Motivation and IncentivesRelated to Smarter Cities

John C. Thomas

15 July 2010

Motivation/Incentives Work at Multiple Levels

• Corporations are driven mainly by profits although this can occasionally be influenced by public perception or outrage. Any one company who “voluntarily” chooses to act in a cleaner but more expensive way is at a competitive disadvantage. Laws that require everyone to behave differently are more likely to work.

• City employees are motivated in complex ways; partly, by social pressures that mainly have to do with their own department or working group; partly by financial incentives. Managers may be reluctant to do things that make their own departments more “efficient” by reducing resources. (NYNEX example).

• In this talk, I will focus mainly on the level of citizen motivations and changing behavior; however, the other topics above are equally important for overall change.

• Motivation and Incentives is worthy of a year long course at least. I will give some examples of interesting effects, not an exhaustive treatment.

Reality vs. Perception .

• Human beings (and other animals) evolved to be very sensitive to what is big and fast and obvious in order to survive.

• But now, human beings face problems that are small, slow, and subtle.

• Examples of gap between our “instincts” and reality.

– Most people are more afraid of sharks than automobiles.

– Foods high in salt, sugar and fat taste good.– Individual pollution is largely invisible; e.g., a single

auto’s exhaust seems to disappear close to the tailpipe.

• How to bridge the gap? – Awareness, education and training.– Tools to make the subtle and complex more

obvious and simple.

• Yerkes-Dodgson Law– Increasing Stress/Motivation increases then

decreases performance– Optimal point interacts with complexity and novelty.– Optimal stress is lower for complex problems

requiring creativity and novelty.

Perception vs. Reality

Which one scares you more?

5 deaths/year

1,200,000,000 deaths/year

Behavioral Change depends on multiple factors not just motivation

• When people fail to change, we may be tempted to attribute it to lack of motivation (and that could be correct) however, it could also be difficulty in learning the “correct” attributions.

Putting in Golf• Looks easy…but if you miss to the

right, why? It could be because you:• Misread the slope of the green.• Misread the grain.• Hit off the center of the putter.• Hit in a curved arc.• Did not aim where you think you did.• Hit at an angle.• To help differentiate these possible

sources of error, Dave Pelz designed feedback devices.

• Difficulty in attribution interacts with motivational issues.

– People may “give up.” – People may “jump” to simple

explanations.– Difficulty of change may increase

stubborn reliance on old habits.– Peer groups often reinforce

destructive ways of dealing with complexity. “Oh, these greens are impossible.”

Environmental Issues:• Often extremely complex in reality.• Various interested parties often provide partial and contradictory

information: “Using paper cups destroys trees” but “Using plastic cups generates indestructible trash.”

• How much is asthma caused by air pollution? Lack of exercise? Poor diet? Genetics? Stress?

• As is typical, these factors (and more) are linked in a system of systems and not in a simple, direct, linear chain of cause and effect.

• Our perceptions are often partial and biased based on our motivations and reinforced by our peer group.

– If we belong to “Metropolitan Citizens for Clean Air” we may “notice” that many people who have asthma live in places where the air is badly polluted.

– If we belong to the “Polar Bear Club” we “notice” that many friends who used to have asthma have had it cured with cold water swimming.

• Karl-Henrik Robert, pediatric oncologist in Sweden developed systems diagrams that showed inter-relations of major factors relating pollution, disease, and economic factors.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

• An interview study reported at CHI 2008 of why people said they lived in “green homes” showed a wide variety of reasons given.– Be more a part of nature.– Do something different and cool.– Help save the planet for humanity.– Leave the world a better place for kids and grandkids.– Save money in the long run.– Simplify life.

• Which of the following pictures “gets” to you?

