How Silicon Valley Hacks Our Brains 🧠60 Minutes

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Looks at How Silicon Valley

Hacks Our Brains
Smartphone apps are designed with compulsive use in mind.
Peter Hess Neuroscience April 9, 2017

On the April 9 edition of 60 Minutes, Anderson Cooper sat down with former Google product manager Tristan Harris to discuss a troubling issue: how Silicon Valley exploits neuroscience to keep us addicted to technology.

In the segment, Harris describes how app designers exploit people’s desire for pleasure, stimulation, and social connections to keep them hooked in to their devices for as long as possible. He says that, whether it’s intentional or not, Silicon Valley is programming users’ brains. Part of what makes this possible is that interactions with our smartphones trigger a response in a very primitive part of our brains.

“Every time I check my phone, I’m playing the slot machine to see, ‘What did I get?’” Harris tells 60 Minutes. He’s referring, of course, to social media notifications. The slot machine payout is the jolt of dopamine that rewards us when we do something worthy of an internal reward. And while actual slot machines are mostly limited to casinos, we can play the dopamine slot machine no matter where we are.

This is the case because the human brain possesses a marvelously developed system that rewards people with good feelings when we do things that fulfill us, make us happy, or simply ensure our continued survival. Every time you check your phone and see a like or comment or retweet, your brain releases a little bit of dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with reward. It’s no coincidence that dopamine is the same chemical that floods a person’s brain when they use cocaine. But dopamine isn’t just associated with drugs or artificial stimulation. It’s always been a part of who we are.

The dopaminergic system is an ancient adaptation that scientists suspect drives many of our everyday behaviors. Dopamine rewards us when we eat sweets, when we act kindly towards other people, and when we receive recognition for achievements. It’s our brain’s way of telling us when we’re doing well. In the case of social apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, our brains are rewarding us for fulfilling a basic human desire for human connection.

“Somebody commented on something we posted. Somebody liked something. Somebody pinged us. It’s psychological triggers staggered on top of psychological triggers,” Patrycja Slawuta, the founder of Self Hackathon, told Inverse in 2016. “[Facebook] fulfills the basic human need to belong since we are wired to connect as social animals.”

And when doing something makes us feel good, something like staying connected with other people, we tend to keep doing it. By exploiting our natural tendency to seek things that make us feel good, smartphone app developers can foster compulsive use patterns. And Harris contends that not only can developers harness our neuroscience to create compulsive use and emotional investment, but they definitely do.

“There’s a whole playbook of techniques that get used to get you using the product for as long as possible,” Harris tells 60 Minutes.

“There’s a whole playbook of techniques that get used to get you using the product for as long as possible,” Harris tells 60 Minutes.

Former Google product manager Tristan Harris says pulling out your smartphone is like pulling the lever on a mental slot machine.

Harris brings up the example of Snapchat’s “Streak” feature that keeps a running count of how many days in a row you’ve interacted with each of your friends. This is a way of keeping users invested in the app, making sure they keep wanting to come back to it. In this way, it’s anxiety as much as rewards that keep us coming back to apps over and over. Snapchat isn’t the only one that does this. Pokémon GO has its own version of streaks, rewarding users for multiple days of play in a row.

And these things work. We keep coming back to our phones for more little surges of dopamine. A 2016 study of smartphone use found that the average user has 76 phone sessions a day. These could be long sessions to respond to an email or have a text conversation, or they could be short sessions in which you turn on your home screen to check for notifications. Either way, they’re triggering little internal rewards each time. And Silicon Valley app developers know this.

“Inadvertently, whether they want to or not, they are shaping the thoughts and feelings and actions of people,” Harris tells 60 Minutes. “There’s always this narrative that technology’s neutral. And it’s up to us to choose how we use it. This is just not true.”

Photos via CBS News, Flickr / nicolasnova

Peter is a writer living in New York. He is preoccupied with Star Wars and memes, but he writes about climate change, chatbots and ants. You may have seen his work in Popular Science, New Scientist and Motherboard.

https://www.inverse.com/article/30114-60-minutes-tristan-harris-apps-brain-hack

The Problem With iPhones Making Us Into Cyborgs?

App Developers Can't Be Trusted

By competing for our attention, developers are prioritizing commerce over our brains.

Jacqueline Ronson  Neuroscience  April 9, 2017

Neuroethicist Peter Reiner sees smartphones as extensions of our minds, and he’s fine with it. “We are natural-born cyborgs,” he tells Inverse. “We have used technology outside of ourselves for all kinds of things, and now we’re using technology outside of our brains to enhance our cognitive function.”

