Prof. Adam Alter Discusses New Book, "Irresistible", with Malcolm Gladwell

[Applause] welcome everyone and good evening I'm Elizabeth Morrison vice dean a faculty here at NYU Stern and I am thrilled to be here with you tonight for an incredibly exciting program I it is my pleasure to introduce an esteemed member of the Stern family and author of the recent book irresistible the rise of addictive technology and the business of keeping us hooked professor Adam alter in conversation this evening with Malcolm Gladwell let me just begin by saying a few things about Professor alter he's an associate professor in the marketing department here at Stern and also holds an affiliated appointment in the New York University psychology department his research focuses on judgment decision-making and social psychology with a particular interest in the sometimes surprising effects of subtle social cues in the environment on human cognition and behavior professor alter received his Bachelor of Science in psychology from the University of New South Wales and his MA and PhD in psychology from Princeton University where he also held the Charlotte Elizabeth Proctor honorific dissertation fellowship and a fellowship in the Woodrow Wilson society of scholars he's the author of The New York Times bestseller which I'm sure many of you are familiar with drunk tank pink and other unexpected forces that shape how we think feel and behave which examines how features of the world shape our thoughts and feelings beyond our control I'm tonight we're here to discuss and hear about his very recent and second book irresistible which explores why so many people today probably all of us here in this room are addicted to technology driven behaviors and how we might address such behavioral addictions this book was published by penguin press just last month and it has been hailed as quote one of the most mesmerizing and important books of our time receiving praise and from academics and from industry professionals alike and joining adam this evening is the legendary malcolm gladwell bestselling author journalist and speaker malcolm has explored many compelling topics ranging from concepts of how ideas spread decision making and the roots of success he's been named one of the hundred most influential people by Time magazine and one of the Foreign Policy's top global thinkers and on Adams book he wrote the following Adam alter has written a truly addictive book about the rise of addiction irresistible is a fascinating and much-needed exploration of one of the most troubling phenomena of modern times so after this event we hope that all of you will be able to join us as we continue the conversation during a reception and book signing by Professor alter just outside in the lobby where you entered and at this time with with no further delay please join me in a hand over the stage to Adam and Malcolm [Applause] thank you all for coming and joining me in this celebration of Adam's book irresistable I should say to begin that I'm always amused to hear you referred to as Professor altar because we are principally we're running buddies so I know Adam is the guy who I run with and then I discovered that he has this whole other side which is quite surprising I'm used to you gasping for breath that's accurate so I wanted to um um parenthetically before we start the book is really good and if you haven't bought it in triplicate you should do so but I want it I'm really interested in how you came to this topic because as I've gotten to know you it's always struck me as unclear or I've never understood what the line was between your formal research interests and your personality quirks or at least it strikes me to the half the time what you're really doing is using you profess your professorship to explore your own personality it's true of irresistible yes that's true it's true of every academic I think so I study human judgment and decision making and I'm especially interested in the things people do badly and for me it's that I get hooked on games and email I think email sucks up like six hours of my day and screen suck up three six nine twelve hours depending on which screen we're talking about so I noticed for example that I when I fly I always have grand plans to spend six hours on the flight between say here in LA doing a mix of work and sleeping and relaxing and I always find the game on takeoff that I'm still playing on landing and that happens regularly it's always a different one but I'm always impressed that they someone designed a game that I couldn't stop playing we you always do consider yourself to have may I know you don't I know it's a it's a mistake to speak of an addictive type but do you have a tendency you think of yourself as somebody with a tendency towards predictive behaviors I don't think so I don't think so I mean the interesting thing about what I talk about in the book these addictions affect over 50% of the population so when you get that high when we're talking about the majority of the world of the developed world you can't talk about demographics in the same way because when it's a small percentage there might be one group that's especially susceptible but we're talking about a pretty even split of men and women people who are younger and older like our theory about who plays games has to go out the window now we used to think of gamers as you know the stereotype was teenage boys in the basement playing video games for hours on end and that's not true anymore the biggest demographic of game is now is women who are middle-aged and that's because the way people play games is totally different they we play them on our phones but wait when I get on a plane I don't play a game the whole time I actually do my work so what how would you describe the difference between you and me in that respect I'd say there's a difference in productivity obviously yeah okay to start but I would do think it's not as if you're not productive I just