Your Personal Slot Machine — How design can hack your brain

Discussing the links between Digital Services and Gambling in our modern world.

Image by Erick MacLean on Unsplash.

“If you’re an app, how do you keep people hooked? Turn yourself into a slot machine.” — Tristan Harris, co-founder of Time Well Spent and ex-Google.

If you have ever misplaced your phone for a while, you might be familiar with a mild state of panic until it has been found. According to research from Harvard University, about 73% of people claim to experience this unique flavor of anxiety, since most adults spend more than 3 hours per day tapping, typing and swiping on their devices.

Most of us have become so intimately entwined with our digital lives that we sometimes even feel our phones vibrating in our pockets when they aren’t even there — I bet this has happened to you too.

New forms of addictive and pseudo-addictive behaviours have emerged in society with the rapid development of tech. Today I am going to focus on the third step of the Hook Model — the variable reward — which acts as the bridge between modern digital services and Gambling.

While digital services are solely a product of the internet, Gambling has been here almost from the beginning of civilization, noting that the recreation of wagering has evolved immensely with recent technology. With the internet revolution, it is unsurprising that both digital services and Gambling have become intertwined in many ways.

The Relationship Between Digital Services and Gambling

The explosion of both digital services and Gambling followed similar paths on the internet timeline. Online Gambling and sports betting services were introduced in the mid-1990s and were among the early drivers of internet commerce. Just a few years later, Facebook and the most current popular digital services went live in the early 2000s.

Most digital platforms are using the same techniques as gambling firms to create psychological dependencies and ingrain their products in their users’ lives. Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist and product…