D projects and change things because they believe they know better.

In practice: Recognise that your colleagues will often fall victim to this bias, and prepare for it by collecting objective data to counter subjective opinion or belief.

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15. RECOGNITION OVER RECALL

Jakob Nielsen, a pioneer in the field of user experience design, proposed that users should be able to easily identify and select the options they need, rather than having to remember them. Put simply, it's far easier to recognise things than recall them from memory.

A classic example of this is the icon: the thumbs-up for Like; the heart for Love; the (whatever it is) for Share. We all recognise these icons and know what they do without having to specifically recall their function from memory.

In practice: Stick with convention, recognised patterns and defaults that you know people will recognise.

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16. ANCHORING BIAS

Anchoring bias occurs when people rely too much on pre-existing information or the first information they find when making decisions. For example, if you're selling an online course at ￡6,000 and another course at ￡500, users are likely to perceive the second course as cheap - whereas if the user had only seen one course at ￡500, they'd probably not view it as cheap. So, the initial information that users get affects subsequent judgments.

It can even be a useful bias to exploit in business meetings (along with the Decoy Effect), where you present your argument in a certain order that makes earlier statements more (or less) desirable.

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17. CURIOSITY GAP

Nobody likes missing information, especially when it's tantalisingly within reach. The curiosity gap is the space between what users know and what they want or need to know. Gaps cause pain, and to take it away, users need to fill the knowledge gap.

Marketers and news sites (yes, we're looking at you Buzzfeed) have used this effect for decades and never more so than in the practice of clickbait. For example:

In practice: Love it or hate it, the curiosity gap can be exploited in marketing L&D services to your learners. It's great for reverse-psychology techniques and getting people to open emails or messages:

• Why does everyone hate compliance training? Here's 5 reasons.
• This new course on sustainability is changing people's lives. How come?
• You just got a recommendation! Details inside...

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18. FAMILIARITY BIAS

People have an innate desire to stay with the familiar and to avoid the unfamiliar. The good news is that the more we experience something, the more familiar it becomes. But it can take time to adapt.

If you ever used Snapchat, you might remember the time they completely redesigned the platform? Well, it caused chaos and uproar among the user-base and even caused the share price to plummet, losing the company millions of dollars.

In practice: Try to use common or familiar patterns when creating new experiences for learners, and avoid radical or sweeping changes. Instead deploy smaller changes over a longer period. Your users will thank you.

19. THE TURKEY ILLUSION

The Turkey Illusion?was first introduced by?Bertrand Russell, who suggested that humans are prone to extrapolation of trends rather than believing they will break. In other words, we expect things to remain as they are and can be taken by surprise when something unexpected happens. Just as the turkey believes it will continue to be fed and cared for by the farmer - because it doesn't know about Christmas Day - we become overly-comfortable with situations that haven't changed significantly in some time, believing that they will continue along the same path.

In practice: Avoiding the turkey illusion means leaving one's known or familiar thought-patterns and start thinking outside-the-box. It requires a cognitive adaptation - an ability to change perspective and creatively seek out new information.

20. Why only 19?

You may recall we titled this edition "19 cognitive biases you can use to improve learner engagement."

So why 19 and not 20? Well, that because of another cognitive bias known as the The Bandwagon Effect. It refers to our habit of adopting certain behaviors or beliefs because many other people do the same.

Everyone has a list of 20 things. Or 10. Or 5. Why? Because they're nicely rounded-up. 19 is just weird. Nobody does 19.

So - don't do something just because everyone else is doing it. Find what's best for you and your organisation.

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AN EXTRA GOODIE

We've just got time to include a free resource from our recruitment partner Blue Eskimo .

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Download your FREE copy of this report for 2023 Q1 now by clicking the link below.

https://www.blueeskimo.com/resources/downloads/quarterly-market-ld-barometer-q1-2023

That's all for now.

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