Building H #92: Don't Blame the Rat

In 1948, B.F. Skinner, the famed psychologist and behaviorist, published his novel Walden Two, in which a scientist (and Skinner doppelganger) confessed to how frustrated he became when the rats in his experiments failed to act as he expected. "Behave, damn you!" he shouted at the creatures. "Behave as you ought!"

In time, though, Skinner’s scientist realized the rats weren’t to blame at all. They were simply responding to the environment - the box - that he had dropped them in. It was futile to blame the rat.

Skinner himself went far beyond rats (and pigeons) in his work, but the observation that our behavior is a result of our context was a constant. Skinner was a determined determinist, insisting that human behavior was largely dictated not by our individual intentions but by the incentives and rewards that surround our everyday lives. Indeed, towards the end of his career, Skinner was asked by a television interviewer, “Where does that leave free will? Because we all believe we have a choice whether to do things or not to do them.”

“It leaves it in the position of a fiction,” Skinner replied.

We’re not quite as pessimistic as Skinner (or his fellow determinist and free-will naysayer, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky). But we have been thinking a lot lately about free will, especially how much our daily life is deliberately designed to lead us to make specific decisions and down preferred paths - preferred by the product, if not by us. And like rats in Skinner’s mazes, humans consequently behave as they will, not as they ought.

In the digital realm, these predestinations are the stuff of what’s called “dark patterns” or “deceptive patterns” - the insidious tricks of UX design that compel people to click and consent to things that they almost certainly do not truly want to do. Think of those offers that expire in 8 minutes (and counting), or preselected options that get you to subscribe to something you just wanted to try once, or apps that insist you give access to all your contacts before you can proceed. The digital world, we’ve all learned, is a place where anything can be had, except perhaps what you want. So much so that last year the FTC issued an advisory on Dark Patterns, promising to prosecute companies that illegally coerce consumers. 

The same has long been true in real life (IRL!), too, where we’re constantly nudged and coaxed to shop and buy and consume and eat stuff that maybe our better selves would rather avoid. The entire 20th century could be described as a hundred-year-long experiment in turning humans into consumers, creating demand for products. These Mad Men persuasions weren’t just manipulative, they could be poisonous. In 1987, Oxford philosopher and ethicist Roger Crisp argued that advertising was outright immoral, insofar as it sabotages someone’s free will. “Persuasive advertising overrides the autonomy of consumers, in that it manipulates them without their knowledge and for no good reason,” he wrote. “Such advertising causes desires in such a way that a necessary condition of autonomy -the possibility of decision - is removed.”

So what’s happened in the 35 years since Crisp’s jeremiad? Rather cynically, two things: First, any critique of or outrage at our consumerist culture has withered to the fringes, dismissed as out-of-touch anticapitalist absurdity. And second, the Internet enabled rapid, iterative optimization of persuasive tactics, creating a playbook for consumer cajolery that would make Don Draper blush - a playbook that has found its way back into IRL, pulling people into purchases as invisibly and inevitably as gravity pulls our feet to the ground.

Think about how hard it is to unsubscribe from your cable company, or to switch mobile providers. For as much as these companies make it easy to do everything online, to cancel they typically offer no way to cancel or switch without going offline and making a phone call (where you’ll wait on hold for 45 minutes or more). Maximum convenience to sign up, maximum inconvenience to go away. 

Or consider how, since 2018, McDonald's has installed thousands of interactive kiosks inside restaurants to order. These kiosks don’t just save on labor: they are optimized to upsell you into extra sides and larger portions (TIL McDonalds eliminated its “Supersize” option back in 2004 after bad publicity and the movie Super Size Me - but quietly added an “Upsize” option more recently). 

After being introduced at McDonald’s these kiosks boosted sales by 6% - and digital sales (including kiosks) now represent 25% of overall revenue. Other fast food companies have followed suit en masse.

Also notable is the development in recent years of foods with highly engineered “bliss points” that target biological receptors for sugar, salt, and fat. As the Washington Post recently reported, this strategy began in the 1980s when tobacco companies - well versed in developing addictively unhealthy products - began acquiring America’s largest food conglomerates, including Kraft, Nabisco, and General Foods, among other food companies. Soon the companies were releasing “hyper-palatable” foods that became runaway bestsellers. Tobacco companies divested from food holdings in the early 2000’s, but by then the rest of the food industry had caught on to the idea of engineering irresistible foods - with sugar and salt added these days to many foods that previously never had them (for the full sordid story, read the report from University of Kansas researchers in the journal (wait for it)... Addiction.)

The upselling in the food industry has happened in other industries as well, as neuromarketing and psychic sales have found ways to drive consumers to purchase more and more. Just consider the arms race of SUVs, which has now reached the inevitable absurdity of Tesla’s Cybertruck. Even if you think that ride looks ridiculous, the massive growth of the average car or truck size in the US has been a more quiet but no less alarming shift. 

So who's to blame? Companies insist they are just giving people what they want. There are always healthy choices (or smaller cars) available for purchase. The companies are just offering choices - they aren’t forcing people to buy more or buy bigger!

But let’s loop back to Skinner. Do people really have a choice? Are they really making decisions independent of other factors or influences? The paradox of choice, after all, suggests that too many choices become paralyzing - and can often force us to make a decision when what we may really want is… nothing at all.

There are some bright spots! Some research has explored how neuromarketing (think nudges) can be optimized for health (not just exploitation). One example: In 2016 researchers published results showing that twice as many people ordered healthy foods when they were positioned in the upper-left of a menu (versus the upper right). In the digital realm, the Prosocial Design Network shows designers how to create effective, humanistic product experiences that reinforce positive values.

These approaches, though, remain outgunned by the larger context of consumer products that keep us dashing on our hedonic treadmills, buying things that promise to make us happier but just leave us in the same place. Holistically, the problem is even bigger than one treadmill. Indeed, we might think of society in 2023 as life in a hedonic maze, where we scurry from one purchase to another, convinced that we’ll find our way to freedom. 

As Skinner said, you can’t blame the rats. But don’t we all want to be more than rats, anyway?

Let us know what you think. Comments are open below.

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