by Adam Alter
On the other hand, many fans were convinced that the silent black screen signaled Tony’s death. Since Tony wasn’t alive to experience the world after his death, viewers were treated to the same abrupt end. His wife and kids would live to hear Steve Perry sing the final word in the song’s title, but it might be drowned out by the gunshot that ended Tony’s life. According to this theory, the man in the leather jacket was Tony’s assassin; in an homage to Tony’s favorite scene from The Godfather, perhaps the man had gone to the bathroom to retrieve a gun. If Chase were implying that Tony was dead, he couldn’t have chosen a more apt final word than “stop!”
TV journalists clamored for an answer, and Chase occasionally tossed a crumb or two in reply. He continues to lead them on, and refuses to offer a definitive interpretation. In his first interview after the show ended, he said, “I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there. No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God. We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people’s minds, or thinking, ‘Wow, this’ll piss them off.’” Eight years and several interviews later, fans were still unsatisfied. In April 2015 Chase told a writer that, “It was very simple and much more on the nose than people think. Either it ends here for Tony or some other time. But in spite of that, it’s really worth it. So don’t stop believing.” In some interviews, he seemed confused by the question. “I saw some items in the press that said, ‘This was a huge fuck you to the audience.’ That we were shitting in the audience’s face. Why would we want to do that? Why would we entertain people for eight years only to give them the finger?”
Serial fans were more disappointed than angry, because Sarah Koenig wanted to know who killed Hae Min Lee as badly as they did. She was on their team. But Chase was an antagonist, willfully denying his viewers an answer to the most important question he’d posed in eight years. The Chicago Tribune’s Maureen Ryan spearheaded the “pissed off” camp in her column titled, “Are you kidding me? That was the ending of ‘The Sopranos’?” She told her readers, “You can call the ending sadistic. You can call it an ending that leaves room for a sequel. Either way, it’ll have fans talking for months.” One commenter named Ryan agreed. “The finale sucked! The final shot ruined the entire episode for me. We were robbed . . . ROBBED, I tell you!” And yet, for all their anger, nearly a decade on people can’t stop talking about the show’s final episode. It’s as though they’ve taken the show’s final two words from Steve Perry too seriously: “Don’t stop!”
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Which of the following steps in the chain below would you expect to make people happiest?
Step 1: Desiring something (food, sleep, sex, etc.).
Step 2: Wondering whether that desire will be satisfied.
Step 3: Having the desire satisfied.
. . . Repeat for the next desire.
Step 3 is the obvious answer. It’s the step that frustrated fans when The Italian Job, Serial, and The Sopranos ended without resolution, and it’s the reason we bother with steps 1 and 2 at all. But, in 2001, Greg Berns and three neuroscientist colleagues undertook a study that asked twenty-five adults to put a small tube in their mouths as they lay on their backs in an fMRI machine. The machine scanned their brains for evidence of pleasure as an experimenter fed them drops of water and fruit juice through the tube. Most of the adults preferred juice to water, but the human brain treats both juice and water as small rewards. For half of the experiment, the drops came in predictably, every ten seconds, alternating between water and juice:
Then, during the other half, the experimenters introduced the element of surprise. Now the adults had no idea when they’d receive their next reward, or whether it would be juice or water:
If satisfaction were all that matters, participants’ brains would have fired identically in both halves of the experiment—or perhaps more vigorously in the predictable half, when they could anticipate and savor the coming reward. But that’s not what happened. Predictability is pleasing at first, but it loses its luster. Near the end of the predictable half of the experiment, participants’ brains began responding more and more weakly.
Not so during the unpredictable run, which hooked participants in the same way that Serial hooked its listeners. When the rewards were unpredictable, participants enjoyed them that much more—and continued to enjoy them through to the end of the experiment. 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.
These same micro-cliffhangers drive the thrill of compulsive shopping. In 2007, a team of entrepreneurs introduced a remarkably addictive online shopping experience called Gilt. Gilt’s website and app promote flash sales that last between one and two days each. Sales are available only to members, and they feature well-priced designer clothes and home goods. The platform is booming, with six million members, so its merchandisers can purchase huge quantities of heavily discounted high-end products. Even after the site tacks on a small margin per item, members pay far less than retail prices.
New sales arrive without warning, so members constantly refresh their pages. Each newly loaded page produces a micro-cliffhanger. For many of Gilt’s members, the site offers a low-grade thrill amid their otherwise predictable lives. You can see this in the spike of lunchtime traffic between noon and one every afternoon, during which the site sometimes draws in more than a million dollars in revenue.
Darleen Meier, who runs a lifestyle blog called Darling Darleen, was excited when her membership was approved in October 2010. (She was on a wait list for several weeks beforehand.) Meier treated her readers to a front-row seat, celebrating her membership and then sharing some of her favorite purchases. But, just two months later, Meier was moved to publish a post titled “Gilt Addict.” The problem became clear when she barely resisted buying a well-priced Vespa scooter. (She suppressed the impulse after imagining how her husband would respond when he saw the scooter.) Meier’s relationship with Gilt intensified when a chime began alerting her when a new deal had landed on the site. Regardless of what she was doing, she’d stop to check the app. Sometimes, she found herself pulling off the road while running an errand or driving to pick up her young son from school. Sometimes the cliffhanger didn’t resolve in Meier’s favor—some of the deals didn’t appeal to her—but often, by the time the car was moving again, she’d spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars. At the height of her Gilt addiction, new boxes were landing on her doorstep every day.