have to be extremely productive in the few moments I get when I'm not addicted to other things whereas you you're productive across time I mean it's an interesting question I think with a lot of these experiences you know we spent so much time in the business world talking about what makes people buy something what makes them engage with it originally this book is about the next step what makes them unable to stop doing that thing once they've bought it if you buy the wrong things or you know I buy the wrong games and then I lose six hours you probably never get to that point I imagine you don't have all those games on your phone or do you go well that's that's a good first step but the minute I start playing them it's that the battles lost and that's what I was so interested in here but once you engage with certain experiences there's no it's very hard to go back but why do you think of your this is interesting point I want to dwell on this because it comes up in the book a little bit and I one of my very few complaints of the book is I wanted more certain things I wanted more of and this is one of them why are you thinking about your productivity and your addictive behaviors as being in competition opposed to two sides of the same coin or complement I'm sorry as they are actually aren't they complementary traits that is to say the same kinds of behaviors that make you play a game for four six hours straight also make you insanely productive when you put your mind to it yeah I think you could argue that the people who write a lot of books or write books at all have something that drives them to complete the process but they're it's self directed itself will do you have to really try to do that the interesting thing about what I write about in the book is that you don't have to try at all the interesting thing about all these experiences is they're competing for your attention and so they are in front of you saying there are a million other things you could be doing now you should be doing this and they're competing in a way that say writing a book doesn't it's not competing for your attention it all has to come from you so I think they're quite different things although an obsessive nature is probably useful in you when you're writing a book that takes three years to write yeah but you there's a point in the book where you say you quote someone in this tantalizing moment is saying the root of addiction is something fundamentally human and and crucial for human beings and that is our capacity to persevere right and that is really a kind of you can explain this better than me but my reading of it was that addiction is a kind of distended form of a fundamentally crucial human trait which is that we are willing to keep doing something even in the face of all kinds of disadvantages or but given that set I'll make you explore that a little bit because it's at that moment I start and I think oh wait a minute is addiction simply the price we pay for human perseverance basically I mean if you think about how we evolved you know you had to you know roam around looking for say berries to eat and there are lots of different trees and you go through from tree to tree looking for the berries and sometimes you find them sometimes you do and you have to persevere and one of the things that makes us persevere is the uncertainty of the great reward someone asked me today in an interview why do we not just keep going back to the fridge over and over again we like feedback we like seeing a light light up and I said well if every thousandth time you enter the fridge there was a gold bar in there you go back and perseverance is partly seeking that gold bar and we persevere when when the outcome is uncertain and you can take advantage of that and that's what slot machines are that's what lotteries are that's what so many of these experiences on social media are they're all uncertainty you never really know what you're going to get when you release content on the web or when you pull the handle on the slot machine and that's what makes us persevere so you know the thing that was useful in the environment when we devolved millenia ago that pushed us to keep looking for food that's the reason we're here in our ancestors who just lay down and didn't persevere and not here that was useful once upon a time but that same tendency hasn't evolved quickly enough to deal with the fact that we're now that perseverance drive is massively ramped up to the point where we just can't stop mm-hmm I want to go back I still want to play this notion a little bit so my father was a mathematician and he described to me once a problem a very very complicated problem which he worked on for 25 years not full-time but sort of and finally after 25 years he was gardening and bingo the answer came to him now what we have described in that moment is something very similar to the circumstances that create addictions he had a problem that he made marginal progress to over the years and why did he keep coming back to it obsessively for two decades because there was a possibility and he did not know where that pasta was 1% or 99% of the gold bar which in this case was solving this big problem that would allow him to publish a paper and feel at themselves on the back so by virtue of having an intellectually cognitively demanding job my dad got to satisfy his addictive instincts so isn't this addiction simply the addiction that people that what people have to settle for if they can't be mathematician yeah there are many people who are addicted to math there are some there aren't many and that's because it demands something of you what's interesting about the addiction to the phone you just picked up the phone it's as I said it's nearly universal and so it just demands almost nothing of you so that is a form of addiction if you are interested enough in what you're doing and you're motivated enough to keep doing it on this with the slim possibility that you'll