How to Make a Behavior Addictive by Zo Chance at TEDxMillRiver Lyrics
I haven’t started any mass movements; I don’t have a mass movement to start, but I can speak from experience. I’ll be talking with you today about a framework for understanding things that create addictive behaviors, and it’s not my academic credentials that qualify me to share this with you; it’s my experience, my personal experience, as an addict. And I’m coming clean today, telling this story for the very first time in its raw ugly detail.
In March of 2012, winter was ending, or so I thought, and the winter of my discontent was beginning, when I purchased a device that would slowly begin to ruin my life. My husband is right here and he’s smiling because he lived through this with me. The device that I purchased was a pedometer. You’re thinking, “Pedometer?” But some of you are thinking, “I have that pedometer.” This wasn’t just any pedometer. This was the Striiv. They market it as a personal trainer in your pocket. No. It is Satan in your pocket, tempting you and tempting you to walk, tempting you to talk.
So, you know how you're supposed to reach 10,000 steps a day as an ideal goal for living a healthy life and being a healthy person? How many of you have tried and measured to reach 10,000 steps a day? It’s hard. It’s not trivial. 10,000 steps is 5 miles. When I was using the Striiv, I was doing 24,000 steps a day. You do the math. I am not a distance runner. And if you’re walking, the only way you can reach 24,000 steps a day is by not stopping. So that’s what I did. I would arrive at work, I would grab an article, anything I didn’t need a computer to do, and I would pace, down the corridor outside my office. I would come home and while I was eating, or reading, or eating and reading at the same time, or while my husband was trying to talk to me, I would be going in a circuit between the living room and the kitchen and the dining room and the living room and the kitchen and the dining room.
My marriage was deteriorating. I spent a little more time with my daughter, who was 3 at the time. I only spent time with her because she was willing to sit on my lap and fool with the freakin’ pedometer with me. So the only people that I was getting closer to at this time were my colleague Ernest, who also had a Striiv, so we could set challenges and compete with each other and bond over it, and the community of freaks on the internet who were addicts like me. I was creating spreadsheets to optimize and track not my exercising, but my virtual transactions in a virtual world that exists on the Strive device. You know the game Farmville? It’s that really boring, boring game where nothing happens, but it’s so addictive it helped the US economic collapse? Right. Those developers developed a game inside Strive, it’s called My Land. Nothing happens except that plants grow and buildings get built, and nothing happens. But this game is so addictive that you just can’t stop.
I guess the last straw was one night, it was midnight, and I was brushing my teeth. I was getting ready for bed and a pop up challenge on Striiv showed up. These things surprise you; you don’t know when they’re gonna show up. This pop up challenge comes and says “We’ll give you triple the points if you just climb 20 stairs.” And that’s not a lot, that’s two flights of stairs. You can do it probably in a minute. So no problem, I go down to the basement — I don’t have 20 stairs in my basement but I go up and down like a treadmill — but then I finish it, and then another challenge pops up. It says “Hey, great, how about 40 steps and we’ll triple the points again!” These are the points you can use in that crazy virtual world and so yes, of course! It’s a good deal; it’s a good exchange rate! So 4 more flights of stairs…
I’m a behavioral economist, apparently. 4 more flights of stairs, and there are more challenges, and even without the challenges I find that I can’t stop. Between midnight and 2 in the morning, 2 hours that I have planned on sleeping, I am going up and down the stairs in my basement 2,000 stairs I climb. I hurt my neck; my neck is injured because my head, my stupid head is bouncing up and down like this! At this time, I had become so neurotic that I was spending hours a day counting my steps and I found that even when I wasn’t moving, I was still counting. The blessing of the stairs episode was the neck injury. When the neck injury happened, I had to take a break from exercising, so I had to take a break from the Striiv. I finally acknowledged what my husband had been saying for a while, that I had a problem. I would have gone to a 12-step program, but that would have seemed like another challenge.
So the only option was to go cold turkey. And at this point I thought it was my problem, so I gave the Striiv to my sister. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and we talk on the phone. And we’re communicating with each other. She loves it, she’s so happy, it’s a wonderful present! And I do notice that many of the times we talk to each other, she’s walking around outside, which seems like a good thing until my mom calls me. She tells me that my sister Mika has been walking around Cambridge, Massachusetts, which many of know is an urban area, in the middle of the night. She’s walking for miles. She’s taking her life into her own hands when she does this. You guys know there aren’t any street walkers in Cambridge, it’s mostly college kids, but it is urban, and the only women who are walking around at night for miles are crazy. And she’s crazy. She’s possessed by satan in her pocket!
