The Human Condition of Attribution
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007
Life quickly teaches us that context is everything.
Humans have a talent called attribution that enhances our ability to simplify the world around us. Attribution involves the projection of who we are onto external others (and situations) and we use this feature of our nature as a predictive sensor in social interaction. Importantly, its an unconscious process.
Its interesting to sit in a team meeting and speculate consciously about how others might see the same meeting and the same conversation. The unsettling truth about human interaction is we never really do know what the other person brings to the table. My anglo male educated mind justifies the world in an entirely different manner than for someone who hasn’t been as fortunate. My world exists of rationalised science - I understand how the Internet works and many of the technologies of the World Wide Web - and my life is very much about picking apart black boxes. The other person might view their computer in their living room as a magic black box that delivers email and nothing more. My ones and zeros make no sense in that world.
How more interesting when you start thinking about how cultures and sub-cultures might use the website you’re developing?
An interesting exercise in information architecture (called Card Sorting) is to provide a list (or set of cards) of about 15 to 20 items where their logical groupings aren’t entirely black and white. Compact discs are computer related and games are different again from mobile phones. Its really just a simple sort-these-into-groups game. Break the class up into several teams, provide them with cut-outs of each word and ask them to put them into logical lists. Then get each team to come and write their groupings on the whiteboard.
This is why usability testing and other performance and preference measurement is important - the world might not see the information in the same way as the development team. If you can identify this misconception early you’re going to improve the project outcomes.
Attribution is a funny critter. On the one hand it lets us simplify the world around us but on the other it can lead to attribution of blame and even paranoia - the truth is people aren’t always thinking what we’re thinking. People don’t always see the same way as we’re giving them credit for seeing. And its worth sometimes sitting back and taking that in stock.
