If the research was anything like the psychology studies I participated in as a college student, it is a far reach from college students paid to pretend to "interview a job applicant", to conclusions about a professional interviewer.
With nothing else on the line (your reputation, income, self-image), its easy for the warm coffee or comfy chair to dominate your attitude.
What if I said that participants' physiology (stress response, in this case) is completely different depending on a single variable: being interviewed by a person, versus giving an unprepared speech to a camera about why you should be hired.
You can be as cynical as you want, but there's no justification for ignoring good experimental design and the statistics that demonstrate it's unlikely that people would react so differently based on the camera/person condition.
The evidence is: if you interview in front of a person, your blood pressure is demonstrably higher, your palms sweat more, and you self-report that you were stressed out. In front of a camera, the averageperson does not exhibit a stress response.
You're not the first to observe that college students are a poor stand-in for the general population, but I have experience with one of the labs that conducted this work, and they did extensive "general population" work as well, which means it's not all college students.
So many of these naive criticisms are addressed in the paper itself - if only people would take the time to read what the scientists wrote (i.e. "read the science".)
> if only people would take the time to read what the scientists wrote
To do that, I'd have to either pay $15 (for just this one paper) or take a trip to my local university library.
You're free to chastise people all you like, but as long as the actual papers are locked up behind paywalls, it's quite difficult to "read the science".
You can still get this kind of literature from a library, though - especially university libraries. It's like how books aren't free, yet you can still read them for free by going to the library.
Still confused and doubtful: how does the camera/person issue relate to the coffee mug/comfy chair? The article (which I was criticising) made extraordinary claims about mind control and inanimate objects.
Even if the interview process you describe was part of the 'science' (not evident from the article we're commenting on) then its not the camera, but the actual person that is responsible for the stress response. Isn't it ludicrous to attribute it to the camera?
Finally, social 'science' is mostly cargo-cult science. There are such inadequate attempts to control variables, so little effort to even understand the variables, that doing statistics appropriate for physics and chemistry are inadequate and wildly misleading.
"It may seem incredulous to imagine that the boring coffee mug you held this morning while chatting with your kids, or the clipboard you held while filling out that interview this afternoon, were actively priming your behavior and emotions."
Yes it does seem incredulous.
Are we to believe that the only differing factor in each case was the stated coffee cup, puzzle piece softness etc..
Is there a study around desktop methaphors in this context? For example: moving files to the recycle bin can be 'heavier' or 'lighter' depending on the total size of the selection (more files are slightly heaver and therefore subconsciously they're more important - resulting in less user error).
There's an anecdote claiming that the Mac's old "overstuffed" icon for a non-empty trash was unsettling to users, who felt like they should immediately "empty trash" to alleviate the condition... Which defeats the purpose of having a trash can instead of instant delete.
You'd best offset it by making your desktop background a flat shade of maroon; it's the only proven way to counteract neural damage from off-white sources.
I was holding a warm cup of tea while reading the article but I still think it sounds a bit fuzzy. I'm guessing the decline effect will push the results below the noise floor.
This is just a reminder of how desperately important good design is. No matter how minimal this effect may turn out to be, we all interact with thousands of man-made objects each day. Improving the quality of those interactions is a cheap way of raising quality of life.
"As for the notion of a thought vacuum, I think its incredible to consider that no matter how bleak an environment you may find yourself in, or how dull an object you may find yourself holding, these things are always influencing how you think and feel about the people and places around you."
What's more important to me than how this might/should effect product design, is how it should effect our concept of free will.
Um, yeah. Reason why Zen Gardens exist and in minimalism art/architecture/design/etc common for many aesthetic/meditative disciplines such as Zen Buddhism.
