Irresistible

by Adam Alter

  When you set your emails to auto-delete or your office to disappear, you’re acknowledging that you’re a different person when you’re tempted to check your email or work late. You may be an adult now, but this future version of you is more like a child. The best way to wrest control from your childish future self is to act while you’re still an adult—to design a world that coaxes, cajoles, or even compels your future-self to do the right thing. An alarm clock called SnŪzNLŪz illustrates this idea beautifully. SnŪzNLŪz is wirelessly connected to your bank account. Every time you hit the snooze button, it automatically deducts a preset sum and donates it to a charity you abhor. Support the Democratic Party? Hit snooze and you’ll donate ten dollars to the G.O.P. Support the Republican Party, and you’ll donate to the Democratic Party. These donations are your present self’s way of keeping your future self in line.

  SnŪzNLŪz shapes your behavior with small punishments, promising pain if you misbehave rather than pleasure if you do the right thing. That’s a wise choice. Rewards are a lot more fun than punishments, but if you’re looking to change a habit small punishments or inconveniences are often more effective. This is an old idea that pervades psychological science: that we’re far more sensitive to losses and negative events than we are to wins and positive events. To give you a sense of how this works, suppose you’re on a game show and the host offers you the chance to play a game. He produces a coin and tells you that he’ll pay you $10,000 if the coin comes up heads, but you’ll have to pay him $10,000 if the coin comes up tails. Would you play the game? Very few people say yes even though the game is fair—much fairer than most casino games, which are rigged in the house’s favor. But the prospect of losing $10,000 is much more daunting than the prospect of winning $10,000 is appealing. Your mind will gravitate toward the loss, focusing on the potential pain of losing far more than on the potential joy of winning. Losses are all-encompassing, and we’ll do a lot to avoid them. (I’ve asked hundreds of people whether they’d play this theoretical game, and only 1–2 percent say yes. To get half of the room to play, the potential win has to be about two and a half times greater than the potential loss.)

  Maneesh Sethi is an entrepreneur who designed a product called Pavlok, which uses the power of negative feedback to discourage bad addictive habits. “There are two kinds of people,” Sethi told me. “People who generate lots of ideas, and people who can execute those ideas.” Sethi describes himself as an ideas man. “A few years ago, I hired a girl to slap me in the face every time I went on Facebook.” That worked well, for a while, but Sethi developed a more permanent solution in the form of Pavlok, a small wearable wristband that gives feedback whenever the wearer engages in a forbidden bad habit. This is known as aversion therapy: pairing an action you’d like to change with an unpleasant or aversive sensation. At the subtle end of the spectrum, Pavlok beeps or vibrates when you do something you’ve pledged not to do, and at the invasive end it delivers a moderate electric shock, or zap. Users can administer the negative feedback manually, or they can pair the device with an app that automatically delivers the feedback in response to pre-determined cues.

  Sethi generously sent a Pavlok after we finished speaking (the device retails for five hundred dollars). I tested the zap function as soon as I opened the box. It was surprisingly strong, and I understood how a regular dose of zaps might discourage bad habits. When Richard Branson tried the device, he reportedly punched Sethi in the stomach in surprise at the shock’s potency. Other users include entrepreneur and writer Tim Ferriss, actor Ken Jeong, businessman Daymond John, and Congressman Joe Kennedy.

  Pavlok has shown early promise, but it’s too early to say whether it will achieve mainstream appeal. (One psychiatrist in New York City has begun using the product, but it’s still considered experimental.) Just as the first iPad generation hasn’t come of age yet, the remedies designed to dull behavioral addictions are still immature. All of these proposed solutions are to some extent still exploratory, and Sethi and his team are always tweaking Pavlok and its app. Still, the product’s funding campaign on Indiegogo was a huge success, raising almost $300,000—more than five times the amount Sethi sought when he launched the campaign.

  Part of the reason for Pavlok’s success are the product’s simplicity and the vivid testimonials on the product’s site. Here’s how Sethi describes the product on its webpage:

  Here’s how it works:

  Download the app, and choose the habit you want to break.

