How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind — from a
Magician and Google Design Ethicist PART
II
Hijack #4:
Social Approval
Easily one of the most persuasive things a
human being can receive.
We’re all vulnerable to social approval. The need to belong,
to be approved or appreciated by our peers is among the highest human
motivations. But now our social approval is in the hands of tech companies.
When I get tagged by my friend
Marc, I imagine him making a conscious choice to tag me. But I
don’t see how a company like Facebook orchestrated his doing that in the first
place.
Facebook, Instagram or SnapChat can
manipulate how often people get tagged in photos by automatically suggesting
all the faces people should tag (e.g. by showing a box with a 1-click
confirmation, “Tag Tristan in this photo?”).
So when Marc tags me, he’s
actually responding to Facebook’s suggestion, not making
an independent choice. But through design choices like this, Facebook
controls the multiplier for how often millions of people experience
their social approval on the line.
Facebook uses automatic suggestions like this
to get people to tag more people, creating more social externalities and
interruptions.
The same happens when we change our
main profile photo — Facebook knows that’s a moment when we’re vulnerable to
social approval: “what do my friends think of my new pic?” Facebook
can rank this higher in the news feed, so it sticks around for longer and more
friends will like or comment on it. Each time they like or comment on it, we’ll
get pulled right back.
Everyone innately responds to
social approval, but some demographics (teenagers) are more vulnerable to it
than others. That’s why it’s so important to recognize how powerful designers
are when they exploit this vulnerability.
Hijack #5: Social
Reciprocity (Tit-for-tat)
·
You do me a favor — I owe you one next
time.
·
You say, “thank you”— I
have to say “you’re welcome.”
·
You send me an email—
it’s rude not to get back to you.
·
You follow me — it’s rude not to follow
you back. (especially for teenagers)
We are vulnerable to
needing to reciprocate others’ gestures. But as with Social Approval, tech
companies now manipulate how often we experience it.
In some cases, it’s by accident. Email,
texting and messaging apps are social reciprocity factories. But in other
cases, companies exploit this vulnerability on purpose.
LinkedIn is the most obvious
offender. LinkedIn wants as many people creating social obligations for each
other as possible, because each time they reciprocate (by accepting a
connection, responding to a message, or endorsing someone back for a skill)
they have to come back to linkedin.com where they can get people to spend more
time.
Like Facebook, LinkedIn exploits an
asymmetry in perception. When you receive an invitation from someone to
connect, you imagine that person making a conscious choice to
invite you, when in reality, they likely unconsciously responded to LinkedIn’s
list of suggested contacts. In other words, LinkedIn turns your unconscious
impulses (to “add” a person) into new social obligations that millions
of people feel obligated to repay. All while they profit from the time people
spend doing it.
Imagine millions of people getting
interrupted like this throughout their day, running around like chickens with
their heads cut off, reciprocating each other — all designed by
companies who profit from it.
Welcome to social media.
After accepting an endorsement, LinkedIn
takes advantage of your bias to reciprocate by offering *four* additional
people for you to endorse in return.
Imagine if technology companies had
a responsibility to minimize social reciprocity. Or if there was an independent
organization that represented the public’s interests — an industry consortium
or an FDA for tech — that monitored when technology companies abused these
biases?
Hijack #6: Bottomless
bowls, Infinite Feeds, and Autoplay
YouTube autoplays the next video after a
countdown
Another way to hijack people is to
keep them consuming things, even when they aren’t hungry anymore.
How? Easy. Take an
experience that was bounded and finite, and turn it into a bottomless flow that
keeps going.
Cornell professor Brian Wansink
demonstrated this in his study showing you can trick people into keep eating soup by giving them
a bottomless bowl that
automatically refills as they eat. With bottomless bowls, people eat 73% more
calories than those with normal bowls and underestimate how many calories they
ate by 140 calories.
Tech companies exploit the same
principle. News feeds are purposely designed to auto-refill with reasons to
keep you scrolling, and purposely eliminate any reason for you to pause,
reconsider or leave.
It’s also why video and social
media sites like Netflix, YouTube or Facebook autoplay the
next video after a countdown instead of waiting for you to make a conscious
choice (in case you won’t). A huge portion of traffic on these websites is
driven by autoplaying the next thing.
Facebook autoplays the next video after a
countdown
Tech companies often claim that
“we’re just making it easier for users to see the video they want to
watch” when they are actually serving their business interests. And you can’t
blame them, because increasing “time spent” is the currency they compete for.
Instead, imagine if technology
companies empowered you to consciously bound your experience to
align with what would be “time well spent” for you. Not just bounding the quantity of
time you spend, but the qualities of what would be “time well
spent.”
Hijack #7: Instant
Interruption vs. “Respectful” Delivery
Companies know that messages that
interrupt people immediately are more persuasive at getting people to
respond than messages delivered asynchronously (like email or any
deferred inbox).
Given the choice, Facebook
Messenger (or WhatsApp, WeChat or SnapChat for that matter) would prefer
to design their messaging system to interrupt recipients immediately
(and show a chat box) instead of helping users respect each other’s
attention.
In other words, interruption is good for business.
