While most people were still learning how to attach pictures to emails back in 1998, a Stanford social scientist was quietly setting the stage for something much more significant. The Persuasive Technology Lab, which B.J. Fogg founded, sounds almost charmingly honest in retrospect. The lab’s declared goal was to investigate how computing devices might alter people’s thoughts and behaviors. In reality, it may have created the blueprint for widespread behavioral manipulation on a scale that no one had yet fully anticipated.
It’s odd to consider now. The early internet was slow and cumbersome, with blinking cursors and dial-up screeches. No one was concerned about excessive scrolling. However, researchers were already mapping the psychological levers that would eventually make it nearly impossible for billions of people to put down their phones during dinner, somewhere in a Stanford building.
Fundamentally, the formula is simple. The same mechanism that keeps a gambler feeding a slot machine is used to transform regular behavior into compulsive behavior: frequent, small dopamine hits delivered in an unpredictable manner. The brain reacts to repeated pleasurable stimuli by lowering its own baseline dopamine levels, which means you need more stimulation just to feel normal, according to Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke, who wrote extensively on this topic in her book Dopamine Nation. Whether intentionally or not, social media feeds, notification badges, and the small red numbers on app icons were all created to take advantage of this chemistry.
One of the more outspoken critics of what he helped create was Tristan Harris, who studied directly at Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab before going on to work in product design at Google. The arc has an almost Shakespearean quality: discover the formula, assist in its global deployment, and then dedicate years to trying to warn people about it. Although it’s still unclear if his warnings have had a significant impact on the company, they undoubtedly changed public perception.
The research emerging from Stanford’s economics circles gives the issue a distinct flavor. According to research by Matthew Gentzkow, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, people’s lack of self-control accounts for about 31% of their social media usage. Not indolence. Not boredom. true lack of self-control, the kind linked to substance addiction. Many study participants were successful in cutting back on usage when given financial incentives; however, what transpired after the incentives vanished was more illuminating. The decreased usage persisted. It turns out that habit cuts both ways.
The level of awareness that people already possess is what makes the entire situation feel subtly unsettling. When asked what they would like to cut back on, social media and smartphone use rank higher than alcohol and cigarettes. They are aware. The majority of people who are constantly staring at their phones are aware that they are doing so excessively. Kostadin Kushlev, a Georgetown psychology professor who researches the relationship between technology and happiness, presents it more as an opportunity cost issue than a content issue. Every hour spent in front of a screen is an hour spent not moving, sleeping, or interacting with other people. The true harm occurs in those silent, cumulative displacements.
The idea that what was developed in Fogg’s Stanford lab, honed through thousands of product decisions, and implemented across billions of devices is now causing a cultural reckoning that no one quite anticipated seems to be gradually catching up with the reality. The recipe was successful. Nearly too well.