Meier wasn’t alone. Online message boards were full of shopping addicts searching for help. On PurseForum, a social network for avid shoppers, Cassandra22007 admitted to being addicted to Gilt, and to other so-called flash sale websites:
It’s become painfully clear to me that I have a problem with Gilt Group and I need an intervention! I’m thinking about banning myself from this site at least temporarily. Basically, I’m unemployed right now and I really have no excuse for buying new clothes and stuff that I probably won’t wear until I’m employed again. I currently have like 6-10 items I’ve gotten there that I have not actually worn/used yet, and I just ordered like 5 more things today.
What’s striking about Cassandra22007’s behavior is that she wasn’t buying clothes because she needed them. Just as Greg Berns had shown with his juice experiment, it wasn’t so much the reward itself that mattered, but rather the thrill of the chase. Gilt didn’t provide shoppers like Meier and Cassandra22007 with products they couldn’t get elsewhere—it provided them with a string of micro-cliffhangers that made the act of hunting down those products deeply addictive.
This shopping produces a lot of clutter, and there’s now a cottage industry of self-styled home organization gurus. The latest is Marie Kondo, a Japanese “cleaning consultant.” Kondo practices a method that she calls KonMari: throwing out everything in your home that doesn’t “spark joy.” Kondo explained the principle
s of KonMari in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, which she first published in 2011. The book has been translated into dozens of languages, and has sold more than two million copies worldwide. Kondo has since published a companion volume, Spark Joy, which is also a major bestseller. Tidying up isn’t easy, because it goes against the human instinct to retain value. We hate throwing something out if it might provide future value, and it’s hard to know for sure that once-useful possessions won’t be useful again. But KonMari has one tremendous asset: tidying up is a sort of open loop that demands closing. We hate to throw things out, but we also hate clutter. The people who shop obsessively become the same people who tidy obsessively, and the process becomes a self-perpetuating loop. Once you know to look, you start seeing loops like this one everywhere.
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In August 2012, Netflix introduced a subtle new feature called “post-play.” With post-play, a thirteen-episode season of Breaking Bad became a single, thirteen-hour film. As one episode ended, the Netflix player automatically loaded the next one, which began playing five seconds later. If the previous episode left you with a cliffhanger, all you had to do was sit still as the next episode began and the cliffhanger resolved itself. Before August 2012 you had to decide to watch the next episode; now you had to decide to not watch the next episode.
At first this sounds like a trivial change, but the difference turns out to be enormous. The best evidence of this difference comes from a famous study on organ donation rates. When young adults begin driving, they’re asked to decide whether to become organ donors. Psychologists Eric Johnson and Dan Goldstein noticed that organ donation rates in Europe varied dramatically from country to country. Even countries with overlapping cultures differed. In Denmark the donation rate was 4 percent; in Sweden it was 86 percent. In Germany the rate was 12 percent; in Austria it was nearly 100 percent. In the Netherlands, 28 percent were donors, while in Belgium the rate was 98 percent. Not even a huge educational campaign in the Netherlands managed to raise the donation rate. So if culture and education weren’t responsible, why were some countries more willing to donate than others?
The answer had everything to do with a simple tweak in wording. Some countries asked drivers to opt in by checking a box:
If you are willing to donate your organs, please check this box:
Checking a box doesn’t seem like a major hurdle, but even small hurdles loom large when people are trying to decide how their organs should be used when they die. That’s not the sort of question we know how to answer without help, so many of us take the path of least resistance by not checking the box, and moving on with our lives. That’s exactly how countries like Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands asked the question—and they all had very low donation rates.
Countries like Sweden, Austria, and Belgium have for many years asked young drivers to opt out of donating their organs by checking a box:
If you are NOT willing to donate your organs, please check this box:
The only difference here is that people are donors by default. They have to actively check a box to remove themselves from the donor list. It’s still a big decision, and people still routinely prefer not to check the box. But this explains why some countries enjoy donation rates of 99 percent, while others lag far behind with donation rates of just 4 percent. After August 2012, Netflix viewers had to opt out of watching another episode. Many chose to do nothing and, slack-jawed, they began their eighth consecutive episode of Breaking Bad.
