Exposing The Carrot
Exponential advancement in technology has brought us a world we could only dream of just a few decades ago, but this speed brings difficulty in understanding the true long term impacts- have you noticed how much time people spend looking at their carrots these days…
This direction of technological advance has been guided by the ‘increase return to shareholder’ tenet of capitalism. For the majority of smartphone applications this translates to an aim of increasing the number of people using an app, but more importantly, increasing the time spent on apps each day.
They (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Snapchat, Netflix… amongst others) have succeeded. In a typical 24 hour working day, after taking into account sleep, work, commuting and survival or other activities, we have just under 5hrs of personal leisure time for the activities that bring extra meaning and fulfilment to our lives. In 2007, it was estimated that we spent, on average, 50% of this personal leisure time looking at screens, by 2015 it had risen to 66% and crazily, by 2017 we were reported to be spending, on average, 90% of our personal leisure time looking at screens.
Furthermore, we spend 3x as much time on apps that make us feel bad than those that make us feel good.
Let us consider the 10 most used smartphone applications — with the exclusion of Google Play (because it’s primary function is to distribute apps), they are all free, using advertising as a primary revenue stream. This means that teams of people behind these apps wake up every day and think about how to get you and I to use their product more and more, so more ads can sell and more return can be distributed to shareholders. This has expedited the development of techniques, as depressing as they are innovative, that exploit neurological reward pathways for maximum app use.
Researchers have shown that most of us (>80%) experience ‘phantom phone sensation’. This is unsurprising, given that the reward circuitry in the brain getting activated from using our phones is the same circuitry associated with other addictive behaviours. Dopamine is a feel good chemical focused on rewarding specific behaviour, it’s the reason why eating a doughnut, having sex, or taking cocaine feels good. We get a dopamine hit from phone use, so the behaviour is reinforced and we become lost to the whim of the carrot.
Through this reward response, psychological tricks have been employed that continually catch our attention. Some of them have been borrowed from successful gambling methods such as the ‘variable ratio schedule’ in slot machines, where there’s a wait period after pulling a lever and a chance for a reward. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Swiping down to refresh your phone screen is the new slot machine lever, the buffer icon the new wheel and the payout is variable content. It turns out that the spinning buffer wheel’s primary function is not to indicate loading, it is there by design, enchantingly spinning irrespective of internet speed with the primary aim of delivering dopamine and bringing you back for more.
The founder of this new field of behaviour design is B.J. Fogg, who has said for an individual to do some behaviour, three things need to happen; they must want to do it, they must be able to do it and they must be prompted to do it. Traditionally companies focus on the ‘want’, trying to increase the motivation to do something, however digital distribution has exploded the improvement in the ‘ability’ or ‘ease’ to do a behaviour. With technology enabled ease of behaviour we are now one thumb print away from a world of unlimited information and social validation, but critically with more prompts than ever before.
Our tribal brains get easily overwhelmed with constant prompts reminding us to check who has liked us or our posts, who has been watching us, who has added us, who said what to who and what just happened somewhere we’ll never go. Evolutionarily, social information was valuable as it increased the chance of survival and being able to pass on genes. But our hardwired propensity to seek and share social information evolved in a brain that lived in a tribe of 150 people or less with good old fashioned in person interactions, i.e. natural limits on sharing and receiving information. These motives remain but the external limiting factors have been removed- we can now receive (or share) almost unlimited social information within a few seconds through our phones. This is both enabling and paralysing, but while we clearly have a choice of how much or even if we use these applications, we should appreciate that no matter how useful, our interactions with them will always be influenced by the incentives of the designer. The designer who will constantly increase the ease of use and effectiveness of prompts and just like with slot machines, the house always wins.
One of the top listed threats to humanity is the development of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that knowingly or unknowingly causes human harm over human help. But we are living in a world today with market forces directing phone use towards unhealthy but profitable behaviour, fueled by intelligent systems exploiting our evolutionary weaknesses. Have we already created a system shaped by capitalism that is increasingly trending towards human harm over human help? Let us expose the carrot, because-
Exposing The Carrot
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