For years, a small team of researchers at Stanford University studied the seemingly straightforward question of what drives human behavior in a lab located on the second floor of an unremarkable building close to the engineering quad. Not in the sense of grand philosophy. the utilitarian type. Why do you scroll, tap, and return? BJ Fogg, the man most closely linked to that work, trained a generation of students who went on to design the products that are currently found in almost every pocket on the planet and gave the field its name years ago: persuasive technology. The fact that nearly none of those students stayed in the building is difficult to ignore.
That’s the story in miniature. Once a little-known area of behavioral psychology and human-computer interaction, the study of human persuasion has grown to become one of the world’s most valuable fields of study. Additionally, those who are most knowledgeable about it are being subtly kicked out of the organizations that created them. The figures surrounding AI talent make headlines, such as Meta allegedly offering a quarter of a billion dollars in compensation to a single researcher and the large corporations reportedly investing hundreds of billions in infrastructure development. However, persuasion research is that boom’s older, stranger cousin, and it has been losing talent for longer than anyone seems willing to acknowledge.
The pattern is repeated. A paper on choice architecture, habit formation, or how notification timing affects behavior is published by a professor. In a year or two, you’ll have a job title at a product company that includes the word “research” and pays several times as much as a tenured chair. The percentage of newly awarded PhDs in computer science who immediately enter the workforce surpassed 50% more than five years ago, and the trend is even more pronounced in subfields that deal with attention and behavior. Because those who would have cultivated the next generation are now optimizing onboarding flows, there is a feeling among those left behind that the cultivation of the next generation has quietly stopped.
From the outside, what’s lost is not immediately apparent. Persuasion research can be lavishly funded by a company, and many do. However, corporate research responds to a roadmap for a product. The inquiry shifts from “how does human motivation work” to “how do we increase day-seven retention.” Even if the math is the same, those are not the same question. The thing that has stuck with me as I’ve watched this develop over the past few years is how little public accounting there is. At least there is debate about the AI brain drain. The persuasive version appears in faculty pages that are subtly updated, acknowledgments sections, and margins.
This has a historical rhyme. Government labs and university grants funded the development of the semiconductor, the network, and the search algorithm that became Google—foundational science that Silicon Valley later commercialized. In essence, the agreement was that public funds generated public knowledge. That is reversed in the persuasion economy. Human movement knowledge is developed in the open and then incorporated into systems whose internal mechanisms are trade secrets. Perhaps this is simply the way applied science always proceeds. It’s also possible that, like any other talent market, we’re dealing with something truly consequential: the engineering of attention itself.
Though slowly, universities are beginning to react, primarily by competing on unfavorable terms. Because it believes that some scientists prefer intellectual freedom over stock options, Europe has started courting researchers with simplified visas and innovation funds. Some do. Ten years ago, it would have sounded ridiculous to read a researcher returning to academia as a step down, but this is no longer the case.
Even so, there is less noise in the lab by the engineering quad. Investors’ checkbooks indicate that they think knowledge is very important. The question that no one yet knows the answer to is whether the organizations that produce that knowledge can continue to exist after being so extensively exploited. The minds are purchased. What they are being asked to construct is the question.
