How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind — from a
Magician and Google Design Ethicist PART
I
“It’s easier to fool
people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.” — Unknown.
I’m an expert on how technology
hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That’s why I spent the last three
years as a Design Ethicist at Google caring about how to design things in a way
that defends a billion people’s minds from getting hijacked.
When using technology, we often
focus optimistically on all the things it does for us. But I
want to show you where it might do the opposite.
Where does technology exploit our
minds’ weaknesses?
I learned to think this way when I
was a magician. Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges,
vulnerabilities and limits of people’s perception, so they
can influence what people do without them even realizing it. Once you know how
to push people’s buttons, you can play them like a piano.
That’s me performing sleight of hand magic at
my mother’s birthday party
And this is exactly what product
designers do to your mind. They play your psychological vulnerabilities
(consciously and unconsciously) against you in the race to grab your attention.
I want to show you how they do it.
Hijack #1: If You
Control the Menu, You Control the Choices
Western Culture is built around
ideals of individual choice and freedom. Millions of us fiercely defend our
right to make “free” choices, while we ignore how those choices are manipulated
upstream by menus we didn’t choose in the first place.
This is exactly what magicians do.
They give people the illusion of free choice while architecting the menu so
that they win, no matter what you choose. I can’t emphasize enough how deep
this insight is.
When people are given a menu of
choices, they rarely ask:
·
“what’s not on the
menu?”
·
“why am I being
given these options and not others?”
·
“do I know the menu
provider’s goals?”
·
“is this menu empowering for
my original need, or are the choices actually a distraction?” (e.g. an
overwhelmingly array of toothpastes)
How empowering is this menu of
choices for the need, “I ran out of toothpaste”?
For example, imagine you’re out
with friends on a Tuesday night and want to keep the conversation going. You
open Yelp to find nearby recommendations and see a list of bars. The group
turns into a huddle of faces staring down at their phones comparing
bars. They scrutinize the photos of each, comparing cocktail drinks.
Is this menu still relevant to the original desire of the group?
It’s not that bars aren’t a good
choice, it’s that Yelp substituted the group’s original question (“where can we
go to keep talking?”) with a different question (“what’s a bar with good photos
of cocktails?”) all by shaping the menu.
Moreover, the group falls for the
illusion that Yelp’s menu represents a complete set of choices for
where to go. While looking down at their phones, they don’t see the park across
the street with a band playing live music. They miss the pop-up gallery on the
other side of the street serving crepes and coffee. Neither of those show up on
Yelp’s menu.
Yelp subtly reframes the group’s need “where
can we go to keep talking?” in terms of photos of cocktails served.
The more choices technology gives
us in nearly every domain of our lives (information, events, places to go,
friends, dating, jobs) — the more we assume that our phone
is always the most empowering and useful menu to pick from. Is it?
The “most empowering” menu is
different than the menu that has the most choices.
But when we blindly surrender to
the menus we’re given, it’s easy to lose track of the difference:
·
“Who’s free tonight to
hang out?” becomes a menu of most recent people who texted us (who
we could ping).
·
“What’s happening in
the world?” becomes a menu of news feed stories.
·
“Who’s single to go on
a date?” becomes a menu of faces to swipe on Tinder (instead of
local events with friends, or urban adventures nearby).
·
“I have to respond to
this email.” becomes a menu of keys to type a response(instead of
empowering ways to communicate with a person).
All user interfaces are menus. What if your
email client gave you empowering choices of ways to respond, instead of
“what message do you want to type back?” (Design by Tristan Harris)
When we wake up in the morning and
turn our phone over to see a list of notifications — it frames the
experience of “waking up in the morning” around a menu of “all the things I’ve
missed since yesterday.”
A list of notifications when we wake up in
the morning — how empowering is this menu of choices when we wake
up? Does it reflect what we care about?
By shaping the menus we pick from,
technology hijacks the way we perceive our choices and replaces them with new
ones. But the closer we pay attention to the options we’re given, the more
we’ll notice when they don’t actually align with our true needs.
