- Is Geoff Kaufman and his work with Mary Flanagan.
So it's High-Low Splits
Divergent Cognitive Constructural Levels
Triggered by Digital and Non-Digital Platforms.
So, thank you.
- Thank you.
Full disclosure, this talk is actually quite different
from the rest of the talks of this session.
I was pretty confused as to why it was scheduled
for this session.
I thought the first few talks might clear things up,
but in fact, I think I'm more confused
about why (chuckles), why this talk is here.
So I apologize in advance for the sort of divergence,
maybe a brief departure from the topic
before we return to the last speaker
who's going to get us back on track.
But in that sense, the research I'll be presenting today-
- [Host] It's your presentation
(speaking away from mic) - Oh, that's not (chuckles)
that's not what I wanted.
As I'm setting up, as I'm hopefully going to
figure out how to prevent that from happening,
I can give you a brief introduction to tell you
this work is looking at maybe at a broad level,
there is some connection with the other talks
in that it focuses on the affordances of technology
and how they might affect interaction
with those technologies,
but it's focused for on how digital versus non-digital talks
or digital versus non-digital platforms might lead
to different levels of construal
or interpretation of information.
Let me turn off the center view here.
Great.
And this is work that I did as a post-doc
at the Tiltfactor Game Design and Research Laboratory
at Dartmouth College.
As we're all familiar, there's been a host of news reports
about the apparent deterioration of human cognition
as the result of the ubiquity
of modern digital technologies.
So the work I'll be presenting today
is sort of a reaction to the sensationalism
of these types of reports to look
at a more scientific approach to understanding
how digital technologies might be affecting
cognition more generally,
or, more broadly speaking,
how digital platforms might be activating or triggering
a different default mindset
or interpretive framework or lens
that might affect how information is processed.
And this talk is based on the psychological concept
of a construal level, the idea that you can interpret
or see or view information or stimuli or events
at different levels of abstraction
either based on personal preference
or by contextual factors that activate or trigger
one level of interpretation or another.
So on the one hand, we might be able to interpret an event
or a behavior or stimulus more concretely
using a more local processing style focused
on more unstructured, contextualized,
detail-oriented elements of the event or stimulus,
or we can focus more abstractly or more globally
or holistically on the overall decontextualized gist
or meaning of the event or stimulus.
So for example, you might construe your own participation
in the CHI Conference or this session today more concretely
by focusing on the fact that you're attending sessions
or taking notes or sitting in lecture halls,
or you can construe the same events more abstractly,
thinking about how you're gaining knowledge
or being a member of the CHI community
or enhancing your own professional endeavors and so forth.
And Construal Level Theory proposed by Trope and Liberman
suggests that one key factor that pushes people
from one level of construal to another
is the level of distance psychologically you have
between yourself and that stimulus.
So the lower level of distance,
you're more likely to construe
the same event or stimulus more concretely.
At a higher level of distance,
when there is some separation or gap
between you and the stimulus,
you're more likely to exhibit
a more abstract interpretation or construal of it.
So the basic research question that guided
the work I'll be presenting today
is the notion that with all other factors held constant,
does the simple fact that you're processing information
on a digital versus non-digital platform
affect the default level of construal
or interpretation of that information?
And to give you sort of a foreshadow
of the premise behind the work,
we looked at the key idea that digital platforms
might be inviting a more concrete lower level focus
compared to non-digital platforms
and a lower reliance on abstract thought.
And our own work at Tiltfactor,
which, as I mentioned earlier,
is a game design and research laboratory,
hinted that this might be the case.
So in one study, we looked at a basic comparison
of a digital and non-digital instantiation
of the same strategy game
and found vast differences in how players approach the game.
In particular, with the digital version of the game
shown here on the right, an iPad application,
we found that players were much more likely
to utilize immediate localized solutions
to the game's problems,
in this case, the deployment of vaccinations on the board
to prevent the spread of disease in this game called Pox.
And we found compared to players of a board game,
those players of the iPad version were much more likely
to exhibit these more localized and immediate solutions
and not think about the downstream consequences
of their actions.
So even though it's exactly the same game,
we found vast differences in the types
of cognitive processes that players were exhibiting
in response to the game's sort of required system,
and as a result, players of the digital version
were actually much less likely to win the game
in large part because they weren't considering
the broader downstream effects of their decisions.
So this led us to believe that there might be
some general effect of digital technologies
that might be leading to lower levels
or lower inclinations to exhibit abstract thought
or abstract construals of the same situation or stimulus.
And so that's the basic premise
for the work I'll be presenting today.
So we conducted four quantitative
randomized controlled studies
basically comparing directly the processing of information
on a digital platform versus a non-digital platform.
And in all these studies, we attempted to hold
as many factors constant as we could
between the digital and non-digital instantiation.