Netflix subscribers had been binge-watching since the company introduced streaming in 2008, but bingeing has been escalating since then. Google Trends, which measures the frequency of Google searches across time, shows the frequency of searches for “binge-watching” between January 2013 (when people first begin searching for a term) and April 2015 in the United States:
And this one shows the frequency of searches for “Netflix binge” for the same time period in the United States:
Search term popularity is an indirect measure, but Netflix conducted its own research in November 2013. The company employed a market research firm to interview over three thousand American adults. Sixty-one percent of these people reported some degree of binge-watching, which most respondents defined as “watching between two and six episodes of a TV show in one sitting.” Netflix found similar patterns in viewing data, which it collected from 190 countries between October 2015 and May 2016. Most people who binge complete the first season of the shows they’re watching in four to six days. A season once stretched on for months at a time, but now it’s consumed in under a week, at an average of two to two and a half hours a day. Some viewers report that binge-watching improves the viewing experience, but many others believe that Netflix—and post-play in particular—has made it very difficult to stop watching just one episode at a time. Much of this rise, charted in the Google Trends graphs, reflects the effectiveness of cliffhangers, and the absence of barriers between the end of one episode and the beginning of the next.
When Willa Paskin, Slate’s television critic, reviewed a show called Love, she explained that even mediocre TV shows become addictive with “an assist” from binge-viewing. Love was a Netflix production, released in a single batch of ten episodes:
The show gets an assist from binge-watching itself—a style of viewing that encourages audiences to invest in the characters as people, regardless of how little artistry surrounds them. It’s like being told a story, any story: At a certain point, you just want to know what happens next. If Love aired every week, you could take it or leave it. But Netflix makes it so easy to watch three episodes in one sitting that it’s tempting to keep plowing forward on the force of curiosity alone—just how are these crazy kids going to get together? Binge-watching provides a show without much plot all the necessary momentum. By the time you stop hurtling forward, you’ve already seen it all.
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Bluma Zeigarnik, the psychologist we met earlier in this chapter, lived a long and remarkable life littered with cliffhangers. In 1940, her husband Albert was sentenced to ten years in a Soviet prison camp on the charge of spying for Germany. Zeigarnik was left to wonder where he was and when he might come home. When the Soviet authorities captured Albert, they left behind a document that explains why we know so little about Zeigarnik’s life. That document, which her grandson stumbled on many decades later, states that the authorities had seized “the contents of a sealed room with numerous documents, folders, notebooks, and records.”
Zeigarnik’s career took off eventually, but her academic life was just as turbulent as her personal life. She was forced to write three doctoral dissertations after the Soviet authorities refused to recognize her first dissertation, and her second was stolen. She had copies of the second dissertation, but was forced to destroy them when she feared that the thief might publish her work and accuse her of plagiarism. For almost thirty years, Zeigarnik wandered in academic purgatory before completing her third dissertation and joining Moscow State University as a psychology professor in 1965. She was elected chair of the department two years later, and held that position for the next two decades, until her death. With mountainous talent and dogged determination, Zeigarnik ensured that the cliffhanger ultimately resolved in her favor.
9.
Social Interaction
In December 2009, best friends Lucas Buick and Ryan Dorshorst began selling an iPhone app. The app sold for $1.99, and the pair watched eagerly as the download counter climbed. Thirty-six hours after its launch it was the most downloaded app in Japan. Sales rose more slowly in the U.S. but by New Year’s Day U.S. customers had downloaded over 150,000 copies of the app. Apple itself took notice, and soon the app was front-and-center on the Apple Store’s homepage.
The app was called Hipstamatic, and it allowed iPhone users to digitally manipulate the photos they took with the camera built into their phones. With the help of digital film, flashes, and lenses, even naïve photographers could tu
rn mundane shots into masterpieces that mimicked the retro snaps of the 1980s. Experts were paying attention, too. Damon Winter, a New York Times photographer, used the app to take shots of soldiers in Afghanistan in 2010. The photos won Winter third place in the Pictures of the Year International photojournalism competition, and further enriched the Hipstamatic brand.
Buick and Dorshorst were graphic designers by trade, but they also happened to be intuitive entrepreneurs. To cultivate the app’s retro appeal, they used names like Ina’s 1982 Film, Roboto Glitter Lens, and Dreampop Flash. Their masterstroke was inventing a rich backstory for the app that journalists have since struggled to authenticate. As they told it, in 1982 two brothers from Wisconsin created a camera named the Hipstamatic 100. Their aim was to build a camera that was cheaper than its film, and though they succeeded, they managed to sell only 154 units. The brothers died in a tragic car accident in 1984, and their older brother, Richard Dorbowski, kept the three remaining Hipstamatic 100s in his garage until July 29, 2009, when Buick and Dorshorst told him they wanted to release a digital version of the camera.
Journalists were captivated by the story, and they described Hipstamatic’s romantic history in dozens of feature stories. They were helped by scattered online evidence to support the story: a blog page on the Hipstamatic 100 written by Dorbowski (with photos of his younger brothers in the early 1980s), and Facebook and LinkedIn pages that described Dorbowski as living in Wisconsin and working as chief comptroller at a paper company. It wasn’t until several years later, when other journalists tried to delve deeper, that the backstory crumbled. The three brothers were a figment, and so, apparently, was the Hipstamatic 100. Still, the Hipstamatic app was real, and hundreds of thousands of copies were selling every month. Apple crowned Hipstamatic “2010’s App of the Year,” and the New York Times included the app in its “Top Ten Must-Have Apps for the iPhone” list in November 2010.
