Ask HN: Question for Startup Founders on tracking emotions and cognitive signals

2 points by tonyrice 1 day ago | 3 comments

Hey HN,

I've noticed there's been a strong aversion and tone in regard to companies tracking emotional and cognitive signals to make decisions.

I'd like to get people's opinions on this and possibly understand if there's a frame where you would be FOR this in running your own startups.

What is your stance on businesses tracking Emotional Intelligence?

Would it make sense if this was done in the benefit of your company or customer base?

lanyard-textile 1 day ago |

I think this framing makes it seem like you want to track the raw emotions of users and make decisions based purely on their emotions.

I strongly suspect it isn't the case. What you're really after is detecting user frustration or user fulfillment: That is a more complex emergence where emotions can be a symptom.

Reading those emergent signals is well within expectations. Users probably do hope you'll make their lives easier or better, that's why they're using your product :)

Another consideration is that, frankly: Reading emotions to make a business decision implies that your product is the user's entire world. Even for mentally engaging products involving something like therapy, it's not: You can have an angry user that loves your feature, and a happy user that hates it.

Emotions are messy, fluid, imprecise, and circumstancial. And in many people's opinion, simply nobody else's business -- It's a good question to wonder why, but as a baseline, that's just the way it is for many people.

tonyrice 1 day ago | |

Thanks for your feedback. I realize that this is truly a complex subject and the framing of that really drives the direction of where my thought train is.

My ultimate thinking was that having awareness on emotional and cognitive signals correlating with business decisions made regardless of them can paint a deeper picture of how emotions impact the business.

It's a bit difficult to negate emotion in business but there's a strong pattern of people attempting to do that. Ignoring the signals don't make them go away, they just turn into something deeper.

lanyard-textile 1 day ago | | |

You've intrigued me, I leafed through your websites to see what you're up to :)

I think there is an interesting and useful case for detecting things like burnout, I like the example you cited.

I think some employers would love that, to know what's really happening at the ground level of operations, in a digestible way.

There's a huge disconnect between the C suite and pretty much everyone else. Closing that gap is always helpful.

But I think it puts employees at an extremely severe disadvantage, and they will rightfully hate it: These signals generate another mark that can be used against them. That's a pretty serious concern you'd have to resolve. If you have an employee that is burning out every time you make a decision, it's tempting for some people to fire the outlier, you know?