The Friendship Garden: A Co-Designed Digital Intervention to Promote Healthier Social Connections Among Youth; Misuse of Psychology to Drive Business Profitability: How Technology Companies Weaponize Behavioral Science for Profit Maximization 4 views

The sovereign is he who decides the architecture of the choice. — Carl Schmitt, via Cass Sunstein, 2016 Teenagers unlock their phones 96 times per day. They enter digital environments deliberately engineered to create addiction, not connection. Meanwhile, 65% of college students report feeling lonely. The World Health Organization documents a 57% increase in problematic social media use among adolescents in just four years. This thesis addresses this crisis from two angles. My STS research examines how technology companies weaponize behavioral science for profit. My technical capstone project builds an app that redirects those same psychological principles toward genuine human connection. The technical portion of my thesis produced the Friendship Garden. This mobile application combats loneliness and social media addiction among young adults. Working with a five person systems engineering team, a psychology research team, and a Youth Advisory Board, we created an intervention that rethinks how technology can strengthen real friendships. The app uses a garden metaphor. Friendships appear as flowers that grow through shared, in person activities. Users create tasks for hanging out with friends. They complete those activities in real life. They reflect on experiences through photos and written reflections. The app suggests AI generated activities appropriate for different friendship stages. It includes a calendar based memory system for revisiting past experiences. Critically, the app avoids manipulation techniques my STS research identified. We deliberately excluded infinite scroll, stories with background music, and dopamine driven reward schedules. Users share actual experiences, not curated highlight reels designed to trigger social comparison. My STS research investigated how corporations transform psychological insights into exploitation mechanisms. Using Actor Network Theory, I traced how behavioral science moves through corporate networks and becomes weaponized for profit. The research reveals a systematic five stage translation pattern. Academic research on cognitive biases gets appropriated by companies. It gets translated into engagement metrics. Algorithms implement those metrics at scale. Users experience manipulation that feels natural. Internal documents provided evidence. Instagram's research showed the platform worsened body image for one in three teenage girls. Yet Meta continued developing Instagram Kids. TikTok employees compared their algorithm to slot machines. They called American teenagers the golden audience for addiction. My research identified three responsibility shields companies use. They claim algorithms make autonomous decisions. They say users freely choose to engage. They point to regulatory compliance. These shields work together so responsibility never lands anywhere. Doing both projects simultaneously revealed something neither could show alone. Building the Friendship Garden forced me to confront how easy it is to accidentally recreate exploitation. Every design choice became an ethical test. Should we add streaks? Show comparison metrics? Use variable rewards? My STS research taught me these are not neutral technical decisions. They are choices about whose interests the technology serves. When the Youth Advisory Board suggested features similar to existing social media, I could explain why certain designs inevitably lead to manipulation. Understanding manipulation networks made me a different kind of engineer. STS perspectives reveal that technology is never neutral. The algorithms we build reflect choices about what matters. My research showed how companies deliberately distribute responsibility to avoid accountability. As engineers, we participate in those networks. We cannot claim we are just following metrics. We are making choices about the architecture of choice itself. This is what STS thinking brings to engineering. It prevents us from accidentally building exploitative systems. It reveals how technical choices, organizational pressures, and profit motives combine to create harm even when no individual actor intends it. This work matters because the stakes are high. My personal struggle with social media addiction made this research urgent. Many friends delete apps during exam weeks just to focus. Technology shaped by behavioral science could genuinely help people. The same psychological insights currently used to create addiction could support meaningful relationships. But this will not happen through market forces alone. It requires engineers who understand how manipulation networks operate. It requires choosing to build systems that serve human needs over corporate profits. My thesis provides both the critical analysis and the constructive alternative.

BS (Bachelor of Science)

social connection; youth mental health; Social media ; Social media addiction ; mobile application; behavioral science; technology ethics; actor-network theory; systems engineering; friendship; human-centered design; psychology misuse; corporate exploitation ; user experience; engineering ethics; behavioral manipulation

School of Engineering and Applied Science Bachelor of Science in Systems & Information Engineering Technical Advisor: Laura Barnes STS Advisor: William Davis Technical Team Members: Tanjim Redhwan, Bailey Carlson, Maxwell Muldoon, Colin Miedler, Brennen Sumida

English

2026-05-08