Irresistible

The rise of addictive technology and the business of keeping us hooked, by Adam Alter (a summary by Pat Evert) 

• Prologue

It seemed as if the people producing tech products were following the cardinal rule of drug dealing: never get high on your own supply. This is unsettling. Why are the world’s greatest public technocrats also its greatest private technophobes? The problem isn’t that people lack willpower; it’s that “there are a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation you have.” These entrepreneurs recognize that the tools they promote—engineered to be irresistible—will ensnare users indiscriminately. They also discovered that the environment and circumstance of the digital age are far more conducive to addiction than anything humans have experienced in our history. The people who create and refine tech, games, and interactive experiences run thousands of tests with millions of users to learn which tweaks work and which ones don’t. “It’s very easy to hide behavioral addictions—much more so than for substance abuse. This makes them dangerous, because they go unnoticed for years.” 

• PART 1 – WHAT IS BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION AND WHERE DID IT COME FROM?

– The Rise of Behavioral Addiction – An article in Popular Science described World of Warcraft (WoW) as “the obvious choice” when searching for the world’s most addictive game. Games like WoW attract millions of teens and young adults, and a considerable minority—up to 40 percent—develop addictions. Intrusive tech has also made shopping, work, and porn harder to escape. A behavior is addictive only if the rewards it brings now are eventually outweighed by damaging consequences. Addiction is a deep attachment to an experience that is harmful and difficult to do without. Obsessions are thoughts that a person can’t stop having, and compulsions are behaviors a person can’t stop enacting. Addictions bring the promise of immediate reward, or positive reinforcement. Obsessions and compulsions are intensely unpleasant to not pursue. Obsessive passions, the individual “cannot help but to engage in the passionate activity. Because activity engagement is out of the person’s control, it eventually takes disproportionate space in the person’s identity and causes conflict with other activities in the person’s life.” Harmonious passions “make life worth living,” but an obsessive passion plagues the mind. These addictions make our lives less worthwhile, make us less effective at work and play, and diminish our interactions with other people. 

– The Addict in All of Us – How do you deal with a sudden influx of 100,000 heroin addicts? The problem was all the worse because heroin was the most insidious drug on the market. Addiction embeds itself in memory. The lucky Vietnam vets never confronted those memories, because once they left Vietnam they escaped the cues that went along with the act of shooting up. 

reSTART is the world’s first gaming and Internet addiction treatment center. Its founders recognize that Internet use differs from substance addiction, because it’s almost impossible to return to society without using the Internet. The center therefore aims to teach patients how to use the Internet “sustainably,” rather than encouraging them to avoid it altogether. There’s so much more to addiction than an addictive personality. Addicts aren’t simply weaker specimens than non-addicts; they aren’t morally corrupt where non-addicts are virtuous. What’s new, and what only became clear in the 1960s and 1970s, is that addiction is a matter of environment, too. The experts who once believed that addiction was reserved for a wretched minority, because, like Isaac Vaisberg, tens of millions of people in the developed world today exhibit one or more behavioral addictions. Addiction, as it was for Isaac Vaisberg, the Vietnam vets, and Rat No. 34, is a matter of learning that the addictive cue—a game, a place paired with heroin, or a small metal bar—treats loneliness, disaffection, and distress.

– The Biology of Behavioral Addiction – There’s a modern-day malady that affects two thirds of all adults. That malady is chronic sleep deprivation, which is rising in the wake of smartphones, e-readers, and other light-emitting devices. Sleep deprivation is behavioral addiction’s partner. The key is—do not charge your phones by your bed. Ninety-five percent of adults use an electronic device that emits light in the hour before bed. Sixty percent of adults aged between eighteen and sixty-four keep their phones next to them when they sleep, which might explain why 50 percent of adults claim they don’t sleep well because they’re always connected to technology. So 95 percent of us are inducing jet lag at night by telling our bodies that the day is beginning just before we go to bed. People produce less melatonin, sleep more poorly, and feel more tired when they use an iPad before bed. As long as a behavior is rewarding—if it’s been paired with rewarding outcomes in the past—the brain will treat it the same way it treats a drug. In order to develop an addiction, you have to repeatedly take the drug for emotional relief to the point where it feels as though you can’t live without it. A hospital patient who relies on morphine while he recovers from surgery is doing what’s best both in the short-term and the long-term; a morphine addict knows that his addiction combines short-term bliss and long-term damage. Many of the patients who were stuck in a behavior loop also overdosed on their dopamine-producing medication. Addicts get so much pleasure from their addictions that they’re willing to sacrifice long-term well-being for a jolt of immediate bliss. Addicts weren’t people who happened to like the drugs they were taking—they were people who wanted those drugs very badly even as they grew to dislike them for destroying their lives. Even after you come to hate a drug for ruining your life, your brain continues to want the drug. Just as drugs trigger dopamine production, so do behavioral cues. When a gaming addict fires up his laptop, his dopamine levels spike; when an exercise addict laces her running shoes, her dopamine levels spike. Addictions aren’t driven by substances or behaviors, but by the idea, learned across time. 

