 Grace Teo, Ph.D.Senior Research Psychologist The other day, my co-workers and I were having a lively conversation about products that supposedly help us be more “grounded.” They were electricity-powered bed sheets, blankets, and pillowcases. The websites—yes, there was more than one manufacturer—for these products boast glowing testimonials and reviews. You can reconnect with nature by sleeping in bed sheets plugged in to "ground" you to the Earth’s electrons and neutralize your free radicals, drinking alkali water to prevent disease by neutralizing acid in your blood, and wearing copper bracelets to regrow joint cartilage in order to relieve arthritis pain. While these may work for some, there hasn’t been much scientific evidence of their efficacy, so individuals who swear by these health-promoting strategies and products are likely experiencing the placebo effect.  Image created by Craiyon “So what?” you ask. If the mechanism by which these work for some individuals isn’t the mechanism touted by their proponents, should we get upset about that? Maybe it’s a case of “no harm, no foul.” So long as it doesn’t hurt to try the grounding blanket and if someone can benefit from it, then what’s the fuss? Perhaps anything could have therapeutic benefits—if we haven’t seen any, maybe it’s because the “right” person hasn’t used it yet. Maybe the truth about grounding blankets and other similar treatments is not whether they work or not, but it’s about who you ask. Does this make the truth about the grounding blankets relative? I don’t think so. I think the absolute truth about these treatments is that they illustrate the potency of the mind’s belief in health and medicine. In other words, we must consider both objective data as well as the individual’s subjective experience. The challenge lies in capturing this subjective experience in a meaningful way. Unlike objective data which can be verified from a “third person’s” view, an individual’s subjective experience is only accessible from a “first person’s” view. Our subjective experiences can change over time with circumstances and even with our frame of mind. This makes subjective experiences elusive and hard to capture. Researchers have attempted to look for objective neural correlates with specific subjective experiences such as consciousness, pleasantness, attention, and agency, but most rely on interviews and subjective rating scales. Developers of rating scales try to design these scales so that different individuals perceive the anchors or points on the scale in the same way, which is a main assumption about such rating scales. While there are multiple rating scales for experiences that are somewhat easier to describe or define, such as pain or workload, there are many other subjective experiences that are not easy to define and involve an individual’s beliefs, expectations, and worldview, e.g., fear and joy, both of which can have a profound impact on our task performance and responses.  The Scream by Edvard Munch (Public Domain) Capturing the subjective experience is essential for understanding how users engage with products, treatments, and even technology. While objective data provides a solid foundation for evaluating efficacy, it is the subjective lens—shaped by individual beliefs, expectations, and even cultural or societal influences—that often drives our behavior and perceptions. Whether it’s grounding blankets or copper bracelets, understanding the complex interplay between mind and body reminds us that human experience is nuanced. All this contributes to the evolving challenges in human-centered design.
Can you recall a time when you completed a subjective rating scale but thought that it did not quite capture what you were experiencing? What did you wish it asked instead?
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 Grace Teo, Ph.D., Senior Research Psychologist How many times have we been told to “put ourselves in someone else’s shoes” or “see things from the other person’s point of view?” According to the best-seller by Dale Carnegie, perspective taking is one of the principles for How to Win Friends and Influence People. It is not just negotiators or salespeople who have to practice this. We all try to do this when trying to understand our customers, staff, co-workers, bosses, friends, family, people we like, and people we don’t. Perspective taking happens when we imagine ourselves in the other person’s shoes. The thing is, our ability to take the other’s perspective relies on our imagination of what this other person is like and what we think we know about them, but this may not be accurate at all. Social psychology studies show that our reading of other people’s behaviors can be fraught with attribution bias, clouding our understanding of who the other person is. Some of our attempts at perspective taking can also be influenced by the stereotypes and biases we consciously or unconsciously have about different groups of people. When we have little information about the other person to go by, we may tend to overthink their intentions and read too much into things. When we have a lot of information to work with, we may still not select the correct information to focus on to understand what is most compelling for the other person at that particular time. How many well-meaning people have bought gifts that weren't really what the recipient wanted despite putting themselves in the other person’s shoes? I, for one, have done that for sure.  Image created using MagicStudio It's not that there are no benefits to perspective taking at all. Perspective taking can help foster information elaboration that facilitates creativity in diverse teams and can help guard against automatic expressions of racial bias. There is also neuroscience research that suggests that exercises that included perspective taking can change the socio-affective and socio-cognitive brain networks in a positive way. However, putting ourselves in the other person’s shoes to understand them doesn’t always work because sometimes we really don’t know where the person is. A study showed that perspective taking did not necessarily lead to understanding the other person better, although it made the perspective taker feel more confident in their judgments. Interestingly, this confidence may hinder the perspective taker’s receptivity to learning and listening.
So while it’s good to put ourselves “in the other’s shoes” to understand them better, we need to recognize that our attempts to imagine what the other person is thinking and feeling can be obscured by our own bias when interpreting their behaviors, and/or the lack of accurate information. In addition to perspective taking, we should also just ask the other person about their views and listen unreservedly to them with an open mind.
What’s your perspective on this? |
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