Big Think’s 2017 Top Ten: #10. Tristan Harris on Addiction, Hacking, and Corporations | Big Think

Big Think’s 2017 Top Ten: #10. Tristan Harris on Addiction, Hacking, and Corporations

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Casinos, magicians, and the makers of social media platforms all know something about you: your mind is very vulnerable to influence. Just as the magician relies on limitations in your short term memory or visual acuity to accomplish sleight of hand, online software engineers leverage the limits of your mind to make their product addictive. From the sonorous ping of mobile phones to Facebook’s highly nuanced algorithm, product makers understand that frequent reward is what keeps you coming back. And just like slot machines, the easier those rewards are to access, the more frequently we’ll want them.
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TRISTAN HARRIS:

Tristan Harris is a design thinker, philosopher and entrepreneur.

Called the “closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience,” by The Atlantic magazine, Tristan Harris was a Design Ethicist at Google and is now a leader in Time Well Spent, a movement to align technology with our humanity. Time Well Spent aims to heighten consumer awareness about how technology shapes our minds, empower consumers with better ways to use technology and change business incentives and design practices to align with humanity’s best interest.

Tristan is an avid researcher of what influences human behavior, beliefs and interpersonal dynamics, drawing on insights from sleight of hand magic and hypnosis to cults and behavioral economics. Currently he is developing a framework for ethical influence, especially as it relates to the moral responsibility of technology companies.

His work has been featured on PBS NewsHour, The Atlantic Magazine, ReCode, TED, 1843 Economist Magazine, Wired, NYTimes, Der Spiegel, NY Review of Books, Rue89 and more.

Previously, Tristan was CEO of Apture, which Google acquired in 2011. Apture enabled millions of users to get instant, on-the-fly explanations across a publisher network of a billion page views per month.

Tristan holds several patents from his work at Apple, Wikia, Apture and Google. He graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Computer Science, focused on Human Computer Interaction, while dabbling in behavioral economics, social psychology, behavior change and habit formation in Professor BJ Fogg’s Stanford Persuasive Technology lab. He was rated #16 in Inc Magazine’s Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30 in 2009.

You can read his most popular essay: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds – from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Tristan Harris: One thing we don’t talk about is that—it’s sort of hard to talk about this—our minds have these kinds of back doors.

There’s kind of—if you’re human and you wake up and you open your eyes there is a certain set of dimensions to your experience that can be manipulated.

When I was a kid I was a magician, and you learn all about these limits: that short-term memory is about this long and there’s different reaction times, and if you ask people certain questions in certain ways you can control the answer. And this is just the structure of being human. To be human means that you are persuadable in every single moment.

I mean the thing about magic, as an example, it’s that magic works on everybody—sleight of hand, right?

It doesn’t matter what language you speak, it doesn’t matter how intelligent you are, it’s not about what someone knows. It’s about how your mind actually works.

So knowing this, it turns out that there’s this whole playbook of persuasive techniques that actually I learned when I was at the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab and that most people in Silicon Valley in the tech industry learned as ways of getting your attention.

So one example is: we are all vulnerable to social approval. We really care what other people think of us. So for example, when you upload a new profile photo of yourself on Facebook, that’s a moment where our mind is very vulnerable to knowing, “what do other people think of my new profile photo?”

And so when we get new likes on our profile photo, Facebook—knowing this—could actually message me and say, “oh, you have new likes on your profile photo.” And it knows that we’ll be vulnerable to that moment because we all really care about when we’re tagged in a photo or when we have a new profile photo.

Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/tristan-harris-your-brain-is-vulnerable-to-hacking-companies-are-exploiting-that

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