Tag: psychology

The best productivity system I know

I am an awful procrastinator. I realized that, many years ago. Once I did, I started searching for productivity tips and systems. Of course, most of these searches are another form of procrastination. After all, it’s much more fun to read about productivity than writing that boring report. In 2012, I discovered a TiddlyWiki that implements AutoFocus — a system developed by Mark Forster (AutoFocus instructions: link, TiddlyWiki page link)

I loved the simplicity of that system and used it for a while. I also started following Mark Forster’s blog. Pretty soon after that, Mark published another, even simpler version of that system, which he called “The Final Version.” I loved it even better and readily adopted it. For many reasons, I moved from TiddlyWiki to Trello and made several personal adjustments to the system.

At some point, I read “59 seconds”  in which the psychologist Richard Wiseman summarizes many psychological studies in the field of happiness, productivity, decision making, etc. From that book, I learned about the power of writing things down. It turns out, that when you write things down, your brain gets a better chance to analyze your thoughts and to make better decisions. I also learned from other sources about the importance to disconnect from the Internet several times a day. So, on November 2016, I made a transition from electronic productivity system to an old school notebook. In the beginning, I decided to keep that notebook as a month-long experiment, but I loved that very much. Since then, I have always had my analog productivity system and an introspection device with me. Today, I started my sixth notebook. I love my system so much, I actually consider writing a book about it.

Blank notebook page with #1 in the page corner
The first page of my new notebook. The notebook is left-to-right since I write in Hebrew

Can the order in which graphs are shown change people’s conclusions?

When I teach data visualization, I love showing my students how simple changes in the way one visualizes his or her data may drive the potential audience to different conclusions. When done correctly, such changes can help the presenters making their point. They also can be used to mislead the audience. I keep reminding the students that it is up to them to keep their visualizations honest and fair.  In his recent post, Robert Kosara, the owner of https://eagereyes.org/, mentioned another possible way that may change the perceived conclusion. This time, not by changing a graph but by changing the order of graphs exposed to a person. Citing Robert Kosara:

Priming is when what you see first influences how you perceive what comes next. In a series of studies, [André Calero Valdez, Martina Ziefle, and Michael Sedlmair] showed that these effects also exist in the particular case of scatterplots that show separable or non-separable clusters. Seeing one kind of plot first changes the likelihood of you judging a subsequent plot as the same or another type.

via IEEE VIS 2017: Perception, Evaluation, Vision Science — eagereyes

As any tool, priming can be used for good or bad causes. Priming abuse can be a deliberate exposure to non-relevant information in order to manipulate the audience. A good way to use priming is to educate the listeners of its effect, and repeatedly exposing them to alternate contexts. Alternatively, reminding the audience of the “before” graph, before showing them the similar “after” situation will also create a plausible effect of context setting.

P.S. The paper mentioned by Kosara is noticeable not only by its results (they are not as astonishing as I expected from the featured image) but also by how the authors report their research, including the failures.

 

Featured image is Figure 1 from Calero Valdez et al. Priming and Anchoring Effects in Visualization