Czarina Games

Serious Games Online Research and Development from Dr. Alicia Sanchez

Bandwagon Effect – Cognitive Bias Series 8

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This week is feeling pretty deep. I’m off the heels of the Defense Entrepreneur Forum (DEF) annual conference where I was submerged in food and thought. I’ve also been thinking a lot about organizational culture. While I was considering which cognitive bias, I would like to tackle this week, the Bandwagon Effect practically jumped off the page at me.

The Bandwagon Effect is characterized by people being more likely to adopt beliefs when they are adopted by others. The origins of the Bandwagon Effect seem to be focused on elections starting in the 80’s. Those origins suggest that people may alter their voting decisions based on the decisions of others, for example, as voting happens in real time in different time zones etc. The Bandwagon Effect is leveraged highly in marketing campaigns related to politics and everyday consumer behaviors. The premise is the more people think that not eating Gluten is bad, the more people will join in that thought.

I think this might be attributable to several theories of conformity in our lives, but I think there is also an element of self-doubt and lack of resilience that goes into this. For example, if everyone is saying Gluten is bad, they must know something I don’t, right?  Gluten therefore must be inherently evil because if its wasn’t why would so many people say it is?  Its obvious how powerful the Bandwagon Effect can be in marketing, but what about the workplace?  This is where things get a little sideways.

What happens with when the Bandwagon Effect starts to impact our work culture. We’ve seen bad ideas gain traction because they are subscribed to by senior leadership. Sometimes it feels like people abandon all common sense when this happens. This is almost impossible to avoid. But what if we started using the Bandwagon Effect for good?

Its easy for workplace culture to become stale, complacent and filled with bad ideas and bad people. As we have all witnessed before, its not the people who drain an organizations culture who leave, it’s the people who have the wherewithal to see that they are on a sinking ship. But what if we applied the Bandwagon Effect to positive messages. I’m a tad jaded by nature, so I almost never look at the positive side of the coin, so in this I see an opportunity!

What if our senior leadership consistently messaged the culture we want?  What if there were punishments for those who were incapable of conforming to a culture of inclusion and diversity not just in the racial and gender components, but inclusion and diversity in ideas, in leadership, in technology. What if we all got on the bandwagon to change and be better?  What if the Bandwagon Effect spread and allowed us to be our most authentic, creative, and knowledgeable selves?  What if we started a bandwagon of focusing on our warfighter?  What if we started a bandwagon for being more willing to move away from the way we learned and embraced the way technological advances have improved the ability to provide training and education?  What if our senior leadership consistently made our culture a priority? What if we started with getting right inside before we tried to be right for the outside?

THIS is the bandwagon I want to be on. This is the bandwagon we need. So, lets get our favorite Oregon Trail wagons rallied and let’s not die of dysentery this time. I’m starting a bandwagon. Who wants in?

The Google Effect – Cognitive Bias Series 6

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This week’s Cognitive Bias is a fairly easy one to grasp. The Google Effect suggests that we forget information that we can easily access using the internet. Well….YEAH. It has some tendrils to some of the memory posts I’ve been releasing weekly, but this one really does deserve our attention.

It makes perfect sense. Why would we commit something to memory when we know we have easy access to that information pretty much any time we want it. Let me give you a really easy example for this:

I know that there are there are 4 quarts in a gallon. I know this because I grew up without the internet, and if I didn’t remember this fact, I would literally have to find a cookbook or an encyclopedia and turn  to the index to figure this out. And it was easy enough to remember and I used this conversion often enough that it sticks in my brain. How many pints in a quart?  Ok, I didn’t use that one as much. How many cups in a pint?  I don’t know. Is that even a thing? 

I primarily use Alexa in my house to set timers while I’m cooking, to tell me the conversions I need, and often to tell me the required internal temperature of chicken. There is no reason for me to memorize any of this information, because I can literally just ask the empty room a question, and the answer is told to me. I don’t have to type. I don’t have to find a book. I don’t have to wash my hands. I just say it. And the answer is there. How wild is that?

