This Week in EID - Episode 39

I am frequently surprised by the articles that get the most comments and whether they are largely positive or skeptical.  This week, I really expected the post on priming mindsets would be get a lot of comments.  It is one of those rare occurrences where we have a powerful tool to help education at all levels preschool to old age) with very little cost.  All it takes is for the teacher/trainer/tutor/coach to have a little sense of how to frame their messages.  But not many comments.  Perhaps I didn’t do a good job of cross posting to the right places.  I am mostly connected to UX groups and perhaps they aren’t as passionate about education as I am .  And then I got a lot of “thank you” comments about the self-promotion article.  Most people agreed with that one.

And then I was also surprised on the other side.  The posts on believing your own self-delusion and automated steering in cars received bursts of activity, mixed about 50/50 between positive and skeptical.  On self-delusion, many people commented that this is no different from bragging at the water cooler, which has been around for decades.  But the supporters reinforced my point that on social media it is different because the comments come at irregular frequencies over the course of a day or two.  This increases the self-elaboration and the amount of reconsolidation, so it magnifies how much it affects the original author’s own memory.  But it turns out a lot of folks on the UX groups don’t have backgrounds in psychology so they didn’t see the link.

On driver steering, the skeptics suggested that this is no different from anti-lock brakes, which have adjusted our braking experience for years without complaint.  I agreed that this would be true of all the steering did was mute overcorrections or nudge us around hazards.  But when our cars “take control” out of our hands, which anti-lock brakes don’t do, the pushback will be much stronger.  Emotions often trump performance when it comes to human behavior.

And because of the snow, I never circulated the article on Fitbits for multiple sclerosis.