How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist
Tristan Harris, Medium, 2017/01/05
This title of this post should be "How to use technology to hijack people's minds." There's nothing inherently technological in these methods; they've flourished for thousands of years (as the reference to magicians should tell us). Here are the tricks (paraphrased with some quotation and links added):

• disempowering by design - if you control the menu, you control the choices
• intermittent variable rewards - you immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing
• fear of missing out -  it will be hard for you to turn me off, unsubscribe, or remove your account — because (aha, I win) you might miss something important
• manipulation of social approval - I imagine him making a conscious choice to tag me but I don’t see how Facebook orchestrated his doing that in the first place
• manipulation of social reciprocity - creating social obligations for each other (by accepting a connection, responding to a message, or endorsing someone back for a skill)
• bottomless bowls - to keep them consuming things, even when they aren’t hungry anymore
• maximizing interruptions - to heighten the feeling of urgency and social reciprocity
• bundling your needs with theirs - make the thing customers want (milk, pharmacy) inseparable from what the business wants
• nudging - make choice inconvenient to focus on one outcome or another
• foot in the door - asking for a small innocuous request to begin with and escalate from there. More...