Pokemon Go a psychological experiment to test how ready are the masses for Total Mind Control
Business2Community outlines the psychology of Pokemon Go and how it capitalizes on six psychological principles. Listed as the driving psychological principles are: Curiosity, Fear of Missing out, The Ikea Effect (the more effort we put into obtaining an item or reward, the higher value we place on it), The Endowment Affect (feeling ownership and value), and Operant Conditioning (see Classical Conditioning and Pavlov’s dogs).

These 6 psychological principles of marketing are in effect what create an addiction. Thus in essence, Pokemon Go creates an addiction while psychologically weakening the human mind/psyche to the possible point of psychosis in vulnerable individuals.

“Operant conditioning focuses on using either reinforcement or punishment to increase or decrease a behavior. Through this process, an association is formed between the behavior and the consequences for that behavior.

For example, imagine that a trainer is trying to teach a dog to fetch a ball. When the dog successful chases and picks up the ball, the dog receives praise as a reward. When the animal fails to retrieve the ball, the trainer withholds the praise. Eventually, the dog forms an association between his behavior of fetching the ball and receiving the desired reward” .

As one can see in Pokemon Go, this principle is being used. Replace the dog with people and the ball with the App. The rewards systems set up within the Pokemon Go App can form associations between behaviors such as running through the streets at midnight to gathering in crowds near a high ledges all in pursuit of the grand Pokemon reward. Like lemmings running towards a cliff in pursuit of suicide, Pokemon Go, if orchestrated properly, may be able to get people to do just about anything if they are conditioned to react to the stimuli and reward offered.

Additionally, if one were to provide the stimulus but withhold the Pokemon reward, would people still have the same response (i.e. running in search of something) or would they be able to break away from this conditioned learning and think for themselves regarding the mission they were on. From this perspective, Pokemon Go has the potential to teach/program certain responses to stimuli to produce desired behaviors from participants.

Should the game designers ever desire to introduce and associate dangerous or immoral stimuli with a reward, would the people who have been using this app recognize it and be able to un-learn their conditioning? Or would they blindly react to the stimulus presented? These and other ethical questions need to be examined further.

As if living life through a virtual reality was not bad enough, we now have a highly addictive app with the potential to cognitively restructure thinking patterns into a possible mental illness. What will developers come up with when we have a sub-population of Pokemon Go users who are willing to do anything, anything to find their target? Are these virtual-virtual reality games the beginning of something more sinister such as programmed soldiers?

This and other questions are vital concerns that need to be answered. When an industry has control over a population’s thoughts and actions so as to cause a great decrease in participation in real life and reality (online life) and then creates psychological apps which have the power to restructure thinking patterns (addiction) to make-entice people to do what it wants (find the Pokemon), we have serious issues.

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