Buy in print. Looks like you do not have access to this content. Entries Per Page:. Methods Map Research Methods. Featured Case. HBS Working Paper. Leadership The Leadership Initiative undertakes cutting-edge research and course development projects about leadership and leadership development, both within HBS and through collaborations with other organizations. Nov Dec Recent Publications.
Myers , Karim R. Lakhani and Dashun Wang. This dimension of impact disproportionately affects female scientists and those with young children and appears to be homogeneous across fields. These findings may have implications for understanding the long-term effects of the pandemic on scientific research.
Myers, Karim R. Lakhani, and Dashun Wang. Nature Communications 12 Making a company purpose come to life is an arduous journey that requires a multi-pronged and sustained approach. Yet as hard as it is, the journey is well worth it and will yield positive transformation not only for the company, but also for the people who work there. And by changing how the company and its people relate to customers, suppliers, shareholders, and communities, that transformation radiates well beyond the organization itself.
The author presents five steps for turning a company purpose into reality, using both the head and the heart. Joly, Hubert. But surgeons make clinical decisions every day that have great influence on both patient outcomes and hospital costs. The separation of the two groups is a consequence of a narrow interpretation of the accountability principle in which physicians are responsible only for their performance in operating rooms and interventional suites, while administrators are responsible only for operations and finances.
I argue that it is easy to see that the notions of aesthetics that Tractinsky cites with approval over the course of the article neither match the brief and nearly vacuous dictionary definitions he quotes, nor does the view of aesthetics that he promotes reflect the common, non-scholarly, intuitive views of aesthetics held by ordinary people. There is no space here to evaluate these different concepts each of which brings with it insights and difficulties , and Tractinsky is certainly justified in outlining them as influential and important aesthetic ideas that have been explored in psychology, design, and more recently HCI.
But in embracing all of these ideas, Tractinsky has outlined a philosophical infrastructure for an academic theory of aesthetics and departed from a commonsense or dictionary notion of the aesthetic. Therefore, his anti-theory stance is invalid: he has constructed for himself a theoretical apparatus constituted by a set of technical and interlocking ideas, and he is not relying on a simple dictionary definition as he claims. And it is building from this apparatus that Tractinsky offers a particular academic theory of aesthetics in Section Each of these relationships is modified by the type of system used, cultural inputs, domain, type of task, and aesthetic tastes.
In this model, Tractinsky intermingles traditional aesthetic categories e. But merely summarizing Tractinsky shows that what he has offered here is far more than the dictionary definition and adds up to an information processing theory of aesthetics in which design inputs yield evaluation outputs, and evaluation outputs become inputs for outcomes outputs. But I think some very simple reflection can disabuse us of that pretention as well.
In the opening minutes of the first day of that class, before I even introduce myself or give students the syllabus, I show the first few minutes of an art film that has achieved some popular success. This year, I showed the first minutes of Run Lola Run , a German action film with a philosophical subtext. The opening of the film includes 3D computer graphics, 2D cartoon animation, 2.
After showing this introduction once, I ask students to simply talk out loud about their reactions to it. Some describe how it made them feel —excited, anxious, curious. Others talk about symbols that constitute the work as an artifact —how the heavy use of clock imagery and the metronomic beat of the techno soundtrack reinforced each other.
Others offer suggestions about what the director may have intended or was trying to say or do, how this fits in the German cinematic tradition, etc. Still others talk about what was happening when the film was made the s in Germany or popular culture in general. Are these not ordinary, common, and intuitive aesthetic reactions?
Such interpretative strategies—and not aesthetic processing theory—are taught to us as children in schools and at home and come almost naturally to us as adults. My sense is that if one really wants to understand what ordinary people intuitively do, all one needs to do is watch ordinary people intuitively encounter beautiful things. Tractinsky goes far beyond that in his research, and rightly so, but it is disingenuous to claim that he neither needs nor uses any disciplined academic theory of aesthetics.
Nor is it an empirically discovered fact in the world. That theory is thus a philosophical theory of aesthetics , or, in the language of logical positivism which I personally reject but am not certain that Tractinsky does , a dogma. Aesthetic processing is a theory of aesthetic response constructed out of the methodological and conceptual apparatus of information processing psychology and adapted using aesthetic vocabulary from both the sciences and the arts.
