Did you choose that app?

We do have free will, just in case you were wondering. We are responsible for our decisions, at least in part because we can choose otherwise. But our free will doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Some choices are so easy to make that they barely feel like choices at all; others are so difficult to make that they don’t feel like real options. Our choices are constrained by factors that are not entirely of our choosing.

Choice architecture

About 20 years ago two social scientists – Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler – popularized the concept of “choice architecture.” We make our decisions in the context of a background set of conditions (the “choice architecture”) that influence us to make certain choices and avoid others. Here’s an example: you need to get some milk. Do you get in the car to pick it up or do you get there some other way? This choice is going to be shaped by a lot of things, including the way the streets in your neighbourhood are laid out, the frequency of public transportation or whether there’s a big hill between you and the store.

Some aspects of the choice architecture are just natural facts (hills, your own physical abilities, etc.), but a lot of them are matters of design. When we build cities, for example, we not only reflect people’s previous choices but shape their subsequent choices with respect to how they will get around. In other words, we make it easier to choose certain ways of getting to the store and harder to choose others. In a city like Edmonton, people can, with sufficient motivation, choose to get to the store without driving, but the way the city is built means that it will take an extra effort to do so. In light of that, public policy needs to pay attention to the choice architecture and its effects; we need to build cities that make more sustainable transportation easier to choose and unsustainable transportation more difficult to choose.

Online choice

The online world is the same. We are free to “use” search engines or social media or streaming services as we see fit, but these tools aren’t “neutral.” They are algorithmically designed to make some choices easier (and hence more likely) than others (usually choices that maximize engagement and therefore ad revenue). In a city, the choice architecture of transportation is pretty easy to see if you know how to look at it, but online it is well-hidden: we can’t “see” the algorithm as it works on us. That makes it even harder to choose against what the designers want you to choose.

Perhaps this means that, as in urban planning, the choice architecture of the internet is a legitimate concern for public policy or at least for shared action. We can’t individually choose our way out of a harmful or unsustainable choice architecture; it takes collective action. Recent proposals to ban social media for kids are attempts at this kind of collective action, but they are pretty blunt instruments. A sophisticated (if nefarious) choice architecture requires more sophisticated policy responses.