Internet users are wising up to persuasive "nudge" techniques

Every now and again, a company will come up with a product "innovation" that seems to deprive people of their free will, driving great masses of internet users to look for Pokemon, or tend virtual farms, or buy now with one-click, or flock to Upworthy-style "You won't believe what happened next" stories, or be stampeded into buying something because there are "only two left" and "14 people have bought this item in the past 24 hours."

These techniques, "nudges" drawn from behavioral economics, can exert a powerful pull on the public, driving unconsidered and even compulsive behavior.

But marketing techniques don't age well: once you encounter a trick a few times, it starts to lose power, in the way that so many phenomena regress to the mean. Behavioral marketers know that they can prolong the efficacy of these techniques with "intermittent reinforcement" (that is, using each technique sparingly, at random intervals, which make them more resistant to our ability to grow accustomed to them), but marketers have a collective action problem, a little dark-side Tragedy of the Commons: it's in the advertising industry's overall interest to limit the use of techniques so that we don't get accustomed to them, but any given marketer knows that if they don't use the technique to exhaustion, some other marketer will, so each marketer "overgrazes" the land (that is, us), in order to beat the others.

Shoshanna Zuboff's theory of "surveillance capitalism" is grounded in the idea that these interventions will gain effectiveness over time, and that marketers will discover powerful new persuasive tools with machine learning. Read the rest