AOLD 127 | Nir Eyal on Getting Hooked

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Welcome to the Art of Leadership Daily, helping you become the leader others need you to be. I'm your host Joe Terrill, here to share leadership principles to help you grow in life and leadership every day. Join me Monday through Friday as I feature short clips from some of the very best conversations between Cary Nieuwhoff and world class leaders. Today's episode is brought to you by the art of Leadership Academy's online Influence Mastermind course. If 2023 is the year you're going to finally launch a podcast, write that book, create a website, or start building any type of online presence, the Art of Leadership Academy has a free Mastermind course to help you do exactly that. Get the right people in front of Engage with and transformed by your content@inflow kickstarter.com that's influence kickstarter.com and by the He Gets Us Engaging Culture series every month. Experts like Ed Stetzer, Albert Tate, Andy Stanley, Nona Jones and many more give you in depth conversation and practical ways to build bridges and share Jesus message of radical love. Go to hegetsispartners.com engaging culture to learn more and watch the episodes. That's hegetsuspartners.com engagingculture in today's episode, Nir Eyal talks about how we get hooked up on products and programs. Nir Eyal writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology and business. Nir previously taught as a lecturer in Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. He's the author of two best selling books, how to build Habit Forming Products and Indistractable how to Control your Attention and choose your Life. Here's a clip from Carrie and Nir's conversation.

Can you give us why you wrote Hooked and what that book is all about?

Sure. So I'm what you call a behavioral designer. So I help companies build the kind of products and services that build healthy habits in people's lives. And the goal behind Hooked was to democratize these tactics that are used by the gaming companies and by social media companies to to get people hooked to their products so that the rest of us can build the kind of products and services that help improve people's lives. And that's exactly what's happened over the past five years. Companies in the education space like Kahoot, the world's largest educational software, uses the Hook model to get kids hooked onto in classroom learning. Fitbod uses the Hooked model to get people hooked to exercising in the gym. I've worked with people in the publishing industry to get people into the habit of reading a paper. Like the New York Times is one of my former clients in the healthcare space. People to get a habit of taking their medication or using a particular medical device. I even profile in the book the Bible app is an app.

Is an example of a product that uses the Hook model to get people into the habit of engaging with scripture. So I really do believe that we can use these amazing technologies not just for video games and social media. We can use them to build wonderful, healthy habits in people's lives.

And in some respect, then your work parallels to some degree stuff that James Clear or Charles Duhigg has done, like how do you perform a habit? But it really lit up the tech world because also Instagram, Facebook, you know, all the apps, Snapchat, they. TikTok, I'm sure, is probably one of the most latest incarnations of apps that really have figured out and companies that have really figured out how to get us hooked. Can you walk us through the sequence of, like the neural programming that happens that creates a habit for better or for worse?