I found out recently how many times the average Striiv user checks their device. I’m just curious, do you have a pedometer? [Asks person in audience] No? If you did, how many times do you think you might check it in a day, in a week? [Person answers: “Probably every 5 minutes.”] So you would be like me, you would be totally insane? What I learned was that despite being totally insane, we’re not alone. The average Striiv user — the average one, not the crazy one — checks their device 29 times a day. What is it about this machine that makes it so compelling? What is it that’s so tempting?
What I want to share with you is a framework for 6 Human Needs — and this is a framework that was shared first with me by Tony Robbins, who has pulled these needs together, but it’s based on solid motivational research in each of these areas. And Tony Robbins’ claim is that any behavior that meets at least 3 of these needs is going to become addiction, if it meets those needs in a powerful way. I’m a scientist, and this is the type of claim that can’t be empirically validated, so I can’t go out and test it, but you can test it in your own life, and see if this works for you.
The first of these human needs — I’ll share how each fits with Striiv as we go through. The first human need is for significance. And this is the desire to feel that we are important, that we matter. It’s the Ego. It’s one of the key drivers for human life, human behavior. In the Striiv machine, you’re completing challenges, so you feel powerful, you’re kicking ass, and also you have this virtual world where you’re playing God. It’s the Garden of Eden, and the whole world depends on you. It’s powerfully significant.
There’s also certainty. This is another key human driver, and the need for certainty is wrapped up in the need for security. All species have the need to feel safe and secure, and we want to know that our expectations for the world are likely to be met most of the time. In the Striiv device, you have certainty that when you take one step you will get one point, if you’re walking, if you’re going up stairs, you get three, if you’re running, you get five, you know when you wake up in the morning and climb 374 stairs you will get an award called the Statue of Liberty and you know what the little picture is going to look like.
Paradoxically, the third human need is uncertainty. And this is our need for variety and surprise and spice in life. If you’re a rat, and you get food pellets by pressing a lever, when it’s unpredictable how much and when you’ll get food, you’ll press the lever like crazy. It’s also why we buy lottery tickets. We know it’s crazy, but sometimes we win and we don’t know when and we don’t know how much we are going to win! With Striiv, like I was telling you, there are these little unpredictable challenges and they’re so tempting you just can’t possibly resist!
The fourth human need is our need for connection. And this is the need that ensures our survival as a species. It’s what allows us and encourages us and even forces us to form social groups. It’s why we make babies. It’s what makes us take care of our babies. And I told you that when I was using the Striiv my family life was falling apart but I was feeling connected to these other crazy people, I was feeling connected to my friend Ernest. It’s kind of like a druggie who feels connected to their dealer.
The final human need is the need for growth. This is the need to feel like we are moving forward, like we’re becoming something. Research on motivation in organization finds that the most powerful predictor for employee engagement is a sense of progress. No matter what you are doing, if you’re making progress day to day, you’re going to be excited about your job. When you have a pedometer, even if it’s not a cool one like Striiv, you see the numbers flipping as you’re walking. The Striiv also has adaptive benchmarks, so you start out getting prizes at 10,000 steps, but when you beat your records it goes up to 24,000. There’s a lot of growth you’re experiencing, and you’re also experiencing growth and changes in your physical body, most of them being good — maybe not all of them so much.
With this framework of 6 human needs, I think this is a plausible explanation for why a device like Striiv could be so addictive, and I think it’s also possible to predict which behaviors would spread, and which behaviors would not. Let’s take a different example, leave Striiv behind.
Let’s take flashmobs. So, a flashmob is from all appearances kind of like a spontaneously generated mass movement. A flashmob is a group of people who organize on the internet, convene on a particular location, do something bizarre, and then disperse. To me, in theory, that doesn’t sound like an idea worth spreading. But in practice, it did. It spread like wildfire. The first flashmob happened in February of 2003, and by 2004, “flashmob” was in the Oxford English Dictionary. At this point, the American BAR Association, which is not the vanguard of cool, they have a whole page on their website dedicated to flashmob law.
