The ‘Don’t be Evil’ motto was coined by Google around 2000 and was dropped by Alphabet in 2015 and replaced by ‘Do the right thing’.
The human brain doesn’t hear the word ‘not’ when used as part of the verb doing. So instead of hearing ‘don’t’ we hear ‘do’.
Don’t believe me? Try it out with a child. I once walked into a party and it was a summer party in the daytime so kids were allowed to attend. One of the kids had a ‘bored moment’ going on.
This young boy was opening and closing the living room door with his full force, making a real noise and potentially damaging the door or maybe the doorframe. His Dad was shouting at him ‘don’t close the door, don’t close the door and he repeated the mantra without success. It was both annoying to the guests and of course the Dad and his son.
So I intervened and simply said; ‘Stop closing the door’.
Guess what? Yes indeed he stopped doing it.
With Google’s motto ‘Don’t be Evil’, of course the internet has been evil and I’m sure there’ve been a lot of ‘evil’ goings on even inside Google.
One such an example is YouTube autoplays, which literally create patterns of addiction in our brains by allowing YouTube (owned by Google) to tell us which video we should be watching next.
And of course because they are queuing up the next video, it will also include those annoying ads, which pre-play and allow to skip or as is often the case these days no option to skip. (YUK!).
YouTube, (Google) prey on our psychology for their own profit, as do many others on the Internet.
Happy browsing!