Arguably an anti-clickbait article since I found the content more interesting than the title suggested.
Skinner was the most prominent exponent of a school of psychology called behaviourism, the premise of which was that human behaviour is best understood as a function of incentives and rewards. Let’s not get distracted by the nebulous and impossible to observe stuff of thoughts and feelings, said the behaviourists, but focus simply on how the operant’s environment shapes what it does. Understand the box and you understand the behaviour. Design the right box and you can control behaviour.
I think it's a very interesting question where the balance lies between personal responsibility and the pressures of an external system. Some people clearly are just jerks : you can give them all the goodwill and proper education in the world, and they'll still act like a dick. Other people only become so because the system encourages and promotes being horrible. And sometimes both effects are at work on different people in different situations. It would be a huge mistake to neglect the fact that some people are innately just dicks, but it would an (at least) equally giant mistake to think that the system plays no role either.
Fogg explained the building blocks of his theory of behaviour change. For somebody to do something – whether it’s buying a car, checking an email, or doing 20 press-ups – three things must happen at once. The person must want to do it, they must be able to, and they must be prompted to do it. A trigger – the prompt for the action – is effective only when the person is highly motivated, or the task is very easy. If the task is hard, people end up frustrated; if they’re not motivated, they get annoyed.
When you get to the end of an episode of “House of Cards” on Netflix, the next episode plays automatically unless you tell it to stop. Your motivation is high, because the last episode has left you eager to know what will happen and you are mentally immersed in the world of the show. The level of difficulty is reduced to zero. Actually, less than zero: it is harder to stop than to carry on. Working on the same principle, the British government now “nudges” people into enrolling into workplace pension schemes, by making it the default option rather than presenting it as a choice.
When motivation is high enough, or a task easy enough, people become responsive to triggers such as the vibration of a phone, Facebook’s red dot, the email from the fashion store featuring a time-limited offer on jumpsuits. The trigger, if it is well designed (or “hot”), finds you at exactly the moment you are most eager to take the action. The most important nine words in behaviour design, says Fogg, are, “Put hot triggers in the path of motivated people.”
If you’re triggered to do something you don’t like, you probably won’t return, but if you love it you’ll return repeatedly – and unthinkingly... The more immediate and intense a rush of emotion a person feels the first time they use something, the more likely they are to make it an automatic choice. Consider the way Instagram lets you try 12 different filters on your picture, says Fogg. Sure, there’s a functional benefit: the user has control over their images. But the real transaction is emotional: before you even post anything, you get to feel like an artist. Hence another of Fogg’s principles: “Make people feel successful” or, to rephrase it, “Give them superpowers!”
The only times during our conversations when his tone darkened were when he considered the misuse of his ideas in the commercial sphere. He worries that companies like Instagram and Facebook are using behaviour design merely to keep consumers in thrall to them. “I look at some of my former students and I wonder if they’re really trying to make the world better, or just make money,” said Fogg. “What I always wanted to do was un-enslave people from technology.”
Eyal has added his own twists to Fogg’s model of behavioural change. “BJ thinks of triggers as external factors,” Eyal told me. “My argument is that the triggers are internal.” An app succeeds, he says, when it meets the user’s most basic emotional needs even before she has become consciously aware of them. “When you’re feeling uncertain, before you ask why you’re uncertain, you Google. When you’re lonely, before you’re even conscious of feeling it, you go to Facebook. Before you know you’re bored, you’re on YouTube. Nothing tells you to do these things. The users trigger themselves.”
Facebook gives your new profile photo a special prominence in the news feeds of your friends, because it knows that this is a moment when you are vulnerable to social approval, and that “likes” and comments will draw you in repeatedly. LinkedIn sends you an invitation to connect, which gives you a little rush of dopamine – how important I must be! – even though that person probably clicked unthinkingly on a menu of suggested contacts. Unconscious impulses are transformed into social obligations, which compel attention, which is sold for cash.
Linkedin annoys the crap out of me. Everytime someone wants to connect I dread the next six weeks of spam emails nagging me that I haven't signed up. Well, piss off, Linkedin, I never asked to join your crappy site and I'm never going to. Facebook, however, I consciously elected never to sign up to because there are certain things that I get addicted to very easily and I saw everyone around me spending virtually all of their time on the damn thing.
The more influence that tech products exert over our behaviour, the less control we have over ourselves. “Companies say, we’re just getting better at giving people what they want. But the average person checks their phone 150 times a day. Is each one a conscious choice? No. Companies are getting better at getting people to make the choices they want them to make.”
The gambling executives Schüll interviewed were not evil. They believe they are simply offering customers more and better ways to get what they want. Nobody was being coerced or deceived into parting with their money. As one executive put it, in a coincidental echo of Fogg, “You can’t make people do something they don’t want to do.” But the relationship, as Schüll points out, is asymmetric. For the gamblers, the zone is an end in itself; for the gambling industry, it is a means of extracting profit. “There is a fundamental conflict between what people need and what companies need,” he explained.
We need some kind of app that makes you morbidly addicted to critical thinking...
https://pocket.co/x88A6W
But there is very strong side effect: misuse of such influence, learn us we are objects of manipulation, so we learn to ignore it. There is no internet system which is not used against your interest ( sadly, this is the path internet chosen) so in several years, all this theory became obsolete, just exactly as internet advertising did...
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