Let’s Eat Badly

About five years ago, in the course of studying the commercial applications of psychological research, I contacted the agent of Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioural economics at Duke University, to inquire whether Ariely might want to speak at a conference in London. It didn’t come off: I had to explain that my ‘conference budget’ didn’t stretch to the $75,000 speaker fee and first-class return airfare. Ariely is not a typical academic. He has given very popular Ted talks, sells consultancy advice on behavioural prediction and has founded a number of companies to profit from his insights into the vagaries of human decision-making. The focus of Ariely’s research is human irrationality. His best-known book is Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions (2008), which was followed two years later by The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic. The enthusiasm with which the marketing profession has greeted this sort of book requires little explanation: ever since the dawn of market research and advertising in the late 19th century, there has been a commercial interest in understanding what determines individual choices, as distinct from what economists or moral philosophers think should determine them.

Marketers aren’t the only ones hungry for these insights. The popularisation of behavioural economics was led by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book Nudge (2008), which inspired the setting-up of ‘behavioural insights’ teams in governments around the world (with Cameron’s coalition government at the forefront), and has nurtured a view of policy that is attentive to our unconscious biases and irrational tendencies. Where orthodox economists explain behaviour on the basis of rational choice, assuming that each of us is a finely tuned calculator weighing the costs and benefits of every decision, the ‘nudgers’ are always on the look-out for anomalies, situations in which we habitually do things with harmful consequences: eating badly, neglecting to recycle, or failing to save for retirement. The job of policymakers, as nudgers see it, is to make minor adjustments to ‘choice architectures’ (how the various options are presented to us), which discreetly steer us towards the path of rationality. In areas such as personal finance and nutrition, employers and businesses are encouraged to change the default option to the ‘good’ one. Pension schemes are made opt-out, rather than opt-in, so that people end up with a better retirement pot by default. The touchscreen menu ordering system at McDonald’s is now so determined to steer customers towards its range of salads and sugar-free drinks that choosing to sabotage one’s own health with a burger, chips and Coke requires considerable perseverance. These are efforts to protect us from our own irrationality, but some may feel a sense of unease that the powers that be are treating citizens like children.

This new fascination with irrational decision-making coincided with the global financial crisis. Gurus such as Ariely, Thaler and Sunstein helped to modify a free-market ideology according to which consumers and investors are smart enough (smarter than regulators, at least) to calculate risks for themselves. But this sort of thinking also gained popularity just as the combination of social media and smartphones was first ensnaring hundreds of millions of people into an unremitting system of data capture and feedback. The extent to which we are predictably irrational is conditioned by how much of our behaviour the predictor is privy to. And since the launch of the iPhone and the lift-off of Facebook in 2007, the quantity of human irrationality available to be scrutinised and exploited has grown exponentially.

Given this vast and lucrative psycho-industrial complex, you might think that the human mind could hold few surprises for business and policy elites. It has become something of an orthodoxy in these circles that our behaviour is rarely governed by rational self-interest, but is swayed by norms, habits, instincts and emotions. Yet when such irrational forces, combined with techniques of psychological experimentation and influence of the sort used by nudgers on social media platforms, disrupted the democratic arena in 2016, it was as if Dionysus himself had hurtled dancing into the room. Irrationality is predictable, maybe, but not to the point of putting Donald Trump in the White House.

The myopia of the nudgers is in their assumption that irrationality is a ‘behaviour’ like any other, which can be tracked and controlled – that is, rationalised. It’s true that the relation between rationality and irrationality is ultimately one of power: which part of society (or the self) is able to boss the other? But Trump’s election demonstrated the naivety of assuming that in the end reason will always come out on top. Perhaps with sufficient surveillance, the logic of our present madness can be divined; maybe Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon (presently earning $75,000 every thirty seconds), with his global network of household sensors and consumer tracking, is the real rationalist now. But if Silicon Valley (not, say, the university) is now the seat of objectivity and reason, that puts rationality out of sight and out of mind for the vast majority of us. The anxiety provoked by the use of Facebook to influence elections isn’t so much that the platform is all-powerful, but that we have no way of knowing what its true capabilities are. Paranoia is the rational response to a system whose rules and goals are shrouded in secrecy.

The new dominance of such giant technology platforms as Facebook and Google represents a distinctive threat to the status of reason in society. These are businesses that make money by collecting data about our behaviour, then exploiting the intelligence that results: what Shoshana Zuboff refers to as ‘surveillance capitalism’. But as we know from controversies over ‘fake news’ circulating on Facebook and extreme content on YouTube, the platforms have no interest in establishing norms of behaviour, only in maximising engagement with the platforms themselves. As far as Mark Zuckerberg’s business interests are concerned, it doesn’t matter how absurd, stupid, dangerous or mendacious a post is, just so long as it takes place on Facebook.

The iconic model of a surveillance technology is Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon design for a prison, in which prisoners would feel visible to the prison guards at all times whether or not they were actually being watched. As Michel Foucault noted, the panopticon was a disciplinary tool, which sought to bolster the moral conscience of the prisoner to the point at which he was policing his own behaviour, and could be released back into society as a good and rational individual. But the platforms are different: they don’t aim to discipline us, merely to learn about us. And the weirder and crazier we get, the better their psychological insights become. We aren’t inhabiting a moralistic detention centre so much as joining a hedonistic and chaotic focus group, in which we are prompted to throw off our inhibitions for the benefit of the observer on the other side of the mirror. The most valuable data point in this economy is the barely conscious reaction: the ‘like’, swipe, scroll or emoji that reveals some underlying truth about why we behave as we do. The less rational we are, the more the data analyst stands to learn.

Nudgers, like Bentham, see rationality as a habit in which to be trained by a benevolent government in order to steer us towards health and happiness. My preference for a Big Mac may one day be conditioned out of me altogether. Platform giants, by contrast, regard rationality as their intellectual property, the product of a calculation going on in secret. If they can discern the underlying mathematical logic of society, they have no intention of disclosing it. Neither of these attitudes to rationality is politically attractive. The problem lies with behaviourism itself, and its assumption that human freedom is programmed and programmable: ‘rationality’ is in the eye of the all-seeing observer, not a property of conscious action at all. In this conception of reason there is no place – and crucially no time – for thinking, reflection or deliberation: each of us is reduced to a node in a network, bombarded by stimuli to which we can react only as automatons. Behaviourism flips rationalism into irrationalism. Surveillance capital treats the global population as if it were a vast zoo, spotting patterns of behaviour that the specimens themselves will never know about. Once democracy and public argument are premised on the logic of the platform, it simply doesn’t matter what anyone says or does, so long as they remain engaged and engaging. President Trump is the symptom of a society that treats rationality as a property of machines, and not people.

by William Davies, LRB |  Read more:

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[ed. The problem is that nearly every institution (media, politicians, tech, business, healthcare, finance, education, etc. etc. - everyone) has an agenda these days; one of acquiring, leveraging and preserving as much power/capital as they can, regardless of the social costs. For most normal people it's a full-time job just to avoid getting punked or fleeced (usually both). See also: Silicon Valley’s Sun Kings (The Baffler).]