• PART 2 – THE INGREDIENTS OF BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION

– Goals – If you want to compel people to act, you whittle down overwhelming goals into smaller goals that are concrete and easier to manage. What is it about the world today that makes goal pursuit so alluring? The concept of setting one goal after another—of perfectionism—is also quite new. The word barely existed in the early 1800s, but it seems to be everywhere now. Beyond Inbox Zero, the Internet has also made it easier to stumble on new goals. Streaks uncover the major flaw with goal pursuit: you spend far more time pursuing the goal than you do enjoying the fruits of your success. When you approach life as a sequence of milestones to be achieved, you exist “in a state of near-continuous failure.”

– Feedback – The following descriptions of slot machines come from gambling experts and current and former addicts. Slots are the crack cocaine of gambling. They’re electronic morphine. They’re the most virulent strain of gambling in the history of man. Slots are the premier addiction delivery device. These are sensationalized descriptions, but they capture how easily people become hooked on slot machine gambling. Losses disguised as wins only matter because players don’t classify them as losses—they classify them as wins. Adults never really grow out of the thrill of attractive lights and sounds. If our brains convince us that we’re winning even when we’re actually losing, how are we supposed to muster the self-control to stop playing? “Many casinos use ‘luck ambassadors.’ They sense that you’re reaching your pain point—the moment when you’re about to leave the casino—and they dispatch someone to give you a bonus.” These bonuses were either meal vouchers or a free drink or even cash or gambling credits. The difference between casinos and video games is that many designers are more concerned with making their games fun than with making buckets of money. Gamers are motivated by the sense that they’re having an effect on the world. Remove that and you’ll lose them. Most of the time, rats tend to be risk-averse, preferring the low-risk options with small payouts. But that approach changed completely for rats who played in a casino with rewarding tones and flashing lights. Those rats were far more risk-seeking, spurred on by the double-promise of sugar pellets and reinforcing signals. Like human gamblers, they were sucked in by juice. If idle smartphones and tablets draw us away from real-world interactions, how will we fare in the face of VR devices? Many games and gambling experiences are designed to get your hopes up by displaying near wins. 

– Progress – Many of these “addicts” are high-functioning people who otherwise hold down impressive jobs and raise families. They aren’t the stereotypical addicts of yesteryear, which is precisely what makes the products that seize them so insidious. One minute, they’re novices passing time with a new, free game, and the next they’re apologizing for blowing the family budget on gameplay. Beginner’s luck is addictive because it shows you the pleasure of success and then yanks it away. Later, when we asked everyone how much they enjoyed playing and how motivated they were to play again, the “lucky” beginners were game to continue. The unlucky beginners weren’t completely discouraged, but their early dose of realistic feedback dampened their enthusiasm for the game. The game works by giving you instantaneous gratification upfront and leading you down a slippery slope. Beginner’s luck is addictive, but some experiences are so friendly to beginners that luck is unnecessary. In 2010 Kimberly Young opened the Center for Internet Addiction—the country’s first hospital-based treatment center for Internet addiction. 

