This link has been bookmarked by 218 people . It was first bookmarked on 26 May 2016, by Tuija Sonkkila.
-
09 Jun 19
-
02 Apr 17Francois Guite
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.
-
24 Mar 17
-
15 Mar 17
-
27 Feb 17
-
07 Feb 17Michael Hammel
Den her om, hvordan vi fortrylles af apps mm på vores telefoner, er en af de bedre designrelaterede: https://t.co/l4ZBd7pQuG
-
03 Feb 17fraser smith
Estimated 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 Design Ethicist at Google caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion p…
-
31 Jan 17
-
28 Jan 17
-
27 Jan 17
-
09 Jan 17
-
08 Jan 17
-
04 Jan 17
-
03 Jan 17bittkomk
"“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?
" -
30 Dec 16
-
25 Dec 16Edison Morais
Estimated 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 Design Ethicist at Google caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion p…
-
22 Dec 16
-
13 Dec 16
-
01 Dec 16manuelcaballero
Comment les grandes entreprises technologiques captent notre attention et la détourne.
-
-
- “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?”
When people are given a menu of choices, they rarely ask:
-
the group falls for the illusion that Yelp’s menu represents a complete set of choices for where to go
-
Is it?
-
By shaping the menus we pick from, technology hijacks the way we perceive our choices and replaces them with new ones.
-
It emerged by accident.
-
-
25 Nov 16
-
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.
-
-
23 Nov 16
-
12 Nov 16
-
31 Oct 16
-
03 Oct 16Buster Benson
@stewart Make sure to read @tristanharris' piece on this if you haven't already. It's
-
Boris Mann
@stewart Make sure to read @tristanharris' piece on this if you haven't already. It's
-
02 Oct 16kiretaro
"How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist"
-
29 Sep 16
-
22 Sep 16occams razors
"“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."
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.
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.Google Psychology Persuasion Propaganda Internet Addiction Free will
-
19 Sep 16
-
They play your psychological vulnerabilities (consciously and unconsciously) against you in the race to grab your attention.
-
. They give people the illusion of free choice while architecting the menu so that they win, no matter what you choose.
-
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.
-
Addictiveness is maximized when the rate of reward is most variable.
-
For example, they could empower people to set predictable times during the day or week for when they want to check “slot machine” apps
-
-
05 Sep 16
-
14 Aug 16
-
03 Aug 16Chandra Greer
How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds - https://t.co/AR9P0PYCz3 / Today's rather uncomfortable & thought-provoking #mustread #socbiz
-
29 Jul 16
-
25 Jul 16
-
24 Jul 16
-
- “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)
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:
-
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.
-
-
Muzaffaruddin Alvi
via All News on 'The Twitter Times: Muzaffar69/corpgov' http://ift.tt/1MszafE
#CorpGov All News on 'The Twitter Times: Muzaffar69_corpgov'
-
22 Jul 16
-
20 Jul 16
-
19 Jul 16
-
18 Jul 16
-
-
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.”)
-
-
15 Jul 16
-
13 Jul 16Iron Fist
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.
kchu isomassign4 isom1090Summer2016 Digital_Maoism illusion_of_choice
-
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.
-
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.
-
Another way apps and websites hijack people’s minds is by inducing a “1% chance you could be missing something important.”
-
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.
-
We are vulnerable to needing to reciprocate others’ gestures. But as with Social Approval, tech companies now manipulate how often we experience it.
-
Another way to hijack people is to keep them consuming things, even when they aren’t hungry anymore.
-
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).
-
-
12 Jul 16
-
11 Jul 16
-
08 Jul 16
-
06 Jul 16
-
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.
-
-
Roberto Balaguer
Estimated reading time: 12 minutes.
technology Psychology attention Tech psychological cognición cognition adicción apps mobile celular
-
05 Jul 16
-
29 Jun 16
-
27 Jun 16
-
26 Jun 16
-
23 Jun 16
-
20 Jun 16
-
-
an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities
-
Where does technology exploit our minds’ weaknesses?
-
Hijack #1: If You Control the Menu, You Control the Choices
-
They give people the illusion of free choice while architecting the menu so that they win, no matter what you choose.
-
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.
-
The “most empowering” menu is different than the menu that has the most choices.
-
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
-
One major reason why is the #1 psychological ingredient in slot machines: intermittent variable rewards.
-
Apps and websites sprinkle intermittent variable rewards all over their products because it’s good for business.
-
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.”
-
But living moment to moment with the fear of missing something isn’t how we’re built to live.
-
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.
-
Hijack #4: Social Approval
-
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.
-
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)
-
We are vulnerable to needing to reciprocate others’ gestures.
-
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.
-
magine 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.
-
Hijack #6: Bottomless bowls, Infinite Feeds, and Autoplay
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.”)
-
uining 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).
-
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.
-
In an ideal world, there is always a direct way to get what you want separately from what businesses want.
-
Hijack #9: Inconvenient Choices
-
Businesses naturally want to make the choices they want you to make easier, and the choices they don’t want you to make harder.
-
Instead of viewing the world in terms of availability of choices, we should view the world in terms of friction required to enact choices.
-
Hijack #10: Forecasting Errors, “Foot in the Door” strategies
-
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.
-
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.
-
-
19 Jun 16
-
17 Jun 16
-
16 Jun 16
-
Samir Prakash
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?choice decision design autonomy freedom software technology deception attention distraction time tool socialmedia media control addiction psychology selfcontrol selfimprovement productdevelopment Facebook Google Twitter LinkedIn
-
15 Jun 16
-
14 Jun 16Pujan Z
"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." -
13 Jun 16
-
12 Jun 16
-
11 Jun 16
-
10 Jun 16
-
09 Jun 16Erich Feldmeier
@tristanharris
"How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist"
#attentioneconomy #AufmerksamkeitsOekonomieeconomy technology web2.0 socialmedia spatzenhirn education system1 excellent behaviour evolution neurobiology
-
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
- “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?”
When people are given a menu of choices, they rarely ask:
-
when we blindly surrender to the menus we’re given, it’s easy to lose track
-
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.
-
- 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.
-
Another way apps and websites hijack people’s minds is by inducing a “1% chance you could be missing something important.”
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Facebook wants to convert every reason you have for using Facebook, into their reason which is to maximize the time you spend consuming things
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
-
Gautam Sen
Fascinating but critical account of the effects of technology products on our psychology. Gives credence to the Luddites.
TOK TECHNOLOGY PSYCHOLOGY ETHICS BUSINESS ETHICS BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT COGNITION HUMAN SCIENCES GOOGLE
-
08 Jun 16
-
-
Estimated re
-
-
07 Jun 16
-
06 Jun 16
-
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.
-
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.
-
Page Comments
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.