IBM Corporation 2009Melting Polar Ice Cap

ARID AFRICA

IBM Corporation 2009

A Country Underwater

A rise in sea level would leave the city of Amsterdam and 2/3 of The

Netherlands underwater

IBM Corporation 2009Deforestation

IBM Corporation 2009

“Smarter Cities”: The People Side

• Example: Car-pooling (or lack of car-pooling!) and off-set work schedules to reduce energy costs and pollution are not just traffic engineering problems but also complex social issues. – What if we carpool and then your

boss insists you stay late?

– What if I do not want to car pool with you because of your dangerous driving or taste in music?

– What if I want to study Chinese in the car for the next two weeks?

– What if I suddenly discover relatives are visiting and I need to stop at the store on the way home?

Temporality• Social habits, sometimes reinforced by institutions or laws cause

“peaks” and “valleys” of activities.

– In the case of “rush hour” traffic, this is inordinately inefficient wasting billions in fuel and productivity.

– In the case of “market days”, this is actually more efficient.

• In many areas, managing the temporality of demand is vital.

• People often develop temporally based habits as well causing them to eat, sleep, work, commute, do laundry etc. at fairly specific times.

• Such temporality of demand factors might be capable of being modeled mathematically.

• New and widespread use of sensors, cameras, cell phones, GPS, etc. may provide additional information thereby making finer grain modeling possible.

• Note that providing information about temporality of demand can itself cause changes in temporality.

– Once everyone learns that airline travel is lightest on Wednesday, or that parking is easiest on Wednesday, so many people may change their behavior that it is no longer true.

• Temporal effects are also physically important in terms of both:

– Energy sources such as solar and wind.

– Energy needs caused by drought, heat waves, cold.

Designing Smarter Cities: The People Side

Incentive Structures• Behavior is partly determined, not just by actual rewards and punishments but also partly by how these

are perceived.

– Social justice theory in pay satisfaction.

– Giving a “credit” rather than charging a “tax” to incent people to drive less will probably produce less backlash.

• In some cases, making people easily aware of information has a large impact on behavior.

– Writing down all food eaten in a food diary itself changes eating behavior.

– New applications are being developed for people to become aware of the impact of their choices; for instance, impact of food on environment not only health.

• Stimuli can also have intrinsic effects on behavior not just informational or symbolic effects.

• Difficult to estimate changes due to temporary novelty effects.

• Change may begin for one set of reasons and continue for another.

– E.g., a person may bike to work one week only because of a temporary social competition to reduce carbon.

– Then discover that it is fun and do it another week.

– Then discover that they feel better physically and do it another two weeks.

– Then discover that they are saving money and do it for another few months.

– Then find a biking club and gain social companionship.

– Then agitate for more and safer bike paths.

Designing Smarter Cities: The People Side

Community Effects• People are primarily social animals.• Communities are effective because people motivate each other.• Communities are effective because people learn from each other.• Communities have shared “stories” that select acceptable narrative cause/effect lines from

the complex web of inter-relationships. • For example, the community of basketball sports fans generally believes in the “hot hands”

effect but statistical studies consistently show that there is no such effect. • Some of the “American Story” lines such as “conquering the wilderness” and “individual

overcoming all odds” may make it difficult to see certain important relationships.• The community stories are internalized by individuals and impact behavior.

– Asian women reminded they are women before a math test do worse than unreminded group.

– Asian women reminded they are Asian before a math test do better than unreminded group.

– Opposite effects on test of English proficiency.

• In Sweden’s “Natural Step” program toward sustainability, Karl-Henrik Robert used a “Community of Communities” pattern so that each community could

– Focus on what they were most interested in and knowledgeable about– Could learn from each other– Could work together on a complex multi-faceted problem (sustainability).

Designing Smarter Cities: The People Side

American Culture: Traditional Garb

American Culture: Traditional Eating

American Recreation

American Culture?

• What is American Culture? Is there one? Several? Thousands?

• And, if so, what relationship does it have to the culture of Ballroom dancing, dirt bike racing, cheeseheads, golf, etc?

