Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again

For Johann Hari, people’s increasing attention deficits are partly to blame on the habit-forming design of many websites, particularly social media. Hari interviews several web engineers and reveals that their understanding of human psychology is as essential to their work as their knowledge of coding. This has allowed developers to exploit vulnerabilities in the human psyche to make sites as addictive as possible, coaxing users to spend more and more time online.

Tristan Harris’s computer science education at Stanford included classes that taught him the “psychological insights and tricks that had been discovered about how to change human beings and to get them to do what you want” (109). When Harris was developing Instagram, he included immediate reinforcements in the app, inspired by B.F. Skinner’s studies about using positive reinforcement to program behavior. Indeed, Harris and his classmates implemented psychological “insights and tricks” so successfully in their web designs that they nicknamed Professor B.J. Fogg, a Stanford behavioral scientist, “the millionaire maker” (110). Tech designer Nir Eyal showcased similar strategies in his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, which was aimed at fellow web designers. In his work, Eyal encourages developers to use “mind manipulation” to target users with content that will soothe “internal triggers” (148) and make checking the app a habit.