Best content in Brentwood EdTech

n 1930, a psychologist at Harvard University called B.F. Skinner made a box and placed a hungry rat inside it. The box had a lever on one side. As the rat moved about it would accidentally knock the lever and, when it did so, a food pellet would drop into the box. After a rat had been put in the box a few times, it learned to go straight to the lever and press it: the reward reinforced the behaviour. Skinner proposed that the same principle applied to any “operant”, rat or man. He called his device the “operant conditioning chamber”. It became known as the Skinner box.
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But behaviourism never went away completely, and in recent years it has re-emerged in a new form, as an applied discipline deployed by businesses and governments to influence the choices you make every day: what you buy, who you talk to, what you do at work. Its practitioners are particularly interested in how the digital interface – the box in which we spend most of our time today – can shape human decisions. The name of this young discipline is “behaviour design”. Its founding father is B.J. Fogg.
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He noted that “interactive technologies” were no longer just tools for work, but had become part of people’s everyday lives: used to manage finances, study and stay healthy. Yet technologists were still focused on the machines they were making rather than on the humans using those machines. What, asked Fogg, if we could design educational software that persuaded students to study for longer or a financial-management programme that encouraged users to save more? Answering such questions, he argued, required the application of insights from psychology.
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The experiment was significant, said Fogg, not so much for its specific finding as for what it implied: that computer applications could be methodically designed to exploit the rules of psychology in order
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get people to do things they might not otherwise do.
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he added a qualification: “Exactly when and where such persuasion is beneficial and ethical should be the topic of further research and debate.”
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captology
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” (Computers as Persuasive Technologies).
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behaviour design
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The emails that induce you to buy right away, the apps and games that rivet your attention, the online forms that nudge you towards one decision over another: all are designed to hack the human brain and capitalise on its instincts, quirks and flaws. The techniques they use are often crude and blatantly manipulative, but they are getting steadily more refined, and, as they do so, less noticeable.
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This is dangerous.
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This is amazing.
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three things must happen at once. The person must want to do it, they must be able to, and they must be prompted to do it. A trigger – the prompt for the action –
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When motivation is high enough, or a task easy enough, people become responsive to triggers such as the vibration of a phone, Facebook’s red dot, the email from the fashion store featuring a time-limited offer on jumpsuits. The trigger, if it is well designed (or “hot”), finds you at exactly the moment you are most eager to take the action. The most important nine words in behaviour design, says Fogg,
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“Put hot triggers in the path of motivated people.”
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The more immediate and intense a rush of emotion a person feels the first time they use something, the more likely they are to make it an automatic choice. It’s why airlines bring you a glass of champagne the moment you sink into a business-class seat, and why Apple takes enormous care to ensure that a customer’s first encounter with a new phone feels magical.
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Such upfront deliveries of dopamine bond users to products
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way Instagram lets you try 12 different filters on your picture, says Fogg. Sure, there’s a functional benefit: the user has control over their images. But the real transaction is emotional: before you even post anything, you get to feel like an artist.
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Fogg’s principles: “Make people feel successful” or, to rephrase it, “Give them superpowers!”
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project called Send the Sunshine
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Mike Krieger, went on to co-found Instagram
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Social-media apps plumb one of our deepest wells of motivation. The human brain releases pleasurable, habit-forming chemicals in response to social interactions, even to mere simulacra of them, and the hottest triggers are other people: you and your friends or followers are constantly prompting each other to use the service for longer.
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Their aim was to get as many followers as possible – that was their definition of success. Every new follow and every comment delivered an emotional hit
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But a life spent chasing hits didn’t feel good. Moseley’s respondents spent all their hours thinking about how to organise their lives in order to take pictures they could post to each persona, which meant they weren’t able to enjoy whatever they were doing, which made them stressed and unhappy. “It was like a sickness,” said Moseley.
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One of his alumni, Nir Eyal, went on to write a successful book, aimed at tech entrepreneurs, called “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products”.
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vary the rewards it received
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This became known as the principle of variable rewards.
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Every time we open Instagram or Snapchat or Tinder, we never know if someone will have liked our photo, or left a comment, or written a funny status update, or dropped us a message. So we keep tapping the red dot, swiping left and scrolling down.
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“The job of these companies is to hook people, and they do that by hijacking our psychological vulnerabilities.”
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Tristan Harris
- Bob Kahn on 07 Dec 21
  
  The creator of The Social Dilemma and HumaneTech.com
  
  <div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">The creator of The Social Dilemma and HumaneTech.com</div>
  
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he argued that they needed to see themselves as moral stewards of the attention of billions of people.
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design ethicist and product philosopher.
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“Behaviour design can seem lightweight, because it’s mostly just clicking on screens. But what happens when you magnify that into an entire global economy? Then it becomes about power.”
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Whoever controls the menu controls the choices.” The news we see, the friends we hear from, the jobs we hear about, the restaurants we consider, even our potential romantic partners – all of them are, increasingly, filtered through a few widespread apps, each of which comes with a menu of options. That gives the menu designer enormous power.
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The more influence that tech products exert over our behaviour, the less control we have over ourselves.
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The environment in which the machines sit is designed to keep people playing. Gamblers can order drinks and food from the screen. Lighting, decor, noise levels, even the way the machines smell – everything is meticulously calibrated. Not just the brightness, but also the angle of the lighting is deliberate: research has found that light drains gamblers’ energy fastest when it hits their foreheads.
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The casinos aim to maximise what they call “time-on-device”.
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variation in rewards that is the key to time-on-device.
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“Some people want to be bled slowly”
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“the machine zone”
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You’re in a trance,” one gambler explains to Schüll. “The zone is like a magnet,” says another. “It just pulls you in and holds you there.”
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“The world is turning into this giant Skinner box for the self,”
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The gambling executives Schüll interviewed were not evil. They believe they are simply offering customers more and better ways to get what they want.
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“You can’t make people do something they don’t want to do.”
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Tristan Harris sees the entire digital economy in similar terms. No matter how useful the products, the system itself is tilted in favour of its designers. The house always wins.
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But the imperative of the system is to maximise time-on-device, and it turns out the best way of doing that is to dispense rewards to the operant on a variable schedule.
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If we are captives of captology, then we are willing ones.
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