Something major happened in Silicon Valley in 2007 that completely changed our relationship to technology, though the general public was told nothing about it. That year, a secretive science called Persuasive Design Technology was born, and it’s the primary reason that it’s been such a struggle for parents to regulate screen time for the last 20 years. If screen time is difficult in your house, Persuasive Design is to blame.
Persuasive Design Technology was invented by a behavioral scientist at Stanford University named BJ Fogg. Fogg spent 10 years exploring ways to take everything he knew about behavioral science and combine it with technology to create apps that persuade and motivate us. He described his work by saying, “I design systems to influence human behavior.”
By 2007, Fogg had perfected this new science and founded a class at Stanford called the Persuasive Design Technology Lab. He taught 75 of Stanford’s best young tech designers the science of how to motivate human behavior and then asked them to create apps using his techniques. (Instagram originated as one student’s homework assignment.) Just ten weeks after this Persuasive Design Technology class ended, the apps these students designed had amassed 16 million users and taken in $1 million. Fogg quickly became known as “The Millionaire Maker.” The tech industry immediately hired these designers, asking them to add Persuasive Design to as many of their products as they could.
Persuasive Design Technology—such as loot boxes in gaming, Youtube’s autoplay, notifications, and the ability to scroll infinitely—works by lighting up the reward system in our brain. This system evolved to help us survive by rewarding us with the neurotransmitter dopamine whenever we engage in survival behavior, like eating, seeking the company of others, and sex. We often hear dopamine referred to as a “pleasure chemical,” but it’s much more accurate to think of dopamine as a “motivation chemical.” It’s responsible for our feelings of wanting, craving, and seeking. The higher an activity raises our dopamine, the more we crave it, and the more motivated we are to do it.
However, because our brains evolved in a Paleolithic environment of scarcity, our reward system can glitch when confronted by modern activities and substances. Many of these (alcohol, nicotine, opioid drugs, and slot machine gambling) raise our dopamine much higher than our brains can cope with. These high dopamine activities can hijack our reward system, causing us to crave, seek, and repeat behaviors that aren’t survival based.
What Fogg perfected in the 10 years he spent developing Persuasive Design was how to make technology that significantly raises our dopamine levels. Many of the apps we now use raise our dopamine as high as addictive drugs. A handful of tech industry insiders, including several of Fogg’s former students, have come forward to say they regret adding Persuasive Design to the technology we use. Tim Kendall, the former head of monetization at Facebook, testified before Congress in 2020 saying, “We [Facebook] didn’t just create something useful and fun. We took a page from Big Tobacco, working to make our offering addictive at the outset.” He went on to say that their intent was to make Facebook as addictive as cigarettes. Today, some of the tech products with the highest levels of Persuasive Design are video games, social media, and YouTube—the screen activities our kids use the most. The parents of Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids grew up using technology that was a neutral tool. The technology we are buying for our kids today is anything but—it’s chock full of addictive behavioral design. We have unwittingly become the first generation of parents to have to navigate this shift.
Persuasive Design is the missing piece of the puzzle when we’re wondering WHY it’s so hard to set limits on tech, and why it’s so hard for our kids to self-regulate. It’s why we remember being able to self-regulate our own gaming when we were young, but can’t understand why our kids struggle with it. Tech companies are getting better at Persuasive Design every year, hiring psychologists, behavioral scientists, and neuroscientists to ensure their apps raise our dopamine as high as possible. As one of the whistleblowers from BJ Fogg’s class now says, “There are 1000 people on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation you have.”
Learning about Persuasive Design is one of the best things families can do to make screen time easier to manage. Great resources for parents are the book Better Than Real Life by Richard Freed and the documentary The Social Dilemma on Netflix. There’s a brand new book that explains Persuasive Design to kids ages 8-12 called The Amazing Generation by Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price. We can also remove some of the Persuasive Design from the tech products our kids are using. Check out my website mindful-media.net to find my printouts How To Spot Persuasive Design and “Removing Persuasive Design from Technology.