• Might these be more powerful predictors of behavior and the design of tools?

• The group you identify with, at least in America, makes very different behaviors acceptable. But perhaps America is odd in this way?

UK: Traditional Weddings

Technologies can have huge (often

unintended) social impacts.• Examples from Whyte (1962)

– Stirrup led to Medieval hierarchy because a knight could control the horse and fight and was much more powerful than an unarmored peasant.

– Better “horse-factored” harness and redesigned plough led to population explosion in Europe.

• Automobile generally credited with breakdown of nuclear family.• Commuting and television credited with less participation in Democracy (Putnam,

2000).• Microwave cooking:

– Traditional cooking requires social negotiation and results in communal activity; shared food at a shared time.

– Microwave cooking requires little or no social negotiation and individual activity may be started while the other person makes their dinner; different food at a different time.

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But social values also moderate and determine behavior.

• Example from Diamond (2005). Early Norse settlements in North America could have survived largely on fish but this was considered a “low-class” food and instead they insisted on raising beef. This led to overgrazing the land leading to erosion, starvation, and abandonment.

• Example from twenty-first century North America: The automobile. If it is for transportation, then, most of the advertisements are sadly misdirected.

– Self-expressive• Thrill seeker• Intelligent• Concerned about family• Concerned about the environment• Powerful• Rich• Etc.

• If we are to “replace” personal automobile with more efficient transport, how do we deal with these other wants?

Social Values help Determine behavior in

sometimes bizarre ways

• Asked to judge who was better for a job, people rated people whose names began with “D” higher for “Dentist” and similarly for other professions.

• People rate others more highly who share names, towns of origins, and even whose names are somewhat similar.

Care needs to be taken not to imply a bad social norm!

• Exactly because environmental issues are complex, people often judge what to do on the basis of what others do.

• Signs at the petrified forest that described how much was being destroyed by deplorable people taking pieces as souvenirs increased this behavior. Signs that emphasized how rare such behavior was decreased it.

“Systems Thinking” approach to Design is often useful

In “Smarter Cities” it is vital!• Otherwise, if the design treats people as

oversimplified objects:

• People may “game the system.”

• People may “leave the system” that is, leave the city or not come to it.

• People may even “destroy the system.”

Designing Smarter Cities: The People Side

Two Examples of the Need for a Systems View --- An Ecological Approach

• NYNEX was about to buy new “improved” terminals for telephone operators.

– GUI Interface.

– Human Factors work done to minimize operator keystrokes and speed transaction time.

– Every second saved in average work time $4 million saved expense/year.

– Problem: System was optimized for Operator – Machine Interaction, not Operator – Machine – Customer Interaction.

– Cognitive Modeling showed and empirical work verified that new “improved” interface was slower.

– Keystrokes were mostly “saved” when operator was NOT on the critical path; in fact, most of the time was “speaking” not typing, and most of critical path was due to Customer.

– Changing operator’s initial greeting resulted in large time savings because of its effect on customer’s behavior.

• Thames water works had dispatchers and engineers.

– Engineers were measured on how many troubles they fixed.

– Dispatchers were measured on how many calls they handled.

– One older dispatcher was nearly fired for taking triple the target time for calls.

– However, on average, one engineer was dispatched/10 calls.

– In her case, one engineer was dispatched/1000 calls.

Designing Smarter Cities: The People Side

Example systems aimed at aiding the process of better city design

Arias, E. G., Eden, H., Fischer, G., Gorman, A., & Scharff, E. (2000) "Transcending the Individual Human Mind—Creating Shared Understanding through Collaborative Design," ACM Transactions on Computer Human-Interaction, 7(1), pp. 84-113.

Fischer, G. (2009) "End-User Development and Meta-Design: Foundations for Cultures of Participation." In V. Pipek, M. B. Rossen, B. deRuyter, & V. Wulf (Eds.), End-User Development, Springer, Heidelberg, pp. 3-14.