Your smartphone can take over all sorts of mundane tasks, like remembering your grocery list, your appointments, and your deadlines. The more effectively we offload cognitive tasks to our devices, the more brain power we should have for stuff we really want or need to use it for, like creativity, expansive thought, and managing willpower, Reiner explains. The problem is that both humans and programmers have a tendency to go about things backwards.

Most existing software doesn’t prioritize helpfulness, it prioritizes capturing your attention for as long as possible, so it can either sell you something directly, or sell your eyeballs in the form of advertising. The result is an ecosystem of applications that constantly demand and fight for your attention, and this comes at a cost to your cognitive health. “There are some very, very scary implications to that, and the most scary part of it is that some company is at the other end of that process and they may or may not have our best interests in mind,” he says.

It's hard to turn away from a smartphone because they're designed to hold your attention.

If smartphones are going to work for us instead of against us, they’re going to need a redesign, says Reiner, who envisions an independent panel of designers, behavioral scientists, and industry setting industry standards. The goal of this board is to make sure software respects the attention of the user and enhances cognitive function.

Today, your smartphone works like a manic assistant determined to keep you apprised of everything, regardless of relevancy. Some training and discipline could go a long way. Here are four ways to remake smartphones before they remake us.

Smarter Notifications

Imagine: You’re in a meeting and someone calls your phone. Your phone knows you are in a meeting, because it knows your schedule. So instead of ringing, it interrupts the call: “So-and-so is in a meeting right now. Press 1 to leave a message, and so-and-so will return your call. Press 2 if you need to reach so-and-so immediately and would like to interrupt.”

Your phone could do the same thing for text messages, emails, and social media notifications, holding them back until you are ready to take them. Your phone could learn your schedule and behavior, and automatically avoid disturbing you when you are focused on work or coming up to a deadline.

Death to Infinite Scroll

“Infinite scroll is designed specifically to hold you there,” says Reiner, “and to give you yet one more little jolt of dopamine in your brain every time something interesting shows up — and then nothing interesting, nothing interesting, nothing interesting, and just when you’re about to leave, you scroll upon something that — ‘Oh, isn’t that amazing, there’s some cats there I really need to see!’”

Your applications are constantly playing tricks on your brain to hold your attention. Companies and publications, this one included, use the same techniques that slot-machine makers use to keep you in front of the screen and coming back for more. Imagine if, instead of a news feed or notifications, Facebook sent you a single message once per day with a roundup of only the most important updates, based on what it already knows and continues to learn about your preferences. Imagine if you could customize Facebook so that it only includes features you find useful — say, birthday notifications and event invitations — without the things that distract you and steal your time. Imagine if you tried to login to Facebook within ten minutes of the last time you were there, and Facebook said, “You were just on here, and nothing important has happened since you left. Are you sure you want to continue?”

Of course, Facebook currently has every incentive to do everything in its power to keep your eyeballs glued to its platform. But what if there was an alternative platform, one that gave you only what you need, at the time when you want it? What would you pay for that service?

Better Voice Recognition

This one is probably coming with or without public pressure. But imagine, the next time you think of something you need to remember, saying out loud, “Remind to call Mom after work,” or “Have a taxi pick me up in one hour, or “put ‘mow the lawn’ on my to-do list,” and have your phone automatically respond to your request.

It would be a lot more like having a real executive assistant, and we’re not far off from it. The Amazon Echo can already do some of these things, and the device has integrated itself its owners’ homes and daily habits in surprising and almost creepy ways.

The better our devices get at taking over these tasks from us, the more we will be able to rely on them to take care of things that might otherwise clog our brain with worry.

Goal-Based Programming

What if you could tell your smartphone how to work better for you? Reiner says he sees a glimmer of hope in a new application from Google, an add-on to Calendar that allows you to set goals and helps you stick to them. If you want to meditate every night before bed, you get a notification for that. If you want to play tennis every week but never seem to find the time, the application will find a hole in your calendar and schedule it in. Can’t make that time? Google Goals will reschedule.

You’re still getting interrupted by your phone, but the notifications are based on goals you set. “You’ve told it, ‘this is how I want to run my life,’ and it’s helping you run it the way you want to,” says Reiner.

There are already plenty of apps and add-ons that promise to help you manage your life, keep and stick to goals, and avoid distractions. But this principle should be built into social media platforms and the like from the ground up, not as something you have to consciously add on once it has already had a negative impact on your life, says Reiner. There’s evidence that people are willing to pay for this — more than 100,000 people have signed up for Freedom, an app that charges $29 per year to block websites or even shut down the whole internet for set periods of time.

For now, the attention economy is king, and the major players have little incentive to make changes. There has to be a major push to tell developers that software must put the wellbeing of consumers first or lose them, says Reiner. “Even a small improvement would be better than what we have now.”