We presented the same information
using as many of the same variables,
so for example, the same type font and size,
the same distance between individuals
and the information itself and so forth,
to isolate the effect of platform on construal levels.
And we tested this basic idea across many different
information processing tasks and contexts,
which I'll be discussing briefly,
given the limitations of time,
as we go through them.
I'm happy to answer any more detailed questions
about methodology either in the Q&A or afterward.
So the first study basically was an attempt to show,
at its most basic level, that digital platforms
can affect construal levels
by relying on a convenient measure
that psychologists have developed
to actually measure construal level preferences
called the Behavior Identification Form.
This form presents participants
with 25 different everyday actions,
and along with those, two different possible
alternative descriptions for those behaviors,
one which is more abstract in nature,
one which is more concrete in nature,
and simply asked respondents to choose
which one in that moment they think they would prefer
to use to describe that event or behavior.
So for example, we could construe making a list
even more concretely in terms of writing things down
or more abstractly in terms of getting organized.
So every item was of the same fashion.
You're making a choice between the abstract
and a concrete construal of the same basic behavior.
And we implemented this scale itself
either on an iPad or a physical printout
just to see if the difference in platform would affect
the default level of preference for abstract
versus concrete construals of the same behaviors.
So everything else as I mentioned was held constant,
and we simply wanted to see the effect of platform
on responses to this validated measure of construal level.
And we found in general that the non-digital instantiation
of the survey, a paper and pencil version,
elicited higher levels of preference
for abstract descriptions compared to the digital
iPad instantiation of the same exact survey.
So in essence, this amounts to about a 25% increase
in abstract construals than the non-digital version,
or in other words, a 25% decrease in preference
for abstract descriptions on an iPad,
all other factors being held constant.
So this gave us a first glimpse that there might be
this general effect of platform lowering reliance
on abstract interpretations of the same information.
In Study Two, we transferred to a very different domain,
the domain of reading comprehension,
by presenting participants with a short story
written by David Sedaris on either an iPad
or a paper printout.
So in this case, we're looking at the extent
to which people process a narrative,
either through a lens that was
more concrete or more abstract,
and we chose the story by Sedaris
that was very rich both in details
and possible inferences or implications
of the events or behaviors depicted in it.
And we tested memory and comprehension
for the events of the story
in a surprise test afterward
which included both 12 inference-focused questions
and 12 detail-focused questions
like the ones you see here on the screen
just to see if there would be a difference in performance
on inference versus detail-oriented questions,
inference questions being more abstract in nature,
detailed questions being more concrete.
And again, all factors were held uniform
across the iPad and paper versions of the story.
And we found that performance did differ
quite dramatically based on the platform.
So we found on the inference questions, for example,
that participants in the digital version performed worse.
They answered fewer questions correctly
which involved implications or inferences,
whereas they did better when the questions involved
specific details from the story.
So in other words, there was a dramatic effect
or a difference between the detailed
and inference-related questions for the iPad participants
but not for the non-digital participants.
In a final study, which was quite complicated
in its methodology,
I'll just give you the gist of it,
it involved the problem-solving task
for which other work has shown
that a more abstract mindset,
a more gist-focused mindset led to better performance.
It presented basically an information overload,
a ton of information about different car models
and their features.
That other work has shown if you focus too much
on the details, you actually don't discern
the correct answer in terms of
which of these car models is superior.
The bottom line is that gist processing allowed respondents
to figure out which of those categories
is actually the most important more easily.
So focusing on details actually lead to worse performance.
And we administered this task
either on a laptop or a paper form
and found that performance again dramatically differed.
Participants who answered the same exact questions
on a laptop performed worse.
They were much less likely to figure out the correct answer.
And finally, in one last study, I'll just mention briefly,
we wanted to see if one way of counteracting this effect
might be to activate our prime and more abstract mindset
for users of laptops.
So it's like exactly the same procedure
in that participants undergo a task
that was meant to activate a more abstract mindset
by having them focusing on increasingly abstract reasons
for engaging in certain behaviors
like pursuing healthy actions.
And we found that doing so actually reversed this trend.
Activating this more abstract mindset ahead of time
led participants who were using their laptop
to perform better on this task,
which is increasing evidence that when you can find ways
of activating the abstract mindset,
it counteracts this tendency
for users of digital technologies
to exhibit lower levels of construal.
I know I'm out of time, but just to conclude,
the next steps in this research
is to basically understand
what the underlying mechanism is
for why this effect might have occurred.
We saw this fairly robust across different domains.
The next step is to figure out why this occurs
and to what other domains
or decision-making tasks it might apply.
So I'll close there, and thank you very much.
(audience applauds)
Is there time for one question?
- No, unfortunately not. - Okay.
I'm happy to stay afterward. - We're out of time
(speaking off mic)
- Thank you.