Hostile Scaffolding

Abstract

Most accounts of cognitive scaffolding focus on ways that external structure can support or augment an agent’s cognitive capacities. We call cases where the interests of the user are served benign scaffolding and argue for the possibility and reality of hostile scaffolding. This is scaffolding which depends on the same capacities of an agent to make cognitive use of external structure as in benign cases, but which undermines or exploits the user while serving the interests of another agent. We develop criteria for scaffolding being hostile and show by reference to examples including the design features of electronic gambling machines and casino management systems that hostile scaffolding exists and can be highly effective. In cases where the scaffolding is deep and permits the offloading of significant cognitive work, hostile scaffolding exploitatively manipulates cognitive processing itself. Given the extent of human reliance on scaffolding this is an important and neglected vulnerability.

Acknowledgments

We presented versions of this paper at the Wollongong 4E and Social Justice conference in August 2022, and at the philosophy seminar at UKZN in September 2021. We’re grateful to audiences at both for their engagement. We also thank Kim Sterelny, John Sutton, Nick Brancazio, Alex Gillett, John McCoy, Shen-Yi Liao, Ross Pain, Richard Sivil, Jelle Bruineburg, Regina Fabry, Francesco Rovetta, Katsunori Miyahara, Andries Gouws, Anita Craig and Russell Comrie for their feedback on earlier versions of the text.

Notes

1 Sterelny (2010) drew attention to an incomplete list of significant dimensions along which scaffolding can vary, and Saarinen (2020) provides a helpful review of dimensions along which specifically affective scaffolding has been regarded to differ, arguing that a permissive and broad approach will be more productive than strict criteria. Coninx and Stephan (2021, pp. 44–45) note in connection with affective scaffolding that a risk of more demanding criteria is to neglect potentially interesting phenomena.

2 We emphasise that it isn’t the intending that is doing the work here, but the fact that the beneficiary plays a role in the scaffolding being where it is, like it is.

3 Slaby (2016) argues for something along these lines, although he focuses on the downstream exploitative effects, in enculturation and habit formation, of what we would call shallow (affective) hostile scaffolding.

4 The design of this system was plausibly motivated by the ‘peak end rule’, suggesting that both experienced and remembered utility (or pain) are disproportionately sensitive to the evaluation of the most extreme point, and the final stage, of an experience rather than duration or total (Kahneman et al., 1993).

5 Universal Distributors patented a system which generated high numbers of apparent near misses, and received regulatory approval for it. ‘Universal’s “near-miss” software increased the excitement during play and extended the average length of each gambling session, therefore resulting in a higher player appeal’ (Enkvist, 2009, p. 174; Okada, 1986).