Where Behavioural Economics, Social Media, Politics, and Futurism Collide

Recently I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts, interviews, and talks by experts in futurism, technology and politics, and to my surprise, there’s been a common thread.

To paraphrase —

“We’re taking the smartest people on earth and paying them to figure out how to get people to click on ads”.

It felt like synchronicity to me. I was honestly taken aback to hear the same sentiment — almost the same words in some cases — shared by historian, Yuval Noah Harari; neuroscientist and philosopher, Sam Harris; computer scientist, Tristan Harris (no relation); and even billionaire space-industrialist, Elon Musk.

I’m not sure who said it first. It may very well have been someone else entirely, but the lesson is clear — as a species, or even as a collective of different economic actors, we’re not optimising the insights of behavioural science or the platforms of infotech for the good of the world, not by a long shot.

The big software giants and social media empires pay top dollar to advertisers and software engineers who can figure out how best to harness the power of human attention. Most of us have at some point found ourselves trapped in the gravitational pull of the Facebook or Instagram news feed: a never-ending magic scroll whose contents might include useless gossip, memes, daily affirmations, images of unattainable lives, the man or woman of your dreams, alarming news, pressing social issues, videos and / or pictures of people’s children and / or pets, movie trailers and music videos, your friend’s latest mixtape, and of course an infinitude of selfies that no one asked for.

That’s not (just) because we might lack self discipline. It’s because there are professional scientists — people who understand our brains better than we do — who are programming computers to also understand our brains better than we do. And they are paid handsomely to do so. But beyond the personal productivity issues of this cybernetic dopamine addiction*, there have also been drastic effects on politics and the global economy. The fake news epidemic, the abundance of conspiracy theories, and the increasing political polarisation of democratic societies, are more than just byproducts of an untrustworthy and scandalous media industry (the usual scapegoat). They are the results of a technological ecosystem in which human attention translates into currency.

The algorithms that curate our experiences under the canopy of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc, are amoral. They place as much weight on outrage (for which our primitive human brain is hardwired) as they do on global wellbeing. These algorithms don’t “think” or “care” about whether or not a piece of information is true, or a soundbite is taken out of context. They only care that such gems translate into reposts, clicks, and attention (currency). This isn’t meant to be luddite’s rant against technology, but we’re only now seeing the large-scale social effects of this type of system. And we need to acknowledge the consequences of the tools we’re using, because they will only get more complex and more powerful.

It would be great to live in a world where the big tech companies spent their seemingly bottomless funding and intellectual resources, not on developing algorithms to sell us more things, but on solutions to problems like climate change, global poverty, and the ballooning rates of lifestyle diseases. Unfortunately, we don’t seem to live in that world. But the fact that so many prominent people — in history, neuroscience, philosophy, data science, politics, and futurism — could converge on this issue may be cause for hope. It has added another layer to my appreciation for the field of behaviour change design.

A decade ago, when I was studying Industrial Design at RISD, long before co-founding Vessel, or even fully charting out my career as a Behaviour Change Designer, I knew I wanted to work as a designer for social good. It ultimately boiled down to the fact that I wanted to spend my creative acumen solving social problems rather than selling people more beer or cheaper chicken. I continue to see that that decision has paid off, and 2020 has proven that by understanding people’s choices, and figuring out how to nudge them in the right direction, we *could* just maybe, approach a healthier, happier, and fairer society.

Books in our collection by two of the authors mentioned.