Both concepts have also been developed and critiqued for over a century, and the conceptual difficulties of each are well known among analytic philosophers of art, if not the HCI community. My argument thus far has been largely philosophical, seeking to show that the conceptual edifice on which Tractinsky builds his aesthetic processing theory is flawed inasmuch as it claims to be a-theoretical when it clearly is not.
Two of them are as follows:. I will address both of these practical consequences in what follows. Scientific research is expensive, and one way or another the public pays for it, and so any scientific agenda should deliver some sort of public good. What is the social value of aesthetic research in HCI?
These definitions are not terribly helpful. Tractinsky himself offers numerous and much better arguments in the course of his essay. He notes that aesthetics has long been integrated within design disciplines whose professional and socioeconomic success is beyond dispute and whose theories and methods can be leveraged in HCI and interaction design.
He notes that Gestalt psychology has shown that aesthetic criteria are linked with other design values, including usefulness and suitability, his most powerful argument to the HCI community, which historically has had a orientation towards the useful. He also notes that aesthetics helps otherwise similar products differentiate themselves, thus contributing economic value which, in the case of Apple, has been substantial.
I accept each of these normative arguments as stated and stress that he has here offered a number of social benefits that can emerge from this research, most of which are functional in nature: aesthetics supports usability, aesthetics satisfies needs, aesthetics contributes to the self, aesthetics contributes to economic prosperity.
If we turn to other philosophers of aesthetics besides Tractinsky and I count him as one, whether or not he does , we can see many other arguments commonly made that would support the idea that this research contributes to the public good. Going back to Plato, aesthetics has been implicated not only in pleasures but also its role in contributing to or detracting from an educated and responsible public, and this predisposition is amply reflected in the list above.
As interactive technologies continue to replace older media forms in mediating how people interact with themselves, each other, and the world, making interaction aesthetic in these senses seems to be imperative, rather than optional. The cultivation through aesthetic engagement of ourselves as perceptive, imaginative, and insightful citizens an epistemological position would seem to depend increasingly on human-computer interaction.
I have briefly sketched 3 simple arguments justifying aesthetic interaction: a hedonic argument, a functionalist argument, and an epistemological argument. Now that I have sketched out three primary arguments in favor of pursuing visual aesthetics in HCI, and I have earlier established that Tractinsky offers a theory of aesthetic processing as a means to do so, so we are finally in a position to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of this aesthetic processing theory for HCI.
Tractinsky does much of my work for me here, since his article systematically summarizes the achievements of this tradition, and by and large I accept his account of that at face value; as I said in my introduction, I use aesthetic processing research in both my own research and teaching.
I begin with the point that although aesthetic philosophy, literary theory, and art history etc. Aesthetic processing research provides new discoveries about the very mechanisms of aesthetic perception and experience, and their implications go beyond HCI and should influence anyone interested in visual aesthetics in the humanities and sciences.
Anyway, aesthetic processing approaches to aesthetics have revealed much about the nature of fast aesthetic judgments of interactive systems, have done so with useful implications for design, and have offered compelling evidence to support their findings.
Tractinsky helped change the field by offering evidence that usability and aesthetics were not, in fact, in conflict. In so doing, he helped create space for others of us interested in aesthetic interaction, not by making a nice argument about aesthetics, e. I am hardly a fan of scientism for its own sake, but the ability of this paradigm of research to leverage science to contribute to the scholarship of aesthetics and aesthetic philosophers and literary theorists are beginning to read cognitive science on aesthetics , and specifically to advocate successfully for more work on aesthetics in HCI, is an enduring achievement.
Of the three arguments I offered supporting research on visual aesthetics in HCI hedonic, functionalist, and epistemological , a strength of this tradition is that it speaks to the first two in powerful ways. As with any synoptic theory of aesthetics, the aesthetic processing model as presented has a number of practical weaknesses. One aspect of that is the reductive approach that aesthetic processing theory relies on. Likewise, the reduction of holistically experienced phenomena e.
