Persuade me… can we afford more technology distraction?
Product psychology, digital addiction and influencing human behaviour
“There we go, that’s the one I’ll upload!” — We’ve all been there.
50 different photos of the same scenario, for only one to be filtered, cropped and edited beyond recognition with a tagline that has some attempt at wit.
But, my question is why am I doing this exactly?
I’m a bit of a fanatic of analysing human behaviour. I consciously caught myself obsessively checking a social media post uploaded on the 26th October. I was late to the smartphone game comparatively to my peers and I’ve always considered photo uploads on social media as “our generation’s photo albums”. Turns out, I too enjoy the dopamine hit of social media attention more than I realised:
Checking anything over 200 times in one day has to be considered a habit (I’m not entirely sure my work emails get checked that frequently!) but how has this developed essentially under my nose?
Apps can’t control you… right?
The proliferation of smartphones has ultimately defined the way in which we interact with one another over the past two decades. With daily life ever increasing the amount human-computer interaction (HCI), human psychology will continue to change. The practise of defining and guiding human behaviour comes under a field of behaviour design started at Stanford University under B. J. Fogg in the “Persuasive Technologies” lab. This academic field is otherwise known as “Captology” or, “Computers as a persuasive technology”.
These persuasive technologies can be products in the form of apps or websites and use traditional psychological techniques to drive behaviour, whether they be incentives or coercion. Fogg’s simple, three-step method outlines just how to do this: Get specific, make it easy, and trigger the behaviour.
For example, the 2007 Class of this Stanford lab used psychological tools on Facebook to engineer reciprocity scenarios with “waving” to your friends or to “send a virtual hug”. These simulate an environment where individuals can build relationships that would have otherwise been built face-to-face. Developers use A/B testing, segmentation, and similar methods to collect data about how certain reward methods in these applications perform.
The average person spends over four hours a day on their device.
What is an example of a reward method?
Notifications.
Does a simple little red dot on an application badge distract your focus? Do pop-ups on your lock screen alert you to react to a text, email, social media post or a breaking news headline whilst in the middle of a task? Some studies suggest that that the mere presence of one’s own smartphone may occupy limited-capacity cognitive resources.
When humans experience positive, or motivating behaviour, dopamine is produced by our brains — rewarding us for favourable behaviours. These could be from exercise, sex or just eating something tasty. The human brain contains different pathways that act as a passage for chemical messages called neurotransmitters. Four of these act as a dopamine pathway. Positive social stimuli releases dopamine, whether this is online or off-line, and studies show some of these pathways become active when expecting or experiencing a positive event.
In layman’s terms, if one expects a hit of dopamine given the link of some application behaviour to a positive social stimuli, every notification essentially is a gateway to more dopamine. No wonder that the average person spends four hours on their phone a day — quick apology to all of my past and current employers!
Furthermore, incentives on an app that encapsulate some form of investment and effort (whether it’s the number of connections and likes created, or purely the effort involved with the creating your own data on a platform) boosts retention. Human’s are more likely to work harder to avoid a loss than to acquire a gain (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979). With these psychological tools in mind, we can easily get hooked and be prevented from leaving any of these apps.
Digital haze: Drugs for your mind
“Receiving a text message has been shown to light up the same area of the brain stimulated by highly addictive drugs such as heroin or cocaine”.
Studies have shown that we can experience negative feelings of withdrawal when we aren’t receiving notifications and that it takes “an average of 25 minutes to get back on task after being interrupted by an email notification during the work day”. There are countless studies on the correlation of social media use and deteriorating mental health, whether it exacerbates loneliness, anxiety and one’s fear of missing out.
More and more charities and therapy centres are offering help with digital addiction, or “digital detox” camps. South Korea have offered a number of camps for internet addiction with statistics showing that over 140,000 people were addicted the last year. This Summer, Instagram trialled a banning of showing ‘likes’ in a number of regions intended to reduce the anxiety caused from the popularity of posts.
Is it all bad? Influencing user behaviour for good
Designing products in a way that persuade us to act in a certain way can naturally be deemed on the forefront with many negative connotations and repercussions, but in actuality there can be some good involved. Fogg himself is a big advocate of the ethics surrounding Captology!
Understanding how these products are designed are ultimately the key for not only product managers like myself, but for the user of these products. It’s true that use of these applications can turn into an unhealthy addiction, but the concern of “dopamine hacking” through smartphone engagement boil down to the incentives the persuasive tool actually provide to a user.
How should I categorise and make meaning of an extra like on my Instagram post? My personal account is not intended as a digital marketing business, so why should I symbolise it as such? I do believe most developers don’t set out to deceptively manipulate actions, but rather use habit-forming techniques to attract a user’s attention. Understanding the objectives of the product designers will give users more control of the products they consume.
If these persuasive technologies could be used in products that promote a positive societal and individual change, whether in health or financially, then there are cases in which these psychological tools are used beneficially. FYI, I personally have reduced the number of active notifications I have, especially on messaging apps and social media. It’s definitely a start.
