Notes from a talk by Suw Charman Anderson
The video of her talk is available at the FOWA London 2008 site.
Suw Charman Anderson is a social media consultant-trying to orchestrate some behaviour change in users of a site. Technology is only 20% of that battle. The rest is human behaviour. How people work, what makes people react the way that they do, alot of them is unconscious, is not rational. If we understand how that works, we can develop web apps that sink more deeply with the human brain.
2 questions we will explore:
1. Why is icanhascheeseburger.com addictive?
2. Why is it important to understand why a site is addictive?
addiction is subconscious.
addictive- is about feeling an irresistable urge to do something against our conscious being
There is no sense of narrative in icanhascheeseburger. It means that users can prowl randomly, and that is addictive. There is no schedule. Like once a day. It encourages compulsive behaviour. If you know a site or a blog will only be updated once a week, you wont go back to the site again until the next week. Hence, sites which are randomly updated is more addictive than those which are not.
What are the symptoms of compulsion?
1. occasional behaviours became habitual
2. There is a lot of control over the behaviour,
3. A feeling of pre-occupation
4. The behaviour continues regardless of the consequences
5. There are feelings of anxiety
6. Denial there is a problem at all
Operant conditioning- you get more reward for doing something thats why you keep doing it and there is random schedule for the rewards. Emotional rewards that human beings value.
How to train in a behaviour:
1. Train an initial behaviour with a constant reward
2. and then switch to random reward schedule to strengthen the behaviour
In short, Reward & Random re-inforcement.
What happens if unwanted and unhealthy behaviour is re-enforced?
eg. email, you dont know when a new mail is coming
38% of people get more than a hundred email a day.
60% of people spent more than 2 hours a day in their inbox.
50% people say they check inbox once an hour.
35% say every 15 minutes.
In reality, when they are observed, people actually check their emails every 5 minutes.
With email, you think you have a control over it. Nobody is forcing you to check your email. But you sometimes dont really have a control over it. Especially if the email has alert system that interrupts us. People usually take 15 mins to recover from an interruption.
People crave the emotional reward of getting the email. Not so much of replying the email.
Getting things done: How do you get over a behaviour that’s trained in
Behaviours changed from random reward is much harder to deal with than behaviours changed with a consistent reward. Why? because random reward is not tied to a logic, you dont always get a reward each time, thats why you keep coming back to see if its there. So you’re constantly hoping and checking.
With consistent reward, you stop checking once there is no reward when doing the behaviour.
Number of ways to break operant conditioning:
1. If you can change the reward to be consistent everytime you do the behaviour, you’re less likely to be compulsive about doing the behaviour, you stop looking.
2. Break the link between the behaviour and the reward. Dont reward immediately. Maybe delay it.
3. Remove the reward completely
4. Remove the stimulus to check- (eg. the alert system for email)
5. Provide a schedule for yourself. Like do the behaviour only at certain time, so you dont have to think whether or not to check.
6. Remove the thing that you need to do to do that behaviour. Like dont use the computer so much.
We are creating technology that are sometimes rude. We need to understand how it works, how it affect our lives, so we can diminish bad behaviours and create healthy behaviour around technology that fit into our life.
Something that we design may create a certain compulsion within people that we didn’t expect and we didn’t predict. We need to understand how we can change our tool to decrease that unwanted behaviour.
The field of psychology has a huge amount to teach us. A lot of what we’re learning are not really new. But how we apply it and how we make the best of it, is new.
