Tristan Harris wants you to know that your attention is a commodity. In fact, it’s such a commodity that app designers are crossing ethical lines to grab as much of it as they can.
In his 2016 TED Talk, Harris describes the root of the situation:
“[E]very news site, TED, elections, politicians, games, even meditation apps have to compete for only one thing, which is our attention, and there’s only so much of it. And the best way to get people’s attention is to know how someone’s mind works. And there’s a whole bunch of persuasive techniques that I learned in college at a lab called the Persuasive Technology Lab to get people’s attention.”
The lab he’s referring to here is infamous. If there’s an origin story about how addictive design and social media became so intertwined, its setting would be there – at Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab.
Motivation + Prompt + Ability = Addiction
Back in the mid-to-late 2000s, the Persuasive Technology Lab and its instructor (BJ Fogg) introduced Silicon Valley to the formula at the heart of technology addiction: Fogg’s Behavior Model.
According to Fogg’s Behavior Model, there are three forces – motivation, prompt, and ability – that work together to drive user activity.
- Motivation: A reason for users to act. Fogg categorizes them as:
- Sensation (pleasure/pain)
- Anticipation (hope/fear), and
- Belonging (acceptance/rejection)
- Prompt (or Trigger): An external or internal “call to action” that reminds users to do a certain behavior.
- Ability: Designing in a way that makes a behavior easier to do.
Take, for example, Facebook’s app.
- Motivation: Receiving “likes” on something you posted acts as a form of validation and thus motivation to use the app
- Prompt: Push notifications telling you that you’ve received a “like” act as a trigger to pull you back into the app.
- Ability: The moment you open the app, you can easily and mindlessly peruse material in your feed’s “infinite scroll” will keep your attention with minimal effort on your part.
Think of any popular app (Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube) and the ways they use these three forces to keep users’ attention hooked become prolifically apparent.
Even Creators Get Hooked
Even Silicone Valley designers have found themselves hooked.
Leah Pearlman, co-inventor of Facebook’s “like” button, realized she had become addicted to Facebook after she caught herself using the number of “likes” she received as a stand-in for self-worth.
Describing her mindset at the time, Leah recalls:
“When I need validation – I go to check Facebook. “I’m feeling lonely, ‘Let me check my phone.’ I’m feeling insecure, ‘Let me check my phone.'” – BBC interview
And while many designers of this addictive tech did not set out to do an ethically dubious thing, they feel responsible:
In 2006 Mr Raskin, a leading technology engineer himself, designed infinite scroll, one of the features of many apps that is now seen as highly habit forming. At the time, he was working for Humanized – a computer user-interface consultancy.
Infinite scroll allows users to endlessly swipe down through content without clicking.
“If you don’t give your brain time to catch up with your impulses,” Mr Raskin said, “you just keep scrolling.”
He said the innovation kept users looking at their phones far longer than necessary.
Mr Raskin said he had not set out to addict people and now felt guilty about it.
Harris’ Call to Arms
Tristan Harris has been fighting against tech’s manipulative design practices since he was working for Google back in 2012, when his 144-slide presentation “A Call to Minimize Distraction and Respect Users’ Attention” went viral across thousands of Google employees. Since then, Harris became Google’s first “design ethicist” before breaking ties and founding his own nonprofit, the Center for Humane Technology.
Harris thinks three changes need to take place before addictive technological design loses its hold.
First, technology users need to become aware that their attention is being deliberately cultivated by tech. He argues that this does not have to be an all-or-nothing approach: users can make simple changes (such as turning off all push notifications) to regain control over their tech habits.
Second, the business model of tech and the accountability systems around it needs to become more transparent and ethical – something that will only happen once the people in the locus of control become more accountable and transparent. This could potentially change with some of the legal challenges to tech giants we’ve seen developing in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, among others.
Third, app design needs to go through a second birth – “design renaissance” – in which design choices like Fogg’s Behavior Model are used to encourage beneficial instead of addictive user behavior.
Reflecting on Addictive Design
What are your thoughts on addictive app design? Do you think Harris’ suggestions are viable?
Further Reading
Andersson, H. (2018). Social media apps are “deliberately” addictive to users. BBC Panorama.
Stolzoff, S. The formula for phone addiction might double as a cure: Ten years ago, a Stanford lab created the formula to make technology addictive. Now, Silicon Valley is dealing with the consequences. Wired. Feb. 2, 2018.
Tristan Harris’ TED Talk: “The Manipulative Tricks Tech Companies Use to Capture Your Attention” (2016)
Tristan Harris’s Non-Profit: The Center for Humane Technology.