And the first flashmob was completely lame, I think. 200 people convened in a department store to look at a particular rug to say they were buying a “love rug” for their group apartment. But they got cooler. So you’ve seen them on the internet. If you haven’t participated in one, there’s lots of singing, dancing, synchronized movements, zombie races, who doesn’t love that? Pillow fights with thousands of people. In Grand Central Station, you’ll have thousands of people going about their business and then all of a sudden all of them freeze, for five seconds, and go about their business like nothing happened. Flashmobs are spreading all across the world, videos are going viral, at this point I think it’s kind of disturbing and wrong for some reason, but you can hire a company to do a flashmob for you.
So what is it about flashmobs that have made them go viral? Looking at the 6 human needs again, let’s think about it. A need for significance. From the perspective of the flashmobber, you’re meeting your need for significance because everyone is looking at you. And you’re creating an experience that they’re going to remember, and other people are going to relive this experience and maybe even watch you online! You’re meeting a need for certainty, interestingly, because even though you’re doing something pretty weird, you’re doing it in a group. A flashmob performance is an ensemble piece, and there’s no individual judgement of you as a person. You can still feel safe and secure.
You’re meeting your need for uncertainty because as we said, it’s variety, the spice of life. You’re doing something completely different, but also it’s a theatrical performance without a dress rehearsal, no tech rehearsal, and no guarantee of what’s going to happen when you get there. You’re meting a need for connection because group activities and especially synchronized movements that create rapport. When you’re coming together in a flashmob with other people, it’s almost as if you become this group entity. You can also be meeting your need for growth if you’re a person who values as part of your development being someone who does things that are fun and interesting and spontaneous. You are creating stories that you can share potentially even with your grandchildren.
So flashmobs from this perspective, not so crazy that it became so popular. Let’s think about something else that’s much more obvious that it became a good thing. Wearing a motorcycle helmet when riding your motorcycle. No downside, obviously it’s a good idea, right? But look at these needs, and see which one of them it’s meeting. Only certainty, which is a need for security. There’s nothing else that the motorcycle helmet needs, and think about it, certainty and security is not what you’re looking for when riding a motorcycle, right? So, not a contagious behavior, and this is why we have to regulate it.
So my challenge to you as you leave these talks that you’ve seen here today is that you consider taking this framework and using this as way to develop your own habit, or making a behavior that you care about more addictive, help your ideas spread. I would love to hear about it.
In March of 2012, winter was ending, or so I thought, and the winter of my discontent was beginning, when I purchased a device that would slowly begin to ruin my life. My husband is right here and he’s smiling because he lived through this with me. The device that I purchased was a pedometer. You’re thinking, “Pedometer?” But some of you are thinking, “I have that pedometer.” This wasn’t just any pedometer. This was the Striiv. They market it as a personal trainer in your pocket. No. It is Satan in your pocket, tempting you and tempting you to walk, tempting you to talk.
So, you know how you're supposed to reach 10,000 steps a day as an ideal goal for living a healthy life and being a healthy person? How many of you have tried and measured to reach 10,000 steps a day? It’s hard. It’s not trivial. 10,000 steps is 5 miles. When I was using the Striiv, I was doing 24,000 steps a day. You do the math. I am not a distance runner. And if you’re walking, the only way you can reach 24,000 steps a day is by not stopping. So that’s what I did. I would arrive at work, I would grab an article, anything I didn’t need a computer to do, and I would pace, down the corridor outside my office. I would come home and while I was eating, or reading, or eating and reading at the same time, or while my husband was trying to talk to me, I would be going in a circuit between the living room and the kitchen and the dining room and the living room and the kitchen and the dining room.
My marriage was deteriorating. I spent a little more time with my daughter, who was 3 at the time. I only spent time with her because she was willing to sit on my lap and fool with the freakin’ pedometer with me. So the only people that I was getting closer to at this time were my colleague Ernest, who also had a Striiv, so we could set challenges and compete with each other and bond over it, and the community of freaks on the internet who were addicts like me. I was creating spreadsheets to optimize and track not my exercising, but my virtual transactions in a virtual world that exists on the Strive device. You know the game Farmville? It’s that really boring, boring game where nothing happens, but it’s so addictive it helped the US economic collapse? Right. Those developers developed a game inside Strive, it’s called My Land. Nothing happens except that plants grow and buildings get built, and nothing happens. But this game is so addictive that you just can’t stop.