  Wear your Pavlok and listen to the 5-minute audio training sessions. The app will automatically trigger the Pavlok, you simply need to pay attention.

  Use Pavlok’s zap when you do the bad habit. Pavlok can be triggered by sensors and apps, a remote control, and manually. Manual is as effective as automatic.

  It might seem like your habit is broken in 3-4 days. Continue doing the bad habit (with zap) for at least five days, making yourself do the bad habit on purpose if necessary. The longer you continue, the more permanently the habit stays broken.

  Sethi says that early results are promising. Only a few percent of smokers manage to quit cold turkey, but Sethi reports that 55 percent of a sample of regular smokers quit smoking after following the Pavlok’s five-day training process. The same is true for other behaviors. In videos on the app, Nagina explains how she stopped biting her nails, David explains how he stopped grinding his teeth, and Tasha explains how she stopped eating sugar. Writing for Yahoo Tech, Becky Worley explained that Pavlok’s shocks discouraged her from using Facebook, which she felt she was using far too often. It’s too early to know whether Pavlok will work for everyone as well as it did for Becky, Nagina, David, and Tasha, but the science behind the device is sound. Even without the Pavlok itself, you can engineer your environment so you follow bad habits with mild punishments—tasks you’d prefer to avoid or experiences that you find unpleasant.

  One of Pavlok’s biggest strengths is that it does the hard work for you. You don’t have to remember to do the right thing, because the device will remind you with a zap when you fail. But it also has a weakness: you can stop using it whenever you like. Punishments are effective when they’re genuinely unpleasant, but some people might stop using a device that makes them feel bad. The trick for those people is to find a method that isn’t aversive.

  I was wrapping up my PhD at Princeton University in 2008, when Nobel prizewinner Daniel Kahneman invited me to his office. “You can tell me about your research,” he said. I was excited. Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky had pioneered the field of judgment and decision making, and now, forty years later, I was a young researcher in the same field. I told Kahneman that I wanted to invent a tiny alarm clock that followed each of us around and rang whenever we were about to make an important decision. He and Tversky had spent decades studying laziness in decision making, so he understood what I was getting at. “So the alarm clock will tell people when to pay close attention?” he asked. “You need the mental equivalent of a sign that flashes the words PAY ATTENTION NOW! in front of people’s eyes at exactly the right moment.”

  I still haven’t invented the alarm clock, but a company called MOTI is piloting a device (also called MOTI) that comes close. The company’s founder, Kayla Matheus, noticed that people tended to abandon wearable tech over time. “When you look at the research in wearables,” she said in an interview with FastCoExist, “there’s a huge drop-off rate. Data alone isn’t enough. We’re human beings—we need more than that.” Matheus was speaking from experience. She’d torn her ACL and was struggling to keep up with her rehab. Many people have the same experience with fitness trackers, which they buy and then quickly abandon at the bottom of a drawer. Fitness trackers are passive devices: you have to choose to use them, otherwise they’re useless.

  Matheus designed MOTI to reinforce good habits in the same way that Kahneman’s PAY ATTENTION NOW! reinforces careful thought. It’s a simple animal-like gadget that trac
ks behavior over time. “It will basically learn what’s normal for you,” says Matheus. “If you start straying, then you’re going to get prompted with a reminder. Rather than being a push notification you can easily swipe away, MOTI might get sad or angry.” There’s a small button on the front of the device, which you push when you’ve done the right thing. For some people, that’s rehab exercise for a torn ACL; for others, it’s running once a day, or shutting down their smartphones and laptops and going to bed before 10 P.M. MOTI flashes a rainbow of colors and emits a series of happy chirps when you do the right thing; when you leave it unattended for a while, it flashes red and chirps and buzzes less happily as a reminder. Unlike passive apps, MOTI sits on display. You can’t ignore it—and early testing suggests that people form a bond with the device, so they don’t abandon it. One of Matheus’ early testers was struggling to drink enough water. “He tends to get stuck at his desk and forgets to hydrate,” Matheus says. “Because it’s a physical object, all of a sudden it becomes an environmental cue. Whenever he’s typing at his computer, his eyes happen to flick over to MOTI, who’s right there, and he’ll be reminded.” MOTI’s testers seem to feel a sense of duty to the little device—as though they’re disappointing it when they do the wrong thing.