Finally, many of the example interfaces shown in these studies are frankly ugly see Figure Pragmatically, this research is not typically used to promote beautiful interactions, but rather more beautiful than they otherwise would have been interactions. Second, the aesthetic processing model is also comparatively weak at ethical and socio-cultural considerations. I agree with the ancient Greeks in seeing ethics and aesthetics as so deeply intertwined as to be inseparable, but in doing so, one must move the aesthetic from the realm of the perceptual and into the hermeneutic.
Not only do none of these have a strong ethical dimension to them, but worse, armed with the findings of this research, marketers and designers are in a better position to manipulate users, because so much of this research provides practical guidance on how viscerally to influence perceptions, behaviors, and affects through design choices.
Aesthetic philosophers have long taken to task theories that, like this, focus tightly on the perception of objective visual qualities precisely because of concerns about manipulation. Now, Triumph of the Will is an extreme case, but it calls into question the hermeneutic effects of moral sensibility within of aesthetic sensemaking and reflection.
All of the aesthetic processing involved in this case is at best loosely connected with visual stimuli in the sense that Tractinsky uses the term. The aesthetic processing model applies equally to all visual forms, painting, visual HCI, film, sculpture, etc.
But given that we are in HCI and interaction design, it would seem that interactive , rather than visual , aesthetics would be the target. This concern is raised by Jinwoo Kim is his Commentary to this chapter. This weakness can presumably be explained by the fact that the aesthetic processing model, by virtue of being a processing model, is fundamentally about the cognitive i. The final weakness I will mention is that the aesthetic processing theory struggles to deal with the notion of skilled or expert interpretation, e.
Tractinsky himself acknowledges this problem in Section Lacking a solid account of how legitimate subjective expert judgments are formed, exacerbated by a rejection of the normative aesthetics that they imply, the aesthetic processing account leaves little epistemological space for designers of aesthetic interactions to be anything other than ordinary people armed with empirical data—a characterization that is far from the self-perceptions of most designers and is all but senseless when applied to artists.
In short, the weaknesses of the aesthetic processing account is that it sheds little insight on the third argument in favor of visual aesthetics for HCI I described above: the epistemological one, which focuses on how aesthetic encounters have the long term effect of cultivating our capacities for imaginative perception, insight, critical thought, and empathy.
As I have stressed throughout this essay, the aesthetic processing theory has made contributions to HCI research and, I would argue, aesthetics research more generally. Its analysis of visceral perception and evaluation coupled with its ability to demonstrate subtle causal relations among diverse factors at the very heart of aesthetic perception are peerless as far as I know in any discipline.
As Tractinsky notes, there is still much to do here, and as someone committed to aesthetic interaction and aesthetic life in general, I enthusiastically support the continuation of that agenda. But it is a good reason to be more epistemologically open-minded than Tractinsky portrays himself to be and to acknowledge as fellow travelers researchers who work on alternative formulations of aesthetics.
Specifically, this encyclopedia chapter aiming to survey the whole field of visual aesthetic for HCI should acknowledge the history and philosophy of aesthetics as pursued throughout the humanities for millennia rather than replace them with vacuous dictionary entries, and also acknowledge work in HCI that builds on these traditions.
The inclusion of such contributions would also enrich the prescriptions for the future of aesthetic research in HCI. It has been a professional mystery to me, since moving to HCI from my doctoral work in comparative literature and philosophy, why so much of the work on aesthetics in HCI and design is so emphatically cut off from the rest of the aesthetic world.
Indeed, reading this research, one might not even know that there is a massive domain of inquiry into aesthetics beyond aesthetic processing and other experimental traditions. Though I repeatedly stress that I find value in aesthetic processing, it is also worth pointing out to readers that aesthetic processing occupies the marginal position academically.
Dozens of similar high profile examples in between these two extremes can be found. I speculate that this self-imposed exile from millennia of interdisciplinary aesthetic thinking reflects a scientific habit that emerged in the Renaissance and came into its own in the Enlightenment and again in the Logical Postivism of the s through 50s, which seeks to reject tradition as dogmatic and confused and seek instead to start anew, using rigorous science and empirically discovered facts to re-investigate phenomena that traditional culture muddled with its dogmas and pet theories.
