The economic value of web businesses increasingly depends on the strength of the habitual behavior of their users, argues Nir Eyal on Techcrunch. These habits ultimately will be a deciding factor in what separates startup winners and losers.

“Increasingly, companies will become experts at designing user habits. Curated Web companies already rely on these methods. This new breed of company, defined by the ability to help users find only the content they care about, includes such white-hot companies as Pinterest and Tumblr. These companies have habit formation embedded in their DNA. This is because data collection is at the heart of any Curated Web business and to succeed, they must predict what users will think is most personally relevant.

Curated Web companies can only improve if users tell their systems what they want to see more of. If users use the service sparingly, it is less valuable than if they use it habitually. The more the user engages with a Curated Web company, the more data the company has to tailor and improve the user’s experience. This self-improving feedback loop has the potential to be more useful – and more addictive — than anything we’ve seen before.”

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All web designers use perceptual persuasion in their designs, but without knowing they do. Interaction designer Wouter Middendorf delves into the matter:

“Persuasive design is hot. Especially on the web as designers found out that the internet perfectly lends itself for persuasion. The combination of both interpersonal and mass communication as well as its interactivity creates a perfect environment to apply persuasive techniques like the ones described by Maurits Kaptijn in his article on Persuasion Profiling. These kind of persuasive techniques can be traced back to psychological principles that rely on symbolic strategies to trigger emotions or emotional aspects in order to motivate people towards a preferred behavior. Almost all of these techniques work on the level where users interact with the website. A good example of such a persuasive technique on that interaction level can be found on LinkedIn. Users are persuaded (or motivated) to complete their profile through the completeness bar that is placed next to their LinkedIn profile. The psychological principle that is at work here is the fact that people crave for completion, which is why it works so well.

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Increasing privacy infringement on the Internet has set off a campaign to uphold the “right to be forgotten,” which allows users to demand information about them be deleted by social networking websites. Si-Soo Park provides an Asian angle on the matter in the Korea Times, particularly looking at how upcoming EU regulation could have an impact on Korean legislative thinking as well.

“Many celebrities here [i.e. in South Korea] are haunted by articles and photos they posted on social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Some carelessly-written comments during wayward teenage years are reproduced and stir controversy, causing irrevocable damage to their hard-won reputations. Old photos unintentionally divulge their untold story of having perfect looks thanks to surgical help.

An increasing number of ordinary people have also been badly affected by the endless lifespan of online data.

But existing regulations give website operators the exclusive right to delete or modify reproduced content, leaving their customers helpless when it comes to self-control of their own privacy online.

This shortcoming has galvanized people to recognize the significance of the “right to be forgotten” in the Internet age. Promotional campaigns for the unheard-of rights are increasingly gaining momentum worldwide.”

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Behavioural change researcher Dan Lockton discusses an approach which has emerged out of some of the ethnographic work he has been doing for the Empower project, working on CarbonCulture with More Associates, where asking users questions about how and why they behaved in certain ways with technology (in particular around energy-using systems) led to answers which were resolvable into something like rules: behavioural heuristics [which are] rules (of thumb) that people might follow when interacting with a system.

“I would envisage that with user research framed and phrased in the right way, observation, interviews and actual behavioural data, it would be possible to extract heuristics in a form which are useful for selecting design patterns to apply. While in the workshop we ‘decomposed’ existing systems without doing any real user research, doing this alongside would enable the heuristics extracted to be compared and discrepancies investigated and resolved. The redesigned system could thus match much better the heuristics being followed by users, or, if necessary, help to shift those heuristics to more appropriate ones.”

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All human societies are alive with the battle for influence. Every single day each of us is subject to innumerable persuasion attempts from corporations, interest groups, political parties and other organisations. Each trying to persuade us that their product, idea or innovation is what we should buy, believe in or vote for.

In our personal lives the same struggle is played out for the supremacy of viewpoints, ideals and actions. Whether it’s friends and family, work colleagues, potential employers or strangers, each of us has to work out how to bring others around to our own point of view. We all play the influence game, to greater or lesser degrees.

Psychologists have been studying how we try to influence each other for many years. In an 18 part blog series on PsyBlog, Jeremy Dean, researcher at University College London, has been covering some highlights of this research, which are collected below.

1. 3 Universal Goals to Influence People
Effective influence and persuasion isn’t just about patter, body language or other techniques, it’s also about understanding people’s motivations. Central to the art and science of persuasion is understanding three goals for which everyone is aiming.

