Spamalot: Trampolines, Manipulation, and How the Promise of a Reward Alters Behavior

A few days ago, I posted a trampoline image with a heading suggesting people double click for something cool to happen.

Within the post I talked about how easy it is for social media posts to manipulate behavior.

I framed the post like a spam post and found myself surprised.

My average post runs around 1,000 views. I don’t post for the views, I post because I enjoy the process. But this trampoline post reached over 100,000 views. On average I receive about 20 likes per post, but the trampoline received over 3,000.

I’m under no illusion that my message reached 100,000 people, but more likely that the power of a manipulative post can reach 100 times more people than a non-manipulative post.

What was originally designed to be a fun way of posting a message to be more aware of when we might be being manipulated, instead turned into a quasi social experiment.

To say I’m shocked is an understatement.

There are quite a few lessons to be taken away from this:

1. People don’t have endless amounts of time to read articles, but will react to something quickly
2. People seek rewards for behavior, which makes manipulative messages so powerful
3. A lie (manipulative message) will travel halfway around the world before the truth has time to puts its shoes on

There are a lot more learnings, but for me personally it’s this:

1. If it looks like spam, acts like spam, even if it’s not, it’s spam

I do know that at least a few didn’t just double click the trampoline. But to the 99% that simply reacted to the “manipulative spam” message, sorry for clogging your newsfeed!

Signed your friendly neighborhood spammer.

Feel free to comment with your own thoughts on this, I'd love to hear from you!