Yet the presence of traditional aesthetic concepts, categories, and systems of relations in aesthetic processing theory reveals the problem. So my argument instead is to accept the legitimacy of aesthetic processing but to end its self-imposed exile from the rest of aesthetics.
Humanists would benefit from a little empirical rigor as well—my argument cuts both ways. As Tractinsky correctly argues, aesthetics is fundamental to human life and wellness.
Not surprisingly, something so important to being human is going to get a lot of attention in human thought. One way to introduce it, then, is to focus primarily on contemporary aesthetic thought and the disciplines in which it unfolds. The following brief introduction is meant to sketch out what some of these disciplines are and the sorts of issues that people within them try to deal with.
I also include a handful of introductory readings as starting points for those interested. Analytic aesthetics takes as its problem the careful evaluation of aesthetic systems of thought or dogmas. An analytic approach is typically strong at evaluating arguments about aesthetics, frequently and frustratingly demonstrating the irrationality of both everyday and sophisticated aesthetic positions.
Nearly all of the core concepts of aesthetics e. Aesthetics has historically been linked to reasoning about art. The art history and theory tradition is exceptionally strong at close analyses of art works, their experienced effects, the conditions of their creation, and the historical, national, cultural, and social contexts of their production and use.
Studies of film are of interest to interaction designers for several reasons. As a dynamic, visual, and screen-based medium, film is also arguably closer to digital interaction than other cultural forms such as novels or paintings.
Finally, because film was so spectacularly implicated in the horrors of the twentieth century Nazism in particular , film theorists and critics have intermingled aesthetic and ethical considerations in insightful ways that have similarly deep implications for HCI.
One of the strengths and problems! As I have spent much of my adult life reading about aesthetics from the fields listed above, I have my own perhaps idiosyncratic sense of the achievements of aesthetic thinking. I point out from the outset that these frequently comes in the form of theory—the kind of thing that Tranctinsky wants to rule out. But these theories are not, at least in the hands of the stronger writers, muddled and speculative dogmas; rather they are new concepts or new systems of concepts that empower us to perceive the experiential and socio-cultural significances of cultural works in much more diverse, nuanced, and personally fulfilling ways.
These theoretical innovations are legitimated in at least two ways I can think of. First, they have to empower us to see and feel the sociocultural significance and experiential meanings of a work more robustly than we can without them.
Second, they have to withstand, at least partly, the often brutal scrutiny of analytic philosophy, as described above. I will briefly sketch some of the issues and related concept systems that have been developed to help us think more deeply about them—and to cultivate our appreciation for the aesthetic. But it is not always good for me. By false pleasure , I refer to pleasures that are harmful to us in ways that we fail to perceive or understand while we are enjoying them.
Visually seducing desperate and fearful citizens to seek the paternal embrace of Nazism is a false pleasure, offering an ideological myth that stimulates the very fear it promises to assuage in place of actually providing a socially just system of government that would accomplish such security.
Both of the preceding paragraphs have linked aesthetic experience with personal growth and the emergence of an intelligent and moral identity or the perversion of them. The following quote is from Richard Shusterman, an aesthetic philosopher who has influenced a considerable amount of HCI research to the point that Shusterman has been invited and accepted to be a featured speaker at CHI In the quote, Shusterman introduces his aesthetic vision:.
My purpose in citing these quotes is not to assert that this is better or more important that the research ambitions of aesthetic processing theory, but simply to stress that this sort of agenda a is legitimately aesthetic HCI including visually aesthetic HCI , because its aesthetic credentials are unassailable and it has influenced diverse HCI researchers e. Aesthetic philosophers have also developed an extensive vocabulary to investigate artistic expression , including the development and articulation of sophisticated and intensely personal emotional insights e.
Expression is important for HCI and interaction design, because unlike novels or paintings, interactions are made out of user expressions as much as designer choices. I submit that this research agenda is strengthened, not confused, by a more holistic use of theory. I briefly introduce a number of them below in the hopes of offering Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction readers a more comprehensive and balanced set of references than they would have gotten had my Commentary not existed.
I cannot here comprehensively cover all of the relevant work, but I do at least want to introduce four major themes of non-aesthetic processing approaches to aesthetics in HCI, themes that in many cases include seminal work. The first research theme includes medium-specific theories of interactive aesthetics. As noted earlier, aesthetic processing does not explicitly distinguish between visual interaction and any other visual medium; it also scopes out non-visual digital interactions.
