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Bj Fogg Captology Stanford

see uber

evil bc exploits our vulnerability aka strengths?!

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wiki

Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab (now the Behavior Design Lab) performs research into computers as persuasive technologies. It is part of H-STAR, the Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute and housed in Cordura Hall.

Founded by B.J. Fogg, it includes the Stanford Web Credibility Project, which published How Do People Evaluate a Web Site's Credibility? Results from a Large Study in 2002. The Lab received a grant from the National Science Foundation in 2005 to support experimental work investigating how mobile phones can motivate and persuade people, an area the lab calls "mobile persuasion."

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https://www.economist.com/1843/2016/10/20/the-scientists-who-make-apps-addictive

The scientists who make apps addictive

Silicon Valley’s most successful tech companies use the insights of behaviour design to pump us with dopamine and keep us returning to their products. But, as Ian Leslie learns, some of the psychologists who developed the science of persuasion are worried about the way it is being used

In  1930, a psychologist at Harvard University called B.F. Skinner made a box and placed a hungry rat inside it. The box had a lever on one side. As the rat moved about it would accidentally knock the lever and, when it did so, a food pellet would drop into the box. After a rat had been put in the box a few times, it learned to go straight to the lever and press it: the reward reinforced the behaviour. Skinner proposed that the same principle applied to any “operant”, rat or man. He called his device the “operant conditioning chamber”. It became known as the Skinner box.

Skinner was the most prominent exponent of a school of psychology called behaviourism, the premise of which was that human behaviour is best understood as a function of incentives and rewards. Let’s not get distracted by the nebulous and impossible to observe stuff of thoughts and feelings, said the behaviourists, but focus simply on how the operant’s environment shapes what it does. Understand the box and you understand the behaviour. Design the right box and you can control behaviour.....

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https://www.salon.com**/2008**/08/07/facebook_2/

...Fogg is director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, an independent research center that explores a discipline he invented, called "captology." Captology stands for Computers As Persuasive Technology, and it looks at how certain technologies intentionally persuade us to do their bidding.

no lnx vid

Fogg's research examines how product designers can methodically use persuasive techniques in everything from ATMs to shareware.

One example of persuasive technology is the "nag screen" that's built into shareware programs to persuade slacker users to pay up. Another is the computerized Baby Think It Over doll, which tells you when your "baby" needs to be fed, and changed, and bathed, and played with -- clearly designed as a propaganda tool in the fight against teen pregnancy.

If you visit a video arcade or a casino, you're surrounded by captology. The ringing, squawking, flashing screens that pitch such a fit as you walk by actually have a name. They're called "attract mode," and their sole purpose is to make you stop and drop the first of many quarters into their slots.

And remember the Tamagotchi "digital pets" from the 1990s? Talk about persuasive -- I still shudder to recall the U.S. News and World Report story that I read at the height of the Tamagotchi craze: One father of a couple of fanatics had to return a puppy to the pet store because his daughters preferred to "feed" their Tamagotchis.

As more of the world hooks up with the Internet, the social network phenomenon provides some of the most powerful present-day examples of technological persuasion. According to Fogg's research, for example, Facebook is the most persuasive interactive technology on the planet.

"Facebook has changed more people's behavior, more dramatically and faster, than anything that has come before it," he said. With millions of people "ritualistically" involved with their Facebook accounts every day, he and his students are now trying to deconstruct precisely how it does its voodoo so well -- from its subtle, yet incessant siren song of inviting and finding friends, to the triggers that keep you coming back, as many people do, several times a day.

The pinnacle of persuasion in the "trigger" category, according to Fogg, is the individual status updates that Facebook users type in at random times. Those who don't change very often get a subtle interface cue from Facebook saying, "What are you doing right now?"

At the moment, for example, mine says, "Denise wants an iPod touch. It's a vague, formless desire, unsupported by good reviews. But she wants it nonetheless." I read my friends' updates at least once a day, and often change mine every day as well.

"Status updates are amazing," Fogg said. "They are pellets that keep popping out for the pigeons -- tremendously effective at keeping you coming back."

The lab's first foray into understanding "the psychology of Facebook," as Fogg puts it, was from the inside: he and a colleague taught a course in designing Facebook applications.

"The first class was crazy," he said. "It was like watching a field of poppies grow -- in six weeks, the students' applications collectively got 16 million installations. Then it was 25 million. We stopped keeping track."

But as anyone knows who has added or removed a gazillion Facebook apps for various reasons, persuasion is not a permanent process.

"Some of the most viral apps from our class had a clear life cycle," said Fogg. "Once the novelty wore off, they weren't so fun anymore. So students would create another app. Learning to transfer users from a dying app to a rising app became a skill. We want to learn more about this, so we're starting to look at the psychology of persuasive designs and what metrics you can use to measure it. I want to be able to teach how to use psychology to make good decisions about what you want to persuade people to do, measure what's working, and be able to iterate quickly based on how they respond."