– Escalation – People don’t seem to embrace ease when you give them a choice. So they preferred to endure the unpleasantness of a shock to the experience of sitting quietly with their thoughts. In the experimenters’ words, “most people prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative.” Many of us prefer to break up a period of mild pleasantness with a dose of moderate hardship. That’s why people spend precious chunks of free time doing difficult crosswords and climbing dangerous mountains—because the hardship of the challenge is far more compelling than knowing you’re going to succeed. This escalation of difficulty is a critical hook that keeps the game engaging long after you’ve mastered its basic moves. What seemed hard initially became easy with practice, and this sense of mastery was addictive. The experience of almost winning lights a fire under us, and drives us to do something—anything—to ease the sense of disappointment that follows a last-minute loss. Near wins signal that success is nearby. Instead of watching as the wads of bills in their wallet dwindle, shoppers and gamblers use a single card that remotely and abstractly registers each loss and each expense. People will pay up to twice as much for the same item when using a credit card rather than cash. Addictive experiences live in this sweet spot, where stopping rules crumble before obsessive goal-setting.

– Cliffhangers – It wasn’t interruption that made the tasks memorable, but rather the tension from not being able to complete them. When the subject sets out to perform the operations required by one of these tasks there develops within him a quasi-need for completion of that task. Incomplete experiences occupy our minds far more than completed ones. When the rewards were unpredictable, participants enjoyed them that much more. Each new reward followed its own micro-cliffhanger, and the thrill of waiting made the entire experience more pleasurable for a longer period of time. 

– Social Interaction – People are never really sure of their own self-worth, which can’t be measured like weight, or height, or income. We’re social beings who can’t ever completely ignore what other people think of us. And more than anything, inconsistent feedback drives us nuts. Social confirmation, or seeing the world as others see it, is a marker that you belong to a group of like-minded people. When people are deprived of these bonds, they experience a form of pain so severe that it’s sometimes called “the social death penalty.” It’s also very long-lasting—just remembering a time when someone excluded you is enough to rekindle the same agony, and people often list cases of social exclusion among their darkest memories. The addictive online friendships that attract young gamers are dangerous, not for what they provide, but for what they can’t provide: a chance to learn what it means to sit, face-to-face, as you maintain a conversation with another person. It’s a lot like feeding sugar to a hungry person. It’s pleasurable in the short-term, but eventually, they’ll starve. A brain raised on online friendships can never fully adjust to interactions in the real world. Children develop different mental skills at different ages, during so-called critical periods. They pick up new languages, social skills—and for learning how to navigate the complex world of teenage sexuality. If kids miss out on the chance to interact face-to-face, there’s a fair chance they’ll never acquire those skills. Many of them turn to pornography instead of forming real relationships, and they never seem to understand true intimacy. One study found that gamers aged between ten and fifteen years who played more than three hours per day were less satisfied with their lives, less likely to feel empathy toward other people, and less likely to know how to deal with their emotions appropriately.

• PART 3 – THE FUTURE OF BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION (AND SOME SOLUTIONS)

– Nipping Addictions at Birth – Reading emotions is a finely tuned skill that atrophies with disuse and improves with practice, time spent face-to-face with friends. There is a significant downside to text-speak when nothing is spontaneous and very little is ambiguous when you follow the rules. There are no non-verbal cues; no pauses and lilts and unplanned giggles or scoffs to punctuate your partner’s message. Without these cues, children can’t learn to communicate face-to-face. For Louis C.K., face-to-face communication is essential, because it’s the only way for kids to appreciate how their words affect other people. Two-dimensional screen worlds are poorer versions of the real thing. Social interactions are watered down, and there’s more room for spoon-feeding and less room for imagination and exploration. Kids need sleep and physical activity, and family time, and time to use their imaginations. Those things can’t happen when they’re lost in screen worlds. Young children learn best by interacting with people, not screens. We understand that social media is a part of the real world. China has become the first country to declare Internet addiction a clinical disorder, labeling it “the number one public health threat” to its teenage population. Internet addiction is a massive and growing problem in China. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual now recognizes that gambling is a genuine behavioral addiction, and excessive Internet use was almost included in the DSM’s fifth edition, published in 2013. The answer is not to medicalize these moderate forms of addiction, but to alter the structure of how we live, both at a societal level and more narrowly, as we construct our day-to-day lives. Parenting today is incomplete without lessons on how to interact with technology, and for how long each day. Motivational interviewing rests on the idea that people are more likely to stick to their goals if they’re both intrinsically motivated and feel empowered to succeed. What makes one approach radical is that clients are allowed to decide they don’t want to change their behavior at all. It’s non-judgmental by nature, so addicts are less likely to be defensive. “I’m not here to preach to you or tell you what you “should” do; how would I know, it’s your life and not mine! I believe people know what’s best for them.” It works because it motivates people to change, and gives them a sense of ownership over the process. They aren’t being cajoled or pressured to change by someone else; they’re choosing to change voluntarily. 