It’s also in their interest to
heighten the feeling of urgency and social reciprocity. For example, Facebook
automatically tells the sender when you “saw” their message, instead of
letting you avoid disclosing whether you read it(“now that you know I’ve
seen the message, I feel even more obligated to respond.”)
By contrast, Apple more
respectfully lets users toggle “Read Receipts” on or off.
The problem is, maximizing
interruptions in the name of business creates a tragedy of the commons, ruining
global attention spans and causing billions of unnecessary interruptions each
day. This is a huge problem we need to fix with shared design standards
(potentially, as part of Time Well Spent).
Hijack #8: Bundling
Your Reasons with Their Reasons
Another way apps hijack you is by
taking your reasons for visiting the app (to perform a task)
and make them inseparable from the app’s business reasons(maximizing
how much we consume once we’re there).
For example, in the physical world
of grocery stores, the #1 and #2 most popular reasons to visit are pharmacy
refills and buying milk. But grocery stores want to maximize how much people
buy, so they put the pharmacy and the milk at the back of the store.
In other words, they make the thing
customers want (milk, pharmacy) inseparable from what the business wants. If stores were truly
organized to support people, they would put the most popular items in the front.
Tech companies design their
websites the same way. For example, when you you want to look up a Facebook
event happening tonight (your reason) the Facebook app doesn’t allow you to
access it without first landing on the news feed (their reasons), and that’s on
purpose. Facebook wants to convert every reason you have for using
Facebook, into their reason which is to maximize the time you spend consuming
things.
Instead, imagine if …
·
Twitter gave you
a separate way to post a tweet than having to see their news
feed.
·
Facebook gave a separate
way to look up Facebook Events going on tonight, without being forced
to use their news feed.
·
Facebook gave you
a separate way to use Facebook Connect as a passport for
creating new accounts on 3rd party apps and websites, without being forced to
install Facebook’s entire app, news feed and notifications.
In a Time Well Spent
world, there is always
a direct way to get what you want separately from
what businesses want. Imagine a digital “bill of rights” outlining design
standards that forced the products used by billions of people to let them
navigate directly to what they want without needing to go through intentionally
placed distractions.
Imagine if web browsers empowered you to
navigate directly to what you want — especially for sites that intentionally detour you toward
their reasons.
Hijack #9: Inconvenient
Choices
We’re told that it’s enough for
businesses to “make choices available.”
·
“If you don’t like it
you can always use a different product.”
·
“If you don’t like it,
you can always unsubscribe.”
·
“If you’re addicted to
our app, you can always uninstall it from your phone.”
Businesses naturally want
to make the choices they want you to make easier, and the choices they don’t
want you to make harder. Magicians do the same thing. You make it
easier for a spectator to pick the thing you want them to pick, and harder to
pick the thing you don’t.
For example, NYTimes.com lets you
“make a free choice” to cancel your digital subscription. But instead of just
doing it when you hit “Cancel Subscription,” they send you an email
with information on how to cancel your account by calling a phone number that’s
only open at certain times.
NYTimes claims it’s giving a free choice to
cancel your account
Instead of viewing the world in
terms of availability of choices, we should view the world in terms
of friction required to enact choices. Imagine a world where
choices were labeled with how difficult they were to fulfill (like coefficients
of friction) and there was an independent entity — an industry consortium
or non-profit — that labeled these
difficulties and set standards for how easy navigation should be.
Hijack #10: Forecasting
Errors, “Foot in the Door” strategies
Facebook promises an easy choice to “See
Photo.” Would we still click if it gave the true price tag?
Lastly, apps can exploit people’s
inability to forecast the consequences of a click.
People don’t intuitively forecast
the true cost of a click when it’s presented to
them. Sales people use “foot in the door” techniques by asking for a small
innocuous request to begin with (“just one click to see which tweet got
retweeted”) and escalate from there (“why don’t you stay awhile?”). Virtually
all engagement websites use this trick.
Imagine if web browsers and
smartphones, the gateways through which people make these choices, were truly
watching out for people and helped them forecast the consequences of clicks
(based on real data about what benefits and costs it actually had?).
That’s why I add “Estimated reading
time” to the top of my posts. When you put the “true cost” of a choice in front
of people, you’re treating your users or audience with dignity and respect. In
a Time Well Spent internet, choices
could be framed in terms of projected cost and benefit, so people were
empowered to make informed choices by default, not by doing extra work.
TripAdvisor uses a “foot in the door”
technique by asking for a single click review (“How many stars?”) while hiding
the three page survey of questions behind the click.
Summary And How We Can
Fix This
Are you upset that technology
hijacks your agency? I am too. I’ve listed a few techniques but there are
literally thousands. Imagine whole bookshelves, seminars, workshops and
trainings that teach aspiring tech entrepreneurs techniques like these. Imagine
hundreds of engineers whose job every day is to invent new ways to keep you
hooked.
The ultimate freedom is a free
mind, and we need technology that’s on our team to help us live, feel, think
and act freely.
We need our smartphones,
notifications screens and web browsers to be exoskeletons for our minds and
interpersonal relationships that put our values, not our impulses, first. People’s time
is valuable. And we should protect
it with the same rigor as privacy and other digital rights.
https://medium.com/thrive-global/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds-from-a-magician-and-google-s-design-ethicist-56d62ef5edf3
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