• Friedman, B., Borning, A., Davis, J. L., Gill, B. T., Kahn, Jr., P., Kriplean, T., & Lin, P. (2008). Laying the foundations for public participation and value advocacy: Interaction design for a large scale urban simulation. To appear in Proceedings of the 9th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o2008) (pp. 305-314). Montreal, Canada: Digital Government Society of North America.

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Gerhard Fischer work on Tabletop Displays for Group

Design

The “million person interface”

• How can we leverage collaborative technology so that we can build on the world-wide diversity of cultures, geographies, talents and interests to provide a more comprehensive “view” of reality?

• Relatively easy with problems that have objective answers and are decomposable like finding prime numbers, “events” in the night sky, writing on plants or countries in Wikipedia.

• Not yet a solved problem with “intelligent discourse” on complex tangled problems.

Can we do something analogous to High Dynamic Range Photography with Thoughts?

Carbon Rationing Groups

Little Green Patch

Some laboratory analogues used to study social motivational phenomena

• Prisoner's Dilemma: Mutual cooperation leads to best mutual outcome but people are tempted to “defect.” More likely to cooperate if face to face but also more likely if people exchange any personal information first.

• Hidden Profiles: People given partially overlapping information and asked to make a decision focus in discussion on common information and put too little emphasis on non-shared information to arrive at optimal decision.

• Desert Survival Task: Typically people individually rank items, have group discussion, and then re-rank items individually. Huge cultural differences here. Americans moved an average of one item rank after discussion. Chinese (who were equally diverse before discussion) moved to within one item rank --- a six-fold difference.

Negotiation

• Negotiate from Needs rather than positions

• Parable of the two sisters and the orange

• William Ury, Getting Past No.

• Fisher, Ury & Patton, Getting to Yes

References:• Alexander, C. A., Ishikawa, S., Silverstein, M., Jacobson, M. Fiksdahl-King, I., and Angel, S. (1977) A Pattern Language. New

York: Oxford Press. • Alexander, C. The Nature of Order. (2004) New York: Oxford Press.• Arias, E. G., Eden, H., & Fischer, G. (1997) "Enhancing Communication, Facilitating Shared Understanding, and Creating

Better Artifacts by Integrating Physical and Computational Media for Design." In Proceedings of Designing Interactive Systems (Dis '97), ACM, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, pp. 1-12. Available at: http://www.acm.org/pubs/articles/proceedings/chi/263552/p1-arias/p1-arias.pdf.

• Arias, E. G., Eden, H., Fischer, G., Gorman, A., & Scharff, E. (2000) "Transcending the Individual Human Mind—Creating Shared Understanding through Collaborative Design," ACM Transactions on Computer Human-Interaction, 7(1), pp. 84-113.

• Brand, S. (1995). How buildings learn: What happens after they’re built. New York: Penguin.• Chetty, M., Brush, A. J., Meyers B. & Johns, P. (2009) It’s not easy being green: Understanding home computer power

management. Paper presented at CHI, May, Boston, MA. • Davis, J. (2008). Engaging and informing citizens with household indicators. Proceedings of the Hawai'i International

Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-41) (p. 190). Waikoloa, Hawaii • Diamond, J. (2005). Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. New York: Penguin. • Friedman, B. & Freier, N. G. (2005). Value Sensitive Design. In K. E. Fisher, S. Erdelez, & E. F. McKechnie (Eds.). Theories of

information behavior: A researcher's guide (pp. 368-372).Medford, NJ: Information Today. • Friedman, B., Borning, A., Davis, J. L., Gill, B. T., Kahn, Jr., P., Kriplean, T., & Lin, P. (2008). Laying the foundations for public

participation and value advocacy: Interaction design for a large scale urban simulation. To appear in Proceedings of the 9th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o2008) (pp. 305-314). Montreal, Canada: Digital Government Society of North America.