find the answer to that puzzle then you'll be addicted to math thing is not that many people are because it requires a lot of you you have to give so much of yourself I think the main in the main the addictions we're talking about today don't require much of you at all that's why they affect so many more people I mean it's possible in a strange alternative planet that there are enough people who are into the same mathematical problems your dad was into and then we'd be having this conversation about how the rise of mathematics has turned us all into zombies but that's that's not this planet do you think that over time doo doo doo addictions or the kinds of addictions that were drawn to evolve that to say you would not I've noticed is true but if you said to me well there's one kind of very like entry level addiction that you have when you're a teen but if you do that for 10 years you're not longer going to be addicted to you and what you will need is a kind of more challenging rewarding kind of addiction is there that kind of growth in these things in other words this is this not going to work 10 years to now when we're kind of over the phone well the phone itself isn't addictive it's the vehicle for addictive content if the content evolves we'll be addicted to it anyway I think if virtual reality which is supposed to be mainstream within two to four years if you talk to people in the industry they give you different estimates but they say within maybe five four to five years we will all own a virtual reality headset and then I think we'll look back at these phones that consumed so much of our time as primitive and we won't understand why we spent so much time using them but still since it's a vehicle for content and the contents always evolving I don't think we'll get used to it but buried in that is also the question of whether we escalate whether what's addictive to us becomes more and more intense and it does so what's addictive to a child will not be addictive for very long and we keep escalating no matter what it is I mean if you think even about the goals we set for ourselves if you have a fitness watch and you have a goal of walking say 10,000 steps in the beginning that seems really satisfying and it's rewarding and then 10,000 is not enough everyone almost universally escalates from there if you run you'll know that either you need to get faster or you need to run further you need to change something and it's always in that escalating direction and so yes they you know any addiction will evolve over time and it'll generally become more intense and that's really tolerance when we talk about a dinner I reminded certainly of the fact it had of I used to run the stairs in Fort Greene Park and we started out the first time we did it we did like 15 times and then by the end we were doing 40 times you were doing 40 times no I'm still doing 50 but there's no possibility that it could escalate into something useful cinnamon so let's go back to mathematicians and their problems and how they resembled least superficially the shape of a addiction that we but that is driven by the possibility of the gold bar at the end what if childhood internet addictions are simply kind of the training wheels for some people for something for a more complex rewarding maybe socially useful addiction later on or I just being is that an absurd thought not at all the last chapter of the book is about that about how weather weather or how these things can be turned for the good and they can absolutely it's the same process it just depends what the ends are that you're driving towards there's this some toothbrush that philips released the kids and kids weren't brushing their teeth it's a classic problem and I had this little character and the character sort of jumps around when you're supposed to be brushing your teeth and in the beginning they didn't build a stopping rule in so the character kept jumping and kids wouldn't go to bed because they just keep brushing because until this guy went to bed they weren't going to go to bed so they had to adjust and make a new version with it after two minutes this character went to bed now that's an extreme form where the kids found it so engaging they did something that they normally hate doing to the point where they wouldn't even go to bed because it was so much fun so as it's really just it's a vehicle it's a method and once you turn it to the good you can you know you can encourage people to save more to eat better to exercise more the thing is you know we wouldn't be having these discussions if these forms of tech and these experiences weren't in a lot of ways greatly beneficial and a lot of fun we have them because that fun and those positives you go past the certain points you go past a tipping point and then they become negative and at that point you know you're not able to stop and so that's I think what the big issue is how do you how do you use them for the good without making people obsessed about even good things that when they're obsessed enough about them become all consuming yeah we'll come back to that but before that I want to do another kind of initial question and that is so this book fits into the category of you can very cruelly do divided books of this sort and I know this because I write them in the two categories the book that says the world is exactly the same as it always was and the book that says the world is dramatically new one thing what I work I write books the world is exactly the same that always was you have written a book that says the world is very different so I want to do my it's the same as it always was argument so if this was nice this was 1950 and I looked at in the audience 60% of the audience would be smoking right we probably would be smoking ourselves up here well ashtray right here would be a big cloud of smoke and so anyone coming from 2017 to this audience 50 years ago would say good lord what an addictive group of people a group