May 6, 2009 1
Using Peer Pressure to Improve Our Health
Amazon Brilliantly Leverages Other Users Behavior to Affect Yours
Attempting to draw insight from the titans of user interface design, I have been thinking about how to use technology to motivate the people we love to take better care of themselves. If Amazon can convince us to buy books that readers with similar tastes have purchased, there must be a way to use that sort of social pressure to encourage us to listen to the warning signs of dangerous diseases. Facebook made the process of spreading apps so intuitive and fast that many users inexplicably found themselves adding silly applications without deriving any real enjoyment out of the experience. Can’t we similarly make taking care of ourselves viral?
The same incentive that drives app adoption on Facebook and sales on Amazon would also be effective for a health service. It’s called peer pressure. It made you drink beer in high school, stage zombie attacks on Facebook, buy just one more book on Amazon and, if leveraged properly, can lead you to check yourself out. You may not be willing to take care of yourself at the expense of everything else in your busy schedule, but knowing that your mother or child is worrying about your health could be enough to drive you to get that recurring headache checked out.
The key, as always, with social apps is to make them action focused and keep the minimum amount of action required, i.e. the barrier to entry, extremely low. With that in mind, here are a few very rough ideas of web services and apps that might help us to pay more attention to the silent screams of our bodies.
- E-Cards – A very simple old concept revitalized for a new purpose. We could send our loved ones cards asking them to check out specific ailments that we know bother them. Incorporating celebrity PSA-type videos could drive the message home further. Even more effective would be allowing users to record their pleas via their webcams. That could go a long way to convince their mothers/daughters to check themselves out, especially if the footage was combined in Flash with other uploaded photos, graphics and text to create a simple multimedia presentation.
- A web quiz app could question you about your own symptoms, give you a list of possible causes in a printable PDF format (that you’d bring to your next doctor visit) and ask you to forward it to your loved ones to remind them to take care of themselves. iVillage does something similar with their symptom solver.
- A DonorsChoose type site that lets you create a page with your case why your mom should treat herself better – stop smoking, exercise more, get more regular mammograms, etc. Your page would be anonymous and visitors to the site could submit advice and stories about similar experiences. You’d then forward the interesting bits of wisdom and advice you get from the crowd to your mother. This concept has the benefit of allowing good Samaritans to wander around the site and taking a few seconds to give a bit of wisdom that might prove convincing. You’d obviously get a ton of bad advice that you’d have to filter out. But bad or harmful advice and other trollish behavior would be flagged and thus reflected in some sort of reputation rank for that user. And when you did send along someone’s thoughts to your loved one, the good Samaritan would get reputation points which would show up next time they offered a suggestion to someone else. People love giving advice, building good reputations and doing small but helpful tasks that make them feel good about themselves so I think there would be no shortage of advice givers. As for the intended recipient of all of this unwanted feedback from strangers, they might be turned off and angered but if cleverly constructed and designed, the site would show them just how much their daughter/son/mother/father/brother/sister loved them and worried about them. And if they got any insight from the crowd on how to get healthier without too much effort, so much the better.
These are merely kernels of ideas and there are obvious and quite major hurdles to services like the ones I’ve outlined above.
- Privacy is the biggest. We want to protect our medical info from companies and from each other’s prying eyes.
- Fear is another. People are often afraid to confront their symptoms because doing so makes them more real. It also means they need to spend money on addressing the problems.
Kiva.org Enables Users to Engage in Micro-Finance
However, with further thought and development, I’m confident that it is possible to leverage social pressure online to encourage our loved ones to pay close attention to their health. Organizations like Kiva and DonorsChoose have unlocked massive social potential by making it easy, visible and social to do small, granular acts of giving and micro-lending. The same can be done to address a whole host of humanity’s other problems – like taking care of our bodies. Kiva and DonorsChoose opened a giant door by pairing the social activities of the web with the social consciousness inside us all. It’s up to tomorrow’s great social entrepreneurs to walk through that door.
