Feedback loops and the new behaviourism

 

The recent Wired article about feedback loops by Thomas Goetze has helped me to understand the phenomenon of sensors, feedback, learning and behaviour change better. Or better to say, after the article I was aware how pervasive these loops are already part of our lifes.

New sensors and feedback via personal devices have inspired many developers and companies to use live data measures for intelligent information distribution in many parts of our lives (energy consumption, sports activities, health awareness etc.). What surprised me about the obvious success of these feedback loops is their simplicity. In its core they often realize a behavioristic stimulus-response model and to some extent also conditioning effects. Dan Lockton (via Stephen Downes) has written an interesting article on his blog where he discusses the implications of behaviourism for designers. He discusses the different conditioning types and he presents an example of a simple feedback loop:

"Pryor (2002) gives the example of a car seatbelt warning buzzer as negative reinforcement—a device designed to be irritating or unpleasant enough to cause the user to take action to avoid it. We might consider that a recorded voice saying “Thank you” after the seatbelt is fastened could be a positive reinforcement alternative. Positive and negative punishment are essentially the inverse of each of these—a fine for not wearing a seatbelt while driving is a form of positive punishment, and taking away someone’s driving licence would be a form of negative punishment" (Lockton, 2011).

On the other hand, many feedback loops (and this is what Goetze has neglected to some extent) also seem to work because of social control or social competition effects. Let's take the famous example of running trackers and sensors. People use individual sensor to control their speed and perseverance and after their running session they share their efforts with a specific audience (the family, facebook friends or the world). This again seems to have positive effects on motivation and in the end healthiness. But there can also be a negative effect of the social embeddedness which Lockton calls social fences or social traps. A social trap is a situation where reward and negative consequences are given but they overlap each other. Lockton points to a social trap taxonomy by Cross and Guyer (1980) which discusses 5 classes of traps:

• time-delay traps (delay between behaviour and reinforcement is too long to be effective)
• ignorance traps (knowledge about negative effects is not used because the rewards establishes a habit)
• externality traps (negative effects are not on the individual but on other people)
• collective traps (similar to the tragedy of commons)
• hybrid traps (a mixture of some of these traps)

For the design of ambient displays and feedback loops it would be very interesting if we could break these traps and connect behaviour and consequences directly, especially with a focus on the grand challenges of our time (e.g. sustainability, security etc.).