How to Put Down Your Phone: Or, Stanford’s Persuasion Wizards and the Ghost of Rene Girard
The digital cultivation of desire via behavioral conditioning and mimesis
Over the summer, I’ve been meditating on the origin of desire. A strange thing to be thinking about, I know. “Why don’t you just enjoy your summer like a normal person and stop being so neurotic?” you ask. Good question. All I can say is, at least I got into gardening!
I suppose I can’t help but reflect upon why I want what I want. I wanted to know (and still want to know) where our desires spring from. Do they well up from some invisible beyond in the depths of my soul? Did I catch my desire for this, that, or the other thing from another person (heaven forbid, an influencer!)? At the same time, I’ve also been doing some research on how digital technologies are designed to be habit-forming devices. A customer with a habit for your product is a guaranteed recurring revenue stream.
It turns out that these two things aren’t so unrelated. We’ve got some nasty digital habits and some even more insidious desires that the web helps to cultivate.
In this short article, I want to outline some of the more interesting things I’ve read about desire in our digital milieu. The more you’re aware of where desire is bred, I think, the more capable you’ll be of reigning that desire in. And, at least in the context of our digital technologies, you also become more aware of those tiny aliens sitting in their Silicon Valley offices making you want what you otherwise may not have wanted.
Engineers of Instinct
Since we are sandwiched somewhere between animals and angels (as Walker Percy might say), human beings cannot entirely escape suffering from the same instinctual desires and motivations that other animals do. This now eight-year-old article from The Guardian entitled “‘Our Minds Can Be Hijacked’: The Tech Insiders Who Fear a Smartphone Dystopia” written by Paul Lewis is very good. You should read it. In fact, you should make everyone in your life read it.
In it, we hear from repentant designers of various design artifacts that are so absolutely ubiquitous as to seem timeless. At one point, someone had to design the pull-to-refresh mechanism (Loren Brichter), which appears all over the Internet. Someone also came up with the “Like” button (Justin Rosenstein). Both of these technologies are right here on this supposedly writer-friendly, intellectual medium: Substack. We’ve got hearts and “feeds” here (a “feeding trough” for the mind).1
The Guardian article implicates Nir Ayal as teaching tech entrepreneurs how to make their products habit-forming. Ayal has given numerous talks on how to create habit forming technologies. See here, for example. His book Hooked lays out the methodology, which is rooted in behavioral conditioning. Eyal studied under BJ Fogg, founder and director of the Stanford Behavior Design Lab. And Fogg was apparently (per Wikipedia) a teaching assistant for Philip Zimbardo, the architect of the 1971 Stanford prison experiment. That’s quite the intellectual lineage. If you didn’t catch what I just wrote, allow me to reiterate: You can trace back some of the most influential people responsible for building our digital technologies to… the Stanford prison experiment! Who would’ve thought?
Another of Fogg’s students, Tristan Harris, had some fascinating things to say about the Facebook “Like” button, which was originally designed to be blue. I’m quoting directly from Lewis’ article in The Guardian:
A friend at Facebook told Harris that designers initially decided the notification icon, which alerts people to new activity such as ‘friend requests’ or ‘likes’, should be blue. It fit Facebook’s style and, the thinking went, would appear ‘subtle and innocuous’. ‘But no one used it,’ Harris says. ‘Then they switched it to red and of course everyone used it.’
Lewis continues,
That red icon is now everywhere. When smartphone users glance at their phones, dozens or hundreds of times a day, they are confronted with small red dots beside their apps, pleading to be tapped. ‘Red is a trigger colour,’ Harris says. ‘That’s why it is used as an alarm signal.’
The most seductive design, Harris explains, exploits the same psychological susceptibility that makes gambling so compulsive: variable rewards. When we tap those apps with red icons, we don’t know whether we’ll discover an interesting email, an avalanche of ‘likes,’ or nothing at all. It is the possibility of disappointment that makes it so compulsive.
It’s this that explains how the pull-to-refresh mechanism, whereby users swipe down, pause and wait to see what content appears, rapidly became one of the most addictive and ubiquitous design features in modern technology. ‘Each time you’re swiping down, it’s like a slot machine,’ Harris says. ‘You don’t know what’s coming next. Sometimes it’s a beautiful photo. Sometimes it’s just an ad.
In those three short paragraphs alone, you have all the justification you need for a) making your phone grayscale and b) disabling all notifications. Every time you see a little red notification in LinkedIn or Substack or whatever your platform of choice is (whatever best expresses you and your identity), just remember that little tickle and murmur in your heart is just some good old fashioned Skinnerian conditioning.
If you don’t want to be a Skinnerian pigeon for our tech overlords, you need to recognize that these tools are designed to work in a very particular way, and they are very good at hooking you, most often without you realizing it. As with everything having to do with rhetoric, however—the disease turns out to be the cure. By learning about their strategies of persuasion (which in reality are architectural in nature), you become more resistant to the subtle ways technologies have been designed to gently seduce you into staring at your phone for two to eight hours a day.
The Ghost of Rene Girard
The insights of the persuasion wizards at Stanford need supplemented, in my opinion, by another figure who also happened to teach at the same institution: Rene Girard. Girard’s genius lies in the fact that he takes us beyond behavioral conditioning and into the realm of human desire. He moves us from the merely animal to the properly human—i.e., the anthropological. These two approaches to understanding human motivation—behavioral conditioning a la control of the digital architecture and what Girard calls mimetic desire—need not be mutually exclusive. In fact, we’ll need them both if we are to stomach what is being cooked up at present by our tech overlords.
