[IxDA Discuss] Ethical Issues for Interaction Designers

[Robert Reimann]

This is an interesting direction.

Personally, I think Evolutionary Psychlogy (EP) is a very promising way of
approaching the understanding
of human behavior, but not one yet solidly grounded in strong theory. As
such, I'm not sure I would yet
consider it as a basis of design thinking (it remains for me an interesting
field to monitor, however). I'd
also worry a bit about designers (or any non-expert) generating lay
interpretations of EP theory, even
once it exists, to your point about Social Darwinism.

The programme of EP is very ambitious:

"A genuine, detailed specification of the circuit logic of human nature is
expected to become the theoretical centerpiece of a newly reconstituted set
of social sciences, because each model of an evolved psychological mechanism
makes predictions about the psychological, behavioral, and social phenomena
the circuits generate or influence." (Tooby and Cosmides, 2005)

But, that is of course decades away, at best.

In the meantime, how do we approach the problem?

BTW, for anyone interested in a very detailed explanation of EP by leading
proponents of the field, look here.

http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/papers/bussconceptual05.pdf

Robert.


On 8/3/07, Olly Wright <olly.wright at mediacatalyst.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 2 Aug 2007, at 17:21, Robert Reimann wrote:
>
> > The main issue I have with your third point (cultural ethics) is
> > that it immediately raises the question:"from the perspective of
> > whose culture?". As unique cultures continue to be extinguished at
> > an ever increasing rate by western megaculture, and understanding
> > that technology is one of chief vectors of western cultural
> > hegemony, the idea of a cultural ethics (presumably determined by the
> > majority culture) and employed in the design of technology seems as
> > though it could itself be ethically suspect.
> >
> > Robert.
>
> That's a very good point. Daniel Dennett discusses it in a recent TED
> lecture, talking about 'toxic memes' transmitted by western technology:
>
> http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/116
>
> It's would clearly be a mistake to think of 'cultural ethics' as
> 'what x culture says is good', and then apply that to 'culture y'.
> And to justify this based on 'which culture is the majority' is
> doubly flawed. However pure cultural relativism is broken also, the
> answer has to lie somewhere in the middle (cultural relativism
> leading to moral relativism leading to effectively no morality at all).
>
> The way I have been looking at this is along the lines of nature
> versus nurture. Nature being our biological / genetic / innate
> behaviour, and nurture being learned / cultural / societal behaviour.
> This second set (our 'culture') is determined in turn through
> interaction between our environment and our nature (our genetic
> behaviour). According to Darwin at least.
>
> From this perspective, 'cultural ethics' in IXD / IA becomes a
> matter of context design. We create contexts and then place humans in
> them and see what happens. Given that humans have a natural set of
> behaviours based on our genetics that are universal (ie transcend all
> races + cultures), we are in a position to evaluate a whole range of
> factors. Things like motivation, social interaction, healthy
> activity, and so on.
>
> My favourite current example of this is provided via the definition
> of genetic reciprocal altruism established by Robert Trivers in 1971,
> an evolutionary psychologist. In short he tells us that all humans
> (except the occasional psychopath) have an innate tendency to act in
> an altruistic way, given certain conditions. Conditions such as
> established mutual trust, a reasonable likelyhood of the favour being
> returned, and living within a fairly fixed social group where
> altruistic behaviour is remembered and rewarded. This is a tool we
> can use as designers: establish the necessary conditions for
> reciprocal altruism to occurr (via technology-mediated social
> interaction), and altruism will floursh. This is surely ethical design?
>
> I think this approach has a few clear benefits. It's culturally
> neutral (since genetics apply equally to all cultures), and provides
> rich academic material to draw on, primarily evolutionary psychology
> and anthropology, but also some moral philosophy. On the down side,
> you have to show that this approach does lead to 'real' ethics
> (contested by many), and especially it's easy to get mixed up in
> arguing that something is 'good' just because it's 'natural'. Witness
> the gross errors of the Social Darwinists for example.
>
> If this is something that interests you, I wrote an article about it
> for the ASIS&T bulletin:
>
> http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Jun-07/Wright.pdf
>
> Olly Wright
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-- 
Robert Reimann
President, IxDA

Manager, User Experience
Bose Corporation
Framingham, MA