I.
The intersection below my office has the power to break humanity. Wilson Boulevard and Lynn Street, in Arlington, VA intersect at right angles in what seems like an ordinary intersection. But then there’s the noise. Some days, especially Fridays, at around 4:30 PM, the air above the intersection is thick with the honking of angry drivers. Most intersections don't result in such a cacophony - what makes this one special?
The traffic lights are positioned further back relative to the intersection than drivers are used to, as if mischievously encouraging drivers to enter it even if the lane in front of them is full. There is so much traffic in the area that oftentimes cars can’t exit the intersection before the light turns red and cross traffic starts–or would start if it weren’t blocked. Thus, the honking. Light after light, week after week.
But it’s not the intersection design that interests me–though someone should probably take a look at it–it’s the impact on humans. People traverse dozens of intersections each day without incident, but, suddenly, when all the factors are just right (or, more accurately, wrong), they become participants in an angry, roiling honk-a-thon. There is something about being stuck in traffic that sets us off. You know your own intentions, but you only know other people’s actions. This is always true, but the limited communication between impatient drivers makes it worse, and the most noticeable actions tend to be dumb or dangerous. Good driving goes unnoticed, and bad actions get amplified. You might do something a little bad, like enter the intersection when your exit is blocked. But if the lights change, and you can’t get out, suddenly your minor transgression becomes the center of attention and blocks traffic flow. The only ways to communicate are an annoying car horn to draw attention to the injustice or maybe a universal hand signal, but that rarely helps improve the situation. So you get a mob of angry drivers at the intersection of Wilson and Lynn.
I’m glad I walk.
II.
Your family is heading to an Airbnb for a well-deserved vacation - time for some delicious meals and family fun. Usually, it's Scrabble or Ticket to Ride–Cards Against Humanity if your family is particularly dysfunctional–but not this time because Dad forgot all the games at home. So you scour the place and find one you all know well - Monopoly. You haven’t touched a Monopoly board in years, but it’s so famous; it must be fun, right? Two hours later you’re sobbing, Mom and Dad aren't talking to each other, and it’s a good thing Tiny Tim flipped over the board before Belinda landed on Boardwalk again.
How did this happen? It’s not that your family members are especially obnoxious winners and whiny losers. You all win or lose in Scrabble all the time, but that doesn’t result in overturned chairs. For some reason, losing at Monopoly is much, much, worse than losing at other games. This isn't unique to your family; it's that Monopoly is a really poorly designed game for humans.
There are many reasons why this game affords such a miserable experience: chance has far too large a role, you mostly only gain by taking from others, there’s ganging up and screwing over, you get large power differentials between the players, then people are negotiating under these power differentials (“OK, I’ll let you not go bankrupt if you give me this… and this… and all of this”). The game is too long and house rules usually make it longer and unclear (If you’re about to go bankrupt, can you trade all your land and money to someone else just so the person making you go bankrupt can’t get it?). In short, it’s everything people dislike in people, all wrapped up in a tidy box.
It’s an astonishingly awful game that has noticeably increased human misery.
III.
These might seem like unrelated anecdotes, but I think they point to the significance of design in the human experience. Bad design can make well-intentioned people have terrible experiences. But there’s a positive lesson to draw from this. When something is not working well, it may require only small tweaks around the edges to improve. I think these examples are indications of how pivotal designs are in the world. If the bad design of an intersection or board game can cause such negative experiences, it stands to reason that the impact of good designs might be surprisingly significant and positive. And I see no reason why this shouldn’t scale up to the level of entire societies.
There are a lot of problems with social media today. They might be fixable. This isn’t to say that we could fix social media simply by rearranging the buttons, but tweaks might have more impact than one would expect. Twitter can be obnoxious — are there small tweaks we could make to make it less so? For example, the Quote Tweet button is too often used for dunking on people. How about we take that away? It might not be enough to make Twitter a good place, but I wouldn't be surprised if it created a positive feedback loop of more pleasant behavior that ended up having a significant effect.
Human political systems have gone through many changes over the centuries, some small, some revolutionary. We've had some incredibly bad designs, like hereditary monarchies that have led to child-rulers, like Mary, Queen of Scots, who assumed the throne at six days old. (Yes, I know there are regents. It’s still a bad design.) Our current design is much better, but could still be vastly improved.
We've seen some really ugly politics recently. I would guess that about 80% of US voters think one of our last two presidents has been a complete failure and is destroying or almost destroyed the country. Does it have to be like this? I don’t think employees of major corporations would say the same about their last CEOs. I don’t think it has to be this way; assuming it does seems like a failure of imagination. We can see the misaligned incentives in our structures. We can watch politicians benefit from brinkmanship while the country suffers. We can fix misaligned incentives to address this. We can create structures around our public figures that nudge them in a better direction for the country. Or we can choose not to.
We're living in a time of increasing polarization, and it doesn't seem to be getting any better. But what if we could change that? Our current two-party system with first-past-the-post voting encourages negative campaigning. What if we change this? Lots of people like ranked-choice voting, although I have problems with it and prefer approval voting. Either would be better than first-past-the-post. Regardless of the choice, it's clear that we need to rethink the incentives we provide for our politicians.
We know a lot about human nature. Instead of trying to change human nature, we should focus on changing the incentive structures of our system. We can build systems that work well given human nature, or we could build ones that don’t. The important point here is that we're the designers. We can design things that bring out the best or the worst in people.
I think there’s cause for optimism here. I had been worried about what would bring us together and hadn't been able to come up with much. But maybe I had underestimated the power of design, of small changes at the margins. A slight change in structure can make a huge difference. The power of design is truly incredible. With a bit of smarter thinking, we can bridge the divide and fix what's broken. We can change things on the margin to create a much different, and better, world for ourselves.