Brain Hacking — How Technology Can Capture Your Attention

The following is adapted from Screen Captured by Sean Herman.

“I feel tremendous guilt,” Chamath Palihapitiya admitted to an audience of Stanford students during an interview at the Graduate School of Business. Palihapitiya was a former Vice President of User Growth at Facebook, and when asked about his involvement in exploiting consumer behavior, he replied, “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works.”

He’s not the only one with feelings of remorse, or at least recognition of what is happening. After years of premeditated scheming and untold millions invested in driving user engagement, key players in social media are starting to change their tune. Tristan Harris, former product manager and design ethicist at Google, is one of the most active advocates against obsessive behavior in social media, and he’s forcing change at some of the largest organizations in social media.

While at Google, Harris warned technology companies about the “arms race to capture attention” and the need for responsible design. Harris left Google in 2016 and launched a nonprofit initiative called Time Well Spent, aimed at encouraging tech companies to adopt better design practices. Since then, Google and Apple have added “time well spent” features to iOS and Android phones.

In 2018, Harris launched the Center for Humane Technology. I urge all parents to familiarize themselves with Tristan Harris’ work, which speaks to many of the issues presented in this book.

In a very popular 2017 segment of 60 Minutes, Anderson Cooper talked with Harris on brain hacking, featuring Snapchat as a vivid example.

In the interview, Harris reminds us that Snapchat is currently the most popular messaging service for teenagers and the platform now includes Snapstreaks, which shows the number of days in a row that you’ve traded messages with someone — a feature that plays heavily into the hands of the dopamine hit as users attempt to keep their streaks going.

Doesn’t seem like that big a deal, right? On the surface, maybe not, but Harris explained a surprising result of teens’ infatuation with the streak.

Kids don’t want to lose their streak, to the point that when they go on vacation are so stressed about their streak that they actually give their password to five other kids to keep their streaks going on their behalf. And so you could ask, when these features are being designed, are they designed to most help people live their life? Or are they being designed because they’re best at hooking people into using the product?

His conversation highlights the fact that validation metrics matter — and they matter a lot. Harris pointed out that some people say it’s just the modern-day equivalent of gossiping on the phone “back in the day,” but technology has made this new phenomenon distinctly different.

The problem, he says, is that “your telephone in the 1970s didn’t have a thousand engineers on the other side of it who were redesigning it to work with other phones and then updating the way your phone worked every day in order to be more and more persuasive.”

The same is true for television. Like most every other kid in pre-smartphone days, I sat in front of the TV for hours. But as Jaron Lanier, computer scientist and outspoken critic of social media, said: “When you watch the television, the television isn’t watching you.”

On the same 60 Minutes segment, Anderson Cooper spoke with Ramsay Brown, co-founder of the appropriately named Dopamine Labs. Brown first studied neuroscience before getting into tech. He described how apps look at user engagement, such as “likes” on an app, as “virtual currency,” and they “spend” it in strategic ways to influence user behavior.

“They’re holding some of your ‘likes’ back,” Brown observed, “and then [they] deliver them later in a big burst. ‘Here are thirty ‘likes’ from a little while ago.’ But why that moment? It’s simple: there’s some algorithm somewhere that predicted that for this user right now who is experimental subject 79B3 in experiment 231, we think we can see an improvement in his behavior if you give it to him in this burst instead of that burst.”

Think about that for a moment: some of the platforms you use every day are purposefully withholding “likes” on your content and delivering them to you at a time when it is most likely you’ll take action. The objective, always, is to drive you back into the platform and get you to engage.

Social media platforms are constantly gathering data about what stimulus will keep you online, and consciously using that knowledge to develop programs to keep you hooked. Algorithms tailor everything, from notifications to bursts of “likes,” to motivate your behavior.

Kind of makes you feel like a rat or a monkey in a giant experiment, doesn’t it?

You can learn more about the effects of technology on kids in Screen Captured on Amazon.

SEAN HERMAN is the father of an 8-year-old daughter and a 2-year-old son. The experiences his daughter had online inspired him to start Kinzoo, a private messenger that turns screen time into family time. As Founder and CEO, Sean aims to make Kinzoo the most trusted brand in the world for incorporating technology into our children’s lives, and he wants to help parents mold their kids into responsible digital citizens. As a CFA Charterholder, Sean is uniquely qualified to analyze the future of technology from both the consumer and company perspectives. He lives in Vancouver with his two children and wife of twelve years.