Your Tech Is Training You
The New Economy of Habits
If there’s one thing our tech industry does well, it’s training us on new habits.
Google, Facebook and Twitter started out as free services with no advertising. They spent millions of venture capital dollars training users to come back to Google, Facebook and Twitter every day. Only then did they monetize those habits through advertising.
Uber has spent billions of investor dollars training us to use Uber. Apps from PostMates to TaskRabbit are following the same path. And there are offline habits as well, like getting a Cinnabon every trip through the airport.
You might not want be trained on all these habits. Let’s talk about why, and what we can do to reassert our own priorities in our daily lives.
Brushing Teeth and Pepsodent
If you’ve ever taught a child to brush their teeth, you know it’s not a natural thing to do. It’s pretty weird to poke a brush around your mouth and scrub 32 teeth for three minutes. In 1900 nobody did it.
As Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Charles Duhigg explains, marketer Claude Hopkins gave us the brushing habit — decades before toothpaste even worked. It wasn’t until the 1950’s that effective fluoride toothpaste was developed.
People didn’t start brushing their teeth because it prevented cavities. They started brushing their teeth because the advertisers taught them a habit. The Pepsodent ads asked people to run their tongue across their front teeth. Feel a slippery film? That’s a problem. Brush with Pepsodent to remove the film and reveal a clean smile.
Pepsodent created a recurring cue in our lives that prompted us to use their product. The product had a pleasant tingle that make it enjoyable to use. Having a clean, fresh-brushed smile became a social requirement — just as being on Facebook became in the 2000’s.
These are all the elements of a habit — create a recurring cue, an action to take, and a payoff.
Habits Are Hard To Let Go
Experiments in neuroscience reveal what’s going on behind the scenes as a habit is formed. Wolfram Schultz’s experiments on macaque monkeys tied a cue (shapes appearing on a screen) with a task (the monkey would pull a lever) and a payoff for completing the task (delicious fruit juice).
The first time the monkey was rewarded with fruit juice, the brain scans clearly showed pleasure and happiness. That’s what everyone expected. What happened next was not expected.
When the shapes appeared on screen (the cue), the monkey started to get a jolt of pleasure right then — before pulling the lever or getting the reward. Other studies tracked the rise in neurotransmitters like dopamine which rise at the same time — on seeing the cue, before performing the task. Research from Benjamin Libet and others shows electrical activity in the non-conscious brain rising before people say they made a conscious decision to take action.
What’s going on? Once that cue appears, the reward machinery in your brain kicks in to convince you to perform the task. Whether it’s good for you or not.
Once you’ve been trained, you have to overcome the whole reward apparatus in your brain to not do the behavior. Think about that. We should be VERY careful of what habits we are trained into.
What Habits Will Be Trained?
In a free market, what habits will be trained? Smart capitalists will focus on habits that are easy to train and profitable to serve. The highest market valuations go to companies whose habits are also defensible, so customers can’t jump to a different supplier.
You can see this pattern in the food industry. We’re hardwired to love salt, sugar and fat. If you want to train consumers on a new eating habit, the path of least resistance is to train them to eat something full of salt, sugar and fat.
David Kessler tells the story of Cinnabon. They put storefronts into malls and airports with lots of walk-by traffic. Baked cinnamon rolls waft a sweet, spicy smell through the air that you can’t avoid. The rolls are cheap to bake and provide a big payoff of sugar and fat to the taste buds. There’s only a few eating places in an airport, so there is less competition and higher prices. Once you smell the cinnamon, the habit kicks in.
Easy to Train = Bad for You
Why are habits that are easy to train so bad for us?
Human tastes and needs evolved in an environment of short lifespans, imminent danger and profound scarcity. Life for humans was pretty stable for thousands of years before the agricultural revolution, and that’s where our hardwired preferences come from.
We love salt, sugar and fat, because those were the scarce ingredients our ancestors needed more of to survive. It’s easier to sit on the couch than go running, because our ancestors needed to conserve energy.
We pay more attention to bad news than good news, and we find it easy to create in-groups and battle those we label outsiders. Those tendencies evolved as humans competed for territory and farmland over thousands of years.
Our world is different today. We are consuming too much salt, sugar and fat — leading to high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, and other problems. We sit too much and move too little. Our lives are safer than ever before, but the drumbeat of bad news makes us believe we’re in danger from others in our midst.
Habits that are easy to train have been marketers’ focus for a century. In an era powered by abundant energy and information, we have the tools to completely oversupply everything that’s habit-forming. And we do, so much so that our lifespans are declining.
Change All the Cues At Once
To change the strongest habits, you have to change all the cues at once. And never change them back.
Inpatient drug rehab programs provide an entirely different environment — all new cues and rewards, and no way to obtain street drugs. You’re locked into a new environment, and while living at the rehab center, many people can stop using. But then they’re sent back home, and relapse.
