In a previous article, I shared what persuasive design is – and the behavioral psychology behind it. This week, we’re going to take a walk through recent history to see how we got to where we are today.

The father of persuasive technology is a man named B.J. Fogg, an adjunct professor at Stanford. He is also the founder and director of the university’s Behavior Design Lab, which was formerly known as the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab. In 2007, Professor Fogg gave his students an assignment: design an app, get as many people to use it as possible, and keep them coming back. 

Using persuasive design, his students created various free apps for Facebook, and almost overnight, they drew in millions of new users—attracting advertising revenue.

Now dubbed the “Facebook Class,” more than two dozen participants from this original group laid the path for an entrepreneurial methodology known as the lean start-up. 

The quick success of these students caught the attention of nearby Silicon Valley executives and investors: 

If college kids at Stanford could generate that many users that quickly, could Silicon Valley translate this into profit? 

It turns out that they could, and as a result, start-up tech culture exploded. Things then changed rapidly. Between October 2007, when Fogg first challenged his students, and August 2008, the number of Facebook users leaped from 50 million to 100 million.

By 2022, the social media juggernaut had nearly three billion daily active users.

These designers tap into our emotions, such as stimulating feel-good dopamine pathways, to create and shape our habits. Many tech leaders would have us believe that there is nothing really nefarious about our ubiquitous devices and apps. Programmers and developers who implement persuasive design also speak of its positive potential, suggesting that digital apps can help people eliminate bad behaviors – such as forgetting to floss – or encourage good ones – such as weight loss. 

However, while all emotions are valid, not all behaviors resulting from emotions are reasonable. 

For instance, we might feel really angry at someone, but that indignation or rage might grow into a refusal to communicate, take someone else’s perspective, or resolve the conflict (one of my favorite quotes is, “Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die”). Other emotions, like shame, might lead us to self-medicate or self-harm.

When it comes to our children, allowing devices to influence or control them in an unscrupulous way should not be part of a healthy parenting approach. 

The tech companies whose target market is children, tweens, and teens hire behavioral psychologists and other experts in child development who study the impact emotions play in their decision-making. This becomes deeply problematic when we consider the very real and destructive reality of the products they help design. 

These researchers and engineers of persuasive design know that we humans are motivated by the way we feel, by how we are perceived by others, and by our need for acceptance and approval. However, the dark side of technology is that it manipulates all our emotions to change our behavior. 

For adults, this is hard enough. For children, who have not-yet-fully-developed brains, this is cruel.

The technology industry’s use of persuasive technologies is unethical and immoral, particularly as it manipulates children. The work we do now as parents is so important; becoming tech-intentional means fighting for our children’s future cognitive and emotional wellbeing and interrupting the coercive, habit-forming techniques that interfere with healthy brain development. 

We would never dream of testing the addictiveness of cigarettes on young children, yet we are letting technology companies test the addictiveness of their products on our children’s brains. 

Big Tech today is yesterday’s Big Tobacco.