– Habits and Architecture – Religious repression is no match for sex drive—and if anything it seems to exaggerate the urge. People from conservative states with traditional views of sexuality are more likely to subscribe to online pornography services and search for porn-related terms more often. It’s the people who are forced to exercise willpower who fall first. Suppression alone doesn’t work—but suppression paired with distraction works pretty well. The key to overcoming addictive behaviors, then, is to replace them with something else. Suppose you were trying to avoid using Facebook. Each time you’re tempted, you can either tell yourself “I can’t use Facebook,” or you can tell yourself “I don’t use Facebook.” They sound similar, and the difference may seem trivial, but it isn’t. “I can’t” wrests control from you and gives it to an unnamed outside agent. It’s disempowering. You’re the child in an invisible relationship, forced not to do something you’d like to do, and, like children, many people are drawn to whatever they’re not allowed to do. In contrast, “I don’t” is an empowering declaration that this isn’t something you do. It gives the power to you and signals that you’re a particular kind of person—the kind of person who, on principle, doesn’t use Facebook. Their language empowered them rather than implying they were in the grip of an external force beyond their control. How far are you from your phone right now? Can you reach it without moving your feet? And, when you sleep, can you reach your phone from your bed? If your phone is nearby, you’re far more likely to reach for it throughout the day. Worse, you’re also more likely to disrupt your sleep if you keep your phone by your bed. 

– Gamification – The human tendencies that enslave us to smartphones, tablets, and video games also prepare us to do good: to eat better, exercise more, work smarter, behave more generously, and save more money. To be sure, there’s a fine line between behavioral addictions and helpful habits. Gamification is a powerful business tool, and harnessed appropriately it also drives happier, healthier, and wiser behavior. 

Q2L is a school founded on fun. If kids enjoyed school, surely they’d be happier and more engaged. The school’s founders decided that the best way to inject fun was to make the learning experience one big game. By the end of the mission, students have learned the same scientific information that other schools teach, but for them the process is a game. Students and their teachers are also engaged: average student attendance sits at an impressive 94 percent, and the school has retained 90 percent of its teachers.

A virtual-reality game called SnowWorld is critical because much of a patient’s pain comes from anticipation. The experience is immersive, and some burn patients describe playing the game as “fun”—a long way from the “excruciating” label they gave to the process of having their burns dressed before playing the game. The same process works for other painful experiences, too—the researchers have shown that it reduces dental pain, pain suffered by children as well as adults, and the psychiatric trauma of survivors of the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001. Gamification is a powerful tool, and like all powerful tools it brings mixed blessings. On the one hand, it infuses mundane or unpleasant experiences with a measure of joy. It gives medical patients respite from pain, school kids relief from boredom, and gamers an excuse to donate to the needy. By merely raising the number of good outcomes in the world, gamification has value. On the other hand, games like FarmVille and Kim Kardashian’s Hollywood are designed to exploit human motivation for financial gain. They pit the wielder of gamification in opposition to the gamer, who becomes ensnared in the game’s irresistible net. But, the heart of gamification is just an effective way to design experiences.

Epilogue – The illusion of history is comforting, in a way, because it makes us feel that we’ve finished becoming who we are, and that life will remain as it is forever. At the same time, it prevents us from preparing for the changes that are yet to come. Behavioral addiction is still in its infancy, and there’s a good chance we’re still at base camp, far below the peak. Of course we don’t know exactly how the world will look in ten years, but, looking back on the past decade, there’s no reason to believe that history has ended today, and that behavioral addiction has peaked with Facebook, Instagram, Fitbit, and World of Warcraft. If our culture makes space for work-free, game-free, screen-free downtime, we and our children will find it easier to resist the lure of behavioral addiction. In its place, we’ll communicate with one another directly, rather than through devices, and the glow of these social bonds will leave us richer and happier than the glow of screens ever could.