At the moment we’re living in the biggest experiment of all time. You may not know it and you may not have asked for it, but we all take part in it. The results are being used to persuade you, influence your political opinion, make you stare longer and more often at your smartphone screen, and to make you buy more stuff. Billboards and commercials are being replaced by online persuasions. The persuaders have learned how your brain works, and with that, how to make you click. It’s all about conversion rates, time-spent, clicks and habits.
Back in the 1930’s, a psychologist at Harvard University named B.F. Skinner showed us how positive reinforcement of behavior worked. He did this by placing a hungry rat in a box, which contained a lever on one side, as the rat moved it would accidentally hit the lever. When it did so, a food pellet would drop into the box. The rat quickly learned to go straight to the lever and hit it: the reward reinforced the behavior. Skinner introduced a new school of psychology called behaviorism, which sees human behavior as a function of incentives and rewards.
On the internet, behavior is measurable. It doesn’t know how you feel, but it knows if and when you clicked. Almost all e-businesses are trying to learn how to persuade us to click, spend time, and buy stuff on their websites. The websites that want to sell you stuff, the forms that push you towards one decision over another and the apps that ask your attention are all being researched and ultimately designed to hack the human brain. Websites like Booking.com experiment with small things like colors, images, text font, etc. in order to find out what leads us to book a room and what does not.
Skinner’s insights in behavioral design are being used to pump us with dopamine and to keep us returning to an app or website. Within apps, users are triggered into certain behavior. A trigger is effective only when the person is highly motivated, or when the task is very easy. For example, after watching a show on Netflix, its so called Post-Play feature makes sure the next episode plays automatically, unless you tell it to stop. In this situation motivation is high, because the last episode left you hungry for more. The level of difficulty is reduced to less than zero, it is actually harder to stop than to keep watching. In similar situations in which a task is easy and motivation is high, people become very responsive to triggers like the vibration of a smartphone, Facebook’s red dot, the email from Aliexpress featuring a time-limited offer on your favorite tech.
Behavior design may seem innocent, because it’s mostly just clicking and tapping on screens. But what happens when you put the principles into an entire global economy? Then it’s all about power. The more influence big companies have on our behavior, the less control we have over ourselves. Companies tell us that they are just getting better at giving people what they want. But the average person checks their phone 50 times a day. Is that a conscious choice? With big data companies are getting better at getting people to make the choices they want them to make. Is this ethical? Are we in need of a set of rules that will diminish the tech giants’ power in order to protect own choice? Does own choice even exist?
We can all leave the vicious circle of incentive and reward, but few of us choose to. It is just so much easier to accept and connect. If we are captives of persuasive technologies, then we are willing ones.
References
https://www.1843magazine.com/features/the-scientists-who-make-apps-addictive
http://www.npo.nl/vpro-tegenlicht/25-09-2016/VPWON_1257581
Interesting post. However, I do not see the phenomenon you described as a threat for two reasons. The first reason is that I think we are currently in a ‘digital bubble’ that will diminish over time. More and more people are deleting Facebook for example and are trying to move back to real social connections. This could be in a digital way, like FaceTime or Snapchat but is quite different from the way Facebook operates and these new ways of communicating will provide less ways to influence consumers. This is a good post on this idea: http://www.computerworld.com/article/3062925/social-media/im-calling-it-social-networking-is-over.html.
The second reason is that although the businesses are getting more powerful, the consumers are getting more powerful as well. Consumers are more and more informed of IT and the way businesses influence consumers. That way, they recognize that they are being influenced and can make a conscious decision to ‘go with the flow’ and accept the service of a business that exactly knows what they want or decide to opt out and break the flow.
I don’t completely agree with you there. Digital is becoming bigger and bigger, the same holds for big data and analytics. Facebook activity could be decreasing, but that’s only one player. Others are growing.
I also don’t think that the average consumer cares about things like online privacy and security. The average person is not that interested in tech, they just want things to work. I think there’s actually a huge discrepancy between companies and consumers when it comes to knowledge about tech.
William, I agree with most of your thoughts on how we are being controlled, what I don’t fully agree with is your conclusion: “We can all leave the vicious circle of incentive and reward, but few of us choose to. It is just so much easier to accept and connect. If we are captives of persuasive technologies, then we are willing ones”.
As human beings we are prone to be much more complicated than this. Reading through your post I assume you have seen Dan Ariely’s TED talk, “Are we in control of our own decisions”(TED 2009) (if you haven’t, you should!). At the start of his talk, he refers to a visual illusion, after which he gets into illusions that are more conceptual. He arrives to the same conclusion as you regarding us not deciding for ourselves. He says that the decisions we take are either due to sellers creating an illusion or own made illusions. What we have to acknowledge however, is three things: (1) we have no idea how many things we think are certain are actually illusions, (2) illusions are part of the human being, (3) even though we might be aware that some things are illusions, we will maintain our illusion-based decision. To be more clear:
Lets put as an example that you have a girlfriend, but you’re having some problems recently and you’re thinking about your relationship: “should I start seeing other girls, or should I stay with her?” The train thought goes on and you start thinking: “It’s not a bad relationship, but maybe I could be better without her”. You still will not leave her for an uncertain possibility unless either the relationship becomes a large problem or you find another person. Until either the costs of staying with her are very high, or the benefits of leaving her are high as well. But, if the benefits of leaving her were slightly to moderately higher than the costs of doing so, you will stay in the relationship. The latter is due to our human mind valuing costs higher than benefits. This is the 100% human version of seeing the next Netflix episode. Is it easier to keep watching even though I have to wake up early, or to stop watching it? Is it easier to stay in my relatively problematic relationship or should I break up?
Illusions exist despite technology; they are ingrained in our lives and minds. Thus, escaping those that arose due to technology would not imply escaping all of them. What is the purpose of only escaping the former?
Companies have been using illusions long time before big data. Additionally, a large amount of studies have suggested that the “emotions of an individual have an effect on reasoning performance independent from task content”(Jung et al. 2014). This is independent of the company putting a red colored “buy” button on the page. If we would still not make purely rational decisions, are company choices that make us more prone to choose them as suppliers as bad as you think they are? Knowing that you would only choose this company based on their illusions if you did not already have a strong opinion about what you want to buy, from whom and when?
Leaving that aside, even if we are aware of all the illusions in the world, would you change your decisions? Would you leave your girlfriend now? I would not.
Jung, N., Wranke, C., Hamburger, K. and Knauff, M. (2014). How emotions affect logical reasoning: evidence from experiments with mood-manipulated participants, spider phobics, and people with exam anxiety. Frontiers in Psychology, 5.
Ariely, D. (2009). Dan Ariely: Are we in control of our decisions? |. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X68dm92HVI [Accessed 7 Oct. 2016].