The easiest way to catch a raccoon is to make a trap. The simplest trap you can make is with an old aluminum can. Just cut it in half and then put something shiny in it, like a penny. Hammer in some nails leaving a small opening for the raccoon to fit its paw into.
This works because raccoons love shiny things. When it sees the penny it will reach in to grab it. When its paw is closed, it won’t fit back out of the small opening of nails.
This sounds ingeniously simple until you realize that if the raccoon lets go of the penny, its hand can fit back out of the trap. It can escape whenever it wants. But it won’t. It’ll stay there struggling against the trap until it starves to death or you release it.
Why Doesn’t The Raccoon Just Let Go?
When the raccoon sees something shiny its brain lights up and makes it really want the shiny object. This is its reward system kicking in. Depending on how powerful the reward is, the reward system can override other sectors of the brain, like the ones responsible for its survival.
Essentially, the reward system hijacks the animal’s brain and prevents it from behaving rationally. This doesn’t happen because raccoons are dumb animals. In fact, they’re one of the smartest species in the animal kingdom, along with dolphins, elephants, octopuses, and chimpanzees. The irrational behavior exhibited by the raccoon exists in all animals, even human beings.
What we’re seeing here is that when there is a reward involved, animals tend to act irrationally to obtain that reward. This irrationality is consistent and predictable. This creates a vulnerability in the psychology of the animal that can be exploited by anyone smart enough to notice it and has an incentive to do so.
In the raccoon’s case, a simple trap showcases how this psychological vulnerability can be exploited. Traps that exploit an animals psychology are called cognitive traps. With physical traps, like a bear trap, there is no physical way the bear can escape. With cognitive traps, the animal can escape at any time but its own psychology prevents it from escaping.
Cognitive traps have been used by humans for thousands of years. However, only in the last few years have we seen humans designing cognitive traps for members of their own species. Although we’re much smarter than raccoons, it turns out that traps for humans are just as simple to design – if you’re smart enough to spot their vulnerabilities.
Several years ago, Mark Zuckerberg and FaceBook spotted a human vulnerability and decided to exploit it. In 2001, they pioneered the largest cognitive trap in human history: the like button.
When asked about the creation of the like button, Facebook stated that it’s purpose was to encourage positivity. By establishing positive feedback as the default and only option, it would transform Facebook into a more positive place. This explanation seems plausible but there also might have been some other reasons. The creation of the like button seems to draw upon a series of experiments conducted in the 1970’s by a psychologist named Michael Zeiler.
In Zeiler’s experiments, pigeons were trained to press buttons. If the pigeon pressed a button it was rewarded with a food pellet. As the experiment progressed, Zeiler made an interesting observation: when the pigeons were rewarded with pellets only sometimes, they’d peck the button more frequently than when they received pellets every time.
At the time, this fact was simply noted by Zeiler who had no idea of the implications this fact would hold if applied to humans. Several decades later, Facebook rolled out a simple psychological experiment on the 100 million test human subjects that they had.
Note how similar the like button is to the pigeon experiment.
Action
A pigeon pecks a button
You post something on Facebook
Reward
The pigeon receives a food pellet
You receive a like
Variable Rewards
The pigeon receives food pellets sometimes
You receive more likes on some posts fewer likes on others
With the like button, Facebook managed to perfectly combine two of our psychological vulnerabilities to create an incredibly powerful cognitive trap.
Vulnerability #1: Need For Peer Approval
In the case of the like button, the reward isn’t a food pellet, it’s the approval of our peers. Although most of us won’t admit it, one of our deepest most innermost desires is for our peers to like us, to respect us, and to love us. By having people simply click like, Facebook figured out a way to transfer the feelings of peer approval from real life to the pixels on our screens.
Vulnerability #2: Variable Rewards
When things are predictable we quickly grow bored with them. When the outcome varies, we stay hooked. When we receive lots of likes we receive a high that feels like real peer approval. When we don’t, we feel the real feelings of being socially snubbed. The occasional lows keep us coming back for the next high.
The Aftermath
In an age where a person’s attention is the most valuable thing in the economy, there lays a massive incentive on the table for corporations to design traps that keep it at their disposal. The success of the like button has resulted in a race by corporations to design even more effective traps– traps that people will find impossible to escape. Think of Twitters retweet button or YouTube’s autoplay. As the competition increases, the traps will only get better. The same human ingenuity that drives progress in medicine and space travel also drives the design and creation of cognitive traps. These designs aren’t at their apex, in fact, they’re only just beginning.
We are the most advanced organisms on the planet but we should not feel superior to animals lower than us on the food chain. The same set of psychological vulnerabilities that exists in these animals, also exist in us. These vulnerabilities reside under our conscious awareness and control. They can easily be exploited by those with an advanced understanding of the human mind.
This sounds rather ominous but there’s an upside:
Cognitive traps have a crucial flaw. Once you understand how they work, they are extremely easy to escape. Future posts will identify pragmatic approaches to escaping cognitive traps.
Stay tuned with https://nosurf.org/ or this might just be your future:
Notes:
The pigeon experiments I mentioned came from Chapter 5: Feedback in Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and The Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter