Two people want to sell you something.
They start talking to you about yourself.
Person A is trying to understand you in order to “elicit desired behaviors.” He wants to know you in order to modify your behavior. Or to put it less nicely, he wishes to manipulate you into doing something he wants you to do.
Person B is trying to learn from you in order to understand how he can cultivate a mutually beneficial relationship with you. Maybe you’ll teach him something new.
Person A might offer you a mutually-beneficial deal, and Person B might prefer one behavior over another, so it’s tempting to say that there’s really no difference. Person A would say that in fact there is no difference. What he fails to recognize, however, is that he is seeing the customer not as a fellow human being, but as a behaving thing.
That is why “elicit desired behaviors” sounds so creepy, and why many of us might prefer to remain a mystery to researchers.
Frankly, a functionalist (one who thinks about everything in terms of use) might be very sophisticated within his domain, but his domain is spiritually limited. It is this mentality that speaks of human beings as “resources” which are to be “utilized”, thinks about new customer relationships in terms of “customer acquisition” — whose mania for quantification can grow so intense he is tempted to deny the value of anything he has not yet figured out how to quantify (nothing wrong with quantification — but all value is ultimately rooted in quality). Everything is reduced to use.
The dominance of this kind of stunted soul is what has given the word “corporate” its icky overtone.
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When people are given a viable alternative to soulless, hollow, insincere, inauthentic, self-interested manipulation, they take it. Customers prefer the human, and so do employees.
We all dislike being manipulated. We all love being respected. (Re- “back” + spect “look” — to treat one another as one who looks back at you.)
The User Experience industry enjoys talking about its respect of users, but its own language reveals its functionalist bias — the same bias that makes corporations so corporate: It utilizes its techniques to understand users and provide those users with useful, usable and (to sweeten the deal) desirable experiences. Why? To elicit desired behaviors, to which it has attached a monetary value to each individual instance.
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Let’s imagine someone approached by Person A has intuited what he’s up to. How would that person describe it? Maybe:
- “He just wanted something from me.”
- “He struck me as insincere and manipulative.”
- “I felt used.”
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Being human to your fellow humans is a competitive advantage.
This can’t be faked, and it should not be faked.
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