Book of the Week: Evil by Design

29 Jun 2015

evil_by_design This week’s book is Evil by Design. The premise of the book is that for designing for humans, we should start with the seven deadly sins, which are fundamental human traits. Each chapter deals with a deadly sin and gives examples of how those sins are being used to manipulate you. After reading the book, I see evil all around me. It is the devil’s work! The Seven Deadly Sins

The principles laid out in each of the seven deadly sin chapters can be applied either for good or for evil. How far you take it is up to you. There is a continuum from persuasion to deception. That continuum takes in everything from being totally open, through being economical with (or neglecting to mention) certain truths, through bent truths and white lies, to all-out deception.

Pride

In other words, changing your opinion (that smoking can kill you) is much easier than changing your behavior (smoking). So the dissonance is resolved by rationalizing your opinions, even if that leaves you believing something strange.

The evil side of pride is hubris. After reading this chapter, I thought of Fox News and how people will maintain opinions that are strange, because they need to rationalize things. One example of rationalization is buyer’s remorse. People look for stuff that will justify their purchase by imaging experiences, which don’t happen after buying the product. The chapter also mentions, closure, people’s desire for a firm solution rather than agonizing in ambiguity. Sloth

Barry Schwartz suggests in the paradox of choice that choice paralyzes us and makes us dissatisfied.

People are lazy. Companies do a lot of things to capitalize on laziness, like having to uncheck something to opt out. Too much choice can actually stop people from proceeding, so it is best to reduce things enough to give an illusion of choice. Gluttony

Sites also make us fearful of missing out-scarcity, exclusivity, and loss aversion play on the fears behind gluttony.

People fear losing things they already have. They don’t think rationally. You value something you own.

Counterintuitively, if Turkers were paid any more, they may start comparing the work to other potential work they could be doing and start seeing it less like entertainment and more like a badly paying chore.

There’s a famous scene from Tom Sawyer, where he gets the other boys to paint the fence by framing it as a skilled thing that it is a privilege to do.

Gluttony is a failure of self-control.

The chapter talks about how reciprocation can guilt people into doing something for you. This is why they send you address mailing stickers when asking for donation or sending you a coin in the mail. When I was on campus, a monk looking person tried to give me the Bhagavad Gita. Then he asked me for a donation. Then he asked for the book back when I didn’t give him a donation. I was going to sell the book on eBay. When you give something away, you can’t take it back. I also owned a copy of the Bhagavad Gita from a previous course. Anger

Anger is fear with a focus.

A common persuasion technique involves inducing fear by scaring people, and then giving those people a target and a way to resolve the fear through anger.

This reminded me again of Fox News. Induce fear, then give a target. Nine things used to sell pseudoscience from UC Santa Cruz professor of psychology, Anthony Pratkanis.

  1. Create a phantom
  2. Set a rationalization trap
  3. Manufacture source credibility and sincerity
  4. Establish a granfalloon
  5. Use self-generated persuasion
  6. Construct vivid appeals
  7. Use pre-persuasion
  8. Frequency use heuristics and commonplaces
  9. Attack opponents though innuendo and character assassination.

Envy Envy can be manufactured through desire and aspiration. Apple (AAPL) creates envy with

Lust

Lust is the starting point; envy and greed are the results.

Lust is the intense desire for any item.

This blunder made a difference. Of the four experimental conditions (near perfect, near perfect with a blunder, mediocre, and mediocre with blunder), the superior person was rated most attractive when the person blundered, followed by the non-blundering superior person, the non-blundering mediocre person, and finally the blundering mediocre person.

Appearing slightly fallible makes a person seem more attractive if you are already superior. This is know as the pratfall effect. People desire someone who is almost perfect, but imperfect enough to humanize them. It helps you manufacture desire. Then you use desire to get commitment. This chapter also talks about the Benjamin Franklin effect. Greed

Paul Piff, a social psychologist at UC Berkeley, found that people who “had more” (those in higher social classes) were less ethical, and more likely to lie, cheat or steal. Interestingly, it wasn’t the more greedy people made it to higher social status, but that getting to a higher social class reinforced those behaviors, making people more likely to be greedy.

Behaviors between people who are in contention over a resource. | Help other | Harm other
—|—|—
Help self | cooperation | selfishness
Harm self | altruism | spite
Gambler’s fallacy, believing that a win is becoming more likely after a series of losses. You want some winning or appearance of winning to keep people hooked. the random payouts are more effective than known payouts. this is used by game companies. when they say games are evil, i think this is what they meant. The Dunning-Kruger effect describes when an unskilled person overestimates their abilities in relation to others.

It shows that the view we form on what is cheap and what is expensive is somewhat arbitrary.

Anchoring. People are hesitant to rent a place at current prices, because they are anchored with lower prices. A person moving from a more expensive place would find the rent to be cheap. Knowledge has made you dissatisfied, but conditions are the same. On a menu I can list expensive items that I don’t expect you to buy to make the other items look cheap in comparison. People are not good at judging absolutes. They see things in a relative world. Evil Design

In the introduction I said that the truly great evil designs are ones where people will enter willing into the deal even when the terms are exposed to them.

When people knowing enter into a deal, it is like signing a contract with the devil. Time to start using evil for good.