Over the last decade...
-iPhone is like having your life in your pocket.
-...technology has reshaped how we interact with the world.
-One third of humanity uses Facebook at least once a month.
If Facebook were a country,
it would be the largest in the world.
-It's also reshaped our own lives.
-More families are texting each other
while inside the same house instead of actually talking.
-Even the CEO of Apple thinks he's on his iPhone too much.
-Some people are so addicted to technology
and their devices, they're now turning to rehab.
-But to understand how this technology hooks us,
we need to look back to a different time.
-Conquest -- the search for new knowledge
about our universe, our world, and ourselves.
♪♪
What is behavior?
What makes a man love, gamble, write a sonnet?
In this laboratory,
scientists seek answers to those questions using pigeons.
-It was 1959, and an unassuming scientist
was about to tell a nation about a remarkable discovery.
-Dr. Skinner, what are you doing with this pigeon?
-I'm getting ready to demonstrate
a fundamental principle of behavior.
This pigeon is hungry,
and I can give it food just by pressing this switch.
This operates a small food dish
back at the square opening in the wall.
In that way, I can select parts of its behavior
and make it do practically anything I like.
-For decades, behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner
had been experimenting with pigeons and rats
to see what he could make them do,
but rats pressing levers and pigeons pecking disks
was just the start.
-If it goes past one pigeon, the other pigeon can eat,
and if it goes the other way, the other pigeon eats.
-That's remarkable.
-Of course, we're not interested in behavior
because it's amusing or dramatic.
We want to study its causes and find out how to change it.
-One of those techniques he found that was particularly
useful in shaping behavior was the variable reward.
-The things we do in everyday life don't always pay off,
and they don't always not pay off.
It isn't simple all or none.
We study that in the case of the pigeon
by arranging various schedules or systems of payoff.
-He found that if you don't know what is gonna
come down that chute in terms of a reward,
and you don't know when it's going to come,
you will stay there pressing the button and pulling the lever.
-The key, Skinner discovered,
was making the payoff unpredictable.
-That element of uncertainty, that perfect sweet spot,
that balance of, you know,
predictability yet uncertainty --
that is the most addicting reinforcement schedule.
-To help make his case that humans could be
controlled in the same way, Skinner pointed to casinos.
-People gamble because of the schedule
of the reinforcement that follows.
-In Skinner's time,
people found a lot of what he said
for cultural and historical reasons to be very creepy.
The idea that we could be controlled was coming
right on the heels of this image of sort of communism
and that we could be all turned into little drones
executing the commands of others,
and so people were repelled by it.
-I come back to the old question, the old objection --
quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Who is going to guard our guardians?
Who is going to modify the people
who are going to modify us?
-In the climate of the '70s, '80s, and even '90s,
it would've been a very dubious proposition to call yourself
and advertise yourself as a behavior designer.
-But that's not the case today.
-I'd like to share with you a design pattern
that companies use to build habit-forming products.
It's called the HOOK.
-I decided to dive deeper into the psychology
of what makes products habit-forming
hoping that I could build a habit-forming product.
-Nir Eyal now works as a behavioral designer
helping companies figure out
what kind of behavioral techniques
will attract users and keep them.
-What we find is that habit-forming products
have what's called a hook designed into the product.
If we feel lonely, we check Facebook.
If we're uncertain, we Google.
All of these things fundamentally cater
to an emotional itch, an emotional discomfort.
What we want to do is to find the pain points in users' lives
so that we can solve that problem for them.
-But behavioral design goes beyond
simply finding and easing an emotional itch.
The hooks built into these products
are also intended to keep users coming back,
and here, Skinner's discoveries are key.
-The connection is to make something interesting.
It needs to be variable.
It has to be -- there has to be
some kind of mystery, some kind of uncertainty.
Instagram is a great example of a product
that has a fantastic hook built in.
The internal trigger is when you're seeking connection.
The action is to open the app.
The variable reward is to scroll the feed.
Over time, you're changing your habits to use this product.
-There are certain possibilities,
and there's certain uncertainties, right?
So something like Twitter really has that feel of,
you never know when a pellet is gonna come down the chute,
and the same with Facebook.
You log on, and you just keep scrolling to see, like,
when am I gonna get a little hit?
I think it is useful to think about them
as some kind of digitally enhanced Skinner Box.
-Loren Brichter is one reason Twitter is so addictive.
He developed the code for the now-ubiquitous gesture
known as "pull to refresh."
-It was literally five lines of code.
I put it in, and it was done.
Like, that was pull to refresh,
and then people starting putting it in everything.
In my mind, I did it because it was a more natural gesture.
Like, it was a little bit more ergonomic.
Some people likened it to a slot machine,
which makes a ton of sense in hindsight.
-Today, there's growing concern that technology companies
have gone too far
in their attempt to keep users glued to their screens,
and some of the industry's leaders are speaking out.
-The short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops
that we have created are destroying how society works.
-It's not about giving you all this freedom.
It's about sucking you in to take your time.
-I mean, it's exactly the kind of thing
that a hacker like myself would come up with
because you're exploiting a vulnerability
in human psychology.
-Skinner's daughter, Julie Vargas,
says her father believed that behavioral psychology
could be a force for good if it was used in the right way.
-My sister's school had Father's Day,
and what he saw was the teacher giving a lesson
and then giving a worksheet,
and some of them were doing it quickly.
Others were clearly not knowing what to do.
And that one turns.
So he came home, and he said, "I'm making a teaching machine."
-One of the practical applications of laboratory work
in the field of behavior theory is the teaching machine.
-These machines are now being used
to teach everything from telling the time to advanced physics.
Satisfaction from achievement is a powerful human reinforcer.
-He had an ethics, you know --
an ethics of collective human flourishing
that depended on making the right choices
rather than ones that would deplete us
and keep us in the corner of the Skinner Box pressing the button.
-Vargas says her father would be appalled
by the way his discoveries are being used
by some technology companies today.
-He would be horrified at how much control
these little devices, or the interaction,
has over particularly the young people of our society.
-Just because something is potentially addictive
doesn't mean we don't have control.
We're not freebasing Facebook.
We're not injecting Instagram here.
-Eyal says that many behavioral designers
are actually trying to improve users' lives.
-I'll give you example after example.
Duolingo helps us learn languages.
We've got apps that I use every day
when I go to the gym that helps me exercise,
apps to help us stop smoking,
apps that help us stop using our technology
are all using these behavioral design tactics.
-But in the end, the solution to help us overcome
our addiction to technology may not come from an app.
Instead, it may be from understanding
one of Skinner's most important realizations --
knowing you're being controlled by something
might be the first step to breaking its grip.
-Science liberates you to the extent that you now understand
why things are happening
and when they're going to happen.
Knowing what in your environment is controlling your behavior
lets you change that environment and change your own behavior.
-Loren Brichter is among those now thinking more deeply
about his environment and the ones he created.
-On some levels, it was -- like, I thought I did,
like, good work.
But on other levels, like,
I think that work led to bad things happening,
and they're all part of this big thing that,
like, led to this massive shift in, you know, human culture.
There's no undo button.
I mean, all technology is like Pandora's Box.
You can't predict what making any of this stuff is gonna do.