Fogg said he recently had lunch with an exec from Rock You, the largest ad network on Facebook. "He took three calls from the office, just during lunch, about the metrics that day," said Fogg. "He told me that they change their ads on a daily basis" based on how people respond in real time.

Any kind of persuasive technique can be used for good or for evil, and no matter what others may do with it, Fogg is trying to use his captological powers for good. Last year, he started teaching a course he calls Peace Innovation. The core idea is to try to "invent peace" through persuasive technology.

"What we're doing is identifying antecedents to peace -- like empathy and tolerance -- that most people would agree need to be present in a peaceful society, then we're designing measurable persuasive techniques to achieve them," said Fogg. "It's a new way of looking at the problem."

One class project, for example, imitated the Free Rice site, a game where, for each word the player gets right, Free Rice donates 20 grains of rice through the U.N. World Food Program.

"Our surveys of users before and after showed that people's empathy and tolerance levels changed measurably," he said. "People who answered four questions in the game felt different from people who didn't answer the questions." They were surprised to find that the changes were still true a week later.

"We're still at the very beginning of this, so we don't have hard data yet," said Fogg. "It's a challenge to learn how to measure changes in empathy and tolerance. So we challenged each student to create one simple measurement tool by the end of class. That's a pretty good step to future work."

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https://medium.com/team-human/the-anti-human-religion-of-silicon-valley-ac37d5528683

The Anti-Human Religion of Silicon Valley

How an esoteric Russian religion still fuels the digital apocalypse

There is a Silicon Valley religion, and it’s one that doesn’t particularly care for people — at least not in our present form. Technologists may pretend to be led by a utilitarian, computational logic devoid of superstition, but make no mistake: There is a prophetic belief system embedded in the technologies and business plans coming out of Google, Uber, Facebook, and Amazon, among others.

It is a techno-utopian and deeply anti-human sensibility, born out of a little-known confluence of American and Soviet New Age philosophers, scientists, and spiritualists who met up in the 1980s hoping to prevent nuclear war — but who ended up hatching a worldview that’s arguably as dangerous to the human future as any atom bomb.

I tell the story in my new book, Team Human, because it’s one I have yet to see documented anywhere else. I pieced it together through interviews with some of the people involved in the Esalen “track two diplomacy” program. The idea was to forge new lines of communication between the Cold War powers by bringing some of the USSR’s leading scientists and spiritualists to the Esalen Institute to mix with their counterparts in the United States. Maybe we all have common goals?

They set up a series of events at Esalen’s Big Sur campus, where everyone could hear about each other’s work and dreams at meetings during the day and hot tub sessions into the night. That’s how some of the folks from Stanford Research Institute and Silicon Valley, who would one day be responsible for funding and building our biggest technology firms, met up with Russia’s “cosmists.” They were espousing a form of science fiction gnosticism that grew out of the Russian Orthodox tradition’s emphasis on immortality. The cosmists were a big hit, and their promise of life extension technologies quickly overtook geopolitics as the primary goal of the conferences.

Self-actualization through technology meant leaving the body behind — but this was okay since, in keeping with the gnostic tradition, the body was the source of human sin and corruption.

The cosmists talked about reassembling human beings, atom by atom, after death, moving one’s consciousness into a robot and colonizing space. The cosmists pulled it all together for the fledgling American transhumanists: They believed human beings could not only transcend the limits of our mortal shell but also manifest physically through new machines. With a compellingly optimistic have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too gusto, the cosmists told America’s LSD-taking spiritualists that technology could give them a way to beat death.

Self-actualization through technology meant leaving the body behind — but this was okay since, in keeping with the gnostic tradition, the body was the source of human sin and corruption. The stuff robots and computers could reproduce was the best stuff about us, anyway.

The idea that lit up the turned-on technoculture was that technology would be our evolutionary partner and successor — that humans are essentially computational, and computers could do computation better. Any ideas that could be construed to support this contention were embraced. And so Stanford professor René Girard — whose work had much broader concerns — was appreciated almost solely for his assertion that human beings are not original or creative but purely imitative creatures. And, even more thrilling to future tech titans like Peter Thiel, that the apocalypse was indeed coming, but it was the humans’ own damn fault.

No less popular to this day are the “captology” classes of Stanford’s B.J. Fogg, who teaches how to design interfaces that manipulate human behavior as surely as a slot machine can. According to the department’s website, “The purpose of the Persuasive Technology Lab is to create insight into how computing products—from websites to mobile phone software—can be designed to change people’s beliefs and behaviors.” Toward what? Toward whatever behaviors technologies can induce — and away from those it can’t.

