I noticed when I was at Stanford, there was a class called the persuasive technology design class, and it was a whole lab at Stanford that teaches students how to apply persuasive psychology principles into technology to persuade people to use products in a certain way.

Tristan Harris

Technology is causing a set of seemingly disconnected things - shortening of attention spans, polarization, outrage-ification of culture, mass narcissism, election engineering, addiction to technology.

Tristan Harris

Technology steers what 2 billion people are thinking and believing every day. It's possibly the largest source of influence over 2 billion people's thoughts that has ever been created. Religions and governments don't have that much influence over people's daily thoughts.

Tristan Harris

Tech companies are distracting, dividing and outraging citizens to the point where there is little basis for common ground. This is a direct threat to democracy.

Tristan Harris

There's nothing in your life or in our collective problems that does not require our ability to put our attention where we care about. At the end of our lives, all we have is our attention and our time.

Tristan Harris

Information that confirms our beliefs makes us feel good; information that challenges our beliefs doesn't.

Tristan Harris

With its onslaught of never-ending choices, never-ending supply of relationships and obligations, the attention economy bulldozes the natural shape of our physical and psychological limits and turns impulses into bad habits.

Tristan Harris

None of most powerful tech companies answer to what's best for people, only to what's best for them.

Tristan Harris

The most important problems we face are complex, and require sustained attention. But we don't speak in terms of nuance or complexity. Is that by accident? It's because our minds have been entrained to expect shorter and shorter bite-sized bits.

Tristan Harris

For every design goal you have, you have to have a corresponding measurement to know how you're doing - a way of measuring success.

Tristan Harris

You're either on, and you're connected and distracted all the time, or you're off, but then you're wondering, am I missing something important? In other words, you're either distracted or you have fear of missing out.

Tristan Harris

We're going to need a new social contract with the tech world one that asks for consent, and one with transparent goals. Right now, the goals of technology are not aligned with our goals as humans. We need technology that empowers us to make the life choices we want to make.

Tristan Harris

Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people's perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing it. Once you know how to push people's buttons, you can play them like a piano.

Tristan Harris

If you're an app, how do you keep people hooked? Turn yourself into a slot machine.

Tristan Harris

We continue to have this illusion that things outside of us aren't driving what we think and believe, when in fact so much of what we spend our attention on is driven by decisions of thousands of engineers and product designers.

Tristan Harris

We're all vulnerable to social approval. The need to belong, to be approved or appreciated by our peers is among the highest human motivations. But now our social approval is in the hands of tech companies.

Tristan Harris

While nations protect their physical borders, tech platforms leave digital borders wide open.

Tristan Harris

I'm an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That's why I spent the last three years as a Design Ethicist at Google caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion people's minds from getting hijacked.

Tristan Harris

Traditional companies have been subject to licensing for many years. Attention utilities should be required to obey limits on data extraction and message amplification practices that drive polarisation, and should be required to protect children. We should ban or limit microtargeting of advertising, recommendations and other behavioural nudges.

Tristan Harris

I was a design ethicist at Google, where I studied how do you ethically steer people's thoughts? Because what we don't talk about is how the handful of people working at a handful of technology companies through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today.

Tristan Harris

New technologies always reshape society, and it's always tempting to worry about them solely for this reason.

Tristan Harris