A soft-spoken behavioral scientist named B.J. Fogg started posing a question that most academics weren’t yet interested in in the late 1990s in a small, easily overlooked building on the Stanford campus. He wondered if computers could be made to influence people in the same way that a convincing friend could. He coined the term “captology,” which he combined with “computers as persuasive technologies.” Back then, it sounded innocuous. Almost scholarly. In retrospect, that quiet start seems like the beginning of a much bigger tale, with a phone ringing in every room of every home.
Motivation, ability, and a prompt are the three components that Fogg’s framework, the Fogg Behavior Model, reduced behavior to. When you remove the technical terms, you have a recipe. If you want someone to do something, nudge them at the appropriate moment, make it simple, and make them want it a little. It’s the kind of realization that, once heard, seems apparent. Thousands of years ago, Aristotle was considering similar concepts. Fogg added a method for purposefully applying it to screens.
His 2007 “Facebook Class,” in which students were instructed to create apps on the new Facebook platform and worry about polish later, became notorious. Construct, ship, watch, and refine. Together, the projects attracted sixteen million users and about a million dollars in ad revenue in ten weeks. One of the most well-liked allows users to give friends “hotness” points. It lacked elegance. It wasn’t intended to be. It hooked, as it was intended to.
Mike Krieger, who would go on to co-found Instagram, was one of the students seated in that room. Fogg also influenced Tristan Harris, who would later quit Google in protest of the very strategies he had learned. So did Nir Eyal, whose book Hooked became something of a scripture for product managers across Silicon Valley, even as Fogg later distanced himself from the precise lineage. It’s possible that none of them imagined, in those early seminars, that the small design tricks they were testing would scale into the most absorbing infrastructure in human history.
The patterns that emerged from those classrooms are now embedded in nearly every app on your phone. Slot machines are the source of the pull-to-refresh gesture. A primitive part of the brain that interprets novelty as urgency is exploited by the red notification dot. The natural stopping cue that a printed page or a TV show used to provide is eliminated by infinite scroll. Autoplay makes the decision for you. Being regarded as well-connected matters more than most of us realize, which is why LinkedIn displays your connection count. This was not an accident. It was researched, improved, and rewarded.
Walking around Palo Alto today gives the impression that the optimism of those early Stanford years has somewhat subsided. In recent years, Fogg has written about healthier habits, such as exercising and flossing. The Center for Humane Technology was founded by Harris. In a follow-up, Eyal discussed opposing the very forces he praised in his first book. The lab has undergone multiple renaming and reframing.
Even so, it’s difficult to remember the original lessons in the modern world. Every time an adult opens an app they vowed to stop using, or every time a teen refreshes their feed at midnight, there’s a silent line back to a California classroom where the question of whether machines could be trained to persuade was first raised. It’s difficult to ignore that the answer was in the affirmative.
