<story><title>Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?</title><url>https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/12/should-there-be-limits-on-persuasive-technologies.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>I wrote this for a related article yesterday:&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;If we know that humans have all sorts of cognitive biases, how come it&amp;#x27;s ok to use that fact while at the same time we insist there&amp;#x27;s some kind of free market?&lt;p&gt;Say you discover that putting good-looking women next to cars causes the sale of cars to increase. Why does nobody question whether it is legitimate to do so? It&amp;#x27;s as if there&amp;#x27;s a line between actively lying (&amp;quot;Studies show that men who buy this car will find many many women attracted to them&amp;quot;) and just putting it there suggestively, for some as yet undescribed but working cognitive bias to do its magic.&lt;p&gt;Some advertisers even make a joke out of it, eg the Lynx ads where the dude is thronged by a huge horde of women. It&amp;#x27;s a cliché, for a good reason.&lt;p&gt;I suppose most people will just say you have free will and it&amp;#x27;s your own fault for thinking what was suggested, but I sense this is more of a grey zone than most people are willing to admit. How can the free market work if everyone is so easily affected by suggestion?&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;Of course this also applies to the free market in ideas. In what sense are people free to make up their minds if it&amp;#x27;s decided for them what they should see, whether or not the government is doing it or FB? Isn&amp;#x27;t this the same as the authoritarian nightmares that we&amp;#x27;ve been pointing fingers at?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stickfigure</author><text>There is absolutely no limit to this. Putting on a suit for a financial job interview exploits the cognitive biases of interviewers. Tattoos exploit the cognitive biases of hipsters.  Putting hockey-stick growth projections in pitch decks exploits the cognitive biases of VCs. Equity grants (pretty much always) exploit the cognitive biases of startup employees. Driving a fancy car exploits the cognitive biases of (a very large portion of) the dating market.&lt;p&gt;Human beings are not computers. No aspect of human behavior is perfectly logical or rational. You simply cannot ban emotional appeals in principle, because all appeals have an emotional component. This way lies a dystopia far more terrible than &amp;quot;grandpa shared some nonsense on facebook&amp;quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?</title><url>https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/12/should-there-be-limits-on-persuasive-technologies.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>I wrote this for a related article yesterday:&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;If we know that humans have all sorts of cognitive biases, how come it&amp;#x27;s ok to use that fact while at the same time we insist there&amp;#x27;s some kind of free market?&lt;p&gt;Say you discover that putting good-looking women next to cars causes the sale of cars to increase. Why does nobody question whether it is legitimate to do so? It&amp;#x27;s as if there&amp;#x27;s a line between actively lying (&amp;quot;Studies show that men who buy this car will find many many women attracted to them&amp;quot;) and just putting it there suggestively, for some as yet undescribed but working cognitive bias to do its magic.&lt;p&gt;Some advertisers even make a joke out of it, eg the Lynx ads where the dude is thronged by a huge horde of women. It&amp;#x27;s a cliché, for a good reason.&lt;p&gt;I suppose most people will just say you have free will and it&amp;#x27;s your own fault for thinking what was suggested, but I sense this is more of a grey zone than most people are willing to admit. How can the free market work if everyone is so easily affected by suggestion?&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;Of course this also applies to the free market in ideas. In what sense are people free to make up their minds if it&amp;#x27;s decided for them what they should see, whether or not the government is doing it or FB? Isn&amp;#x27;t this the same as the authoritarian nightmares that we&amp;#x27;ve been pointing fingers at?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>deegles</author><text>As an absurd example, if someone were to invent a ray-gun that reprograms people&amp;#x27;s brains with arbitrary beliefs it would be 100% unethical and illegal to use.&lt;p&gt;However, ads or fake news article that takes many exposures to reprogram you (by using the cognitive bias back channels as you mention) are perfectly fine. ¯\_(ツ)_&amp;#x2F;¯</text></comment>