This link has been bookmarked by 155 people . It was first bookmarked on 19 May 2016, by Scott Eshbaugh.
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Juan Carlos MunévarHow Technology Hijacks People's Minds
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treehouse99Estimated reading time: 12 minutes.I’m an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That’s why I spent the last three years as a …
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27 May 16
Mike SmithEstimated reading time: 12 minutes.I’m an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That’s why I spent the last three years as a …
technology design psychology attention social media ux ethics tech
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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.
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When using technology, we often focus optimistically on all the things it does for us. But I want you to show you where it might do the opposite.
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Once you know how to push people’s buttons, you can play them like a piano.
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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
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I want to show you how they do it.
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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.
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When people are given a menu of choices, they rarely ask:
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“what’s not on the menu?”
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“why am I being given these options and not others?”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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hen we blindly surrender to the menus we’re given, it’s easy to lose track of the difference:
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“Who’s free tonight to hang out?”
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a menu of most recent people who texted us
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a menu of news feed stories
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“What’s happening in the world?”
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By shaping the menus we pick from, technology hijacks the way we perceive our choices and replaces them with new ones
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26 May 16
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dr tech"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."
ITGS technology psychology ethics menu internet peopleandmachines policiesandstandards
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lisamperrinhabits
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Jim KonstanEstimated reading time: 12 minutes.I’m an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That’s why I spent the last three years as a …
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25 May 16
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Instead of viewing the world in terms of availability of choices, we should view the world in terms of friction required to enact choices.
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Joe Edelman’s work on Human Values and Choicemaking.
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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.
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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.
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24 May 16
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Piers YoungWe 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…
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G NEstimated reading time: 12 minutes.I’m an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That’s why I spent the last three years as Go…
technology design psychology attention social media ux ethics personal productivity
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Mikel MadinaEstimated reading time: 12 minutes. I’m an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That’s why I spent the last three years as Google’s Design Ethicist caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion peop…
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23 May 16
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mathew lowrywhat 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.... <br>The “most empowering” menu is different than the menu that has the most choices... 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.”...By shaping the menus we pick from, technology hijacks the way we perceive our choices and replaces them new ones...
<br>One major reason why is the #1 psychological ingredient in slot machines: intermittent variable rewards... several billion people have a slot machine their pocket... living moment to moment with the fear of missing something isn’t how we’re built to live.<br>
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.<br>We are vulnerable to needing to reciprocate others’ gestures. But as with Social Approval, tech companies now manipulate how often we experience it... LinkedIn is the most obvious offender. -
Sorin Vlaicu"But grocery stores want to maximize how much people buy, so they put the pharmacy and the milk at the back of the store."
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- “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)
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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.
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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?
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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.”
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One major reason why is the #1 psychological ingredient in slot machines: intermittent variable rewards.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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michael chalkgood piece on internets and social medias.. how they capture your attentions
attention social.media internet how opinion technology medium.com article
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María Pérez de ArriluceaEl ex responsable de ética del diseño de Google lista estas tácticas de diseño persuasivo éticamente problemáticas
https://t.co/2h9utw79t5 -
James Barley"(Apps) give people the illusion of free choice while architecting the menu so they win, no matter what you choose"
https://t.co/xSbE6aAaoKux userexperience design psychology persuasion variablerewards habits
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Ruth HowardBest article I've read in weeks
By Google's 'ethicist' (would u believe?)
Ex-magician (and therein lies a tale)
https://t.co/Hh2e5reSLC -
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Where does technology exploit our minds’ weaknesses?
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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?”)
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One major reason why is the #1 psychological ingredient in slot machines: intermittent variable rewards.
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all tech designers need to do is link a user’s action (like pulling a lever) with a variable reward
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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.
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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.
