Where Do the 3 Concept Types Come From?
How do we know this categorization is exhaustive of everything going on inside someone’s cognition?
In my research, I focus on three things that ran through people’s minds when they were working toward something. These three things are:
- inner thinking, thoughts, pondering, reasoning
- emotional reactions, feelings, moods
- guiding principles, personal rules
But why these three things? Where do they come from? Do they represent everything we need to know about?
The idea comes from the field of psychology via the definitions of different types of empathy. When I wrote my second book, Practical Empathy, I was doing research. I ran into a group of psychologists that let me join their monthly meetings. I got to learn a lot about their approach and lingo. What they helped me understand was not only that “empathy” wasn’t regarded as one thing, but also that listening is usually used to help a person feel heard. In therapy, a psychologist uses listening to understand that individual, help them hear themself, and feel confidence to make changes in their thinking and behavior.
On the other hand, in applied research in the UX field, when you listen to understand patterns across people, it’s a different thing. It’s called cognitive empathy. (Hopefully a person in a listening session also feels heard.) The goal is that teams can wield the sum of this cognitive empathy in ways that could benefit end users, and their org, and team process.
So those three things (thinking, emotions, guiding principles) are what define cognitive empathy for my work.
An important element to recognize is that cognition is tied to topics. It’s not a way of defining a whole person or personality. I think most of humanity is used to thinking in terms of “personality type” or “horoscope,” a blanket condition of a person’s soul that applies to all contexts. This is what we’re up against. In reality, one human will behave differently in different circumstances. So I define studies by the circumstance and purpose that person is addressing, listening to numerous people with this same purpose. And humans change, slowly or quickly, by context or by life event. To describe these changes, the states of mind, I use patterns of the three concept types to create Thinking Styles. Archetypes. Archetypes don’t have photos and demographic descriptions, but characters do. The takeaway: core cognition is tied to topics within a purpose, not to the whole person.
But why those three? I let myself try to think about where that trio came from, which meant reviewing my thinking from the early 2000’s. Why don’t they represent things like humor or some session-mode things that we communicate to each other? What I remember is that it stems from work I did in “task analysis” back in the days of writing requirements documents and functional design specifications. It may have been influenced by early reading I did into the world of psychology and empathy, and also by The Center for Nonviolent Communication and by the book Difficult Conversations. I can’t pinpoint it.
In my first book from 2008, Mental Models, I was using these three things, but calling them something different than I do now.
- task (the wrong word, which I realized 3 months after publication)
- feeling
- philosophy (a word open to interpretation, which I changed later)
In project teams, these names get mixed up with “needs, motivations, and emotions” which are not what I am actually looking for in a listening session. Why? Because in my experience, needs tend to get expressed as explanation and scene setting, and motivations are a mix of preferences, opinions, and generalized inner thinking. Not always, but often enough that I saw it wasn’t helpful to teams trying to understand people. They could understand process, but not people.
So in my second book I renamed the three things to differentiate them from the common “needs, motivations, and emotions” that teams were trying to pursue. I switched “task, feeling, philosophy” to “inner thinking/reasoning, reaction, guiding principle.” They represent the same trio. I keep fiddling with the names for the trio of concepts. I’m happy to see teams adopt words that work for themselves.
- inner thinking, thoughts, pondering, reasoning
- emotional reactions, feelings, moods
- guiding principles, personal rules
So, why these three? I can mainly answer by saying that all the other concepts from a listening session fall into other concept types. There’s session-mode discussion, reassurance, support, wrapping up, hesitation, embarrassment, etc. And then there’s memory-mode scene-setting, explanation, implied emotion, opinion, etc. Those are the jawbreaker candies, the topics that a person is communicating about how, in the past, they had addressed a particular intent of theirs. (Not “using an app,” but the reason for using the tool.) The stuff that’s not in these categories tends to come under the three concept types at the core.
You can read more about these ideas in my third book, Time to Listen. (also translated to Brazilian Portuguese)
Historic note: You can see that the context I was writing in very much influenced the words I chose. We were measuring people by how they could follow a process. We were transitioning from defining “user experience” as time-on-task, mouse movements, and number-of-clicks to a more holistic emotional experience a person has trying to accomplish something with a tool. (e.g. trust, confidence, satisfaction) In my first book, Mental Models, I wrote:
I use the word ‘task’ loosely. When I use the word ‘task,’ many of you in the research field might think of ‘mouse clicks’ and ‘steps to completion.’ Others might think strictly in terms of ‘tasks and goals.’ Because I want just one word to use in sentences when I’m describing this process, I use ‘task’ to mean actions, thoughts, feelings, philosophies, and motivations — everything that comes up when a person accomplishes something, sets something in motion, or achieves a certain state. With this definition, more intangible aspects of the person’s experience will make it into the mental model and will influence you to craft a better product. Tasks can be defined in many ways. There is a movement afoot to encourage designers to expand beyond strictly ‘tasks and goals.’