Captology: A Primer
The point of the new offices is to compel us to behave and socialize in ways that we otherwise would not—to overcome our initial inclination to be office suburbanites. But, in all the studies of the new workplaces, the reservations that employees have about a more social environment tend to diminish once they try it. Human behavior, after all, is shaped by context, but how it is shaped—and whether we’ll be happy with the result—we can understand only with experience.
—by Malcolm Gladwell Designs For Working; Why your bosses want to turn your new office into Greenwich Village; December 11, 2000, the New Yorker
In 1971, city police cars began rounding up students. Although it was a surprising way to start, each new “convict” had answered an ad seeking volunteers for psychological experimentation. Of the group of students used, prisoner and guard were chosen by the flip of a coin.
The prison, cobbled together in the basement of the Stanford psych department, was a prison in name only. However, the symbolic nature of the system was maintained. From guard uniforms to prison garb, from booking and delousing to parole hearings and solitary confinement, the systems were a functional (if not perfectly accurate) representation of a prison.
Although it started as play acting, within days both guard and prisoner had fallen into their role. So much so the experiment was halted only six days into its planned two week run. The findings are interesting for an experiment the participants could quit. Conducted by one of BJ Fogg’s professors, the prison experiment points the way to Fogg’s later work: Captology.
Technology Influences Everything
In another example told to me by Trudy Bell, a former editor for IEEE Spectrum, merely altering the layout of cubicles shifted the power dynamics of the office setting. Foot traffic patterns were redirected towards one managing editor and away from another. Decisions once shared between the two editors skewed toward one to the perceived detriment of the other. This reportedly caused tensions to rise in the office. A noteworthy anecdote because of the highly scientific background of the engineering journal staff.
The central idea of captology, that technology can influence human behavior and attitude, is not new. Most school children learned the automobile influenced American society. In similar fashion, captology links network topology to pressing problems, like email abuse. Study persuasion for any length of time and you will find a natural mesh with system thinking. The Stanford prison experiment provides some evidence for the persuasive power of systems.
Captology Of Systems
Peter Senge, author of system thinking classic The Fifth Discipline, also teaches a leadership lab attended by CEOs. He asks the CEOs, on a ship crossing the ocean, who is the leader? The answers given are the captain, helmsman, navigator. Senge argues that the designer determines not only where a ship goes, but how it gets there. This makes some sense when you realize how a ship is powered will determine how its course is chosen. The style and techniques of captaining are to a large extent dictated by design considerations. Small and fast ships require aggressive captaining to manuver around a storm, as larger ships batten down and weather them. Captology would argue design choices reward a certain management culture and penalizes another.
As technology becomes more powerful and ubiquitous, it exerts more influence on your life. As with other human factors, influence and persuasion already exist in technology design. Systems not designed for change readiness will reward the status quo. Design which does not bridge silos in an organization will empower fiefdoms.
If Senge is on to something, then captology may mark the maturity of high tech design, rather than any truly new field. Captology simply acknowledges computers as a mature technology where human factors matter. And there is nothing quite so human as persuasion, the catalytic mechanism turning talk into performance.
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Resources
- More an Influence 100 course to get you ready for Influence 101, Sitepoint’s How to Master Influence Skills to Sell More Web Design Services is good practice for every design discipline. Although salesy in tone, the author deftly steers between black hat issues and the basic persuasive design principles required for survival.
- Persuasive web designs take into account such things as the micro actions making up the conversion from surfer to buyer. Persuasive merchandising techniques in physical retail are constantly being refined, and similar building blocks for persuasive web design are moving designers beyond usability. When you understand how persuasive navigation technique differs from traditional calls to action you begin to grasp just how far web merchandising has yet to evolve. Designing Electronic Shops, Persuading Consumers to Buy even goes into seductive computing design.
- From the system and captology perspective, blogs are the self–organizing result of the Google search engine algorithm. How Google ranks pages results in a form of behavior best fitted to exploit it.
- MIT researchers observed the elderly who owned pets took better care of themselves. They made the electronic Pill Pet so it would suffer an electronic death if the elderly patient didn’t ‘feed’ it by acknowledging taking medication. The feeding technique was designed to persuade a different behavior from the user.
- Users don’t use the computer help function, and nothing I say here will change that. Well, users long ago found the help function doesn’t. And trying to change behavior is often fruitless. However captology is about cognitive loopholes and lacunae. Users may not show much interest in using help, but will use a properly constructed hint or tip. IBM charts the captology: Poor documentation produces users who will not read the manual.
- The Corporate Fallout Detector compiles data from pollution and ethics databases to form a social fallout profile. Scanning the product barcode causes the detector to give off a Geiger counter noise whose intensity reflects social and environmental record of the manufacturer.
- Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline Containing the idea design influences where an organization goes and how it gets there. Senge, Peter, et al, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook; Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization. New York: Doubleday-Dell, 1994. ISBN: 0-385-47256-0
- Designs For Working; Why your bosses want to turn your new office into Greenwich Village; December 11, 2000, the New Yorker
- Stanford Prison Experiment site.
- Stanford Captology Examples page. A little short on actual examples, but good for inspiring your own thinking.
- For the courageously open–minded, check out how technology can modify an intransigent either–or issue like choice/life. Whatever your position, the crucial point is to understand how technology influences decisonmaking in unanticipated ways, and learn from it.
- ChangingMinds.org has a comprehensive library on how we persuade, including a section on technology and persuasion.