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Brendan Schneider"(Apps) give people the illusion of free choice while architecting the menu so they win, no matter what you choose"
https://t.co/xSbE6aAaoK -
22 May 16
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Tom Smith"ss 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 tha" -
21 May 16
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dtweneyRT @mattcutts: This is worth your time: https://t.co/AUAkaMmD6V
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Andrew Nachison"I'm an expert" is the perfect Medium lede. https://t.co/qUDVp4qnca
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Vincent MurphyHow technology hijacks people’s minds: https://t.co/K4GUOpwzbd Very happy to see @tristanharris ideas getting out there. Deeply important.
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20 May 16
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- “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)
When people are given a menu of choices, they rarely ask:
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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.
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When we pull our phone out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what notifications we got.
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Another way apps and websites hijack people’s minds is by inducing a “1% chance you could be missing something important.”
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Hijack #5: Social Reciprocity (Tit-for-tat)
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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.
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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).
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In other words, interruption is good for business.
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Hijack #10: Forecasting Errors, “Foot in the Door” strategies
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autoplaying the next thing.
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By contrast, Apple more respectfully lets users toggle “Read Receipts” on or off.
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f stores were truly organized to support people, they would put the most popular items in the front.
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Instead of viewing the world in terms of availability of choices, we should view the world in terms of friction required to enact choice
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When you put the “true cost” of a choice in front of people, you’re treating your users or audience with dignity and respect
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Google’s Design Ethicist
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When using technology, we often focus optimistically on all the things it does for us. But I want you to show you where it might do the opposite.
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Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people’s perception,
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Once you know how to push people’s buttons, you can play them like a piano.
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Hijack #1: If You Control the Menu, You Control the Choices
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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 we’re manipulated upstream by limited menus we didn’t choose.
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is this menu empowering for my original need, or are the choices actually a distraction?” (e.g. an overwhelmingly array of toothpastes)
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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
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blindly surrender
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Who’s free tonight to hang out?” becomes a menu of most recent people who texted us (who we could ping).
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“What’s happening in the world?” becomes a menu of news feed stories.
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“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).
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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)
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The average person checks their phone 150 times a day. Why do we do this? Are we making 150 conscious choices?
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One major reason why is the #1 psychological ingredient in slot machines: intermittent variable rewards.
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Slot machines make more money in the United States than baseball, movies, and theme parks combined
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NYU professor Natasha Dow Shull, author of Addiction by Design.
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several billion people have a slot machine their pocket:
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Neither did Apple and Google’s designers want phones to work like slot machines. It emerged by accident.
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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.
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But living moment to moment with the fear of missing something isn’t how we’re built to live.
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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.
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The need to belong, to be approved or appreciated by our peers is among the highest human motivations
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So when Marc tags me, he’s actually responding to Facebook’s suggestion, not making an independent choice.
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LinkedIn is the most obvious offender. LinkedIn wants as many people creating social obligations for each other as possible
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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
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Bottomless bowls,
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increasing “time spent” is the currency they compete for.
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Instead, imagine if technology companies empowered you to consciously bound your experience to align with what would be “time well spent” for you
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Hijack #7: Instant Interruption vs. “Respectful” Delivery
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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.
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In other words, interruption is good for business.
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By contrast, Apple more respectfully lets users toggle “Read Receipts” on or off.
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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.
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If stores were truly organized to support people, they would put the most popular items in the front.
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In an ideal world, apps would always give you a direct way to get what you want separately from what they want.
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Imagine a digital “bill of rights” outlining design standards that forced the products used by billions of people to support empowering ways for them to navigate toward their goals.
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friction required to enact choices
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People don’t intuitively forecast the true cost of a click when it’s presented to them.
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When you put the “true cost” of a choice in front of people, you’re treating your users or audience with dignity and respect
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Are you upset that technology hijacks your agency? I am too.
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Imagine whole bookshelves, seminars, workshops and trainings that teach aspiring tech entrepreneurs techniques like this. They exist.
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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.
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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.
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Tristan Harris was Product Philosopher at Google until 2016
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Ex-Design Ethicist & Product Philosopher @ Google, former CEO of Apture (acquired by Google), dabbler in Behavioral Economics, Design and Persuasion.
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