2. The Persuasive Power of Swearing
Show your passion and people have one more emotional reason to come around to your point of view. But how can we convince others of our conviction? Light swearing at the start or end of a persuasive speech can help influence an audience.

3. Loudest Voice = Majority Opinion
Even if only one member of a group repeats their opinion, it is more likely to be seen by others as representative of the whole group.

4. Don’t Take No For An Answer
You ask someone for a favour and they say no. Where do you go from there? Dealing effectively with objections can be more powerful than other standard methods of persuasion.

5. The Influence of Fleeting Attraction
Friendship is a fantastic lever for persuasion and influence, a lever we happily push on every day. But how much does someone have to like us before we can start to influence them?

6. Caffeine Makes Us Easier to Persuade
Of all the effects caffeine has on our minds—enhanced attention, vigilance and cognition—perhaps least known is its tendency to make us more susceptible to persuasion.

7. Persuasion: The Right-Ear Advantage
If you want someone to comply with a random request for a cigarette, you should speak into their right ear.

8. Balanced Arguments Are More Persuasive
The instinct to paper over weaknesses in our argument is wrong—so long as we counter criticism.

9. The Battle Between Thoughts and Emotions in Persuasion
Nowadays people tend to use ‘I think’ and ‘I feel’ interchangeably. Does it make any difference whether what you say is couched in ‘thinking’ or ‘feeling’ terms?

10. Our Secret Attitude Changes
When you change your attitude about something, do you know why? Psychologists have argued that the inner workings of our minds are largely hidden away from us. One aspect of this is the surprising finding that people are often unaware when they have changed their attitudes.

11. Are Fast Talkers More Persuasive?
Beware the fast-talker, the person with the gift of the gab—the friendly salesman, the oily politician—running through the ‘facts’ faster than you can keep up.

12. Persuasion: The Sleeper Effect
Any time we receive a persuasive message before we find out who the source is, the sleeper effect can come into play.

13. Communicating Persuasively: Email or Face-to-Face?
Face-to-face communication is usually most persuasive but it’s not always possible to meet in person. How, then, do people react to persuasion attempts over email?

14. The Influence of Positive Framing
Do people really pay more attention to frightening messages? Actually emphasising the positive can be more persuasive than pointing out the negative.

15. The Illusion of Truth
Repetition is used everywhere: advertising, politics and the media. It seems too simplistic that just repeating a persuasive message should increase its effect, but that’s exactly what psychological research finds (again and again).

16. 9 Propaganda Techniques in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11
Back in the Summer of 2004 Michael Moore brought out ‘Fahrenheit 9/11′, his personal view of how terrorist attacks in the US were used to pursue illegal wars. This article examines the psychological techniques of persuasion used in that film.

17. Persuasion: The Third-Person Effect
Attractive woman holding a bottle of beer? Hah! How stupid do they think we are? Many people say that persuasion attempts have little or no effect on them. Other people, oh sure, adverts, work on them. But not you and I, we’re too clever for that.

18. 20 Simple Steps to the Perfect Persuasive Message
Perfection is hard to achieve in any walk of life and persuasion is no different. It relies on many things going just right at the crucial moment; the perfect synchronisation of source, message and audience. But even if perfection is unlikely, we all need to know what to aim for.

Applying Anthropology in the Global Village
Edited by Christina Wasson, Mary Odell Butler and Jacqueline Copeland-Carson
Left Coast Press – November 2011 – 326 pp.
Hardback (978-1-61132-085-5)
Paperback (978-1-61132-086-2)

The realities of the globalized world have revolutionized traditional concepts of culture, community, and identity—so how do applied social scientists use complicated, fluid new ideas such as translocality and ethnoscape to solve pressing human problems?

In this book, leading scholar/practitioners survey the development of different subfields over at least two decades, then offer concrete case studies to show how they have incorporated and refined new concepts and methods.

After an introduction synthesizing anthropological practice, key theoretical concepts, and ethnographic methods, chapters examine the arenas of public health, community development, finance, technology, transportation, gender, environment, immigration, aging, and child welfare.

An innovative guide to joining dynamic theoretical concepts with on-the-ground problem solving, this book will be of interest to practitioners from a wide range of disciplines who work on social change, as well as an excellent addition to graduate and undergraduate courses.

It’s increasingly clear that we live in collaborative times. Many of the most interesting innovations of recent years have at their heart ideas of sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, exchanging or swapping. These are age-old concepts being reinvented through network technologies and a cultural shift driven by the more civic minded millennial generation.

