What Keeps Us Checking Our Tech?

Hi, my name is Nir Eyal and today we're going to talk about what's at the heart of the most habit forming products in the world. We're going to talk about variable rewards. To understand habit forming products and what keeps us coming back to some of the world's most engaging products and services, we've got to understand this principle of variable rewards. Now, variable rewards are in all sorts of products that you find most habit forming, most engaging. Think about the kind of things that capture your attention and won't let go and you will probably find a variable reward right smack dab in the middle of that experience. So what are variable rewards? To understand variable rewards, we have to look at the work of perhaps one of the most famous psychologists in history, B.F. skinner. Skinner's experiments helps inform why certain products and services keep us hooked. Here's what Skinner did. He took a pigeon, he put it in a box and he gave this pigeon a little lever to peck at. And every time this pigeon would peck at this little lever, they would get a reward. They would get a little food pellet. And very quickly Skinner could train that pigeon to peck at the disc whenever they were hungry. This is called operant conditioning. But then Skinner did something a little bit different. In the next experiment, Skinner gave a variable reward. So sometimes the pigeon would peck at the disc and nothing would come out, no food pellet. The next time the pigeon would peck at the disc, they would receive a reward. The 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. This same exact principle that Skinner demonstrated is at the core of so many products and services that we find so engaging. The things that we just can't get enough of. And I think there are three types of variable rewards of the tribe, rewards of the hunt and rewards of the self. Let me introduce these to you. Rewards of the tribe are things that feel good, that have this element of variability and come from other people. Rewards of the tribe are things like empathetic joy, feeling good because someone else feels good, cooperation, competition. All of these things feel good, have this element of variability and come from other people. Of course, the best example of rewards of the tribe is social media sites. Sites like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and WhatsApp on Facebook. All of these sites have this element of variability associated with what you might find when you engage with the service on Facebook, for example, when you open the app or check the website and you start scrolling through your feed, you're never quite sure what you're going to find, right? What videos might you see? What photos might people have posted? What do the comments say? How many likes does something get? High degree of variability when it comes to this reward of the tribe. Next comes rewards of the hunt. Now, rewards of the hunt stems from our primal search for food and material possessions. Probably the best example of variable rewards of the hunt is machine gambling in Las Vegas, right? When you pull on a slot machine, there's this variability around what you might win, right? Are you going to get the big jackpot? And what makes slot machines so habit forming, if not all out addictive is this variability, this reward? Just like Skinner's pigeons, you're unsure about what might come out of that machine. But of course, it's not just Las Vegas that uses variable rewards of the hunt. If you think about what makes your year end bonus at a job, why is that a retention device? While there's variability about what you might get at the end of the year if you stick around, we also see variable rewards at the hunt when it comes to commerce. When you think about why people might go to the mall to hunt for a deal, or why we keep scrolling and scrolling on Amazon, it's again this search for this material reward. In fact, if you think about the feed on mobile devices in particular, you'll see that so many products and services have this feed mechanic. And if you think about LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, this idea of scrolling and scrolling, looking for that next interesting piece of information uses the exact same psychology as pulling on a slot machine. Both variable rewards of the hunt and finally rewards of the self. Rewards of the self are things that feel good, that have an element of variability, but don't come from other people and aren't about this material or information rewards. Rewards of the self are things that are intrinsically pleasurable. They feel good in and of themselves. Now, rewards of the self are all about the search for mastery, consistency, competency and control. Best example I can think of for rewards of the self is gameplay. So when you think about what makes playing Candy Crush or Pokemon Go or any number of other online games, you're not necessarily playing them with other people. It's not rewards of the tribe. It's not necessarily that you're going to win something. So it's not rewards of the hunt, it's a reward of the self. There's something fun and exciting and interesting about getting to the next level, the next accomplishment, the next achievement. But of course other experiences use rewards of the self as well. When you think about what keeps us checking email, clearing those unread messages, finishing the to do's on your to do list or the thing that always gets me is that one app notification on my phone's home screen that I just have to open to clear it away. These are all examples of rewards of the self, the search for mastery, consistency, competency, and control. So that's a brief introduction to variable rewards and the three types of variable rewards, rewards of the tribe, hunt, and self. The key here is to not just throw in variable rewards willy nilly. What we really want to do is to figure out how to scratch the user's itch, how to give the user what they came for, but to leave this element of mystery, this bit of variability associated with with what they might find the next time they engage with the product. Now there is one important thing to understand here too is that some products want to insert variability to make the product more engaging. But some products need to take an inherently variable situation and give the user greater agency and control. Let me give you an example. So Uber would not want to insert variability because the experience of getting to where you want to go on time is is inherently variable. There's already uncertainty and stress associated with getting to where you want to go on time. So because the variability is already there, Uber doesn't want to insert variability. Uber wants to give the user greater agency and control over something that's already variable. Principally, can I get to where I'm going on time? So that's it. When it comes to variable rewards, they're an extremely powerful tool to keep users coming back to to leave this bit of mystery about what might happen next time you engage with the product or service. And remember to use these three types of variable rewards to keep your users coming back. Good luck.