Just In Time Nudging

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Have you ever wondered how amazon always seems to know what you want to order? The way those recommendations just pop up after you purchase an item and it is a must-have product? The same thing happens when you think of a person and suddenly they appear on your Facebook list of people you may know. Type only two characters on google search and it will complete it with the full query you were thinking about.

This is the state of technology today. It is powerful enough to kind of predict our next move.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. It is exactly how I imagined computers would work when I was a child. When computers succeed at guessing what we want, we notice it. When they don't, we simply ignore them. How many times have you ignored the list of people you may know on facebook? Or all the other suggestions from Google?

But that innocent looking list of recommendations is a powerful tool in disguise.

Inception

The idea in the movie "Inception" is to influence a person's decision by implanting an idea in their mind at the subconscious level, in their sleep. When that person wakes up, she is more likely to make the same decision as the one suggested in the dream.

In the real world, influencing decisions is not so dramatic. In fact, it is so subtle that it might have even happened to you multiple times today.

When you head to a grocery store to do your shopping for the week, your intention is to buy groceries, or essentials. Check items off your list one by one and the next thing you know your cart is full. Now that you are done you roll to the cash register and you are presented with the most flashy products in all the store. Candies, chocolate, tabloids. All the sort of things that will attract your attention. Chances are you will grab something that was not in your list. You have been influenced to buy something you had no intention of buying.

A similar thing happens online. Here the influence is disguised as an innocent looking recommendation list. Amazon shows that "People who bought this laptop also bought a laptop bag with it" . Of course it makes sense. Are you going to be the person who owns a laptop but not the bag? Add to cart!

Reading these two examples make it seem like this is always a bad thing. Yes, it is a bad thing to exploit people in this manner. But the same tool can be used for the greater good.

Stackoverflow is one of the great examples. Anyone can ask a programming question on stackoverflow and anyone can answer it. While this opens the door to a flood of bad behavior in other online communities, stackoverflow is where you will find it the least.

People who get an error after a single attempt at programming automatically try to ask questions without doing any research. To prevent this, before they submit their question the first thing they will see is a list of similar questions people have asked in the past, with answers. Chances are they can find their answer without ever posting their own question.

If they still post their not so well written question and another user decides to tell them how stupid they are, this user is also presented with a message right before he submits his mean answer. It will be something in the lines of "Criticize the question, not the person". This Just In Time reminder prevents bad behavior before it ever occurs.

Another example where the tool is used for good, is the private social network Nextdoor, an app that allows neighbors to communicate. With the app popularity soaring, users started using it for something other than what it was intended for. They used it for racial profiling. People of different ethnicities were constantly being reported as suspicious for simply being present in a neighborhood.

The solution to this problem was not a large protest in the streets of suburbia. Instead it was a little nudge disguised as a Just In Time reminder. When users are about to report a suspicious activity, they are reminded not to report someone simply because of the color of their skin. Instead they are asked to describe the person (what they wear, color of their clothes, height, etc) and the suspicious activity. Because of this small change, racial profiling has dropped by 75%.

The voice in your pocket

The emergence of technology outside the confinement of a store or a desktop computer, but into our pockets makes us subject to these influences more frequently. You don't need to be on amazon.com to see the list of recommendations. You don't even need to be shopping. The app can ring at any moment it thinks you are more susceptible to buy.

If Google notices that it does not have pictures of the interior of a particular restaurant, all they have to do is send a suggestion to people who are currently in the restaurant (happened to me). A notification pops on your phone and shows you a frowny face because there are no pictures of the restaurant. Now you want to turn that frown into a smile. So you turn...