CHARLES SEIFE

Charles Seife is a professor of journalism at New York University, holding degrees from Princeton, Yale, and Columbia. He has been writing about math and science for over two decades; his most recent book is Virtual Unreality: Just Because the Internet Told You So, How Do You Know It’s True? (2014), from which this excerpt is taken. In this passage, Seife argues that Internet games often encourage behavior that doesn’t even bring users enjoyment, but provides game makers with crucial information that can be sold to others.

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This Is Your Brain . . .

In November 2012, legendary game designer Peter Molyneux released Curiosity. The game involved a giant box made up of tiny cubes. Players clicked on those tiny cubes to remove them, one at a time, layer by layer. Each time someone removed a cube, he earned a coin. Enough coins and he could buy a tool to remove those cubes more efficiently. Within a few weeks of its launch, several million people had played Curiosity, and about 300,000 visited daily, slowly chipping away at the monstrous virtual box. Four months after the game started, players had clicked away more than 200 layers, meaning that people had clicked tens of millions of times per day. Even with all these players clicking again and again, it took more than six months of work before the very last cube was clicked, revealing what was inside the box. It was an amazing and baffling waste of manpower — the spiritual antithesis of building the pyramids — for a single purpose: to get to the center of an imaginary object.

What’s at the center? While the game was under way, Molyneux was coy, promising only that the secret at the center would be “amazing” and “life changing.” But there was a catch. Only one player would find out. Yes, after millions of people click-click-click to chip away at an enormous virtual box for month after month, a single person got a glimpse of what was inside.1 You can almost hear the ghost of B. F. Skinner cackling in appreciation.

Curiosity is the reductio ad absurdum of a kind of experiment pioneered by B. F. Skinner, one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century. Skinner’s scientific work mostly involved operant conditioning — the use of punishments and rewards to modify an organism’s behavior. A pigeon or a rat might get a pellet of food or an electrical shock after acting in a certain way — hitting a lever, for example — and, over time, the animal would change its behavior to gain the most rewards and to avoid the punishments. To understand the process of conditioning, Skinner tweaked the experiments in various ways. For example, he might suddenly cut off the reward for hitting a lever and watch how long the rat would continue to press the lever in hopes of receiving a food pellet. (The behavior would gradually disappear, a process known as “extinction.”) Or he might decide to give pigeons birdseed on a completely random basis and watch what happened. (The pigeons would pick up weird behaviors — spinning counterclockwise three times or “tossing” their heads as if they were lifting an invisible bar — in hopes of getting seeds to drop. In other words, the pigeons had become superstitious.)

The only fundamental difference between Curiosity and a Skinnerian experiment is the level of reward. No self-respecting rat or pigeon would click a lever all day with the vague hope that several months from now, he’d be the lucky one out of millions of rats who got a reward for all that effort. We humans, though, are supreme in the animal kingdom in deferring our immediate gratification in hopes of a larger reward to come. As a result, in many ways we’re easier to manipulate than rats or pigeons. We’re happy to change our behavior in hopes of getting more abstract, more insubstantial, more infrequent rewards than any other creature under the sun.

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5 Skinner manipulated his rats and pigeons for a definite end: he wanted to learn about how changing an organism’s environment directly affected its behavior. So, too, are the designers of Curiosity manipulating us for a definite end. Precisely what end that is, we don’t know. But if you listen to what Molyneux has been saying, it’s clear that Curiosity is not a game but an experiment. It’s an attempt not to amuse people, but to look at their interactions with the cube and to draw inferences about their behavior. Molyneux made this plain on the Pocket Gamer website: “We’re capturing all the analytical data, and we’ll share what people are doing with the coins and what they’re saving up for and the analysis of how the cube decayed. All of that is just fascinating stuff,” he said. This data, Molyneux added, will help him make more games. It’s hard to be more explicit. As Curiosity players clicked away toward the center of the box, their every move was being observed.2 They were subjects in a three-million-person experiment, test animals who were performing a mindless task in a virtual fishbowl so that the experimenters can extract some knowledge that will allow them to manipulate people better.

