Bottomless Bowl Experiment and Attention Economy
In a famous experiment which, ironically, earned him an Ig Nobel Prize, Brian Wasnik established that
altering visual cues of how much is eaten will influence intake
when given inaccurate or perceptually biased visual cues, a person's consumption estimation and perception of satiety will be more influenced by the biased visual cue than by how much they actually consume
The experiment goes thus. A set of individuals were invited to consume soup from a bowl placed in front of them. Half of them were given normal bowls and half of them were given bowls connected to a tank containing six quarts of soup which fed into the bowl through a pressure valve. If the level of soup goes down a below level, slowly, the level rises to that level.
After being seated, they were told that they would be eating a new recipe of tomato soup for lunch and were told to enjoy as much soup as they wanted. After 20 minutes, respondents were thanked and were given a questionnaire asking them to rate the soup and to estimate how much they believed they ate (in ounces and in calories). After this, they were asked a series of questions measured on nine-point scales about how sated they are, how hungry they were before starting the study, whether they generally try to eat until their bowl is empty, and whether they believed their consumption was influenced by the presence of others.
The results of the experiment are revealing. The bowls are classified as below as
accurate visual cue (normal bowl)
biased visual cue (self-refilling bowl).
The naming is self-explanatory.
One would notice that those who used the bottomless soup bowls consumed more soup(73% more on an average) but assumed they consumed only consumed 20% more!!
What does all this mean?
When initially presented with a reasonable-sized food portion, there is emerging evidence that people may have an approximate expectation of how much of it they intend to consume. For instance, 54% of American adults generally claim that they attempt to eat until they “clean their plates”. For these people, there is a visual cue or benchmark they have established (a clean plate), and they eat until they either reach that benchmark or until they are otherwise sated.
The word here is visual cues and what happens if the visual cues are tweaked?
Simply put, this experiment proves that tweaking those visual cues can make the designer alter the behaviour of the user. Note, I used the word designer here. And that means this bottomless soup bowl concept has already entered UX design - the notorious infinite scroll.
A good tweet set explains the problem with infinite scroll well -
One of the dirty secrets of silicon valley is called the infinite scroll which caused a massive boom in usage in every single product. no one talks about it because it’s better UX but it’s one of the most psychologically destructive things to ever happen—a blip on the radar. It’s psychologically destructive for people to not hit walls—it literally creates an infinite dopamine response to the act of scrolling while looking for something pleasurable (which you eventually lose the ability to find). Doomscrolling a scroll hole is literally like smoking packs of cigarettes at a time—it not only destroys your ability to focus it also removes your ability to draw pleasure from other activities.
Aza Raskin who created infinite scroll just two or three years after this experiment(was his brainwave related to this experiment?) noted in 2009,
I like the more idea, but why aren't you guys using infinite history. If the scroll bar is near the bottom, load some more tweets.
But, a decade later, he is disenchanted as it wastes time and hooks people to do something which is not productive.
One of my lessons from infinite scroll: that optimizing something for ease-of-use does not mean best for the user or humanity.
In fact, the oldest reference to infinite scroll comes from 2006(does that mean Wasnik was inspired by Raskin?)
But, how does it work?
Nir Eyal of the Hook Model fame notes,
The infinite scroll is interaction design’s answer to our penchant for endlessly searching for novelty. Certainly, there are technical reasons for the scroll’s increasing ubiquity. The rise of dynamic content, like a new comment entering the feed, necessitated a better solution than pagination built for static content. But to really understand why the scroll works so well requires a brief trip inside the mind and back in time.
Our brains evolved through the millennia into incredible prediction machines, designed to help us make sense of our environment. Our species benefited from our ability to make good decisions based on what we know is likely to happen in the future, thus, keeping us alive long enough to make babies and spread our genes.
To make correct predictions, the brain accesses memories, which allow us to deduce what’s coming next in a nearly instantaneous process of pattern recognition. The ability to learn is simply the conditioning of the brain to recognize cause and (blank).
You were expecting “effect” weren’t you? Of course you were. That’s because your brain has learned that these two words, “cause” and “effect”, tend to go together.
It’s this conditioning that creates cognitive shortcuts and habits, allowing us to process tremendous amounts of information all at once. Our brains move known causal patterns to long-term storage so that our attention can be devoted to learning new things.
And nothing holds our attention better than the unknown. The things that captivate, engross, and entertain us, all have an element of surprise. Our brains can’t get enough of trying to predict what’s next and our dopamine system kicks into high-gear when we’re waiting to know if our team will make the field goal, how the dice will land, or how the movie plot ends. Like a loose slot machine, the infinite scroll gives users fast access to variable rewards.
Interestingly, our brain isn’t wired to seek pleasure alone. In fact, much of our motivation comes from alleviating the pain of desire. Dopamine levels spike when we’re just about to find reward and plummet after we receive it. To get us to do just about anything, evolution uses this chemical cascade to induce anticipation, motivation, and finally pain alleviation. Somehow we call this endless merry-go-round “fun.”
And we are now stuck in a situation - a bottomless soup bowl model created to jack up our attention levels and stay glued. Ironically, it links perfectly to the Hook Model - the user’s curiosity is buttressed by the infinite scroll which feed him more information to satiate his curiosity.
All of this makes one wonder, what is good UX - is it something visually appealing and helpful or is it something healthy for the user on the long run? What should a designer follow - something which is profitable for him financially but which will addict the user beyond tolerable limits or something which may dent his profits but will the user safe even if it means loss of business?
References
Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake
Brian Wansink, James E. Painter, Jill North
Infinite Scroll: The Web’s Slot Machine (nirandfar.com)