Waking Up - Tristan Harris (Design ethicist) Flashcards
Tristan Harris - an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities.
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.
Hijack #1: If You Control the Menu, You Control the Choices
Millions of us fiercely defend our right to make “free” choices, while we ignore how we’re manipulated upstream by limited menus we didn’t choose.
This is exactly what magicians do. They give people the illusion of free choice while architecting the menu so that they win, no matter what you choose.
By shaping the menus we pick from, technology hijacks the way we perceive our choices and replaces them with new ones. But the closer we pay attention to the options we’re given, the more we’ll notice when they don’t actually align with our true needs.
Hijack #2: Put a Slot Machine In a Billion Pockets
The average person checks their phone 150 times a day.
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.
But here’s the unfortunate truth — several billion people have a slot machine their pocket:
When we pull our phone out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what notifications we got.
Hijack #3: Fear of Missing Something Important (FOMSI)
Hijack #4: Social Approval
The need to belong, to be approved or appreciated by our peers is among the highest human motivations.
When we change our main profile photo Facebook knows that’s a moment when we’re vulnerable to social approval: “what do my friends think of my new pic?” Facebook can rank this higher in the news feed, so it sticks around for longer and more friends will like or comment on it. Each time they like or comment on it, I’ll get pulled right back.
Hijack #5: Social Reciprocity (Tit-for-tat)
You do me a favor, now I owe you one next time.
We are vulnerable to needing to reciprocate others’ gestures.
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. In other words, LinkedIn turns your unconscious impulses (to “add” a person) into new social obligations that millions of people feel obligated to repay. All while they profit from the time people spend doing it.
Imagine millions of people getting interrupted like this throughout their day, running around like chickens with their heads cut off, reciprocating each other — all designed by companies who profit from it.
Welcome to social media.
Hijack #6: Bottomless bowls, Infinite Feeds, and Autoplay
Another way to hijack people is to keep them consuming things, even when they aren’t hungry anymore.
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.
Hijack #7: Instant Interruption vs. “Respectful” Delivery
Companies know that messages that interrupt people immediately are more persuasive at getting people to respond
It’s also in their interest to heighten the feeling of urgency and social reciprocity. For example, Facebook automatically tells the sender when you “saw” their message, instead of letting you avoid disclosing whether you read it
Hijack #8: Bundling Your Reasons with Their Reasons
In the physical world of grocery stories, the #1 and #2 most popular reasons to visit are pharmacy refills and buying milk. But grocery stores want to maximize how much people buy, so they put the pharmacy and the milk at the back of the store.
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.
Founder of Time Well Spent. Mission Statement: We are building a new organization dedicated to reversing the digital attention crisis and realigning technology with humanity’s best interests.
Unfortunately, what’s best for capturing our attention isn’t best for our well-being:
Snapchat turns conversations into streaks, redefining how our children measure friendship.
Instagram glorifies the picture-perfect life, eroding our self worth.
Facebook segregates us into echo chambers, fragmenting our communities.
YouTube autoplays the next perfect video, even if it eats into our sleep.
These are not neutral products. They are part of a system designed to addict us.
The slot machine mechanic of social media with it’s variable reward schedule turns us all into addicts.
Harris is the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience. As the co‑founder of Time Well Spent, an advocacy group, he is trying to bring moral integrity to software design: essentially, to persuade the tech world to help us disengage more easily from its devices.
The attention economy, which showers profits on companies that seize our focus, has kicked off what Harris calls a “race to the bottom of the brain stem.” “You could say that it’s my responsibility” to exert self-control when it comes to digital usage, he explains, “but that’s not acknowledging that there’s a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job is to break down whatever responsibility I can maintain.” In short, we’ve lost control of our relationship with technology because technology has become better at controlling us.
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter hook us by delivering what psychologists call “variable rewards.” Messages, photos, and “likes” appear on no set schedule, so we check for them compulsively, never sure when we’ll receive that dopamine-activating prize. (Delivering rewards at random has been proved to quickly and strongly reinforce behavior.) When interrupted, people take an average of 25 minutes to return to their original task.
In the end, he says, companies “stand back watching as a billion people run around like chickens with their heads cut off, responding to each other and feeling indebted to each other.”
“Never before in history have the decisions of a handful of designers (mostly men, white, living in SF, aged 25–35) working at 3 companies”—Google, Apple, and Facebook—“had so much impact on how millions of people around the world spend their attention.
Harris has a tendency to immerse himself in a single activity at a time. In conversation, he rarely breaks eye contact and will occasionally rest a hand on his interlocutor’s arm, as if to keep both parties present in the moment.
He’s “almost militaristic about turning off notifications” on his iPhone. He buried colorful icons—along with time-sucking apps like Gmail and WhatsApp—inside folders on the second page of his iPhone. Harris keeps a Post-it on his laptop with this instruction: “Do not open without intention.”
Technology should give us the ability to see where our time goes, so we can make informed decisions—imagine your phone alerting you when you’ve unlocked it for the 14th time in an hour. And technology should help us meet our goals, give us control over our relationships, and enable us to disengage without anxiety.
Even his supporters worry that the culture of Silicon Valley may be inherently at odds with anything that undermines engagement or growth.
Harris thinks his best shot at improving the status quo is to get users riled up about the ways they’re being manipulated, then create a groundswell of support for technology that respects people’s agency
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