14/5/2020 How Addictive Tech Exploits Our Evolutionary Needs - Team Human - Medium

How Addictive Tech Exploits Our Evolutionary

Needs
We evolved the need to be aware of anything important going on in our social circle

Douglas Rushko
Apr 30 · 5 min read

Photo: Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images

L iving in a digitally enforced attention economy means being subjected to a

constant assault of automated manipulation. Persuasive technology, as it’s now
called, is a design philosophy taught and developed at some of America’s leading
universities and then implemented on platforms from e-commerce sites and social
networks to smartphones and fitness wristbands. The goal is to generate “behavioral
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Behavioral design theory holds that people don’t change their behaviors because of
shifts in their attitudes and opinions. On the contrary, people change their attitudes to
match their behaviors. In this model, we are more like machines than thinking,
autonomous beings. Or at least we can be made to work that way.

That’s why persuasive technologies are not designed to influence us through logic or
even emotional appeals. This isn’t advertising or sales, in the traditional sense, but
more like war-time psy-ops, or the sort of psychological manipulation exercised in
prisons, casinos, and shopping malls. Just as the architects of those environments use
particular colors, soundtracks, or lighting cycles to stimulate desired behavior, the
designers of web platforms and phone apps use carefully tested animations and sounds
to provoke optimal emotional responses from users. Every component of a digital
environment is tested for its ability to generate a particular reaction, be it more views,
more purchases, or just more addiction. New mail is a happy sound; no mail is a sad
one. The physical gesture of swiping to update a social media feed anchors and
reinforces the compulsive urge to check in — just in case.

Most persuasive technology tactics depend on users trusting that a platform accurately
represents the world it claims to depict. The more we accept the screen as a window on
reality, the more likely we are to accept the choices it offers. But what of the choices
that it doesn’t offer? Do they really not exist?

A simple search for “a pizzeria near me” may list all the restaurants that have paid to be
found, but not those that haven’t. Persuasive designs offer users options at every
juncture, in order to simulate the experience of choice without the risk of the user
exercising true autonomy and wandering off the reservation. It’s the same way game
designers lead all players through the same game story, even though we feel like we’re
making independent choices from beginning to end. None of these choices are real,
because every one leads inevitably to the outcome that the designers have
predetermined for us. Because the interfaces look neutral, we accept the options they
offer at face value. The choices are not choices at all, but a new way of getting us to
accept limitations. Whoever controls the menu controls the choices.

Designers seeking to trigger addictive loops utilize what behavioral economists call
“variable rewards.” Marketing psychologists in the 1950s discovered that human
beings are desperate to figure out the pattern behind getting rewarded. It makes sense
from a survival perspective: Sudden wind gusts mean rain is coming, and predicting
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In the hands of slot machine designers, this survival trait becomes an exploit. By doling
out rewards at random intervals, the slot machine confounds the human being
attempting to figure out the pattern. Consciously, we know the machine is randomized
or perhaps even programmed unfairly to take our money. But subconsciously, those
random intervals of quarters clinking into the metal tray induce a compulsive need to
keep going. Are the quarters coming down every 10 tries? Every five tries? Or is it five,
seven, 10, and then back to five? Let me try again and see…

Compulsions are futile efforts at gaining control of random systems. Once triggered,
they are really hard to shake. That’s why academic studies of slot machine patterning
became required reading in the euphemistically named “user experience” departments
of technology companies. It’s how we’ve become addicted to checking our email —
looking to see if there’s just one rewarding email for every 10 useless ones. Or is it
every 11?

Persuasive design also exploits our social conditioning. We evolved the need to be
aware of anything important going on in our social circle. Not having the knowledge
that a fellow group member is sick or angry could prove disastrous. In the compliance
professional’s hands, this “fear of missing out” provides direct access to our behavioral
triggers. All we need are a few indications that people are talking about something to
stimulate our curiosity and send us online and away from whatever we were really
doing. So designers put a red dot with a number in it over an app’s icon to make sure
we know that something’s happening, comments are accumulating, or a topic is
trending. If you refuse to heed the call, you may be the last person to find out.

User experiences are also designed to trigger our social need to gain approval and meet
obligations — ancient adaptations for group cohesion now turned against us. We seek
high numbers of “likes” and “follows” on social platforms because these metrics are the
only way we have of gauging our social acceptance. There’s no difference in intensity
between them. We can’t know if we are truly loved by a few; we can only know if we
got liked by many. Similarly, when someone likes something of ours or asks to be our
“friend” on a social network, we feel socially obligated to return the favor.

Some platforms leverage our urge to compete, even playfully, with our peers. Websites
employ leaderboards to honor those who have made the most posts, trades, or
whatever metric a company wants to promote. Users also compete for “streaks” of daily
participation, badges of accomplishment, and other ways of demonstrating their
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employees, students, consumers, and even online stock traders. But in the process, the
play is often surrendered to some pretty unplayful outcomes, and people’s judgment is
clouded by the unrelated urge to win.

Many familiar interfaces go even deeper, building addictive behaviors by leveraging

our feeding instincts. Designers have discovered that “bottomless feeds” tend to keep
users swiping down for additional articles, posts, or messages, consuming more than
they intend to because of that unsatiated feeling of never reaching the end.

On the other hand, designers want to keep us in a state of constant disorientation —

always scrolling and paying attention to something, but never so much attention that
we become engrossed and regain our bearings. So they use interruption to keep us
constantly moving from one feed to another, checking email and then social media,
videos, the news and then a dating app. Each moment of transition is another
opportunity to offer up another advertisement, steer the user toward something yet
more manipulative, or extract more data that can be used to profile and persuade more
completely.

. . .

This is section 33 of the new book Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff, which is being
serialized weekly on Medium. Read the previous section here and the following section
here.

From “Team Human” by Douglas Rushko . Copyright © 2019 by Douglas Rushko . Used with permission of
the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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