Strategy. Innovation. Brand.
Are You The Boss Of You?
I am the master of my fate. Aren’t I?
Like so many teenagers, I once believed that “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” I could take control, think for myself, and guide my own destiny.
It’s a wonderful thought and I really want to believe it’s true. But I keep finding more and more hidden persuaders that manipulate our thinking in unseen ways. In some cases, we manipulate ourselves by mis-framing a situation. In other cases, other people do the work for us.
Consider these situations and ask yourself: Are you the boss of you?
- When you eat potato chips, are you thinking for yourself? Or is some canny food scientist manipulating you by steering you towards your bliss point?
- When you gamble in a casino, are you in control or is the environment influencing you to spend a little more and stay a little longer?
- When you eat chocolate, is it because you love the taste or because the microbes in your gut are controlling your behavior?
- When you play the slot machines, are you deciding how much to spend or is a sophisticated algorithm dispensing just enough winnings to keep you hooked? Are you being addicted in the machine zone?
- When you read social media, do you decide how long to stay on or does a slow, steady drip of dopamine keep you engaged?
- When you don’t eat fish for 20 years, is it because you’re allergic or did you just never think to test your own assumptions? Did you frame yourself?
- When you go rock climbing, is it because you’re an adventurous spirit or because your slow heart beat tilts your life towards cheap thrills (and perhaps a life of crime)?
- When you chat with people in your neighborhood, do they express a wide range of opinions or do they all think more or less like you? When you surf the Internet, do you read only items that you agree with? Will that make you crazy?
- When you vote for a political candidate, is it because you have carefully considered all the issues and chosen the best candidate or because a cynical communications expert has got your goat with attributed belittlement?
- When you vote for stronger anti-crime laws, is it because you think they’ll actually work or are you succumbing to the vividness availability bias? (Vivid images of spectacular crimes are readily available to your memory so you vastly over-estimate their frequency).
- Why are so many restaurants painted red? Why is the woman in the picture (above) wearing a red outfit?
- Is the future ahead of you or behind you? Why did you make that choice?
- When you make a big decision for your company, you never let your biases get in the way, do you? Yet when other people make big decisions, they’re biased most of the time, aren’t they?
- When you choose a mate, are you thinking clearly or is sociobiology influencing your behavior?
- Did you carefully consider and consciously choose those activities that arouse you sexually or was the decision made for you by some combination of hormones, psychology, and genetics?
- Is your primary responsibility as an inhabitant of a given country to be a good citizen or a good consumer?
- When you buy something is it because you need it or because you want it? Perhaps you’re being manipulated by Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, the founder of public relations. Or perhaps you’ve been brandwashed.
In The Century of the Self, a British video documentary, Adam Curtis argues that we were hopelessly manipulated in the 20th century by slick followers of Freud who invented public relations. Of course, video is our most emotional and least logical medium. So perhaps Curtis is manipulating us to believe that we’ve been manipulated. It’s food for thought.
(The Century of the Self consists of four one-hour documentaries produced for the BBC. You can watch the first one, Happiness Machines, by clicking here).
Popping The Filter Bubble
Let’s say that I’m a vocal and vehement advocate of a flat tax. I’m adamant that implementing a flat tax will solve all the world’s problems. I read widely on flat tax theories … and I only read articles that agree with me. Why bother reading the opposite side? I already know they’re wrong.
What could be wrong with this? Well, two things. First, it could lead to dementia. The theory is that reading things that I agree with only reinforces existing connections in my brain. It doesn’t create new connections. Creating new connections seems to be a good way to forestall dementia. So, reading contrary opinions may lead to improved brain health.
Second, reading only things I agree with could lead to more extreme positions and greater animosity between people of different political convictions. The body politic polarizes. Does that sound familiar? Can we blame it all on the Internet? Maybe.
Now let’s extend the example. Let’s say that I use a search engine to find new articles about flat taxes. Let’s also assume that the search engine is smart enough to recognize that I only select articles that are positive about flat taxes. So, the search engine does me a “favor” and only presents positive articles. Not only do I not read contrary opinions, I’m not even aware that such opinions exist. Further proof that I must be right!
Several years ago, Eli Pariser coined the term “the filter bubble” to describe this phenomenon. Pariser argues that we live in bubbles that filter out important information, including information that would counter our opinions. (I typically use the term “echo chamber” for the same effect).
To my way of thinking (which may be filtered), this is a serious problem. Fortunately, according to a recent article in Technology Review, there may be ways to build recommendation engines that expose people to contrary ideas in such a way that they receive them with reasonably open minds.
Researchers in Barcelona built an engine based on the “idea that, although people may have opposing views on sensitive topics, they may also share interests in other areas. [The] recommendation engine … points these kinds of people towards each other based on their own preferences.”
According to the researchers who designed the engine, ““We nudge users to read content from people who may have opposite views … while still being relevant according to their preferences.”
The engine creates a “data portrait” for users and compares them. Users who have similar data portraits except for the “sensitive issue” (the flat tax, in our case) are connected to each other. They find that they share many interests even though they’re on opposite sides of the sensitive issue. However, because there is some common ground, the people are more willing to listen to each other.
It seems like a promising start and I’m going to try to use the recommendation engine to see what my data portrait looks like. I’ll report results as soon as I can. In the meantime, you can the original research article here.
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