Blame our faulty brains. Luckily, there are ways to get out of the most common mental traps.
Until there’s a safe and widespread vaccine rollout, the greatest weapons we have against the pandemic are the decisions we make every day. The bad news about this is that humans are notoriously lousy decision-makers.
Why, though? Blame our faulty brains: All of us possess cognitive biases that make it difficult to think rationally when faced with questions involving risk. Should we dine at a restaurant? Is it a good idea to send our kids back to school? Can we safely visit our folks to celebrate Thanksgiving?
While our instincts may be to go with the less-than-optimal choice, we’re not…
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Several countries are facing second and third waves of the COVID-19 pandemic that are a lot worse than the first. Almost all of these countries could have avoided or at least reduced the severity of the crisis they are facing now. Several warning signs were ignored on either a government, community, or even a personal level.
One of the most fundamental things about being human is making numerous errors. …
Interfaces that people love to use every day get a couple of things right: they’re easy to use and accessible for all users, irrespective of their technological acumen or knowledge. An interface’s ‘ease of use’ is determined by both how simple it is to extract meaning from, and whether or not users can relate to its functionality. Designers can promote ‘ease of use’ and set their interfaces up for success by incorporating metaphors and analogies. To use them effectively, it’s important to note the difference between the two, and conditions for their optimal use.
Metaphors
Spotify, Netflix, E-commerce websites, and even…
Jens Rasmussen’s behavior framework of human-machine interaction based on skills, rules, and knowledge, is one of the most widely used frameworks to model human behavior in human-machine systems. Rasmussen studied human-machine interaction in several human-machine systems and concluded that human actions in such systems could be categorized under three major headings — skill, rule, and knowledge-based behavior. This categorization is important for system designers because it captures the different internal representations of the environment and characterizes purposive human behavior.
Skill Based Behavior
I recently moved apartments and one of the most fun parts of this has to be countless Ikea runs followed by evenings and weekends of assembling furniture. If you live in the West, you’ll probably relate to my experience, as well. What makes these Ikea runs so fun and why do we love our Ikea furniture so much?
One possible reason is that the effort we put into assembling our furniture leads to an overvaluation of the final product. In 2012, Michael Norton, a researcher at the Harvard Business School, along with his colleagues, coined the term ‘Ikea Effect’ to…
This December, I was offered the chance to write for Medium’s Writing Pilot Program. It’s has been a fun and educational journey, and I wanted to take a moment to reflect on some of the challenges and lessons I have experienced so far. I hope these tips and thoughts can help other up-and-coming or part-time writers like me who share my experiences.
1. Start observing things in your daily life with more scrutiny
This article is a more digestible summary of a chapter from the book ‘Character Strength Development: Perspectives from Positive Psychology’ I co-authored this chapter along with Prof. Salome Divya Vijaykumar, Ranjitha Kumar, Avneet Kaur, Vibha Bhat, and Ritu Verma.
“In the face of failure and threat, what defines us as individuals is not the misfortune itself, but how we overcome threats to develop traits of love, empathy, and resilience.” — Excerpt from Character Strength Development: Perspectives from Positive Psychology
Multiple studies on positive psychology and personality psychology confirm that adolescents represent the most vulnerable of populations when it comes to…
Working from home over the past year, I have been using the extra time to cook some new dishes. This venture has led to encounters with numerous food blogs, recipes, TikToks, Reels, and YouTube videos with interesting ideas for new concoctions and I’ve found that how well the recipe or the video is structured often predicts how chaotic or smooth the cooking experience will be. Even though most of the time the final result ends up good, the cleaning experience afterward isn’t nearly as homogenously good. …
It’s been a year since the pandemic truly became a ‘pandemic’. I never truly reflected on the year so far until I came across a post on Medium’s Instagram page with a writing prompt for reflective accounts of life during the pandemic.
Initially, I remember thinking about the pandemic as something that had to be “suffered” through for a bit, and then life would resume as normal. This couldn’t have been further from the truth. The mindset of my friends and family resonated with mine as well. …
Anirudh Kedia
Aviation Geek | Grad student — writing to take a break from writing | Making Human Factors accessible one article at a time
