Bean

Patterns

A catalog of design and cognitive patterns that we identified when working in the spreadsheet environment. These are curated here as a sense-making device to help build a vocabulary and navigate around the spreadsheet design space.

Intrinsic Motivation: High vs. Low

A two part division brought in Advait / Gordon paper on how people's motivation levels determine their behaviours. It is interesting to see how people with low intrinsic motivation can still use the spreadsheet environment without learning much of the formal features of the software. This table nicely captures how these behaviors differ:

	Low Intrinsic Motivation	High Intrinsic Motivation
Feature Discovery	Passive discovers features on being informed by a colleague or received as documentation in a spreadsheet	Actively seeks out information in external resources
Expertise Acquisition	Informal, opportunistic, and social	Trial and error and less likely to be social. Usage creates learning opportunities
Attention Investment	Need strong evidence of reward from using a technique or feature	Bricoleur attitude. Lower threshold for evidence of reward

Attention Investment Tradeoff

The attention one is willing to invest before they reap the rewards for their investment. People with high intrinsic motivation have a high drive to invest their attention even if there's a low chance of getting a reward out of their efforts. This is a tradeoff because one has to draw the limit somewhere before there are diminishing returns for the effort they put in. Advait / Gordon mentions this idea in the context of how users with different intrinsic motivations pick up tooling expertise.

Reinhart-Rogoff Error

The paper was used as an advocacy for austerity in fiscal policy as they found an inverse relationship between gross external debt and GDP. The paper was cited by Paul Ryan in US and Olli Rehn in Europe to push for pro-austerity measures after the 2008 financial crisis.

But it turned out that there was a typo in the results which affected the result stated. The paper originally stated that there was a -0.1% decrease in GDP, but with the rows included it was 2% increase.

There were also other criticisms about how they interpreted the data that lead to their conclusions. Further papers by Reinhart-Rogoff found much lower impact on the GDP.

Reinhart and Rogoff responded by saying that the central point of the paper stands despite the discrepancy in the data. Moreover, they pointed out a growing literature and said that the consensus there is broadly that there is an “overhang threshold” beyond which the correlation between debt and growth becomes negative.

A good chunk of spreadsheet literature has been devised to avoid this kind of errors.The Lish paper points out how their cursor selection allows for preventing “out-by-one” errors.

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