Quick snippets from my morning read on Saturday, 24th October 2020
I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of Skinner boxes, which I discovered a few years ago while learning how to make mobile games and understanding gamification.
Essentially, “a Skinner box, also known as an operant conditioning chamber, is an enclosed apparatus that contains a bar or key that an animal can press or manipulate in order to obtain food or water as a type of reinforcement.”
Skinner boxes are used to test, study and manipulate behavior, and when applied on a massive scale – like through social media- can have significant consequences. I stumbled upon the following article and these insights were… interesting to say the least.
Snippets follow.
The 21st Century Skinner Box – Behavioural Scientist
“Order effects, one of the oldest and most robust effects ever discovered in the psychological sciences, can exert a powerful influence over attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors through the strategic arrangement and presentation of information.
This means that you can influence someone’s wine selection, their preference for one type of medical treatment over another, and which candidate they select on a ballot based on the order in which you present them.
In the digital world, controlling the presentation of information becomes even easier. By arranging information, web-based platforms can influence which hotel you book, the music you rate, and, on Facebook, the emotional language you use.
Online systems are a lot like digital Skinner boxes. In online environments, web designers have absolute control over not just every stimulus available to you but virtually all your response options. Despite this, these environments are interactive and provide you with a sense of control.
This leaves you open to subtle influences, like the gamification of work that keeps Uber drivers on the road longer than they would be otherwise. These environments are also often customized for each user, and (…) most people appear to be unaware of this personalization.
Unlike behavior scientists of the past, engineers and designers working at companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple have enormous sample sizes to draw from, and the nature of digital environments allows them to rapidly adjust their experiments on the fly.
The shape and color of the buttons you press, the timing of each notification you receive, and the content of every piece of information that reaches you have often been curated through this data-driven process of mass experimentation.
And companies don’t just run these experiments once; they run them but over and over again, storing each stimulus and response, customizing reinforcers and schedules of reinforcement to maximize their influence.
Over time, this enables companies to predict, shape, and condition each user’s habits and triggers on a scale previously unimaginable.”
Read the full article “The 21st Century Skinner Box” from the Behavioural Scientist
And for an in-depth look at how big tech uses skinner boxes, watch the explosive documentary “The Social Dilemma” by Netflix.
And as always, if you enjoyed this, check out the rest of my daily snippets, curated daily, right here on The Red Notebook.
