Manhattan Gas Leak and Attribution Error

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I started to smell natural gas this morning and called my building’s super. He told me that the construction crew across the street had hit a gas main and was working to seal it up. Half an hour later I found that the smell is Manhattan-wide and the city is trying to find the source of the smell (Jersey City infrastructure maybe).

I wonder if every construction site in Manhattan (and there are a lot) thought they had hit a local main this morning. Ambiguous stimuli are easier to deal with if we attribute them to local, personal sources. How can we design products to leverage this tendency?

When a product tells the user a story through its design- a combination of materials, function, and supporting material like packaging- the user reacts to the product emotionally. The product doesn’t create the emotion, but instead triggers a set of memories, experiences, and beliefs that the user already has. Emotions are notoriously tricky for people to trace to a specific source, so the user may misattribute her emotionally positive state to the product’s function, thinking that it works better when in fact it’s triggering a slew of positive associations; the product’s function is the most local, explainable source.

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