Tech and Social Responsibilities
Overview
Question: How should tech companies, particularly startups, consider their role around social responsibilities?
Background: Our client, Google Area 120, is Google's in-house startup incubator. To support the incubator's 5 year-plan, we were tasked to enlighten on what social issues and social responsibilities might be most feasible, desirable, and viable for tech firms to take on relative to the roles of individuals and public sector. This project ran from March to May 2022.
Methods: Two focus groups, 10 semi-structured Interviews.
Findings:
Participant's top social issues often involved systemic injustice, influenced by their personal and occupational experiences.
Participants favor companies that commit to long term, structural impact in the world.
Participants do not think companies are responsible for addressing social issues, as it is not their purpose, but they still strongly favor companies that proactively hold themselves to high transparency, accountability, privacy, and security ideals while consciously trying to lean away from reactive companies.
Key Considerations:
How might we support communication between companies and participants to transform their relationship in a way that builds trust, accountability, and transparency?
How might tech companies timely discover opportunities on the ground, especially with community organizations that are directly addressing social issues, and provide effective support?
How might tech companies change their critical metrics in a way that also considers their strategic impact on social issues?
Key Contributions: Main manager for the public sector interviews in recruitment, conducting the interviews, analysis, and synthesis; designed two of the four focus group activities; co-moderated focus groups; and developed the recommendations.
Deep Dive
The Problem
Businesses, including tech firms, are increasingly asked to act responsibly to participate in addressing numerous planetary perils from social injustice to climate change. Emerging research shows that brand equity (and profit) can be built by proactive social responsibility, rather than reactive:
What social responsibilities might be most feasible, desirable, and viable for tech firms to assume, as compared to individual or public agencies to address?
"To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society." - Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest investment firm.
Methods
Semi-Structured Interviews
6 Gen Z Participants: 3 Liberals and 3 Conservatives
To capture diverse perspectives with the opposing sides of the spectrum.
A younger psychographic might better support future-looking ideations as people who are maturing into buying-power and joining the workforce in the next five years. .
In five years, they will still remain primary users of social media that could greatly affect brand reputation and online discourse.
4 Public Sector Employees: a teacher, a librarian, a social worker, and a City Councilmember.
To identify specific social issues and opportunities from those who dedicate themselves on ground for community members.
To compare and contrast with the younger psychographic.
Focus Groups
Two Liberal-based Gen Z focus groups: 5-7 participants with 60 minutes each.
Incorporated speculative design and card-sorting to support group ideation and observe collective sentiments. These are particularly suitable for our client (in-house incubator, VCs)
To identify a variety of perspectives in a short period - good for generative research.
Beyond interviews, this can tease out sentiments by forcing participants to make decisions, which might challenge the logic of what they've shared.
Example activity: participants attribute who should be responsible for listed social issues.
Findings
Sample of our affinity mapping process: tying together final findings for each of the research questions across the methods. Used to identify and narrow in on key findings.
Participant's Top Social Issues
1) The top issues mentioned were broad and systemically imbedded injustices.
Racism, climate change, housing crises, homelessness, income inequality, sparse tech infrastructure/access - they involve injustice and inequitable distribution of power and resources with vulnerable population.
"These issues make me feel something strong inside, that it's not ok"
2) Top issues participants care about were ones that they have been directly exposed to.
Personal history: they mentioned identity, work experience, and social network in their selection. For example, one participant notes, "I would say the black lives movement because I grew up during the uprising of it and my father grew up in Jim Crow, Mississippi.”
Our social worker, who despite growing up with housing instability, remarked, "I only really started to care actively after working as a social worker for the homeless."
Relationship between Tech Company and Social Responsibility
1) Participant frame responsibility as purpose driven: they don't think it's tech's responsibility as their only purpose is to make money
Participants formed their expectations and trust base on their understanding of the purpose of actors. With government, participants strongly believed their role is to ensure well-being and address the social issues, because that is their established purpose: "It's hard to say anyone's particularly responsible outside of those who are elected to do so”.
Since the only salient purpose of companies is to make money, expectations are very low and people do not dream of tech companies proactively participate in social issues.
2) But participants still envision futures where tech companies can be trusted to create long-term impacts.
Tech was continuously suggested as a means to structural impact: many recommended companies to provide reliable tech access (e.g. donating technology, wifi, tech literacy materials) to community hubs such as libraries.