• Fung, A. (2006) Varieties of participation in complex governance. Public administration Review, December, 2006, pp. 66-75.• Furnas, G. (2000) Future design mindful of the MoRAS. Human-Computer Interaction, Volume

15, Issue 2 & 3 September 2000 , pages 205 – 261• Gray, W. D., John, B. E., Stuart, R., Lawrence, D. & Atwood, M.E. (1990), GOMS meets the phone company: Analytic modeling

applied to real-world problems. In Proceedings of IFIP Interact’90: Human Computer Interaction. 29-34. • Harter, T., Vroegindeweij, S, Geelhoed, E., Manahan, M. & Raganathan, P.(2004). Energy-aware User Interfaces: An

Evaluation of User Acceptance, Proceedings of CHI 2004, NY: ACM.

Designing Smarter Cities: The People Side

References:• Huang, E. & Truong, K. (2008) Breaking the Disposable Technology Paradigm: Opportunities for Sustainable Interaction

Design for Mobile Phones. Ppaer presented at CHI, Florence, April, 2008.• Jacobs, J. (1961) The death and life of great American cities. New York: Random House.• Karat, J., Karat, C., Brodie, C., and Feng, J. (2005). Privacy in Information Technology: Designing to Enable Privacy Policy

Management in Organizations. In the International Journal of Human Computer Studies, 2005, Vol 63, Issues 1-2, p. 153-174.

• Odom, W., James, P. Stoleterman, E & Blevis, E. (2009) Understanding why we preserve some things and discard others in the context of interaction design. Paper presented at CHI in Boston MA, May.

• Olson, G. M. and Olson, J.S. Distance matters. Human-Computer Interaction 15, (2000), 139-179.• Olson, J.S., Hofer, E., Bos, N., Zimmerman, A., Olson,G.M., Cooney, D., & Faniel, I. A theory of remote scientific

collaboration (TORSC). In G. M. Olson, Zimmerman, A., and Bos, N. (Eds.) Scientific Collaboration on the Internet. MIT Press, Boston, MA, USA, 2008.

• Pelz, D. (2000), Dave Pelz’s putting Bible. New York: Doubleday.

• Schuler, D. (2008) Liberating voices: A pattern language for communication revolution. Cambridge: MIT Press.• Thomas, J.C., (1995). Usability engineering in the year 2020. In J. Nielsen (Ed.), Advances in Human-Computer Interaction

5. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.• Thomas, J. C., Kellogg, W.A., and Erickson, T. (2001) The Knowledge Management puzzle: Human and social factors in

knowledge management. IBM Systems Journal, 40(4), 863-884. Available on-line at http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj40-4.html

• Thomas, J. C. (2001). An HCI Agenda for the Next Millennium: Emergent Global Intelligence. In R. Earnshaw, R. Guedj, A. van Dam, and J. Vince (Eds.), Frontiers of human-centered computing, online communities, and virtual environments. London: Springer-Verlag.

• Thomas, J. C. (1999) Narrative technology and the new millennium. Knowledge Management Journal, 2(9), 14-17. • Whyte, L. (1962). Medieval technology and social change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.• Woodruff, A., Hasbrouck, J. & Augustin, S. (2008) A Bright Green Perspective on Sustainable Choices. Paper presented at

CHI, Florence. April, 2008.

Designing Smarter Cities: The People Side

References:• http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jaime_lerner_sings_of_the_city.html

– Ted Talk by Jaime Lerner: Cities are not the problem; they are the solution.

• http://www.architectureforhumanity.org/

– Organization to promote good design for urban spaces.

• http://elainehuang.com/CHI-2009/position-papers.html

– Position papers for workshop on HCI and sustainability at CHI 2009

• http://www.urbansim.org/Main/WebHome

– Home page of UrbanSim, a software-based simulation system for supporting planning and analysis of urban development

• http://www.sahana.lk/

– Open source software for disaster management

Designing Smarter Cities: The People Side