To quit heroin, it seems the most effective approach is to change your whole environment permanently— such as coming home from the war in Vietnam and going back to civilian life.
It works for cigarettes as well — David Sedaris’ book When You Are Engulfed in Flames details his move to Japan after reading a study that shows moving to a new country is the most effective way to quit smoking.
The lesson here is clear — if you can change your environment radically and permanently, you’ll have the most success in un-training the habits you want to stop. You have to change all the cues and interrupt the path to obtaining the reward.
Training Is Everywhere Now
In the Internet era, technology has supercharged marketers’ ability to train consumers and develop habits. We carry smartphones around all day, and even sleep next to them at night. Many of us spend every workday looking into a computer screen. We spend 11 hours a day interacting with tech and media — essentially all waking, nonwork hours.
It’s a potent environment for training. These devices are able to deliver an infinite amount and variety of prompts, suggestions and cues. They also let us fulfill our cravings — either directly by performing online habits or by ordering things from the real world.
In 2009, Apple launched push alerts for the iPhone, and Android soon followed. Our smartphones became cueing devices — we pick them up 80+ times a day. Just having your phone on the desk leads to a 26% decrease in productivity. A 3-second interruption doubles the rate of mistakes in our work.
Now we’re trained to check Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, as well as email. When you bring up your favorite browser, it “suggests” sites to visit. Go to those sites, and many of them (like YouTube or Amazon) suggest actions to take. Watch this video, buy this product. It’s an infinite loop of prompts, actions, rewards.
What’s easy to train for apps and websites is not great for humans. As Shoshanna Zuboff explains, it’s a model with a lot of downsides for our health, pocketbooks and sanity. The junk food of the mind is a lot like the junk food of the body. Easy to train, habit-forming, and ultimately bad for us.
“I feel tremendous guilt,” says Chamath Palihapitiya, former VP of User Growth at Facebook, in a recent talk. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works.”
Turning the Tables
We’ve all been trained to do everything that’s easy to train and reasonably profitable. It’s not making us happy. In fact, it’s shortening our lives.
Once a few humans cracked the code on how to change human behavior, the rest of us have been exposed to a behavior-change environment that’s actively harming us. And we’re exposed practically all day, every day.
It’s not safe to use the current tech environment of apps, websites and media. You’re agreeing to be trained in habits that will shorten your life, reduce your happiness and empty your bank account. Saying you’re not affected is like a coal miner saying a little dust can’t hurt you.
The only safe option is to buy and use a different set of technology to train yourself in the direction you want to go. That’s how you can turn the tables. That’s how your goals get accomplished, instead of someone else’s.
Positive Training on a Small Scale
We’re starting to see small-scale efforts to use our technology to train ourselves in a better direction.
Want to develop a meditation and mindfulness habit? Download the popular Calm app. Want to eat healthier and exercise more? Download Noom. Why is a Peloton stationary bike worth $2000 + $40 a month, when a Wal-Mart stationary bike is only $99? The Peleton bike is a better training device.
Unfortunately, these are like adding one friend who’s a positive influence while keeping the 20 other friends who are a bad influence. It might produce a statistically significant effect, but over the long term it’s going to get swamped by the bad influences.
The mass market is training people in an easier direction, and has more hours of exposure per day. That’s why the little health and wellness apps can’t solve the whole problem. In most studies of health and wellness interventions, there’s a temporary effect for a few weeks, and then a return to baseline.
If that doesn’t work, what does?
Change Everything With an Assistant
We saw what worked for the American soldiers returning from Vietnam with a heroin habit. Change the whole environment to remove the cues and rewards, and you can change the outcome.
Here’s how to do that in our tech environment today. Consumers need to put a layer between themselves and the bad training. You deal with your virtual assistant technology (that you pay for) and let it answer calls, fetch information and perform tasks for you in the normal tech world.
It’s remarkably similar to the way top executives use a human assistant. The Assistant’s job is to make sure the boss’s day is spent on her priorities. People who want to waste the boss’ time or give a sales pitch will be shut down before the boss is even aware of them. If the boss needs someone to get a piece of info, or make a routine purchase, often the assistant does it.
Consumers can retreat behind an intelligent agent that they’re paying for. They can configure the software with their goals and priorities. The virtual assistant can go out and deal with the robocalls, SPAM, search advertising and manipulative user interfaces for you.
You can use it to order a healthy dinner, and it won’t prompt you to suggest sugary drinks and dessert. It can let you know your friend’s baby arrived and show you the picture from social media, without making you scroll through 100 irrelevant re-posts and 10 ads. It can prompt you to go running after work, instead of prompting you with a new show to binge-watch. It can give you a few minutes of news that’s actionable for you, not an infinite scroll of click-bait that isn’t.
In other words, we are going to have to pay for technology to train us in the direction we want to go. If we aren’t willing to pay for the tools to train ourselves, we’re not going to like the direction the market wants to train us.
Train or be trained — that’s the only choice. There is no opt-out.
