You’re pretty smart, right? So this short test should be easy:
1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? _____ cents
2. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? _____ minutes
3. In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half the lake? _____ days
This series of questions is known as the cognitive reflection test. Plenty of smart people would agree that the answers are 10 cents, 100 minutes and 24 days. These answers are the product of your “automatic system” as opposed to your “reflective system”. Think twice about them—reflect a little—and you realise the correct answers are 5 cents, 5 minutes and 47 days.
In their book Nudge, behavioural economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein cite this and other examples of how we humans need a little guidance to make the right decisions. In short, we can’t always be trusted to do the right thing even when that’s what we really want to do. Our automatic brains are in control, and like it or not this reptile brain is making most of our decisions.
Don’t find out what happens when you stop feeding the reptiles
In the last decade, web designers have become increasingly confident about the sophistication of users. The very concept of “newbies”—users who are new to the web—has essentially disappeared. As a result, web design has become a lot more interesting. If every site looked like Useit.com, a pioneering web usability resource, the web would not be the cool place that it is.
But complacency about all the reptiles out there can be trouble. Even the most savvy digital native can be easily confused or made anxious. No matter how sophisticated we like to think we are, every time we make a decision online we're confronted by some basic reptile instincts. We don't want to go hungry (on the web, that can mean getting bad value or the wrong information), we want to look good (nobody wants to make a dumb mistake—which is why web retailers' shopping carts need to inspire confidence every step of the way), but most of all, we don't want to get eaten (think of all those covert Facebook pix—they're not all that different from a camouflaged chameleon sunning itself).
The job of designers, information architects, content writers and anyone else building sites is to prevent mistakes and mitigate user anxiety, as much as it is to create something interesting, elegant and fun.
Companies like Google do a great job of this. For example, Gmail has some fantastic embarrassment reducing features. If you use the word “attachment” in a Gmail message, but then don’t attach a file before clicking send, you can set up Gmail to ask, “Are you sure you want to send this without an attachment?”
It’s a simple fix to a common reptile mistake. And it’s a good example of why Google is a company that gets it right so often for billions of reptiles like me.