They also see the power of technology used to hold other powerful actors accountable, such as legislators and the military.
They welcome action verbs such as "redesign", "shift", and "cease" in context of what headlines they'd like to see tech companies to be in.
3) And distance themselves from tech companies that do not seem to care enough, or worsening the social issues.
Actions like a one-time monetary contribution were looked down upon by some participants as "bandaid solutions". They note that these do not demonstrate real commitment as they're "easy" and mainly used to "make companies look good".
"I try not to use TikTok because of their problematic algorithm bias"
Views on the Identity of the Tech Company
1) Participants prefer companies who aspire themselves to high ideals to trust the products they build.
Transparency, Accountability, Privacy, and Security - participants favor companies that hold themselves to these standards just as they profess their products to uphold.
Some participants did not want companies like Facebook/Meta to take on social issues due to the lack of trust from prior incidents. In the process of building trust, it is strategic to collaborate with entities that participants do trust that also have clear stake in the social issue, such as nonprofits and governments.
2) Participants view tech companies as well-resourced entities, and some hope they could support other organizations who are working on social issues on the ground.
"I think preferably, they could just put in their money and resources and let grassroots and people who are on the ground lead the work"
What likely will not change in the next 5 years
Participants' anger and exasperation with the aforementioned social issues - racism, inequities, climate change, etc.
Participants' impatience with companies that signal they prioritize money above values.
Changing social issues involve changing people's behaviors that propagates the issue, as well as influencing people's perception of the issues to shift in a direction that reflects established values.
Assumptions
Participants want to know the companies they associate with as per their desire to intentionally construct their identity. This is a phenomenon the Gen Z psychographic seems to reflect.
Improving major social issues involve changing people's behavior that directly feeds into the issue.
Improving social issues also involve influencing more people, particularly key participants with personal backgrounds, to understand and care about the issues.
Participants want a future
Where they are proud of the tech companies they choose, where they don't have to compromise or negotiate their values/identity with the products they choose; and
Where tech companies are a part of the solution and not afraid to make waves for social good; and
Where tech companies can support other forces on the ground working to improve people's lives; and
Where tech companies can own up to both its power and shortcomings in addressing social change.
Key Considerations
How might we support communication between companies and participants to transform their relationship in a way that builds trust, accountability, and transparency?
How can we humanize communications with entities help participants identify with companies of their interest?
How might tech companies timely provide effective support for organizations on the ground dealing with social issues?
How can tech companies be more connected with social justice efforts on the ground, e.g. nonprofits and community leaders? How might we transform these connections into opportunities for everyone involved?
How might tech companies change their critical metrics in a way that also considers their strategic impact on social issues?
How can that critical measure include hidden sentiments of participants, whether they feel aligned with the company or that they have been compromising their values?
Reflections and Reflexivity
With future thinking, it's not about predicting the future, but conducting activities that teases out various forms of envisioned futures, and then honing down on preferred futures that we could work together towards by aligning users' needs and values with company goals. Then we can ask, how might we get there? To reduce bias and narrowing design thinking, it is strategic to ask participants to paint their future first before introducing any tech companies or technology into the picture.
Future thinking is hard - many people are afraid to vision positively for a myriad of reasons, but they had a much easiser time predicting pessimistically. It could be strategic going forward to ask for the worst case scenario and then scope for the opposite, instead of directly asking for the best cases.
Providing examples in explaining an activity could severely limit participants' reflexive memory and ability to recall. Examples were taken away in the second focus group and the range of answers increased.
Trust is the core currency of an UX Researcher. Given the scope and time crunch of this project, we had to divide, conquer, and rely on our own respective codes and methods of analysis while trusting each other's findings. This project being a generative research made the process easier to trust, as range and diversity was of interest.
Our outreach was limited to personal networks and associated universities, which led to more liberal participants. Thus our data likely more externally valid to liberal, college educated individuals.
Future Research
Instead of asking what they'd like to see spcifically from tech comapnies in terms of social justice innovations, how would participants like to be empowered to change the world themselves? Where and how might technology play a role in that?
Because social issues are structurally upheld by people and institutions, and thus structural change requires us to move people's feelings, beliefs, and habits. What evidently moved our participants was anger. So then, how do we build on the intentionality of social change, perhaps by taking advantage of collective anger, to motivate people to use more products that can support social good?
How do people view tech company vs. their technology product differently? How do each of these perception influence each other? Does one influence brand reputation much more than the other?
