What Some App Designers and Magicians Have in Common

Tristan Harris spent three years with Google before founding Time Well Spent, a non-profit initiative that, among other things, aims to catalyze a change among technology companies through “policy recommendations to protect minds from nefarious manipulation.” Following is an excerpt from “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds--from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist,” May 19, 2016, tristanharris.com: “I spent the last three years as Google’s Design Ethicist 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 mind’s 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. 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. 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 Shull, author of Addiction by Design. But here’s the unfortunate truth--several billion people have a slot machine in 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.”

(Friday Church News Notes, October 12, 2018, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)

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