Hijack #2: Put a Slot
Machine In a Billion Pockets
If you’re an app, how do you keep
people hooked? Turn yourself into a slot machine.
The average person checks their
phone 150 times a day. Why do we do this? Are we making 150 conscious choices?
How often do you check your email
per day?
One major reason why is the #1
psychological ingredient in slot machines: intermittent variable rewards.
If you want to maximize
addictiveness, all tech designers need to do is link a user’s action (like
pulling a lever) with a variable reward. You pull a lever and
immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing.
Addictiveness is maximized when the rate of reward is most variable.
Does this effect really work on
people? Yes. Slot machines make
more money in the United States than baseball, movies, and theme parks combined. Relative to other kinds of
gambling, people get ‘problematically involved’ with slot machines 3–4x faster according to NYU professor Natasha
Dow Schull, author of Addiction by Design.
But here’s the unfortunate truth — several billion people have a slot machine their pocket:
·
When we pull our phone
out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what
notifications we got.
·
When we pull to refresh
our email, we’re playing a slot machine to see what new email
we got.
·
When we swipe down our
finger to scroll the Instagram feed, we’re playing a slot machine to
see what photo comes next.
·
When we swipe faces
left/right on dating apps like Tinder, we’re playing a slot machine to
see if we got a match.
·
When we tap the # of
red notifications, we’re playing a slot machine to what’s
underneath.
Apps and websites sprinkle
intermittent variable rewards all over their products because it’s good for
business.
But in other cases, slot machines
emerge by accident. For example, there is no malicious corporation behind all
of email who consciously chose to make it a slot machine. No one
profits when millions check their email and nothing’s there. Neither did Apple
and Google’s designers want phones to work like slot machines.
It emerged by accident.
But now companies like Apple and
Google have a responsibility to reduce these effects by converting
intermittent variable rewards into less addictive, more predictable ones with
better design. For example, they could empower people to set predictable times
during the day or week for when they want to check “slot machine” apps, and
correspondingly adjust when new messages are delivered to align with those
times.
Hijack #3: Fear of
Missing Something Important (FOMSI)
Another way apps and websites
hijack people’s minds is by inducing a “1% chance you could be missing
something important.”
If I convince you that I’m a
channel for important information, messages, friendships, or potential sexual
opportunities — it will be hard for you to turn me off, unsubscribe, or
remove your account — because (aha, I win) you might miss something important:
·
This keeps us
subscribed to newsletters even after they haven’t delivered recent benefits
(“what if I miss a future announcement?”)
·
This keeps us
“friended” to people with whom we haven’t spoke in ages (“what if I miss
something important from them?”)
·
This keeps us swiping
faces on dating apps, even when we haven’t even met up with anyone in a while
(“what if I miss that one hot match who likes me?”)
·
This keeps us using
social media (“what if I miss that important news story or fall behind what my
friends are talking about?”)
But if we zoom into that fear,
we’ll discover that it’s unbounded: we’ll always miss something
important at any point when we stop using something.
·
There are magic moments
on Facebook we’ll miss by not using it for the 6th hour (e.g. an old friend
who’s visiting town right now).
·
There are magic moments
we’ll miss on Tinder (e.g. our dream romantic partner) by not swiping our 700th
match.
·
There are emergency
phone calls we’ll miss if we’re not connected 24/7.
But living moment to moment with
the fear of missing something isn’t how we’re built to live.
And it’s amazing how quickly, once
we let go of that fear, we wake up from the illusion. When we unplug for more
than a day, unsubscribe from those notifications, or go to Camp Grounded — the concerns we thought
we’d have don’t actually happen.
We don’t miss what we don’t see.
The thought, “what if I miss
something important?” is generated in advance of unplugging,
unsubscribing, or turning off — not after. Imagine if tech companies recognized that, and
helped us proactively tune our relationships with friends and businesses in
terms of what we define as “time well spent” for our lives, instead of in terms of what we might
miss.
CONTINUES IN PART II
No comments:
Post a Comment