The report, with the subtitle “Platforms for exchange and reciprocity in public services”, was commissioned by NESTA and nef in an attempt to learn the lessons from the past and to provide a framework for understanding the many different approaches to complementary currencies and other platforms for reciprocal exchange.

An associated literature review brings together the existing evidence of impact, outcomes and cost that exist across reciprocal exchange systems. Time banks, complementary currencies and peer-to-peer platforms for collaborative consumption are all examples of these reciprocal exchange systems, and to structure this review we have created a typology of different types of systems to organise the evidence.

The idea of sharing things instead of owning them goes against everything we’ve been taught as a consumeristic society.

Those who have spent their lives “keeping up with the Jones’” may find it hard to suddenly relinquish their death-grip on idea that owning things is the path toward happiness. But younger generations, poised to inherit the economic turmoil and environmental disaster caused by consumerism, are increasingly embracing the alternatives offered by collaborative consumption.

Findings of a recent independent study revealed that Millennials (18-34-year-olds) are more willing to used shared vehicles than individuals from previous generations.

The study, commissioned by leading car sharing network Zipcar, surveyed over one thousand adults to better understand the current generation’s attitude toward car ownership.

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Jared Spool explores the key differences between “Normals” (normal mainstream users) and tech early adopters.

Instead of thinking about ‘early adopters’ and ‘normals’ as if they are two homogeneous groups, he thinks it’s better to look at the motivations that trigger someone to buy into a new technology or solution at various points in the release timeline.

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Far-flung families are increasingly using Skype, Apple’s FaceTime and Google chat to do things together that would otherwise require a plane ticket.

“Though Skype is now eight years old, the software — and others like it, including Apple’s FaceTime and Google chat — has become a regular fixture in a growing number of American homes, providing new ways for families to stay connected in an age where generations are less likely to gather around the table on Sunday afternoons to share a meal. [...]

Far-flung families are opening birthday gifts together, reading bedtime stories and even providing brief moments of child care. And rather than just making video calls to catch up, people are using them to share experiences that would otherwise require a plane ticket.”

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As design becomes more sophisticated in influencing user behavior, it’s important that we start to think critically about the ethical boundary between persuasion and outright manipulation, argues Stephen P. Anderson.

“You can’t discuss a topic like seduction or what motivates people without some awareness that, no matter how playful or well-meaning your intentions are, these things will certainly be abused. So I’m often asked this question on the subject of ethics: “When is it okay (or not okay) to influence someone’s behavior?”

Here’s my simple response: Don’t take on projects that you wouldn’t personally use yourself or recommend to your friends and family.“

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Using open source tools Homesense brings the open collaboration methods of online communities to physical infrastructures in the home.

“The Homesense project was an open research project around the topic of bottom-up smart homes initiated by Tinker London. In mid-2009, founder Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino wrote a blog post highlighting what the opportunities were for a large-scale open source interrogation of the “smart home” concept. Often explored in closed R&D environments, it was possible to think of the results being more relevant and accurate if the participants could build their own solutions to their problems rather than operating under the assumption that most people would accept top-down design. An existing relationship with EDF R&D via Arduino workshops led to a sponsorship from EDF R&D for 50% of the projectʼs value (£58K or so at the time). Partners in the project also included two PhD students from the HighWire group at Lancaster University, Natasha Carolan and Richard Wood who helped design the packaging for the tools available to users in this experiment. The project was eventually wrapped in mid-2011 and technical tools featured at the New York Museum of Modern Artʼs exhibition on smart objects: Talk to Me.”

After almost 2 years, here is finally the final report outlining all the work & findings.

View/download report

The technology-enabled city is an untapped source of sustainable growth.

“Written in partnership with The Climate Group, Accenture and Horizon, University of Nottingham, this report investigates how technology can be used in cities to meet the growing challenges of expanding urbanisation.

The technology-enabled city is an untapped source of sustainable growth and represents a powerful approach for tackling unprecedented environmental and economic challenges.

By unlocking technology, infrastructure and public data, cities can open up new value chains, spawning innovative applications and information products that make sustainable modes of city living and working possible.

While smart initiatives are underway in urban centres around the world, most cities have yet to realise the enormous potential value from fully-integrated, strategically-designed smart city development programmes.

Now is the time for government and business leaders to recognise the value created by smart city thinking.”