Skinnerian methods existed long before the internet. Slot machines and instant-win lotteries, for example, are attractive — for some, addictive — because they dole out little rewards at intervals that urge us to keep playing. Other mind-control mechanisms were well known before the dawn of the digital era. In the 1950s, Solomon Asch did a series of experiments in which he showed that people asked to perform a very simple task — comparing the lengths of various lines — could be induced by others in the room not just to give the wrong answers, but also to believe that the wrong answers were correct. There are a number of other studies that demonstrate how social pressure can cause people to act against their better judgment, discard their morals, and even misperceive facts. Phil Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment used social pressure to get students to abuse others. Stanley Milgram’s experiments used social pressure to get subjects to give peers “dangerous” electric shocks. Social pressure, like Skinnerian conditioning, is a potent mind-control technique.

But what Curiosity and FarmVille3 make plain is that the internet makes it trivial to combine the raw power of individual Skinnerian conditioning with the mind-bending force of mass social pressure. Curiosity probably wouldn’t survive a week if the players were unaware of the other people chipping away at the box — the very fact that there are so many others working at the same task as you reinforces the seeming importance of the goal that everyone collectively is working toward. Similarly, the never-ending barrage of messages telling you how well your friends are doing at FarmVille and the constant requests to have you help tend their crops go a long way toward defusing the feeling that the whole pursuit is an idiotic waste of time. Skinnerian conditioning, crossed with social pressure, is now an ever-present invisible hand that tries to manipulate all of your actions on the internet. This is the hand that is making you act against your own self-interest. Once you recognize it, you see it everywhere, hovering over you, trying to make you click your mouse or press buttons on your smartphone, giving up your valuable time, money, or information in return for little or nothing at all.

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Foursquare is a social networking application that allows people to use their mobile devices to “check in” to various locations they visit. Each check-in earns points (which don’t seem to have any function other than putting your name on a leaderboard) and has the potential to earn a badge. If you’re the most frequent Foursquare visitor to a certain location, you can become the “mayor” of that site. Sometimes, checking in, earning a badge, or becoming the mayor of a site can earn a person a minor reward (the mayor of a Pizza Hut, for example, gets free breadsticks with every large pizza), but most of the time there’s no palpable reason for whipping out one’s cell phone and telling the Foursquare team where you are. Checking in becomes an end in itself, a meaningless scavenger hunt to collect badges and points in an attempt to beat out your friends who are also trying to collect those same badges and points. (And plenty of people take the game seriously enough to cheat at it — enough of them that the Foursquare team had to crack down on phony mayors.)

Other than the very rare reward and the pride of becoming the mayor of your local Burger King, there isn’t much value to checking in on Foursquare. In fact, there are some very real dangers in giving up your location to a company — and publishing it so that the whole world can see it. In 2010, three computer scientists set up PleaseRobMe.com, a website that used Foursquare and Twitter information to determine when a user was far away from his home — and then to broadcast that the person’s domicile was empty and ripe for burglary. The website made very clear something that people often overlook: information is valuable, and to give it up thoughtlessly is to act against your own interest. If you were required by a court order to check in to a website every time you entered a new location, you’d consider it an oppressive action of a police state. Yet, thanks to the abstract Skinnerian rewards provided by the Foursquare team, combined with the gentle social pressure of competing with friends and strangers in a never-ending scavenger hunt for badges, fascist oppression becomes a fun pastime. People don’t think twice about reflexively transmitting their whereabouts to a company that’s trying to bend your mind and make you a frequent visitor to your local Pizza Hut, Hess gas station, or RadioShack.4 Foursquare is not just attempting to gather information about your behavior, but subtly trying to modify it for the benefit of its sponsors — and for its own bottom line.