I guess the last straw was one night, it was midnight, and I was brushing my teeth. I was getting ready for bed and a pop up challenge on Striiv showed up. These things surprise you; you don’t know when they’re gonna show up. This pop up challenge comes and says “We’ll give you triple the points if you just climb 20 stairs.” And that’s not a lot, that’s two flights of stairs. You can do it probably in a minute. So no problem, I go down to the basement — I don’t have 20 stairs in my basement but I go up and down like a treadmill — but then I finish it, and then another challenge pops up. It says “Hey, great, how about 40 steps and we’ll triple the points again!” These are the points you can use in that crazy virtual world and so yes, of course! It’s a good deal; it’s a good exchange rate! So 4 more flights of stairs…
I’m a behavioral economist, apparently. 4 more flights of stairs, and there are more challenges, and even without the challenges I find that I can’t stop. Between midnight and 2 in the morning, 2 hours that I have planned on sleeping, I am going up and down the stairs in my basement 2,000 stairs I climb. I hurt my neck; my neck is injured because my head, my stupid head is bouncing up and down like this! At this time, I had become so neurotic that I was spending hours a day counting my steps and I found that even when I wasn’t moving, I was still counting. The blessing of the stairs episode was the neck injury. When the neck injury happened, I had to take a break from exercising, so I had to take a break from the Striiv. I finally acknowledged what my husband had been saying for a while, that I had a problem. I would have gone to a 12-step program, but that would have seemed like another challenge.
So the only option was to go cold turkey. And at this point I thought it was my problem, so I gave the Striiv to my sister. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and we talk on the phone. And we’re communicating with each other. She loves it, she’s so happy, it’s a wonderful present! And I do notice that many of the times we talk to each other, she’s walking around outside, which seems like a good thing until my mom calls me. She tells me that my sister Mika has been walking around Cambridge, Massachusetts, which many of know is an urban area, in the middle of the night. She’s walking for miles. She’s taking her life into her own hands when she does this. You guys know there aren’t any street walkers in Cambridge, it’s mostly college kids, but it is urban, and the only women who are walking around at night for miles are crazy. And she’s crazy. She’s possessed by satan in her pocket!
I found out recently how many times the average Striiv user checks their device. I’m just curious, do you have a pedometer? [Asks person in audience] No? If you did, how many times do you think you might check it in a day, in a week? [Person answers: “Probably every 5 minutes.”] So you would be like me, you would be totally insane? What I learned was that despite being totally insane, we’re not alone. The average Striiv user — the average one, not the crazy one — checks their device 29 times a day. What is it about this machine that makes it so compelling? What is it that’s so tempting?
What I want to share with you is a framework for 6 Human Needs — and this is a framework that was shared first with me by Tony Robbins, who has pulled these needs together, but it’s based on solid motivational research in each of these areas. And Tony Robbins’ claim is that any behavior that meets at least 3 of these needs is going to become addiction, if it meets those needs in a powerful way. I’m a scientist, and this is the type of claim that can’t be empirically validated, so I can’t go out and test it, but you can test it in your own life, and see if this works for you.
The first of these human needs — I’ll share how each fits with Striiv as we go through. The first human need is for significance. And this is the desire to feel that we are important, that we matter. It’s the Ego. It’s one of the key drivers for human life, human behavior. In the Striiv machine, you’re completing challenges, so you feel powerful, you’re kicking ass, and also you have this virtual world where you’re playing God. It’s the Garden of Eden, and the whole world depends on you. It’s powerfully significant.
There’s also certainty. This is another key human driver, and the need for certainty is wrapped up in the need for security. All species have the need to feel safe and secure, and we want to know that our expectations for the world are likely to be met most of the time. In the Striiv device, you have certainty that when you take one step you will get one point, if you’re walking, if you’re going up stairs, you get three, if you’re running, you get five, you know when you wake up in the morning and climb 374 stairs you will get an award called the Statue of Liberty and you know what the little picture is going to look like.
Paradoxically, the third human need is uncertainty. And this is our need for variety and surprise and spice in life. If you’re a rat, and you get food pellets by pressing a lever, when it’s unpredictable how much and when you’ll get food, you’ll press the lever like crazy. It’s also why we buy lottery tickets. We know it’s crazy, but sometimes we win and we don’t know when and we don’t know how much we are going to win! With Striiv, like I was telling you, there are these little unpredictable challenges and they’re so tempting you just can’t possibly resist!