Examples include pliability, rhythm, dramaturgical structure, and fluency. In their analysis, these aesthetic qualities are also linked to dominant epistemologies in computer science. Lim et al. Common to all three medium-specific theories of interactive aesthetics are holistic understandings, explorations of design qualities, and efforts to link together interaction attributes with experience and understanding as they are consciously present to us.
The second research theme involves design and research methodologies surrounding aesthetic interaction. As interaction designers have gone from improving the performance of text editors to designing everyday technologies that are increasingly expected to be technologically robust, usable, sustainable, aesthetic, and socially just, design becomes an infinitely more complex problem.
Standing in for empirical data about everything is an expert ability to read culture and to situate designs in appropriate and appealing ways within it Kuutti, A third research theme involves specific aesthetic design domains that touch upon HCI. In an anthology, a number of prominent HCI researchers from different intellectual traditions contributed a notion of funology as a new normative goal for HCI besides usability Blythe et al.
Another rising domain of aesthetic HCI interest is research on craft and DIY , which gets at a number of aesthetic issues, including creativity, the pleasures of things well made and making things well, and the relations among our pastimes, our heritage, and ourselves e. Responding to the explosion of non-WIMP-based user interfaces has been a rising interest in embodied interaction, and much of this work has also had an aesthetic dimension. The final, and arguably most important, of all the themes I briefly sketch here is aesthetic experience.
Others have used similar theory. In her recent My Life as Night Elf Priest , cultural anthropologist and HCI luminary Bonnie Nardi simultaneously constructs a theory of aesthetic experience and interpretively analyzes World of Warcraft play as an aesthetic experience.
Her work helps interaction designers understand more analytically why World of Warcraft has been the smash hit that it has been, even as she contributes to the theory of aesthetic interaction experience. Though they position themselves as partisans on the critical side of that divide, and construct the two theoretical orientations as divided, nonetheless they can also be read subversively to explore opportunities to bridge that divide—which is increasingly what I think we should be doing.
Given the unmistakeably increasing role of interaction in our everyday lives, mediating virtually every aspect of life, from work to the bedroom, interaction design simply must be aesthetic, just as our buildings must not only keep out rain but also be beautiful places to inhabit and our clothing must not only keep us warm but also help us express who we are or want to be.
HCI is not mainly about high-performing text editors and aircraft controller interfaces any more. Whoever is seeking ways to make interaction more aesthetic I consider a fellow traveler. While this article took on, at times, a critical tone, scholarly dialogue is the means by which knowledge advances are made, and my own thinking is clearer and in my view more beautiful than it would have been without his work on aesthetics in HCI.
In his chapter, Tractinsky provides a thorough review of the aesthetics-related literature in the Human-Computer Interaction arena and beyond and it is a pleasure to read. It is especially nice to see just how far HCI research into visual aesthetics has come in 15 short years!
Tractinsky reminds us of the origin of the concept of aesthetics and gives a very nice summary of relevant research from the perspectives of design and psychology as well as looking at practical issues of designed devices.
In addition, Tractinsky also shares his views on where to go from here, outlining several strands of potential future research. I agree with most of Tractinsky offers in his essay, so I decided to extend some of the proposed directions. The section following that discussion is a bold, tongue-in-cheek suggestion that it may be time for HCI researchers as well as product designers to consider the concepts of affect and cognition as an integrated whole, in addition to existing models and paradigms.
I provide research findings challenging the claim that the mere exposure effect is based entirely on affect. Finally, I offer a conclusion. Computer games aiming to entertain and keep users engaged need vibrant colors, action-oriented settings, creative challenges and nifty surprises. Yet all of these attributes would be highly inappropriate for interactive technology designed, for example, to support the management of large-scale terrorist attacks involving mass casualties.
Yet, when looking for a gift for a special friend, the very same people who want banks to look formal expect lots of color and plenty of pictures displaying nicely presented products, perhaps even some playful animations. They enjoy spending time browsing an online gift shop that meets those expectations. Over time, as experience with a particular website genre accumulates, our expectations of the look and contents of that genre develop into increasingly refined mental models Johnson-Laird, or schemata Bartlett, , sometimes also referred to as look-up tables.