10 It’s no coincidence that the mechanics of Foursquare resemble those of a game like FarmVille; both are attempting to use the same mechanisms to make us do their bidding. FarmVille advertises itself as a game, but Foursquare is not even that. It’s a computer program that’s supposed to “[help] you and your friends make the most of where you are.” It’s not technically a game — it’s a social service — but in very many ways, its structure is familiar. Points, coins, badges, and rewards tickle the parts of our brains that respond to Skinnerian conditioning, while the social elements keep us entangled in a web of commitment — and of competitive drive not to fall behind our peers. In short, by creating artificial rewards and engineering social pressures, Foursquare controls your behavior by superimposing a video-game structure on your everyday life. This is “gamification.”

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Gamification is common on the internet. Media websites like The Huffington Post encourage you to comment on (and spread) stories by giving you badges (“level 2 networker”) or titles (“superuser”) for accomplishing achievements. Social networking websites like Klout give you scores for how many followers you have and how much influence you exert upon them. Job networking sites like LinkedIn reward you for having a lot of data on your profile page. Khan Academy, an educational site, gives students “energy points” and badges for completing lessons. But gamification extends well beyond the virtual world and, assisted by digital technology, is creeping into the outdoors. Nike has introduced a set of bracelets that track your motion and give you “fuel” points for your physical activity, grant you badges for achieving goals, and allow you to challenge your friends to various physical tasks. Coca-Cola created a “Happiness Quest” scavenger hunt, which encouraged people to use their cell phones to scan soda-vending machines in various locations.

It’s a brilliant strategy. Running around town taking photos of vending machines can never be considered fun in its own right. By superimposing a gamelike structure on top of that activity — a structure that uses operant conditioning and social pressure to give it heft — Coca-Cola functionally twisted our brains to redefine fun for us. And not so coincidentally, its definition of fun means buying things from vending machines.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea of gamification. It’s a tool that can be used for good — when we need to modify our behavior, Skinnerian techniques, combined with social pressures, can be a powerful way to bring us back in line. Look beneath the surface of Alcoholics Anonymous and you see proto-gamification: the sobriety coins are trinkets to give palpable Skinnerian reinforcement, and the group sessions provide the social network to keep you embedded in the “game.” It’s a technique that’s potent enough to wean us from alcohol, help us lose weight, make us exercise more.

In the days before the internet, such powerful techniques were limited by the sheer difficulty of creating and hooking in to the social networks needed to sustain the game. You already had to be somewhat committed to a cause to get your butt out of bed to visit your local AA or Weight Watchers meeting each week.

15 That’s no longer the case. Our social networks are now no further than our computer keyboards — or our mobile phones. We’re in constant touch with other people playing the game. Because of the near-universal interconnectedness that the internet provides, we no longer have to exercise our will to expose ourselves to a peer group; the peer group is always right there in our pockets, staring back at us every time we pull out our smartphones. The barrier to entering a peer-pressure group is so reduced that we don’t do it consciously anymore. We used to have to make an active decision to try to enter a behavior-modification program. Now we’re signing up for powerful mind-control pressures without an active decision to do so, without even understanding that this is what we’re doing when we sign up for the latest social fad.

At the same time, the volume and precision of data flowing back and forth between players and game masters allow for a complexity and frequency of rewards — badges, ribbons, achievements, points, coins — that would have been unimaginable prior to the advent of digital information. “Players” in one of these behavior-modification schemes are subject to a nearly unending and endlessly varied — yet personalized — flood of positive reinforcement so long as they continue playing the game. Computer algorithms dole out virtual treats to push you along, while the social networks keep you embedded. Pretty soon you lose perspective — you don’t realize how much you’ve given up to keep playing this game seven days a week.

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That’s one common denominator in all of these Skinnerian social games: you’re forced to give something up in order to belong. Sometimes you’re giving up something as obvious as money; by paying a few dollars to the FarmVille team, you boost your efficiency and social status so that you’re ahead of other, more casual players. But more often, you’re giving up something more abstract. Sometimes you’re merely giving up your time. Other times you’re giving up information — your location, your spending habits, even your weight — that allows companies to understand (and control) you better. Outside of the context of a social application, you wouldn’t casually give out this information to a stranger; you’d only reveal it for a good reason — say, to a doctor or a credit counselor. But nowadays we are willing to share almost everything reflexively, even to the point that it could be considered antisocial.