As a result, we have Facebook using algorithms to program people’s emotions and actions.We have Uber using machine learning to replace people’s employment. We have Google developing artificial intelligence to replace human consciousness. And we have Amazon extracting the life’s blood of the human marketplace to deliver returns to the abstracted economy of stocks and derivatives.

The anti-human agenda of technologists might not be so bad — or might never be fully realized — if it didn’t dovetail so neatly with the anti-human agenda of corporate capitalism. Each enables the other, reinforcing an abstract, growth-based scheme of infinite expansion — utterly incompatible with human life or the sustainability of our ecosystem. They both depend on a transcendent climax where the chrysalis of matter is left behind and humanity is reborn as pure consciousness or pure capital.

We are not being beaten by machines, but by a league of tech billionaires who have been taught to believe that human beings are the problem and technology is the solution. We must become aware of their agenda and fight it if we are going to survive.

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https://medium.com/team-human/how-addictive-tech-exploits-our-evolutionary-needs-c3c1e18cfcc8

Team Human

How Addictive Tech Exploits Our Evolutionary Needs

We evolved the need to be aware of anything important going on in our social circle

Douglas Rushkoff

Living in a digitally enforced attention economy means being subjected to a constant assault of automated manipulation.Persuasive technology, as it’s now called, is a design philosophy taught and developed at some of America’s leading universities and then implemented on platforms from e-commerce sites and social networks to smartphones and fitness wristbands. The goal is to generate “behavioral change” and “habit formation,” most often without the user’s knowledge or consent.

Behavioral design theory holds that people don’t change their behaviors because of shifts in their attitudes and opinions. On the contrary, people change their attitudes to match their behaviors. In this model, we are more like machines than thinking, autonomous beings. Or at least we can be made to work that way.

That’s why persuasive technologies are not designed to influence us through logic or even emotional appeals. This isn’t advertising or sales, in the traditional sense, but more like war-time psy-ops, or the sort of psychological manipulation exercised in prisons, casinos, and shopping malls. Just as the architects of those environments use particular colors, soundtracks, or lighting cycles to stimulate desired behavior, the designers of web platforms and phone apps use carefully tested animations and sounds to provoke optimal emotional responses from users.

Every component of a digital environment is tested for its ability to generate a particular reaction, be it more views, more purchases, or just more addiction. New mail is a happy sound; no mail is a sad one. The physical gesture of swiping to update a social media feed anchors and reinforces the compulsive urge to check in — just in case.

Most persuasive technology tactics depend on users trusting that a platform accurately represents the world it claims to depict. The more we accept the screen as a window on reality, the more likely we are to accept the choices it offers. But what of the choices that it doesn’t offer? Do they really not exist?

A simple search for “a pizzeria near me” may list all the restaurants that have paid to be found, but not those that haven’t. Persuasive designs offer users options at every juncture,in order to simulate the experience of choice without the risk of the user exercising true autonomy and wandering off the reservation. It’s the same way game designers lead all players through the same game story, even though we feel like we’re making independent choices from beginning to end. None of these choices are real, because every one leads inevitably to the outcome that the designers have predetermined for us. Because the interfaces look neutral, we accept the options they offer at face value.The choices are not choices at all, but a new way of getting us to accept limitations. Whoever controls the menu controls the choices.

Designers seeking to trigger addictive loops utilize what behavioral economists call “variable rewards.” Marketing psychologists in the 1950s discovered that human beings are desperate to figure out the pattern behind getting rewarded. It makes sense from a survival perspective: Sudden wind gusts mean rain is coming, and predicting the motions of a fish in the water makes it easier to spear.

In the hands of slot machine designers, this survival trait becomes an exploit. By doling out rewards at random intervals, the slot machine confounds the human being attempting to figure out the pattern. Consciously, we know the machine is randomized or perhaps even programmed unfairly to take our money. But subconsciously, those random intervals of quarters clinking into the metal tray induce a compulsive need to keep going. Are the quarters coming down every 10 tries? Every five tries? Or is it five, seven, 10, and then back to five? Let me try again and see…

Compulsions are futile efforts at gaining control of random systems. Once triggered, they are really hard to shake. That’s why academic studies of slot machine patterning became required reading in the euphemistically named “user experience” departments of technology companies. It’s how we’ve become addicted to checking our email — looking to see if there’s just one rewarding email for every 10 useless ones. Or is it every 11?

