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September 02, 2004
10 ways computers manipulate people
My most recent captology course at Stanford focused on 10 ways computers manipulate people. In total, I've found about 60 strategies that software can use to change what people think and do. However, for a 10-week course this was way too much content, so we investigated just one strategy each week. On the last day of class, I handed out a ballot listing the 10 strategies we studied. I asked students to vote for the ones they found most powerful. Here's the vote tally: 25 - Making target behavior easy23 - Playing on user emotions
17 - Rewarding users immediately
08 - Watching and reporting (aka surveillance)
07 - Structuring user behavior (or creating a ritual)
06 - Portraying the computer as an expert
06 - Offering a tradeoff
05 - Publicizing user reputation
05 - Rewarding users via incentives (long-term rewards)
03 - Being persistent Explaining each strategy would make this post really long, so I'll simply touch on a few. "Making target behavior easy" was the #1 choice by my students. Amazon makes good use of this strategy (one-click shopping), as do other websites and software vendors. When something is easy to do, we're more likely to do it. That's pretty obvious, but somehow this truth gets overlooked in many software products and web-based experiences. The #10 strategy was "being persistent"--software that nags you. In my view this is not the weakest strategy in the list, but my students didn't want to vote for it because, like most of us, they hate nagware -- patch this, register for that, and on and on. Our computers have become platforms for nagging. Even though this strategy annoys us, it works. The #2 strategy, playing on user emotions, is really too broad to be on the list. Yes, our emotions control us in many ways. But they work us differently. For example, fear creates a different type of manipulation opportunity than does a positive emotion, such as joy or amusement. You could write a book on how computing systems can evoke different emotions in order to achieve different outcomes. In fact, if I could rewrite Don Norman's most recent book, I'd start off by explaining why emotional design matters: because emotions can get people to think or behavior differently. Designing computing products for emotional impact is clearly part of captology. What strategy intrigues me the most? I find them all fascinating, but one strategy in the list is my current favorite because it's not well understood: "structuring user behavior." To get a glimpse of what this means, think about the rituals in our everyday lives, such as participating in church services, sending holiday greeting cards, getting through airport security, and more. These rituals not only change our behavior, but they also change our attitudes. Consider the airport security ritual. What's the point? Do they really think they'll catch a terrorist this way? Not likely. But the ritual at the airport is designed to make us feel safer. And it works. So what does ritualistic behavior have to do with computers? I'm proposing that more and more, we are engaging in rituals with our technologies, from visiting the same website each morning to checking our system for viruses each night. Because end-user computing is relatively young, our high-tech rituals are not well understood or even recognized. But this much is clear: People today who create high-tech rituals are much like the priests, prophets, and shamans of yore who used rituals to control the thoughts and actions of the masses.
Posted by at September 2, 2004 06:47 PM
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