Susan Weinschenk - Top 10 things every health communicator needs to know about people

Top 10 Things Every Health

Communicator Needs To Know

About People

Susan Weinschenk, Ph.D.

Weinschenk Institute, LLC

#10. People Do As Little As Possible

Iyengar, Sheena S.

and Mark R. Lepper.

2000. When choice is

demotivating: Can

one desire too much

of a good thing?.

Journal of Personality

and Social

Psychology. 79: 995-

1006.

#9. Too Many Choices = No Choice

Choice = Control = Survival

#8. Most Mental Processing Is Unconscious

People can only remember/process 7 + or –

“things” at a time

Fact or Fiction?

FICTION

7 +/- 2 is an Urban Legend

Baddeley, A. D. (1994). The magical number seven: Still magic after all these years? Psychological Review, 101, 353-356. Broadbent, D. (1975). The magic number seven after fifteen years. In: Studies in long-term memory, ed. A. Kennedy & A. Wilkes. Wiley. Cowan, N. (2001). The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24, 87-185.

#7. People Can Remember/Deal With 3-4 Things At A Time

Larson, Adam, & Loschky, L (2009). The contributions of central versus peripheral vision to scene gist recognition. Journal of Vision, 9(10:6)

#6. People Use Peripheral Vision To Get The “Gist”

#5. The Fusiform Facial Area (FFA) Makes Us Pay Attention To Human Faces

#4. Hard To Read Or Overly Decorative Fonts = Task Is Hard

Song, H. & Schwarz, N. (2008). If it’s hard to read, it’s hard to do: Processing fluency affects effort prediction and motivation. Psychological Science, 19, 986–988.

Sillence, Elizabeth, Briggs, P. Fishwick, L., & Harris, P. (2004). Trust and mistrust of online health sites. CHI’04 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference On Human Factors In Computer Systems. New York: ACM.

#3. People Use Look And Feel As The First Indicator For Trust

#2. People Have Mental Models

#1. People Expect Technology To Follow Human To Human Rules

intellectuals solve problems;

geniuses prevent them

~albert einstein

@thebrainlady

[email protected]

www.theteamw.com

Susan Weinschenk, Ph.D.

Weinschenk Institute, LLC