The fourth human need is our need for connection. And this is the need that ensures our survival as a species. It’s what allows us and encourages us and even forces us to form social groups. It’s why we make babies. It’s what makes us take care of our babies. And I told you that when I was using the Striiv my family life was falling apart but I was feeling connected to these other crazy people, I was feeling connected to my friend Ernest. It’s kind of like a druggie who feels connected to their dealer.
The final human need is the need for growth. This is the need to feel like we are moving forward, like we’re becoming something. Research on motivation in organization finds that the most powerful predictor for employee engagement is a sense of progress. No matter what you are doing, if you’re making progress day to day, you’re going to be excited about your job. When you have a pedometer, even if it’s not a cool one like Striiv, you see the numbers flipping as you’re walking. The Striiv also has adaptive benchmarks, so you start out getting prizes at 10,000 steps, but when you beat your records it goes up to 24,000. There’s a lot of growth you’re experiencing, and you’re also experiencing growth and changes in your physical body, most of them being good — maybe not all of them so much.
With this framework of 6 human needs, I think this is a plausible explanation for why a device like Striiv could be so addictive, and I think it’s also possible to predict which behaviors would spread, and which behaviors would not. Let’s take a different example, leave Striiv behind.
Let’s take flashmobs. So, a flashmob is from all appearances kind of like a spontaneously generated mass movement. A flashmob is a group of people who organize on the internet, convene on a particular location, do something bizarre, and then disperse. To me, in theory, that doesn’t sound like an idea worth spreading. But in practice, it did. It spread like wildfire. The first flashmob happened in February of 2003, and by 2004, “flashmob” was in the Oxford English Dictionary. At this point, the American BAR Association, which is not the vanguard of cool, they have a whole page on their website dedicated to flashmob law.
And the first flashmob was completely lame, I think. 200 people convened in a department store to look at a particular rug to say they were buying a “love rug” for their group apartment. But they got cooler. So you’ve seen them on the internet. If you haven’t participated in one, there’s lots of singing, dancing, synchronized movements, zombie races, who doesn’t love that? Pillow fights with thousands of people. In Grand Central Station, you’ll have thousands of people going about their business and then all of a sudden all of them freeze, for five seconds, and go about their business like nothing happened. Flashmobs are spreading all across the world, videos are going viral, at this point I think it’s kind of disturbing and wrong for some reason, but you can hire a company to do a flashmob for you.
So what is it about flashmobs that have made them go viral? Looking at the 6 human needs again, let’s think about it. A need for significance. From the perspective of the flashmobber, you’re meeting your need for significance because everyone is looking at you. And you’re creating an experience that they’re going to remember, and other people are going to relive this experience and maybe even watch you online! You’re meeting a need for certainty, interestingly, because even though you’re doing something pretty weird, you’re doing it in a group. A flashmob performance is an ensemble piece, and there’s no individual judgement of you as a person. You can still feel safe and secure.
You’re meeting your need for uncertainty because as we said, it’s variety, the spice of life. You’re doing something completely different, but also it’s a theatrical performance without a dress rehearsal, no tech rehearsal, and no guarantee of what’s going to happen when you get there. You’re meting a need for connection because group activities and especially synchronized movements that create rapport. When you’re coming together in a flashmob with other people, it’s almost as if you become this group entity. You can also be meeting your need for growth if you’re a person who values as part of your development being someone who does things that are fun and interesting and spontaneous. You are creating stories that you can share potentially even with your grandchildren.
So flashmobs from this perspective, not so crazy that it became so popular. Let’s think about something else that’s much more obvious that it became a good thing. Wearing a motorcycle helmet when riding your motorcycle. No downside, obviously it’s a good idea, right? But look at these needs, and see which one of them it’s meeting. Only certainty, which is a need for security. There’s nothing else that the motorcycle helmet needs, and think about it, certainty and security is not what you’re looking for when riding a motorcycle, right? So, not a contagious behavior, and this is why we have to regulate it.
So my challenge to you as you leave these talks that you’ve seen here today is that you consider taking this framework and using this as way to develop your own habit, or making a behavior that you care about more addictive, help your ideas spread. I would love to hear about it.