Have you ever heard your phone referred to as a skinner box?
Verywellmind.com explains that “a skinner box is an enclosed apparatus that contains a bar or key that an animal subject can manipulate in order to obtain reinforcement… this box also has a device that records each response provided by the animal as well as the unique schedule of reinforcement that the animal was assigned… researchers could use the Skinner box to determine which schedule of reinforcement led to the highest rate of response in the study subjects.”
It’s the job of good tech designers to understand the psychology that drives users’ behaviors. To do their job effectively they must learn, are people more likely to click on this ad if we place it here or here? Which colors draw a person’s eye? At what point do they disengage? To learn these important factors that inform great design, user behavior must be studied and analyzed.
The good news for designers is that it is now easier than ever to study and analyze peoples’ behavior — our phones are little skinner boxes that we carry around with us and use constantly. We swipe or tap, our movements are recorded, and designers can determine which of their reinforcements were most effective. This is good news for creating the most engaging, effective and pleasing designs, but is it good news for humanity?
Here are a few of the problems:
1. The purpose of great design can be to get you to spend more time, money or resources you can’t afford, like the phenomenal design of casinos that keeps you gambling. If you struggle with impulse control you may avoid places like casinos, but to avoid the same style of addictive traps on your phone would pretty much require that you switch back to the old flip phone.
2. These aren’t controlled lab studies. You don’t sign up to participate in the study, you don’t get paid for it, and you don’t get to leave at a designated time. When you open a search engine to try to learn new information, or log on to social media to check in with your friends, or do virtually any of the myriad things we now use our phones for, you get sucked into the study, which is constantly being tweaked based on the feedback you give it to produce optimal results…. But what do I mean by optimal results, anyway?
3. A controlled scientific study will be published, peer reviewed, and its implications widely discussed. Experts can weigh in and even conduct their own studies to analyze how these findings might produce other unanticipated effects. Studies being conducted by private companies are different. The goal of their studies isn’t to contribute new knowledge to the world and be built upon by others, but simply to further their own agenda. When that agenda involves getting you to buy one brand of cereal over another the implications aren’t particularly earth shattering, but when the agenda is to reinforce addictive and unhealthy behaviors, the conversation needs to shift. Optimal results for Facebook are often not the optimal results for their users.
Now that our phones have become such an important and intimate part of our lives, and are giving companies alarmingly direct access to us and to our psyches, it’s about time we start rethinking the way we define our personal information and data, and how it can be accessed and used.