These internal representations function as cognitive shortcuts by enabling us very quickly to determine how well a given exemplar of that genre meets our expectations. We tend to prefer the familiar, prototypical exemplars Martindale, ; Winkielman, et al.
To the extent that a particular website meets our expectation, we are likely to perceive it as an appropriate representative of its genre. To the extent that our expectations are not met, however, the site is likely to be deemed inappropriate even if it is well designed, very usable, and visually very appealing.
In one of our recent experiments, we primed participants to expect to judge the visual appeal and appropriateness of a set of online banking sites or online gift shops even though they were all shown examples of both genres. The findings revealed that participants assigned to the gift shop condition rated visual appeal significantly higher than participants assigned to the banking condition Lindgaard et al. Mental models guiding expectations would thus seem to underlie the concept of appropriateness which, in turn, was shown to be capable of affecting perceptions of visual appeal.
Although some HCI researchers have begun to investigate variables that may mediate perceptions and guide judgments of other variables e. An interactive aesthetic experience is supposed to make us feel happy Csikszentmihalyi, , but as HCI researchers and designers we also need to understand what visual aesthetics means and what aesthetic experiences entail in a variety of situations.
To date, nearly all visual-aesthetics related HCI research, including our own, has involved consumer goods or web sites. That is, research has focused on situations in which users decide themselves which products to buy and which websites to visit.
Yet, it is equally relevant to consider aesthetics in the context of work where the choice of, and interaction with, technology is typically mandatory. In his research, Martindale found that meaningfulness was the most important predictor of preference. Meaningfulness may, however, on occasion lead to rejection of very appealing designs that, to the untrained eye, would be considered visually aesthetic and hence important for human well-being.
For example, the images in Figure 1 below are borrowed from a high-pressure petro-chemical plant-management system. The gas is mixed with chemical catalysts in a process that eventually outputs tiny plastic pellets forming the raw material for other products. Each of the four systems in the factory was represented by the very pretty, realistic 3-D graphical representation and by a different background screen color as shown in Figure 1.
All four systems were accessible from the computer terminals, and the various parts of each system were directly accessible from those colorful front pages by clicking on the relevant component. Observations over several months of the highly experienced teams running the factory, however, showed that they did not use those screens to access the finer details of the systems.
They noted only the number of pumps or the number of secondary compressors to ensure they were entering the intended system. To inspect components of a system, they used menus that relied on the terminology to which they were accustomed, or they reverted to the prototypical monochrome system diagram shown in Figure 2. The impressive graphic design efforts were, in other words, perceived to be unnecessary, indeed inappropriate, for that safety-critical environment.
Images that may look very busy, even cluttered and thus not aesthetically pleasing to a lay audience, may be very pleasing and satisfying to work with for the target audience. The image in Figure 3 shows a screen that enables epidemiologists and infection control personnel effectively to monitor infectious disease outbreaks by tracing the people with whom affected patients may have been in contact since their exposure to the disease. This capability can thus also help to predict how the disease will spread unless preventative measures are taken such as isolating whole hospitals, even cities, in a timely fashion.
To people whose work does not involve such issues, the screen may seem too bland and too busy; the target audience nevertheless finds it both visually appealing and useful.
Both the above examples draw attention to the need to understand the meaning of visual aesthetics, its value to target users beyond the first impression, and the role it plays in different contexts.
The issue is clearly more complex than merely deciding whether to impute or ignore visual aesthetics in the design of interactive technology as some researchers have speculated Norman, To disentangle the roles of expectations and appropriateness in connection with visual aesthetics, we need longitudinal studies of ongoing interactive technology usage with self-chosen consumer products Karapanos et al.
Hundreds of studies have confirmed the so-called mere exposure effect attributed to the work of Zajonc ; Bornstein ; It is found in experiments using a very brief stimulus exposure time, between one and 50 ms Bornstein, ; in a variety of contexts including web pages Lindgaard et al. The accumulated evidence suggests that it is based on affect and that it occurs in the absence of cognitive processes Zajonc, ; In one condition, the animal pictures were presented against a plain white background; in the other, they were shown in their natural environments.
