The Psychological Benefits of Randomness and Anti-Personalization
This is the second installment of a two-part series on curation in the consumer world. The first piece introduces the concept of digital personalization and its unappreciated risks
Key points for the psychological benefits of randomness and anti-personalization
The consumer world is a highly personalized world, in which randomness has been rooted out in favor of curation
However, randomness, while often uncomfortable, also has profound psychological benefits
Most notably, human learning and personal growth is supported by regular encounters with content, ideas, and experiences which feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable
Flipping a coin, drawing straws, or closing your eyes and picking at random. Whatever the method, leaving it to chance can be an effective way to make simple decisions. But what happens when randomness applies to life more generally?
Max Hawkins entertained this idea very seriously. The San Francisco-based computer engineer built a series of apps designed explicitly to deliver randomness. For example, one app selected a random location within the city, hailed you an Uber, and sent special instructions to the driver not to reveal the location. It’s a ride that could literally take you anywhere in the city. The first time he used it, it whisked him off to San Francisco General Hospital’s Psychiatric Unit.
His randomness creations didn’t stop there. He built random generators for YouTube, Spotify, and Podcast playlists. He created a random diet generator, where each day he’d be restricted from eating a new, randomly generated food. He soon found himself spending each evening at the whims of his “random event” selector, which scanned the city’s public meet-ups and delivered a new one each day. One night the algorithm sent him to Chess Club, the next, Truck Driver School.
Remarkably, Max adhered to the random algorithm for two entire years, even using it to select which world cities to live in for months at a time. In a world overwhelmed with algorithmic personalization, this was a potent antidote.
Many of us may not be willing to go to the lengths that Max did to combat personalization. And most of us might naturally be hesitant about embracing randomness with such open arms. Regardless of whether this is a model that can be adopted in full, we can all see ourselves drawn with genuine whim.
His story also illustrates the possibilities that await those who can resist the natural inertia of the digital world. As we saw, this world is excellent at learning our preferences and delivering us exactly what we like and want. But are we missing something crucial? Are there specific benefits to not getting what we want?
Let’s examine this question within a specific domain: the impact of personalization on learning and personal growth.
On Personal Learning: The Spectrum of Algorithmic Personalization
If we spend a day reading about Ford Mustangs, we’re going to accumulate some knowledge about that specific car. If you spend the day looking up cake recipes, you’re going to learn a thing or two about baking cakes. Pretty straightforward. Learning and memory is complex, but it’s clear that input (both information and experiences) is crucial. What we learn is directly tied to what we consume.
In the case of algorithmic personalization, there’s something much more long-term happening. It doesn’t just impact the specifics of what we learn, but the broad character of learning itself.
To understand this, we need to look at algorithmic personalization as a spectrum, with either extreme producing a very different type of learning.
At one extreme, everything we consume comes through a filter that is based on our pre-existing beliefs and preferences. Let’s call this “inertia-ville”. As we’ve seen, much of the digital world has this general characteristic. Everything we come into contact with - whether a news article, a new song playlist, or a restaurant recommendation comes to us through this personalized lens.
In inertia-ville, life is comfortable and frictionless. It’s like being a CEO in a boardroom full of sycophants. Everyone agrees with you, and everyone shares your same interests. You’re constantly presented with things you already like and perspectives you’re already inclined to agree with.
Inertia-ville supports a very narrow, specialized form of learning. As a result, you learn more and more about the domains of knowledge we were already interested in, and our beliefs about these domains tend to become more ossified.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have the complete opposite scenario: total randomness; every possibility is equally likely. Let’s call this world random-ville. This describes the experience of Max over the span of those two years. Every few months he moved to a new random location in the world, and while there, was equally likely to attend any given local event on any given day.
Needless to say, things are very different in random-ville. What you encounter is entirely unrelated to your pre-existing preferences. You’re not sitting above a boardroom of yes-men. Living in random-ville is more like being at a table of total strangers. They’re not there to please you or validate you; they’re just people with their own agendas and interests.
As you might imagine, things aren’t so comfortable in random-ville. It's not an experience constructed for you, catered to your beliefs, preferences, and inclinations. Instead, it’s raw and messy. It’s a world of serendipity, happenstance, and chance encounters. And because of this, randomness produces a very different kind of learning and personal growth.
The Benefits of Psychological Discomfort on Learning
Inevitably, being confronted with random, non-personalized content entails unfamiliarity and discomfort. But far from being a bad thing, psychological discomfort can signify that learning is taking place.
Ruth J. Simmons, then president of Brown University, distilled this idea perfectly in her 2001 Convocation Address to new graduates: “I believe that learning, at its best, is the antithesis of comfort..If you come to this place for comfort, I would urge you to walk to yon iron gate, pass through the portal and never look back.”
In this way, confronting the uncomfortable unfamiliar is a crucial aspect of learning and personal growth. It’s the brain straining itself to assimilate new ideas, perspectives, and points of view. It’s analogous to a physical workout, where soreness and discomfort are the badges of good physical training. One that, over time, will shape a person’s overall physique. Similarly, mental “soreness” is a sign of equally enduring personal growth.
Learning is the antithesis of comfort. But that’s just the beginning. Encountering the uncomfortable unfamiliar may also produce a different kind of learning altogether.
This non-personalized content leads to the development of what author and philosopher Alan Jacobs describes as “personal density”, “the width of your present, your now.”. The idea is that when we’re constantly exposed to what we already know or are already comfortable in, we may gather narrow expertise or perspective. But this comes at the expense of width. What forces us to reassess and think across perspectives is content that is genuinely foreign and orthogonal to our current worldview.
In this view, the personalizing sways of the digital world are a direct opponent to this kind of personal growth. Max echoes this point, noting that “..my existing preferences blinded me to the complexity and richness of the world.”
In his book, Breaking Bread with The Dead, Jacobs considers its importance in early education, especially as it relates to childhood education. Jacobs argues that art that is made for children has its “narrow” merit. A developmentally appropriate picture book about animals can, for example, strengthen a child’s understanding of these concepts by carefully building off existing scaffolds. But this, too, represents a kind of curation that hinders the development of personal density.
What if they saw the diagrams from an undergraduate textbook instead? The semantic content likely wouldn’t stick as well, but it may result in another, arguably more meaningful outcome. As Jacobs distills, exposing kids to “older and adult art” teaches them “to find value and pleasure in something that wasn’t necessarily made for them.”
This idea of personal density through non-personalized content echoes Max’s reflections. As he observed, “..the randomness algorithm gave me the courage to live outside my comfort zone. To discover parts of the human experience that I felt were too different or not for me.”
On the Psychology of Anti-Personalization: Resisting Conformity
There’s much that we can learn from exploring the digital world’s vast corpus. But the real opportunities for growth may come from resisting the internet’s most natural tendency: to conform to our tastes, preferences, and beliefs.
It’s no easy task. But, on the journey through the digital world, the personalized path is the one of least resistance. Embracing randomness means exposure to a broader range of experiences that, importantly, are not designed for your own personal comfort. And in doing so, produces a kind of personal growth not otherwise possible.
Photo by Tatiana P via Unsplash
More on the perils of digital personalization in my TEDx talk
About the author
Matt Johnson, PhD is a researcher, writer, and consumer neuroscientist focusing on the application of psychology to branding. He is the author of the best-selling consumer psychology book Blindsight, and Branding That Means Business (Economist Books, Fall 2022). Contact Matt for speaking engagements, opportunities to collaborate, or just to say hello
References for The Dangers of Digital Personalization in Consumer Psychology
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