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.”
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.”
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