Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?
I wrote this for a related article yesterday:<p>---<p>If we know that humans have all sorts of cognitive biases, how come it's ok to use that fact while at the same time we insist there's some kind of free market?<p>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's as if there's a line between actively lying ("Studies show that men who buy this car will find many many women attracted to them") and just putting it there suggestively, for some as yet undescribed but working cognitive bias to do its magic.<p>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's a cliché, for a good reason.<p>I suppose most people will just say you have free will and it'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?<p>---<p>Of course this also applies to the free market in ideas. In what sense are people free to make up their minds if it's decided for them what they should see, whether or not the government is doing it or FB? Isn't this the same as the authoritarian nightmares that we've been pointing fingers at?