  In fact, choosing rewards and punishments that also affect someone else you care about is a very effective way of forming the right habits. That’s the idea behind a technique called the Don’t Waste Your Money motivator. To begin, you set a goal. Say you’ve been using your smartphone for an average of three hours a day, and over the next four weeks you’d like to lower that number by fifteen minutes each week. By the end of the four-week period, you’d like to be using your phone for an average of no more than two hours a day. Each week, you put a sum of money into an envelope—say, fifty dollars. The sum should feel significant, but not so large that losing it four weeks in a row is financially crippling. You stamp the envelope, and address it to a frivolous organization, or a cause that you don’t support. (Think the SnŪzNLŪz, where Republicans donate to the Democratic Party, and vice versa.) Among other organizations, one manual suggests the following:

  American Yo-Yo Association

  12106 Fruitwood Drive

  Riverview, FL 33569

  Fabio International Fan Club

  Donamamie E. White, President

  37844 Mosswood Drive

  Fremont, CA 94536

  If, on the other hand, you achieve your daily usage goal, you tear open the envelope and spend the money relationally: you take a friend to lunch, buy your son an ice cream, or buy your spouse a gift. Relational spending has two advantages: it makes you accountable, so failing to reach your goal also hurts someone else; and it’s a superior reward, because spending on others makes you happier than spending on yourself or paying your bills.

  —

  Behavioral architecture acknowledges that you can’t avoid temptation completely. Instead of abstinence and avoidance, many solutions come in the form of tools designed to blunt the psychological immediacy of addictive experiences. Benjamin Grosser, a web developer, devised one of these clever tools. Grosser explains on his website:

  The Facebook interface is filled with numbers. These numbers, or metrics, measure and present our social value and activity, enumerating friends, likes, comments, and more. Facebook Demetricator is a web browser add-on that hides these metrics. No longer is the focus on how many friends you have or on how much they like your status, but on who they are and what they said. Friend counts disappear. “16 people like this” becomes “people like this.” Through changes like these, Demetricator invites Facebook’s users to try the system without the numbers, to see how their experience is changed by their absence. With this work I aim to disrupt the prescribed sociality these metrics produce, enabling a network society that isn’t dependent on quantification.

  The Demetricator makes it impossible to check how many likes or comments or friends you have. Here’s one screenshot using Facebook’s regular metrics:

  Everything is measured numerically, and it refreshes as time passes. There’s always something to check, because the feedback changes with each new like or comment. In contrast, here’s the same feedback filtered through Grosser’s Demetricator:

  You learn that people like your post, that it’s been shared, and that there are comments, but you can’t fixate on the numbers because they’ve vanished. The Demetricator does exactly the opposite of what Fitbits and Apples Watches do. When we buy those devices we choose to inject new metrics into our lives—to measure how far we walk, how deeply we sleep, how fast our heart beats, and so on. These are processes that, for millennia, went unmeasured and untracked.

  Grosser’s Demetricator is relatively subtle. It dulls the feedback cues that make Facebook addictive, rather than preventing you from using Facebook altogether. If demetrication isn’t potent enough, the WasteNoTime program is a heavy-handed alternative. WasteNoTime monitors how long you spend on sites that you add to a Block List. You might add Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to your Block List, for example. You can outright block your browser from accessing some of those programs, and for others you can impose a usage limit. For example, you might use the rule, “between 9 A.M. and 5 P.M., I will spend no longer than thirty minutes on Facebook.” You can set stringent limits during work hours and before bed, and lenient limits during leisure time. There are ways around WasteNoTime in an emergency, but evading the program is frustrating enough that it serves as a strong deterrent.