Persuasive design also exploits our social conditioning.We evolved the need to be aware of anything important going on in our social circle. Not having the knowledge that a fellow group member is sick or angry could prove disastrous. In the compliance professional’s hands, this “fear of missing out” provides direct access to our behavioral triggers. All we need are a few indications that people are talking about something to stimulate our curiosity and send us online and away from whatever we were really doing. So designers put a red dot with a number in it over an app’s icon to make sure we know that something’s happening, comments are accumulating, or a topic is trending. If you refuse to heed the call, you may be the last person to find out.

User experiences are also designed to trigger our social need to gain approval and meet obligations — ancient adaptations for group cohesion now turned against us. We seek high numbers of “likes” and “follows” on social platforms because these metrics are the only way we have of gauging our social acceptance. There’s no difference in intensity between them. We can’t know if we are truly loved by a few; we can only know if we got liked by many. Similarly, when someone likes something of ours or asks to be our “friend” on a social network, we feel socially obligated to return the favor.

Some platforms leverage our urge to compete, even playfully, with our peers.Websites employ leaderboards to honor those who have made the most posts, trades, or whatever metric a company wants to promote. Users also compete for “streaks” of daily participation, badges of accomplishment, and other ways of demonstrating their achievements and status — even if just to themselves. Gamificationis used to motivate employees, students, consumers, and even online stock traders. But in the process, the play is often surrendered to some pretty unplayful outcomes, and people’s judgment is clouded by the unrelated urge to win.

Many familiar interfaces go even deeper, building addictive behaviors by leveraging our feeding instincts. Designers have discovered that “bottomless feeds” tend to keep users swiping down for additional articles, posts, or messages, consuming more than they intend to because of that unsatiated feeling of never reaching the end.

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On the other hand, designers want to keep us in a state of constant disorientation — always scrolling and paying attention to something, but never so much attention that we become engrossed and regain our bearings. So they use interruption to keep us constantly moving from one feed to another, checking email and then social media, videos, the news and then a dating app.Each moment of transition is another opportunity to offer up another advertisement, steer the user toward something yet more manipulative, or extract more data that can be used to profile and persuade more completely.

This is section 33 of the new book Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff, which is being serialized weekly on Medium. Read the previous section here and the following section here.

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http://captology.stanford.edu/go/welcome?from=

Persuasive Technology Lab Website. We are part of H-STAR Institute and the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Persuasive Technology was a term BJ Fogg coined while conducting graduate work at Stanford University in the 1990’s. He was, and still is an optimist about the value and impact technology can have to help people feel successful doing what they already want to do. 

From the very early days in the late 90’s and early 00’s we could see the need for an ethical approach for designing persuasive technologies. While our research has moved on from persuasive technology to focus on designing for healthy behavior change, we believe it is important to continue to highlight the ethical contributions in the field of Persuasive Technology so that those who are responsible for designing persuasive technologies can do so in an ethical way. Below you will find several resources our lab created on the ethical creation of persuasive technologies.

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(BJ’s quick note: This video above has a slow pace, and it’s not my best look, with the shaved head and all. However, do listen to what I was predicting and warning people about. At least go to minute 10 and see what I say about the political use of persuasion profiles. We recorded this video in 2006 to warn policymakers of the impacts persuasive technology could have. Remember, this message was recorded in 2006 not 2016 and the message rings true more and more every day.)

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In addition to our lab’s consistent focus on the need for an ethical approach to persuasive technology, we also emphasized the opportunity for Persuasive Technology to help millions of people. Here are a few areas where we put this into practice.  Along with those efforts, our lab focused on technology that promoted peace.

  1. The lab’s focus on technology to promote peace (starting in 2009) led to a new lab at Stanford called the “Peace Innovation Lab” — https://peaceinnovation.stanford.edu/
  2. Based on our work in the lab, BJ co-authored a book in 2010 to help parents understand Facebook and protect their kids: Facebook for Parents (out of print now but you can find copies online).
  3. We researched and then held five ground-breaking industry events (2007-2012) to share insights and best practices around how mobile devices can be used to improve the health of everyday people. We focused on what really works to change people’s health behaviors.
  4. I have long been a champion for my former students doing good things in the world, includingTristan Harrisand his work (“Time Well Spent” and now Center for Humane Technology). Tristan has a TedTalk discussing the dark side of Persuasive Technology and he continues to champion the ethical use of these technologies to solve the current challenges we face. 

I am extremely proud of the work our lab has done over the years and while our work has moved away from this arena, I hope anyone looking to design persuasive technologies will review the work we have done on ethics and focus their research and efforts on positive change and helping people succeed and feel successful at doing what they already want to do.

BJ Fogg, PhD

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https://stanfordreview.org/how-stanford-profits-tech-addiction-social-media/

How Stanford Profits Off Addiction

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https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-on-rene-girards-influence-2014-11

Peter Thiel explains how an esoteric philosophy book shaped his worldview

Richard Feloni

Nov 10, 2014, ...

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