Why tech products should be designed alongside psychologists

This essay was published by The Decision Lab on March 24, 2022.

Technology has drastically changed how we behave and what we feel and think. Every day, the first and last thing most of us do is check our phones. Sounds and vibrations from our phones distract us dozens of times a day. Phones and computers mediate a lot of our social interaction: Zoom meetings are not just for work, but personal events from baby showers to funerals.

Our social media feeds not only move our moods temporarily, but they also change how we view and how much we like ourselves. Technology also impacts the choices we make, from our shopping decisions (e.g., Uber can deter us from buying a car) to our political beliefs (e.g., YouTube can radicalize us into white supremacy).

Technology changes human behavior, emotion, and cognition, despite being largely built or designed by technologists without a background in psychological science ( the term I’ll use to refer to the scientific study of human psychology, not the therapeutic practice of counseling) and whose jobs don’t explicitly involve applying or conducting psychological science.

Many of these technologists are scientists — e.g., data scientists building statistical models to predict human behavior. For example, about 18,000 employees across Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft have job titles containing the words “science” or “scientist.” But only about 200 (1%) have the word “behavior” or “behavioral” (including British spelling of these terms) in their job titles. There are psychologists who work in technology companies, but their jobs most often don’t involve applying psychological science. Job descriptions that overtly mention behavioral science are still relatively rare in the product teams that build most consumer technology.

Given that technology companies change human behavior at scale, profit from behavior change, and generally pride themselves on embracing scientific innovation, why do so few of them lack psychologists with a more formal and central role in product development?

The answer to this question holds the key to technology products that cause less unintended harm to people because they are designed with a more realistic understanding of…