Intention and human behaviour

You make something. It’s intended to do this and to be used in a certain way. Then people come along and muck it all up by using it in an entirely different way. You intended this; people did that.

People make you nuts sometimes.

Ian Roundtree had a post on the weekend where this came up (Defining SILO theory). We briefly discussed it in the comments – what is intended, what people do, and the difficulty in trying to manage that.

It also comes up in Nick Carr’s The Shallows where he talks about a computer program, ELIZA, that was written by Joseph Weizenbaum in the mid-sixties as an experiment. It was a program that interacted with a user based on what the user said. You asked a question; it answered. The program used words from the question asked and formed a response based on them.

Given the period, everyone thought it was very cool. Weizenbaum wanted to see if a program could be written to simulate a human interaction. He did. What he found, however, was that the startling thing was not the program, but how people – you and me – responded to it.

Although everyone knew it was not human but programming, people responded to it as if it were human. We began ascribing human qualities to it.

Not only that, we also mirror the human mind we imagine. That’s the part that worries Carr. He points to studies that show this is something that occurs in specific areas of our brain, areas that manage such things as empathy, sympathy, and loyalty, and which can sometimes cause us to mirror perceived behaviour.

Getting back to intention

The Internet was not created to surf porn sites. It was not created to bully other students at our high school. It was not created so celebrities could garner gazillions of followers and market their latest work. But that’s what human behaviour does. Lofty ambitions get put aside in favour of fun and convenience and profit, among other things.

And this goes back to what Ian and I were discussing. The “SILO’s for Dummies” definition (the one I prefer with my limited mental capacities) is this: a SILO is where we impose controls on an area that manages who can do what and when.* The best known current example is Apple and the iPad.

Apple imposes controls on what can be done and, more to the point, what apps can be there and how they will be written. It could be, as some believe, a power grab and a monopolistic play. But it could also be a well-intentioned attempt to manage human behavior in the same way that our physical communities have laws and regulations in place to manage what we can and can’t do, even on properties that are our own. The reason is simple: what I do can, and often does, affect you.

If everyone can do whatever they want then sooner or later someone will have a party with music blasting through the night till 6:00am. Someone will endanger you and your children by drag racing through your neighbourhood.

I have no idea what I think about Apple other than it does concern me that so much appears to be aggregating in one place, with one supplier. But that’s as much human behaviour as anything else – we have to have iPads and their apps!

But this post isn’t about Apple or iPads. It’s just an inconclusive musing on the tension between what we intend and what we do. Much of our time is spent trying to mediate the two, whether it be in government, the courts, the boardrooms or on the keyboard writing code.

One last example: this post was written with the intention that it be read. The reality, however, is that most people will scan it quickly, if that. Some will only see the headline.

There is always a gulf between what we intend and how people behave.

(Note to software, apps and web tools: behavior is also spelled behaviour — at least it is if you live in Canada or the U.K.)

* There is no “SILO’s for Dummies.” I made that up, just as I made up the definition.