A decade ago, if a corporation asked for the e-mail addresses of all of your friends and family members, you’d almost certainly have refused. From the advent of the internet, everyone knew that e-mail addresses needed to be protected, to some extent, from outsiders who were constantly on the lookout for new people to spam. If you gave out people’s e-mail addresses willy-nilly, you’d probably piss off quite a few of them. But nowadays, people are happy to hand their entire e-mail contact list over to LinkedIn or Facebook or Google or Pinterest or any other site that convinces people to sell out their closest acquaintances in hopes of increasing their own social status. Our social norms are changing as a result of these commercial enterprises.

There’s no telling how far this trend will go. As powerful as Skinnerian conditioning with social pressure might be, we humans have a fairly potent defense against such manipulation: boredom. It may be that our short attention spans — our constant need for novelty — will limit the effect that these gamified behavior-modifying programs can have upon us. Perhaps with overuse of the technique we will become less susceptible. Zynga, the maker of FarmVille, is already seeing its revenue flatten out after its initial booming growth. Foursquare is even beginning to drop in popularity. Even so, there’s no question that, right now, the behavior-modification business, which uses digital technology to try to put us all in socially connected Skinner boxes, is a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. And this is because it works.

20 Seldom do we really question why we’re taking a particular action. We, as autonomous, intelligent beings, find it hard to imagine that our minds are being manipulated by unseen forces. Yet if you take a step back and look carefully at how you spend your time on the internet, on your computer, or on your smartphone, you might well discover that you might have been sacrificing your own self-interest — in almost imperceptible ways — to benefit a commercial enterprise. And it is through self-awareness that we can once again take control of our own brains, despite the parasites that are trying to use us for their own purposes.

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Topics for Critical Thinking and Writing

  1. Early in his essay, Charles Seife discusses the famous behaviorist psychologist B. F. Skinner, who used “punishments and rewards to modify an organism’s behavior” (para. 3). Yet in recounting some of Skinner’s experiments, Seife states, “we’re easier to manipulate than rats or pigeons” (para. 4). Do you agree with Seife’s statement? Support your stance with specific details.

  2. In paragraph 6, Seife argues that people have exhibited responses like Skinner’s rats and pigeons in ways long before the Internet gave them opportunities to do so. He cites slot machines and lottery tickets as two examples. Research and argue how people are influenced to engage in behavior that is not in their best interests, such as gambling. How does that reflect Skinner’s ideas about behaviorism?

  3. The presence of applications on smartphones often works against the best interests of the user, by providing virtual benefits at real-life cost — in terms of either time, money, or information. Given this rather unequal relationship, why do such applications continue to be popular? Cite examples beyond those mentioned in the excerpt, and analyze how they work to modify a user’s behavior for the good of someone else.

  4. In paragraph 9, Seife recounts how three scientists set up a site called PleaseRobMe.com. The purpose was to show how much information people were giving away on their phones, to the point that someone could rob their home, safe in the knowledge that the inhabitants were away. Why are people so willing to divulge information that in other circumstances they would not — such as telling strangers when they’ll be away from home? How does this connect to Seife’s theory about the behavioral patterns of people who play games like Curiosity?

  5. Social media sites come at a price — not of money, but of information. Why are people willing to give out information about themselves, their family, and their friends for an opportunity to be part of the site? Do research on the psychological value of feeling part of a community. Is this a fair tradeoff, in your opinion? Support your response with specific details.

  6. In paragraph 19, Seife says that “the behavior-modification business, which uses digital technology to try to put us all in socially connected Skinner boxes, is a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. And this is because it works.” Therefore, should there be regulation or oversight of the use of such technologies that invade our privacy and change our behavior? Why, or why not?