Outside The Box

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

It began with the bill from that famous online company that offers “free shipping” as one of the benefits of membership. Of course we can’t tell you that Amazon is the name of the company, or that Walmart does the same thing, along with many others. You’ve probably noticed you can buy that gizmo for $9.95 with free shipping, or scrolling down a bit you can get it from a third-party vendor for $4.95 plus $5 for shipping.

You’ll notice the same math at the big box store’s online site, where the cost of the item you pick up in the store is about half of the cost of the item shipped “freely” to your front door. There is no such thing as free shipping. Someone should do a study.

I read studies. I was about to say, “I like reading studies,” but that isn’t exactly true. It takes effort, especially when the field is not one with which you are familiar. But the alternative, if one is to be informed, is to take at more or less face value the claims of the professional talkers and information peddlers, and to paraphrase George Carlin, news organizations are just billboards for the companies that own them.

We see through a glass darkly. What we think we know, we remember from what we have read or heard or experienced, layer upon layer of interpretation of what our senses tell us. Even the scientific study is an interpretation of the data, an interpretation influenced by cognitive bias, and often by whoever paid for the study. The study, however, has the thinnest covering of layers of interpretation, unlike, for example, a news billboard reporting on the opinions of celebrities.

Perhaps the biggest motivation behind the scientific study is a sincere seeking after truth, even when we discount for “tobacco science” and the polls which oversample certain groups in an effort to encourage political momentum.

We can also eliminate the studies motivated by grant money which, if you follow government expenditures, turn out to be quite numerous. Consider The U.S. Department of Defense spending $283,500 on a special unit dedicated to monitoring gnatcatchers, or The National Science Foundation receiving $856,000 to study if lions could be trained to walk on treadmills. The National Institutes of Health funded a $592,527 study to explain why chimpanzees throw their feces. Perhaps they were trying to gain a better understanding of the political process.

Yet even without these examples of studies which do not appear to be particularly motivated by a desire to discover truth, the quest remains a prime motivator for scientists, researchers, and average citizens who are no less truth-seekers than the professionals.

Which brings us to the study we offer this week for your consideration. It was conducted by Patrick Fagan of the University of the Arts in London and it’s titled, “Clicks and Tricks: The Dark Art of Online Persuasion.” The study addresses the practice of “nudging,” which is a psychological technique to “influence people’s judgment, choices, or behavior in a predictable way…It works by leveraging cognitive boundaries, biases, routines, and habits to guide individuals toward certain decisions or actions.”

Here are some examples: Fake scarcity – Only 3 left in stock. Fake social proof – 3247 five-star reviews. Confirm shaming – Click here if you don’t want to save 25% on your next purchase. Roach motel tactics – It was easy to subscribe to this service but there’s no link for unsubscribing. Roadblocks – Up to 30 days required to be removed from this mailing list. Disguised ads – instead of closing the popup window the button opens a new webpage. And “free shipping,” of course.

The list is quite long, and it underlines the extensive amount of research and effort which goes into designing an online experience that has a better chance of separating us from the money in our banking accounts.

Nudging, along with logical fallacies, gaslighting, and other psychological methods designed to acquire our money and our votes, are nothing new, but their effects are magnified and accelerated by information technology. And that brings us back to the studies. Nothing mentioned in the “dark arts” study is outside the boundaries of common sense, and this is true for many of the studies one can find that are circulating between cyberspace and our institutions.

It appears that our culture is experiencing a crisis of common sense. The necessity of scientific studies to confirm the fundamental knowledge held by a community suggests that the very bedrock of that society is unstable. This brings to mind Hannah Arendt’s observation from last week: “The purpose of constant lying is not to convince people of a falsehood, but to create a state where nobody believes anything at all.”