So, why would I remember anything that I have access to?  Well, I probably wouldn’t. BUT, unfortunately, traditional education practices have not yet embraced the ubiquitous nature of information. Don’t test me on dates. I can look those up. Don’t make me memorize a step by step process if it’s not going to be happening while there’s an emergency going on. I’ll look it up as I need it. What I should actually spend time working on and learning is how to do the most efficient searches to get the information I need, and how to interpret and apply that information. Because that’s the naturalistic approach to how I find information I need when I need it.

I would much rather focus on the performance aspect of applying information properly and in the appropriate context than worrying about rote memorization or when a policy was signed into legislature. We debate this a lot at my day job. I’m a believer, give me the google and a problem and I will figure it out so long as I can interpret my findings. If I can’t do that, well then, I’m in trouble.

Ikea Effect – Cognitive Biases Series 4

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For my fourth post in the Cognitive Bias series, I’d like to talk about another fun one, the Ikea Effect. The Ikea Effect, first recognized by Norton, Mochon & Ariely (2012), indicates that people put disproportionate value on items they participated in the creation of. Ha. Just….HAAAA. Yes. Yes Ikea. You have made me love you all the more now. 

Ikea Coloring Book page

For those of us who live near a coveted Ikea, you know that this box store sells some pretty cool stuff at very reasonable prices. The catch?  If its bigger than a teapot, you’re going to have to put it together. You take your nutty side spinning cart into a big ass warehouse, you somehow load flat boxes onto that cart, then you drag them out to your car. You get the boxes home and then the real fun begins. Pages and pages of instructions now challenge you to assemble your bookshelf yourself. They give you most of the tools necessary. And the instructions are actually easy to understand. But deviate from those instructions in even the smallest way and you’re going to be spending the whole day trying to figure it out.

Now some people love this. They love the challenge. It’s a puzzle. Some don’t. And for them, Ikea does offer an assembly and delivery service. For the rest of us, it’s the necessary evil that we must get through because the furniture is so affordable. But who would have thunk that the mere act of putting it together ourselves would make us value it more?  It actually makes sense. Because, we have invested in it. Our own efforts have created this. If there are blood, sweat and/or tears involved, you’ve obviously not followed the instructions.

So how do we take this concept and apply it to work?  My job doesn’t involve any assembly. But the core principle is what matters here. If we invest in making something, we think its more valuable. This could be applied to work product certainly, but I’m more interested in how this relates to our ideation.

I think my ideas are pretty spectacular. And if I think something is a good idea, then I’m usually not going to be swayed without some fairly substantial evidence. This pride of being involved in the conceptualization, when related to the Ikea Effect can explain why some people get hung up on their “good idea”, and certainly why I sometimes think my ideas are the best out there. So how do we leverage this at work?

I have an absolute nonnegotiable thing that I do in every game development effort. I make sure that no matter how small or big one of my stakeholder’s ideas is. No matter how good or bad it is. Its going to be honored in the product. Now, if they have a whole game idea that isn’t going to work, I will dissuade them. But I will still make sure some element of their idea is represented somewhere, somehow in the final product. Does it work?  Every single time. Once I have incorporated an element of my stakeholder’s idea into any effort, I have created a champion. I have made it personal for them. I have guaranteed that each stakeholder has some personal investment in the success or failure of that effort, and that they will work that much harder on it because they have skin in the game.

Have you ever tried to move Ikea furniture? If you have any and you’ve ever had to move, you’ve tried this. Usually, it doesn’t go well. Why?  Because its low-quality stuff that is meant to live in your one living room, but not meant to be a lifelong commitment. Ideas are lifelong commitments. My ideas have certainly evolved, and that can be seen in my body of work, but I can put my finger on anything I’ve ever developed and see the marks that both I and others have left on it. So, are my games priceless?  Yes. They are to me. And they are to everyone who’s ideas have been incorporated into them.

Reference: Norton, M. I., Mochon, D., & Ariely, D. (2012). The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22, 453-460.

The Games Czar

Czarina Games was founded by Dr. Alicia Sanchez. A graduate of the University of Central Florida’s Modeling and Simulation program, Alicia is internationally known as a serious games expert.

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