Here’s a riddle for you from the book review I shared yesterday:
You might remember the gamification craze from the beginning of this decade. App creators were convinced that adding badges, randomness, and leveling up to any activity would make it irresistible.
And yet, despite following a lot of the same strategies that gambling machine designers did, those app creators never did create an army of self-improvement addicts.
If designers optimized gambling machines for addictiveness, why can’t they do the same for these apps? If bad machines can be made addictive, then why can’t good machines?
The anonymous author of the book review gives a few possible answers. But he or she is not happy with any of them.
I don’t know the answer either. But I can tell you the answer to a related riddle, which goes like this:
Why do hazing rituals for college fraternities never involve anything useful or positive?
You know the rituals I’m talking about. A college freshman wants to get into a fraternity. So he’s given a beating by his future fraternity brothers… he’s told to spend the night outside in freezing weather wearing nothing but a loincloth… and he’s forced to eat a pound of raw beef liver.
If he survives all this, he gets into the fraternity.
But why exactly those nasty and humiliating tasks? Why not combine the humiliating with the useful?
Why don’t fraternities make new recruits wash some train station toilets… or change the adult diapers of incontinent senior citizens… or collect litter from the side of a highway on a sweltering August day?
The answer, according to slot machine designer Robert Cialdini, is this:
“They want to make the men own what they have done. No excuses, no ways out are allowed.”
Cialdini claims that the point of hazing rituals is to make new recruits fanatical about their new fraternity membership, once they achieve it.
Hazing rituals work brilliantly for this goal. But there’s a catch:
The ritual tasks HAVE to be pointless.
Otherwise a new member can convince himself that some other good came out of all that humiliation and pain… which takes away from the value of the fraternity.
In other words, whenever we do something because of added motives — whether positive or negative — we don’t end up owning that behavior fully. We don’t make it a part of our identity.
And that I think can be a good answer to why slot machines are so addicting… while your Duo Lingo app is not.
Of course, I also think this ties into running a business. Even though it’s at odds with much direct response wisdom.
I think you can use this insight to create fanatically loyal customers… as opposed to customers who abandon you and forget you at the first turn in the road. Which is exactly what happens to most direct response businesses.
To me, it seems the application is obvious… but if it’s not, sign up for my email newsletter. It’s a topic I might discuss more in the future… or I might not.