“The new magnetism of congregation seems universal. Every online service or forum promotes an event, an invitation, a club night, something for which subscribers will pay, much as online dating points towards a meeting. Demonstrators are never content with online but want to “seize back the streets”. Religious sites plead for church attendance. Courses plead for students to go to colleges. Never have coffee bars been more popular, with Starbucks this week announcing another 300 with 5,000 staff to be employed. Anything for a bit of buzz.” [...]

“As consumer spending evolves from “needs to wants”, from goods to experiences, the post-digital age focuses on personal contact. Post-digital is not pre-techno but exploits technology for a civilising purpose, human congregation and intercourse. The money is at the gate.”

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The video, which is a project of Joana Conill, Manuel Castells and Àlex Ruiz of IN 3, the High School Institute of Research of the University Open to Catalonia, investigates new economic cultures, new forms of living and of understanding the economy. For the .

In particular, it studies the social impact of the economics|economies that do not follow the patterns of the market, where profits are the priority, and that have the satisfaction of the needs and the desires for the persons as a goal.

The video is a tool for research, not a finished or closed work, and is available for free under a Creative Commons license. This is the English version, there are also versions in Catalan and Spanish.

Watch video (Youtube)
Watch video (blip.tv)

“What is social proof? Put simply, it’s the positive influence created when someone finds out that others are doing something. It’s also known as informational social influence.

Wikipedia describes social proof as “a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others reflect the correct behavior for a given situation… driven by the assumption that the surrounding people possess more information about the situation.” In other words, people are wired to learn from the actions of others, and this can be a huge driver of consumer behavior.”

The author provides a “teardown” on various forms of social proof, and how some savvy digital companies are starting to measure its impact.

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“By social labelling, we’re referring to the tag society gives a particular behaviour in order to make sense of it. In other words, society interprets the action and tags it with a motivation – for all to see – that it considers consistent with the behaviour. This means your individual behaviour can carry a social tag independently of the internal tag you may assign it. The big difference is that the social tag is visible to everyone.

Where this gets interesting is that these social tags can be applied to make sense of the behaviour, but they don’t need to reflect the original motivation. So choosing to take the train rather than the car could be driven at the individual level by a desire to be able to read and make phone calls on the way. But society can publicly tag this behaviour as being pro-environmental in motivation. And society can applaud that motivation.”

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Unilever’s Five Levers for Change is a coherent set of principles, which, if applied consistently to behaviour change interventions, will increase the likelihood of having a lasting impact. The Five Levers are: make it understood, make it easy, make it desirable, make it rewarding and make it a habit.

A huge part of our environmental impacts come from how people use our products; two thirds of the greenhouse gas impacts across the lifecycle and about half of our water footprint is associated with consumer use. So inspiring consumers to adopt new sustainable products and behaviours is fundamental to achieving the goals set out in the Unilever Sustainability Living Plan.

Related links:
- Encouraging behaviour change
- Unilever Sustainable Living Plan
- Inspiring Sustainable Living: Expert Insights into Consumer Behaviour & Unilever’s Five Levers for Change (November 2011) (2.4 MB)

“Privacy in the digital age means a lot of things to a lot of people. Some people fret about the privacy controls on social networks, some worry about the companies that track their online behavior, and others are concerned about government surveillance. We asked a diverse group of panelists how much our readers should worry about the vast array of privacy threats.

Read debate summary and watch video

In preparation for the piece, the participants had to respond to a series of questions. Two of these more extensive pieces are now online: Jeff Jarvis – Danah Boyd.

Note Danah Boyd’s description of privacy:

“Privacy is the ability to assert control over a social situation. This requires that people have agency in their environment and that they are able to understand any given social situation so as to adjust how they present themselves and determine what information they share. Privacy violations occur when people have their agency undermined or lack relevant information in a social setting that’s needed to act or adjust accordingly. Privacy is not protected by complex privacy settings that create what Alessandro Acquisti calls “the illusion of control.” Rather, it’s protected when people are able to fully understand the social environment in which they are operating and have the protections necessary to maintain agency.”

French newspaper Le Monde looks at the tablets, sensors, foot boards and other gadgets seniors can use to get caught up and connected (article translated in English for Worldcrunch).

“Surprising but true: the touch tablet is well-adapted to older people, even the least tech-oriented. No cables, no complicated data structures, just single-function touch points. The result is that tablets can be used as an all-purpose communication tool: to keep up with the news, check the weather, play games, or conduct video conference calls with one’s children, grand-children, and home-bound friends.”

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