Greg Ebbecke

You hit my main point at the end, Humans by nature can be irrational, impulsive beings.

My post was less about hitting on any one point than to highlight that so much is interconnected. If you are concerned about certain behaviors, where do you start?

The temptation may be to blame “social media” for our ills, but it’s not the only way humans can potentially misread their dopamine signals.

Is there discussion needed on the roles the devices play?

If the devices are part of this, should the discussion be broader about how expanding the functionality of the devices accelerate “reward-seeking” impulses above and beyond social media (i.e. removing the friction of “buying something” through NFC “bumps”, “swipe right”, etc.)?

If our “reward-seeking” is the issue, how do other decisions (like the Starbucks mention) factor in or not to our ability to elicit the change some ask for?

Is this technology amplifying underlying behaviors? Shaping them in new ways? Or is this just a new “signal” we are learning moderate?

I’m glad you pointed out how there cannot be a universal standard here, even as people look to “the best way to manage social media”, etc. These experiences are inherently personal. At the same time, as we seek out what’s “best” for ourselves and / or our customers, is there benefit in at least some discussion about how what we want fits into the “bigger picture”?

Thanks for weighing in! I appreciate that you hit on many of the “personal math” elements as well. It’s really not my place to comment on how anyone spends their money, but I think there is a deficit of financial education especially as these devices and content become “critical” to participating with society at younger ages.

Also agree the stock market is yet another example of this type of human behavior at work.

As you are likely seeing with most of my posts, my general view on most things is that the “thing” is rarely the issue. We generally need to have figure out how to communicate better and, in some cases, stop “doing” long enough to assess why we do it. If that conversation is just with yourself, that’s fine.

You can get rich being a day trader and have a fulfilling retirement even with a Starbucks habit. It may just require a longer viewpoint to keep all of those metaphorical balls in the air until the end.

The “you” is intended to be the reader. Not assuming anyone has these beliefs, but to put them in the shoes of someone who might / in the presence of someone espousing them.

My expertise is not in behavioral science, so I welcome any outside perspective that validates anything I believe. I believe I understand the general theory enough to apply the idea broadly, but welcome a more nuanced take on how these decisions / responses manifest.

My broad hypothesis here is that people are incredibly stressed in general, more so due to the pandemic. It’s hard to deal with stress directly, so we take pleasure in our own variety of “escapes”. The technology we use makes these “escapes” more accessible, but because the devices and applications are novel, “proper training” doesn’t yet exist. Naturally, we gravitate towards those incremental moments of joy more than we realize.

While some, like you, introduce controls (i.e. turning off notifications) to moderate their behavior, most I do not believe have realized how those individual “momentary” check-ins accumulate. Going to our lecture, none of us spend 3-4 hours a day continuously in our device.

So whether it’s social media, coffee or something else, those decisions are adding up because we haven’t refined our perspective of how they fit into the big picture.

Buying the new phone “makes sense” because we got so much use out of the last phone, etc.

Eventually, we’re hemmed in by the sum of those incremental decisions – the habits that are much more difficult to role back and feel much more essential.

While I agree in theory that the devices are customizable and thus the user is always in “control”, I find that the reality is that the algorithms and related tech can ultimately play that primary role. We accept it because it’s designed to mimic / reward our choices, but in time how can we tell if it’s making them for us?

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/01/covid-19-pandemic-has-increased-stress-say-55percent-in-harvard-unc-study.html

There were a bunch of these articles popping up for the last year.

I actually agree with you more that “busy” is perceived more than real. Similar to how “you can never have enough money” (i.e. your spending tends to adjust to your income), I find that everyone is always “busy” because most people perceive the work to be done in a vacuum vs. any consistent frame of reference.

I also think “irrationality” is a matter of perspective and access to information. I’m an optimist on human behavior. I truly believe most people, given perfect information, would do the right thing. Even then, they tend to make the “rational” decision based on the info they do have (or at least the info they prioritize).

That said, if what we think is “rational” is framed by the bubble we live in, my pessimism kicks in. I think people are becoming conditioned to have information fed to them rather than seek out information. And when I ask myself “why” it’s happening this way, it’s hard not to see marketing and technology companies having some culpability in shaping the behavior by encouraging “quick wins” rather than putting in the work to “earn the win”.

In a crude metaphor, when I need to use physical money to buy something, think how much thought (and time) it takes to decide the most rational way to spend it.

How much thought goes into a purchase when you can literally bump your phone and run?

Neither is “right” or “wrong”. It can even be perfectly rational to get that $3 coffee, but the “rational” short-view may not align with the “rational” long-view. There’s just not terribly much room to think on that because the next temptation is being served to you before you’ve really had a chance to digest the last.

At that point, why even leave the house?

For those sci-fi fans out there, Minority Report (starring Tom Cruise) is probably the best vision of the former (the mall scene) and Surrogates (starring Bruce Willis) might give you an idea of another world where the meta consumes the physical. Plenty of others (Ready Player One, but I already gave you a Spielberg title).

The technology is probably closer than we want to admit, but the computing power to scale a “real world” experience dynamically would be immense. Think of the sacrifices in “realism” some games like Fortnite make to deliver their seamless experience. Then, consider the realism Hollywood can generate, if limited to a static “shot”. If that’s a bandwidth of what’s possible, how much time until the compromise is discovered?

Have you guys seen the 3D cat in Japan installed to create foot-traffic in small towns struggling with slower tourism? Check it out: https://www.cnn.com/style/article/3d-cat-billboard-tokyo/index.html. The cat is huge, terrifying, and entrancing. The idea that immersive ads are nothing but approaching us at lightning speed is also jarring. It is easy to see 3D ads replacing the cat, or even more likely, the cat as an influencer to represent cat food or cat toy brands. As a marketer, the space for creativity is now limitless with the right combination of technology. But as a citizen, I increasingly wonder the border between art and ads, between marketing and creation for creation’s sake (and which was the cat, truly?).