We trust you.

The corporate world relies heavily on willpower.

Unfortunately, what the world relies on is not the actual concept of willpower – it takes a more optimistic view, which assumes that when the time comes, we will be able to summon the mental resources necessary to resist temptation or follow through and take that difficult action.

In reality, willpower can be fleeting. When we’re tired, research suggests we’re much less likely to exert the cognitive effort which may be involved in resisting temptation. This is partly because our bodies are concerned with preserving enough cognitive capacity for other important tasks.

But I’d say that willpower is something that many organisations in the world rely on to help the people working within them sleep at night. They take the optimistic view that humans who consume their products and services are able to use them with the appropriate amount of moderation.

We trust you not to eat too much junk food.

Walking into any supermarket, you’ll see a mind-boggling array of food options. You don’t need to look hard to see the many types of chips, sweets and chocolate that are available.

If I may, I’d first like to pick on the company Cadbury, the chocolate manufacturer. Heading to their website, I notice they have a page dedicated to “mindful snacking” which educates us about how to eat more mindfully, without overindulging. On this page they guide us through mindfulness exercises to help us identify when we are suitably satiated, and therefore should choose to refrain from eating that extra snack.

On this page, they also have a statement:

“It’s all about eating a wide variety of foods in the appropriate amounts and maintaining an active lifestyle. Enjoying your favourite chocolates in a mindful way can be part of a balanced diet.”

At first glance, this seems like a positive move. How nice of Cadbury to help us be more mindful so we can engage with their products more responsibly. I’m a big fan of mindfulness meditation and have been practicing it for more than ten years… so I find it hard to disagree with their mindful approach.

They provide us with tools and information to help us make the right choices – tick. And then they suggest we eat their chocolate only as part of a balanced diet – another tick. They even suggest we engage in an active lifestyle – it makes me feel good to see them help us like this. It’s only when we look at the other side of the system that we start to see the imbalance.

At any supermarket, you’ll see the beautifully designed product packaging, carefully crafted to attract our eye – and also put at just the right level on the shelf so we engage with it before we see other options. This, when combined with additional promotional signage and convenient impulse-buy product placement locations near the checkouts make for an enticing proposition.

Going back to the website, the most prominent line on their home page currently reads “Give in to more indulgence”, when promoting their new chocolate range. If I want to find out about mindful eating I need to dig for it by looking through various menu options.

It’s jarring when you start to look at the brash nature of their offering.

Here’s a product that tastes delicious, looks fantastic, and is cheap enough for most people to purchase, and which is generally very bad for your health.

But when challenged, any employee at Cadbury can say:

“We recommend only eating it as part of a balanced diet. It’s up to the consumer to make the choices that are right for them and their lifestyle”.

Cadbury and similar organisations are simply relying on the willpower of the consumer to do the heavy lifting when it comes to showing restraint in the face of such a tantalising product.

This clearly isn’t working, because waist circumference data (a measure used to indicate health risk) shows that 60 to 70 per cent of adults are at an increased risk level, and Body Mass Index (BMI) data (noting its obvious flaws) also highlights a similar trend.

We trust you not to gamble too much.

Of course, it’s not just the fast food and snack companies that are relying on our willpower to help them sleep at night.

If you watch most professional sport on television these days, you will notice an astonishing amount of gambling advertising.

Australia has the highest gambling spend per capita, at $244 billion in total bets, with losses of $32 billion per year. That amounts to about $1,500 lost per adult, per year. This doesn’t sound like much, until you consider that many people don’t gamble at all, meaning that those who do are doing most of the work to bring up that average figure.

Looking at gambling advertising, I’ve noticed that there is an abundance of “bet with your friends” offers out there now, attempting to increase the social draw of gambling. The commercials show us friends (designed to look like the everyman and woman of Australia) betting together and enjoying the adrenaline rush.

But – I hear you say – gambling promotion is now legislated to require a warning message during all advertisements. So the gambling platforms are doing their duty by offering a clearly addictive product, while disclaiming that you should “gamble responsibly”.

Once again, they’re leaning on that human restraint quite a lot.

We trust you to safeguard your attention.

What if I told you that I was going to provide you with a device that would allow unlimited access to knowledge and information from around the world, along with limitless entertainment options?

The only thing I’d ask you to consider is that the device will gradually reduce your attention span, and sometimes entice you to spend many hours scrolling content, disconnecting you from your real-world relationships and negatively impacting your sleep. Over time, you won’t even want to part with it – it will accompany you everywhere, so you’ll never be alone or need to spend time thinking without it having the answer for you, readily available.

But don’t worry, because to help you overcome these challenges, we’re going to give you a few tools. We’re going to provide you with a report that you can use to see the amount of time you’re spending on the device, so you can monitor when you’re spending too much. As a bonus, we’re also going to give you the ability to turn off all the notifications and alerts that you don’t want, and you can even schedule times of the day where you can turn off intrusive features – and you can customise all of this to your heart’s content.

We trust you to do the right thing with your device, so you can unleash all the benefits, without experiencing any of the downsides. And we also trust you to make sure that your children are doing the right thing, too.

The systems are almost perfect, but the humans aren’t.

Food, gambling and smartphones are far from the only examples where we see this occurring.

The temptress of alcohol beckons us, while at the same time urging us to “drink responsibly”. We are encouraged to “buy now, pay later” to satisfy our consumptive urges, without needing to be patient until we have the money to pay for it.

These systems are all designed to maximise engagement and make for a “sticky” product – one that is difficult to pry even from our lifeless fingers. Their design is nearing perfection, informed by many decades of research and experimentation, and we’ve now arrived at the point where many humans find these offerings almost impossible to resist.

The organisations that provide these services can always rely on one optimistic notion – that if the products are harming somebody, they simply need to stop using them or to consume less of them. And if they can’t do that – well, they were warned.

We told you to gamble, drink and eat responsibly, so it’s really all your fault if something goes wrong.

It’s interesting how organisations can release their moral responsibility by adding a disclaimer, warning or helpful education program to their offering.

This begs the question: how much responsibility should the designers of such systems take, when it comes to addiction-inducing products and services that have the potential to cause harm when used too often?

We tend to demonise the companies who deliver the services, but we know that companies are comprised of individuals – an organisation is nothing without the people who build, operate and oversee it.

Every improvement that made the product just that little bit more irresistible was designed and then approved by people. And as each improvement took hold, it became more difficult for people inside these organisations to push back and say “this isn’t a good idea.”

Instead, it became far easier to let the individual consumer make their own choices, even if the odds of success were stacked against them. After all, who am I to tell someone else what to do with their money, their body or their attention?

We did warn them.