Yeah. So Hooked is really about how to do this through products. And there's a lot of. There's quite a few differences between building a habit for yourself and designing a product or service to help people form a habit. So if you take youversion, for example, if you talk about the Bible app, it's one of these apps that I think is very habit forming, but very few people give it enough credit. We think of TikTok and Facebook and Instagram, but we don't realize how many products can be used to help people form healthy habits in their lives. And of course, this is all a matter of opinion, right? If your values don't include engaging with scripture, well, then you think it's a frivolous thing for people to engage with the Bible. And I would argue I hear the same exact sentiment from people who think that Facebook and TikTok is a frivolity. It's really about your values and what you want to spend your time on earth doing. But if we use these products correctly and we design them appropriately, they can actually help people do more of what they want to do, whether that's going to the gym or eating healthier or engaging with scripture or engaging with loved ones. We can do this facilitated through technology. So the way the Hooked model works is this. So it starts off with a trigger. A trigger comes in two forms. We have an external trigger and an internal trigger. An external trigger is some kind of ping, ding, ring, or thing in your environment that prompts you to action. Now, there's another type of trigger called an internal trigger, which we're going to get back to later. So if you use, for example, Facebook or the Bible app, the external trigger is pretty obvious. It's a notification on your phone. Now, the action phase of the hook is defined as the simplest behavior done in anticipation of a reward. So on Facebook, for example, it's opening the app and scrolling the feed. With the Bible app, it's opening the app, reading the scripture. Then comes the variable reward phase. And the variable reward phase is. Comes from the psychology of B.F. skinner. And this is something that you don't find, I think, in James Clear or Charles Duhigg books around personal behavior change. This is about where a product would engage a person through variable rewards. Now, variable rewards comes from the classic work of B.F. skinner, the Father of operant conditioning. He found that when a reward was given on a variable schedule of reinforcement, when there's some kind of uncertainty there, the classic experiment is he had these pigeons that he put inside a little box, and he let these pigeons peck at a disc. And every time the pigeon pecked at the disc, they would receive a little reward. And at first, he could train these pigeons to peck at the disc. And this is called operant conditioning. You've probably done this with your puppy, right? You get them to do a trick, you give them a treat. Well, one day he ran out of these food pellets. He didn't have enough of these little rewards, and so he couldn't afford to give it to the pigeon every time. He could only give it to the pigeon once in a while. So sometimes the pigeon would peck at the disc. No treat, no reward. The next time the pigeon would peck at the disc, they would receive a reward. And what Skinner observed was that the rate of response, the number of times these pigeons pecked at the disc, increased when the reward was given on a variable schedule of reinforcement. And so in all sorts of things that we find most engaging, most captivating, most habit forming, you always find an element of variability. Why do you think people love watching spectator sports, right, about how it's going to end, right? You don't know how that ball or the puck, you don't know where it's going to go. It's variable. There's uncertainty. A game isn't that much fun when you know who won the match, right? If you record it and somebody told you who wins, it's not as much fun, right? There's Uncertainty there. What makes a book fun to read, what makes a movie fun to watch, what makes romance romantic? What makes a slot machine something that people like to engage with? Uncertainty, variability. And so when we use a product online, like Facebook for example, that scrolling and scrolling and searching for whatever it is you're looking at, some of it is interesting, some of it is mundane. That variability is the reward that is really the fuel of these hooks. Then finally, the last step of the hook model is the investment phase. The investment phase. And this is something you don't see when it comes to traditional personal behavior change. Like you talked about other books that help people change their own habits. This is specific, specific to product design is that when the user puts something into the product that improves it with use. This creates what we call stored value. Stored value means that the product gets better and better the more it is used, which is revolutionary in the history of manufacturing. So when you think about when Henry Ford is credited with saying, you can have any color of model T as long as it's black.

Yeah, yeah.

Why did he say that? Because it was really hard for him to retool his factory just because one customer wanted their car red, another wanted a purple car. That was really hard to do. Well, today we can make individual versions of our product for each and every customer. Because when you give a company data, content, followers, reputation, any of these things store value. So as opposed to physical goods, right? If you think about everything in the physical world depreciates, it loses value with wear and tear. Habit forming products do the opposite. They appreciate, they get better and better the more you use them. The more data, the more content, the more interaction, the more skill, the more reputation you build. In one of these platforms, you are customizing the service to an audience of one.

At this very moment, tech companies are spending millions and millions of dollars to ensure their products become essential components to your daily routine. And they do this by installing cognitive behavioral feedback loops in your brain. According to near, these addictive feedback loops are engineered through internal and external triggers. Even the shade of red used in most social media notification alerts were selected because it triggers a particular biochemical response in the human brain. And every time you boot up or post on social media, you're gambling. According to behavioral psychologists, the same parts of your brain that flare with activity when you receive a push notification are the same parts of your brain that light up when you pull the handle of a slot machine. Some people refer to this phenomenon as magic, maybe, or the fact that unpredictable gratification is far more pleasurable to the human brain than expected gratification. Many of us opted into social media so we could connect with friends and not feel left out. And now it could be the single largest contributing factor to why we always feel left out and disconnected from our most important relationships. You can catch Carrie's full conversation with near and More by going to carynewhoff.com Episode347 thanks for listening to the Art of Leadership Daily. I'm your host Joe Terrell. Tune in tomorrow for more insights to help you become the leader others need you to be.