How technology is manipulating you and what to do about it

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

When you grab your smartphone first thing in the morning, it's not really your decision. When you are constantly distracted by notifications during work, this is also not your decision. You are being manipulated with might and main, and you do not even notice.

When we use this or that technology, we are rather optimistic about the opportunities that it gives us. What if I show you the flipside of all this and tell you how technology exploits the vulnerability of our minds?

I first thought about this when I was playing magician as a child. Having groped blind spots, weaknesses and limits of perception of people, the illusionist can act on them so deftly that a person does not even notice how he is being led by the nose. If you find the right "keys" from people, you can play them like a piano.

Product creators do exactly the same thing with our minds. To gain attention, they play with your psychological weaknesses - consciously or not.

Trick number 1. If you manage the menu, then you manage your choice

Western culture is built on the ideals of freedom and personal choice. Millions of people fiercely defend the right to freedom of decision-making, but at the same time they do not see that they are being manipulated. All this freedom is available only within the framework of a given menu - and we, of course, did not choose it.

This is how magicians work. They give people the illusion of free choice, but in reality they only throw up options that guarantee victory to the illusionist. I can't even convey the full depth of this insight.

If a person is given a ready-made list of options, he rarely wonders what was not included in the list and why it contains such options, and not some others. What the person who made the list wanted to achieve, whether these options help to satisfy the need or only distract from it - hardly anyone will ask about this.

Imagine that you meet up with friends on a Tuesday night and decide to sit somewhere. Open the review aggregator and start looking for what's nearby. The whole company instantly buries itself in smartphones and starts comparing bars, studying photos and evaluating a list of cocktails … So how, did this help to solve the problem of "sitting somewhere"?

The problem is not in the bars, but in the fact that the aggregator uses the menu to replace the original need. “Sit and chat” becomes “find a bar with the coolest cocktail photos”. Moreover, your company falls into the illusion that the list contains all the options available. While friends are looking at the screens of smartphones, they do not notice that the musicians have staged a live concert in a nearby park, and there is a cafe across the street serving pancakes and coffee. Well, of course, because the aggregator did not offer them this.

You may not see a message from an old friend, if you don't sit on Facebook for several hours in a row, miss your ideal partner on Tinder, if you don't flip through photos there 700 times a day, don't answer an urgent call in time - you can't be in touch 24/7 …

Seriously, we do not live to constantly twitch and be afraid to miss something. It's amazing how quickly this fear goes away when you get rid of illusions. Try to go offline for at least a day and turn off all notifications. Most likely, nothing terrible will happen.

We do not miss what we do not see. The thought that you might be overlooking something appears until the moment you exit the application or unsubscribe from the mailing list. Before, not after. It would be great if tech companies take this into account and help build relationships with others in terms of well-spent time, rather than bullying us with the illusory opportunity to miss something important.

Trick # 4. Social Approval

Each of us is easy to catch with this bait. The desire to belong to a certain group and receive recognition from it is one of the strongest motivators for any person. But now tech companies drive social approval.

When a friend tags me in a photo, I think it's his deliberate choice. In fact, he was led to this action by a company like Facebook. Social networks manipulate the way people point to other users' photos, slipping them candidates that can be tagged in one click. It turns out that my friend did not make a choice, but simply agreed to what Facebook suggested. Through solutions like this, the company manipulates millions of people to play on their desire for social approval.

The same happens when we change our profile photo. The social network knows: at this moment we are most vulnerable to the approval of others - it’s interesting, after all, what friends will say about the new photo. Facebook can raise this event higher in the news feed so that as many people as possible like or leave a comment. And every time someone does this, we return to the social network again.

Some groups are especially sensitive to public approval - take teenagers at least. Therefore, it is extremely important to understand the impact designers have on us when they use this mechanism.

Trick # 5. Social reciprocity, or quid pro quo

They helped me - I have to help in return. They say “thank you” to me - I answer “you are always welcome”. I received an email - it would be rude not to answer. You subscribed to me - if I don't do the same in return, it won't turn out very politely.

The need to reciprocate the actions of others is another weak point for us. Of course, tech companies won't miss the chance to exploit this vulnerability. Sometimes this happens by accident: emails and instant messengers, by definition, imply reciprocity. But in other situations, companies deliberately exploit our weaknesses in order to benefit.

LinkedIn is probably the most obvious manipulator. The service wants to create as many social obligations between people as possible so that they return to the site whenever they receive a message or a contact request.

LinkedIn uses the same scheme as Facebook: when you get a request, you think it's a conscious choice of the person. In fact, he just automatically answered the list of contacts offered by the service.

In other words, LinkedIn turns unconscious impulses into social obligations, makes millions of people feel like they're in debt, and capitalizes on it.