There was no difference in the number of animals correctly identified at 1 and 10ms exposure times in the plain condition, but more animals were correctly identified at 10 ms than at 1 ms exposure time in the natural-settings condition. The proposed explanatory models of masking assume that the mask overrides the stimulus in the visual sensory buffer, replacing it with a representation of the mask.
Rieger and his colleagues provided empirical support for this in a study in which they integrated psychophysical and physiological data and employed conditions with and without a mask. Using stimuli comprising complex images of natural scenes, their results showed that viewers had access to the stimulus beyond the target exposure time.
Due to the absence of masking, it is highly likely that Thurgood et al. However, contrary to previous findings involving the mere exposure effect, some cognition evidently did take place. Yet, Thurgood et al. I believe it is time for us to start thinking about a more holistic view of human information processing that includes affect as well as cognition.
The central ICS concept is that different types of information are received, stored and processed by a set of nine functionally independent sub-systems whose function is to process sensory information, interpret it and prepare the organism to respond to events external to it Humphrey, Because ICS is a framework rather than a theory, it makes no specific predictions about the exact representations used Scott et al.
Studies relying on rating scales feature most prominently in the HCI literature, and several of these have been found to correlate well with one another see e. In his chapter, Tractinsky draws attention to the problematic issue of competing concepts that are not mutually exclusive, and which therefore causes confusion among researchers, students, and evaluators alike. Good contrast makes it easy for the eyes to distinguish between foreground and background.
For example, the highly simplified white stick people in Figure 4 below stand out perfectly against the black background. Repetition refers to the use of a consistent visual system.
For example, the same-size icons in Figure 4 denoting different kinds of sports all rely on a very simple visual language displaying drawings of one or two people shown in a frontal or a side view. Likewise, proximity is also captured in the orderly screen in which items that belong together conceptually are placed together physically, with each group framed, and given a title that clearly distinguishes one the others.
That is not the case in the disorderly screen in which individual items are more or less randomly placed. These four basic design principles are largely adhered to in interactive computing systems regardless of whether an application is intended for serious or for more playful purposes, unless it specifically aims to confuse or surprise users, for example, in an interactive treasure hunt. Thus, a pleasant, clear, and clean user interface design is well organized and orderly, much like Parush et al.
Ethical investors prefer avoidance, while institu- tional ones are more keen on activism and advocacy, and both aim at cultural change.
Psychologists have been looking at differences in personality and even introduced the idea of multiple selves, while sociologists reminded us of the importance of social norms and both have been stressing the role of ethical considerations in producing a change that might not be easily swamped.
Since the publication of the book, the world-wide political situation has changed, and for the worst. EI and even SRI seem to have in front of them not only a difficult time but especially a much harder task in producing the cultural change that is more than ever needed. Experiments in Strategic Interaction Colin F.
While game theory has become the standard tool to analyze strategic interaction in economics, it is often criticized for assuming more calculation, foresight, and self-interest than most people are capable of.
Yet, the intention of the book is not to disprove but to improve game theory by establishing empirical regularity. To do so, the author synthesizes a large body of recent experimental and theoretical work. The author must be applauded for promoting a fruitful dialogue between theory and observation. When principles are not accurate, the results of the experiment usually suggests alternative principles. He uses a lucid prose to explain how applying behavioral game theory yields a better understanding of many economically rele- vant strategic situations.
The book is carefully written however, several author names have disturbing misprints , profusely documented with procedural details of experiments, and contains clearly arranged data tables.
Because the author manages to keep the analytical requirements to a minimum, the text can be used in graduate or advanced undergraduate teaching. Alternatively, the volume may also serve prospective and active researchers in behavioral economics as an authoritative reference book. Many of the chapters are up-to-date surveys of recent experimental work. Such a reference text is a timely contribution because the literature in behavioral economics has been exponentially growing over the past decade.
After an introductory chapter, the main body of the text is organized in seven chapters. While the volume is comprehensive in the topics it covers, the text does not touch on some important issues in experimental economics such as unstructured bargaining, the provision of public goods, auctions and competitive markets, and macroeconomic experiments.
0コメント