  —

  Smart behavioral architects do two things: they design temptation-free environments, and they understand how to blunt unavoidable temptations. This process is a bit like taking apart a computer: by reverse engineering the experience, you learn what makes it addictive in the first place, and therefore how to defuse it. Take the case of binge-viewing on Netflix. You may not want to avoid watching Netflix altogether, so how do you fight the tide of episode-ending cliffhangers? If you understand the structure of binge-viewing, it becomes easier to avoid falling into the binge-viewing trap. This is the basic structure of two episodes within a series (and the beginning of a third):

  An episode typically lasts forty-two minutes (with roughly eighteen minutes occupied by ads). The last few minutes of the first episode are devoted to setting up and introducing the first cliffhanger: someone’s shot and we wonder whether he’s still alive, or the killer is unmasked but we can’t see his identity. Then, the first few minutes of the second episode are devoted to resolving that first cliffhanger, so the viewer can move on to the meat of the second episode in anticipation of—you guessed it—the second cliffhanger, which arrives near the second episode’s end. For a viewer, this is catnip. Assuming you enjoy the show, if you obey the structure of the episodes laid out by the writers, you’ll struggle to escape the binge-viewing process. What you can do instead, though, is to short-circuit the cliffhangers either before they’re introduced or after they’re resolved. There are two ways to do this. Instead of watching each forty-two-minute episode from start to finish, you can watch the first thirty-seven minutes of each episode, turning off the show before the cliffhanger arrives. (If you know what to look for, you’ll often see the cliffhanger sneaking up on you.)

  Or, if you aren’t sure you’ll be able to stop before the cliffhanger arrives, you can watch the beginning of the next episode and stop after the cliffhanger has been resolved. That way you watch from the fifth minute of every episode to the fifth minute of the next one. This approach doesn’t diminish the pleasure of viewing—you still get to enjoy the cliffhanger and its resolution—but it does limit your chances of bingeing.

  The problem for most of us most of the time is that these experiences are so new to us that we aren’t sure where to begin. But once you understand how cliffhangers—or any other addictive devices—work, you can find ways around them. Sometimes it’s best to watch the experts. When Bennett Foddy told me he d
ecided not to play World of Warcraft, he was making a difficult and careful decision. One classic test for deciding whether to take up a new game or activity is to ask yourself whether you could afford to lose a certain amount of time to the experience today. According to a phenomenon known as the planning fallacy, even if we’re short on time today, we assume we’ll have more time in the future. That’s why people say “no” to many requests that fall within the next week, but “yes” to similar requests that fall several months in the future. This is a mistake, because your level of spare time today is an excellent guide to how much time you’ll have in a couple of months. If you’re concerned that WoW might suck up too much time today and tomorrow, you should have the same concern about how it might affect you in two months or a year or two years. That’s why Foddy was right to avoid WoW, and why saying “no” to a potentially addictive time-hungry experience is a wise move.

  One of the problems with WoW is that it swamps your schedule. You have to play when your friends are playing, so more pressing tasks fall by the wayside. In contrast, the advent of on-demand viewing and digital video recorders (DVRs) means you can delay watching a TV show until you have nothing more pressing to do. DVRs seem like godsends, but they’re actually powerful addiction drivers. TV networks historically saved their biggest and best shows for coveted prime-time slots, and though people recorded shows on their VCRs, the process was far more cumbersome than DVR recording and on-demand viewing are now. Today, you can find a string of major shows between two and six in the morning, when viewership declines to its lowest levels. Mad Men, one of the biggest shows of the past decade, began showing older seasons in the middle of the night to allow new viewers to catch up to the current season. The result was that thousands of people who once might have missed the boat can decide whether they want to invest in watching the show from scratch. Many of these people are classic binge-viewers who wait till TV shows are vetted by first movers before they decide to watch as well. Instead of missing the show altogether—and spending that time doing other things—they’re roped in and forced to binge-watch if they want to catch up to the show’s current episodes. The solution here is not to swear off using the DVR, perhaps, but to use it sparingly and mindfully. Or to use Bennett Foddy’s test: if it’s going to take too much time now, it’s not wise to record it for a week or a month in the future.