Just imagine how it looks from the outside. People run around all day like a chicken with a severed head and are constantly distracted from business in order to reciprocate each other, and the company that has developed such a model benefits. What if tech companies took responsibility for reducing social commitments, or a separate organization monitored for possible abuse?

Trick # 6. Bottomless Saucer, Endless Ribbon, and Autoplay

Another way to get hold of people's minds is to get them to consume, even if they are already fed up. How? Yes, easily. We take a process that is limited and finite and turn it into an endless stream.

Cornell University professor Brian Wansink has shown how it works. Participants in his experiment ate soup from bottomless bowls that were automatically refilled over and over again. It turned out that in such conditions, people consumed 73% more calories than usual, while underestimating the real amount of food eaten.

Tech companies use the same principle. The news feed automatically downloads all new entries so that you can keep scrolling through it. Netflix, YouTube, and Facebook include the following video instead of giving you an informed choice. Autoplay provides a significant proportion of the traffic on these sites.

Companies often say that in this way they simplify the user's life, although in fact they only defend their business interests. It is difficult to blame them for this, because the time spent on the resource is the currency for which they are fighting. Just imagine that companies could make efforts not only to increase the amount of this time, but also to improve its quality.

Trick # 7: A Harsh Distraction Instead of a Polite Reminder

Companies know that the most effective messages are the ones that dramatically distract the person. They are more likely to be answered than a delicate email that lies quietly in your inbox.

Naturally, instant messengers prefer to bother the user, grab his attention and immediately show the chat window so that he immediately reads the message. Distraction is beneficial for business, as well as the feeling that the message needs to be answered urgently - here also social reciprocity is connected. For example, Facebook shows the sender that you have read his message: like it or not, you will have to respond. Apple treats users with great respect and allows you to turn off read receipts.

By constantly distracting people, business creates a serious problem: it is difficult to concentrate when you are twitched a billion times a day for any reason. This problem can be solved using uniform standards for creating services and applications.

Trick # 8. Your tasks are closely related to the tasks of the business

To make it easier to manipulate you, applications learn your goals (let's say, completing a task) and combine them with business goals so that you spend as much time in this application as possible and actively consume content.

For example, people usually go to a supermarket to buy milk. But the store needs to increase sales, so dairy products end up on the shelves at the very end of the hall. So the goals of the buyer (to buy milk) become inseparable from the goals of the store (to sell as much as possible).

If the supermarket really cared about customers, it would not force them to dash around the hall, but put the most popular goods on the shelves right at the entrance.

Tech companies use the same approach when creating their products. You have a task to open the event page on Facebook. But the application will not let you do this until you open the news feed. He has a different task - to make you spend as much time on the social network as possible.

In an ideal world, we are free to do what we want, not the business: you can post a message on Twitter or open an event page on Facebook without going to the feed. Imagine a digital Bill of Rights that lays out product design standards. Thanks to these standards, billions of users will be able to get what they need right away, rather than wandering through the maze.

Trick # 9. An Inconvenient Choice

It is believed that the business should give the client an obvious choice. If you don't like one product - use another, if you don't like the newsletter - unsubscribe, and if you feel that you are addicted to the application, just delete it.

Not really. The business wants you to make choices that benefit them. Therefore, the actions that a business needs are easy to carry out, and those that cause only losses are much more difficult. For example, you can't just go and unsubscribe from The New York Times. They promise that there is nothing complicated about this, but instead of an instant unsubscribe, you will receive an email with instructions and a number that you need to call at a certain time to finally cancel your subscription.

Instead of talking about the possibility of choice, it is better to consider the efforts that need to be made to make that choice. Imagine a world where available solutions are tagged with a certain level of sophistication, all regulated by an independent organization.

Trick # 10. False Predictions and the Foot-in-the-Door Strategy

Apps and services exploit human inability to predict the consequences of a click. People simply cannot intuitively estimate the real cost of the action that they are asked to perform.

The “Foot in the door” technique is often used in sales. It all starts with a harmless sentence: "Just one click and you will see which tweet has been retweeted." Further - more: an innocent request is followed by a sentence in the spirit of "Why don't you stay here for a while?"

Imagine if browsers and smartphones really cared about people and helped them make informed choices by predicting the impact of a click. On the Internet, all options for action must be presented with real benefits and costs in mind - so that people can make an informed choice without putting in additional effort.

What to do with it all

Sad to know how technology is driving you? So I'm sad too. I have listed only a few techniques, in fact there are thousands of them. Imagine shelves full of books, seminars, workshops and trainings that teach entrepreneurs all this. Hundreds of engineers work all day and come up with new ways to keep you on the hook.

To find freedom, you need to free your mind. Therefore, we need technologies that will play for us and help us live, feel, think and act freely. Smartphones with notifications and browsers should become a kind of exoskeletons for our minds and relationships with those around us - helpers who prioritize our values, not impulses.

Our time is a value. And we must protect it with the same zeal as privacy and other digital rights.