The CHT Perspective

At CHT, we believe that question can and must be answered. With a team of experts operating across media, policy, and tech, CHT’s work reveals the incentive structures at the heart of the most consequential technologies of the 21st century — social media and artificial intelligence.

That core question — “How can technology better serve society?” — holds a deep lineage at CHT. In the early 2010s, when Tristan Harris was working as Design Ethicist at Google, he began to notice the detrimental effects of attention-harvesting design — design that was becoming increasingly prevalent on social media sites and digital platforms. Concerned about where these design practices could lead society, he created the presentation, “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention.” The presentation went viral, and launched the “Time Well Spent” movement.

In 2018, Tristan joined forces with fellow technologists Aza Raskin and Randima Fernando to found the Center for Humane Technology. CHT’s initial work focused on social media, but with the advent of generative AI — and its rapid spread across society in just a handful of years — CHT expanded its focus. Today, our independent nonprofit is staffed by a team of experts able to identify and analyze the incentives driving harmful, misaligned technology — and develop interventions that pave the path to a better future for society.

CHT’s unique perspective lies at the intersection of technology, psychology, and incentives.  Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s business partner, once said, “Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.” At CHT, that maxim holds deep truth. By examining the incentives driving modern technology, we are able to accurately diagnose what is happening with our current tech products — and even predict how technology may impact us in the future.

With technologists as our co-founders, CHT is keenly aware of how tech design reflects the incentives of a tech company, and how design goes on to impact our psychology. This “insider” expertise gives CHT cutting-edge perspective on the critical drivers in this space.

CHT works to demystify this complex system of incentives, so that stakeholders, policymakers, and the public at large can understand how, and why, tech is affecting them in adverse ways. CHT’s legacy work includes dissecting how addictive design features on social media — including red notifications, algorithmic curation, intermittent reinforcement, and infinite scroll — all work to manipulate human psychology, and keep you on the platform for as long as possible.

These design features reveal the hidden incentives at a tech company — and business models built on constant user engagement. By creating clarity around these hidden incentives, CHT offers individuals, families, and society at large the first step toward sparking change.

CHT is not against technology. We are against the misaligned incentives that distort the promises of technology in our society. We take Munger’s famous quote one step further — by changing the incentives in tech, we can change the outcomes. Many of the negative effects of technology are preventable. At CHT, we believe we can transform the future — one incentive at a time.