How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind — from a Magician and Google Design EthicistTristan Harris May 18, 2016
https://journal.thriveglobal.com/ho...ian-and-google-s-design-ethicist-56d62ef5edf3“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.” — Unknown.
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I’m an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities.
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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.
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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. I want to show you how they do it.
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Hijack #1: If You Control the Menu, You Control the Choices
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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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Hijack #2: Put a Slot Machine In a Billion Pockets
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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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When we pull to refresh our email, we’re playing a slot machine to see what new email we got.
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When we swipe down our finger to scroll the Instagram feed, we’re playing a slot machine to see what photo comes next.
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When we swipe faces left/right on dating apps like Tinder, we’re playing a slot machine to see if we got a match.
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When we tap the # of red notifications, we’re playing a slot machine to what’s underneath.
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Hijack #3: Fear of Missing Something Important (FOMSI)
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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 #4: Social Approval
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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.
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Hijack #5: Social Reciprocity (Tit-for-tat)
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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.
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Hijack #6: Bottomless bowls, Infinite Feeds, and Autoplay
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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).
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Hijack #7: Instant Interruption vs. “Respectful” Delivery
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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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Hijack #8: Bundling Your Reasons with Their Reasons
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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.
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Hijack #9: Inconvenient Choices
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Businesses naturally want to make the choices they want you to make easier, and the choices they don’t want you to make harder.
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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. Hijack #10: Forecasting Errors, “Foot in the Door” strategies
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Hijack #10: Forecasting Errors, “Foot in the Door” strategies
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Lastly, apps can exploit people’s inability to forecast the consequences of a click.
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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.
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I’ve listed a few techniques but there are literally thousands.