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Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab
| He turned his research into a class on how to harness human psychology to make tech products irresistible. Just as a dog can be trained to respond to a ringing bell, the theory went, humans can be conditioned to respond to a pop-up notification.
| Students in Fogg’s “Facebook Class” had one major assignment: build your own Facebook app. The projects from the 2007 cohort were not works of genius – the most popular app allowed users to send “hotness” points to their Facebook friends – but they got people hooked. In the space of ten weeks, they collectively gained 16 million users and made $1 million dollars in advertising revenue. Some of the students made so much money they decided to dropout and launch their own start-ups.
| The lessons of persuasive technology spread from Stanford to Silicon Valley, when one of Fogg’s alumni, Nir Eyal ’08 M.B.A. published the bestselling book 'Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products'. It taught aspiring entrepreneurs how to coerce people into compulsively using technology and became the industry’s Bible on psychological manipulation and addiction engineering.
| Thousands of Stanford graduates, enticed by the incentives of the attention economy, rode the social media wave and made their fortune by monetizing people’s distraction.
| The most powerful design features exploit human insecurities. For example, LinkedIn publicly displays how many professional connections users have, tapping into deep-seated desires for social approval and popularity. Tech apologists respond that social media addiction is simply an unintended consequence of a platform with good intentions: to connect people and provide an outlet for digital expression.
| But Stanford’s research into these invasive tactics show that the platforms were designed to be addictive from the very start.
| Even as the evidence against social media grows, students still lust after a software engineering job at Facebook and dream of creating the next Snapchat on campus. A heroic few claim they will be the ones to change tech culture from the inside. But when Tristan Harris ’06, who also studied under Fogg, tried to address the problem of addiction as chief design ethicist of Google, he ran up against apathy and ignorance, and ultimately left the company."
| -This is all from a report by a Stanford student. "How Stanford Profits from Addiction"
https://stanfordreview.org/how-stanford-profits-tech-addiction-social-media/#:~:text=published%20the%20bestselling%20book%20Hooked,psychological%20manipulation%20and%20addiction%20engineering.
| okay that's cool but if you really cared then you would hold my hand to keep the social media away from me :c
| Quality Schizoid post
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| "Not only were major social media networks – Snapchat, Instagram, and LinkedIn – founded by Stanford alumni, but the psychological tricks and triggers they use to hook people were developed by researchers and students here. Back in 1998, one of Stanford’s social scientists, B.J. Fogg, founded the 'Persuasive Technology Lab' to research how tech products could alter people’s attitudes and behavior.