completely nuts wall of nicotine to the point where they are essentially willing to sit in a airless windowless underground room and it's a fixed fee at each other with carbon monoxides and these little things I mean it's an astonishing thought where people and their clothes stink and their breath is horrible and they are you know run the risk of all kinds of illnesses and they'll go leave here and go out and have three martinis and smoke some more right a couple thoughts that sort of addiction smoking strikes me in some ways very similar to very similar to the kinds of addictions that are done by this why do i I spy I get a dopamine rush I get it it is something that's heavily implicated in social interaction it keeps my hands busy huge thing yeah right I mean I go on I can the great thing about smoking as you know Z you can you moderate your owning intake of nicotine you want more you suck harder you want less you suck less and smokeless so this would we have if we were still smoking would we have less of this possibly there's an article in New York Times arguing that teams are now less addicted to drugs and other substances because they're addicted to their phones that they replace one another yes it's a really interesting idea what I think's no length of it what do you make a bet I do I think it's I think it's right because basically all the diction people think of addiction is something that's going on in the brain you know like you you take a puff of the cigarette and your brain does something you get the dopamine rush and you're addicted and that's not true at all that's part of it but every time a kid has ice cream that you get that same rush every time you're in hospital being treated with pain meds and get the same rush but you don't always develop an addiction the addiction has to be treating scratching some psychological itch and if you scratch that itch if you're a teen and you're you know disaffected and you have trouble forming friendships and whatever whatever the issues our teenagehood if you deal with that issue by using your phone as a soothing mechanism you won't need to use other things to soothe so you can certainly replace one with the other I think you know smokings fascinating because it's bad for us we know that now for a long time people either didn't know that or kind of buried that and so they kept doing the same thing and there's no surprise that if you take a substance you take away all of the negative effects or you don't acknowledge them if that substance is addictive initially it feels fantastic you're going to keep doing it until it's really so bad for you that you have no choice but to stop there's nothing really surprising about that what's interesting sociologically with smoking is there was a time when people either didn't know or didn't acknowledge it to the point where they were smoking on mass and that's pretty rare in the history of drugs I mean some ancient times people took drugs enough that sometimes a big part of the population was doing it what's really interesting for me is that that acts on the brain directly it acts on you physically there isn't quite the same thing going on when you're using a phone or some other experience and yet still here where you know the same rate of addiction is occurring with something like a phone or with watches and it's also incredibly recent this is only the last 10 or 15 years yeah and also the one of the things that I think distinguishes this from other behaviors you know we worried about pinball machines and we worried about TVs other things the portability of these phones and these screens I think makes them far more insidious because you're only addicted to something to the extent that you can reach and use it and engage with it and so if these things are further away from us you know when you play on a video game console eventually you generally leave the home most people do not everyone I spoke to some people who spent five weeks in a row playing games but we're you know sitting in a diaper playing a game sleeping for an hour a day that's pretty rare but most of us will eventually leave the console but the phones go with us everywhere so that you know the livery device hazard cigarettes yeah the delivery devices is portable and that's really deadly yeah yeah but I'm wondering was there one so is it if we think about an age of addiction so times in places where human civilization is marked by these kinds of addictive behaviors is it right to think of that age as beginning at a certain point does it begin can we locate the beginning of this with cigarettes and think of this and all that came with as a kind of evolution and perfection of all of these because you talk a lot in the book about addicted the techniques of addiction yeah and how we've gotten better at them but isn't the cigarettes of the crude prototype of am i pushing the cigarette thing too far no not at all I don't think so I talk about Big Tobacco a lot as analogous to big tech to some extent I mean big text not killing us but there are some similarities in the way we we took awhile to acknowledge what Big Tobacco was doing I think big tech to some extent we should acknowledge as well if you release products that are addictive enough or hard too hard to stop using after there should be discussions about that at least yeah I think the analogy makes makes a lot of sense everyone if you but if you have a substance you know if you're a substance and that's addictive once you locate it there's not much skill in that what's really interesting about this for me as someone who's consulted on designs of products and designs of experiences is we are now sophisticated enough you can't do it every time flawlessly but you can make products and you know you can engage people in ways that are driven by theory where they just can't stop doing something where it you know you can start to design it and that's really pretty new our understanding of how to do that is is really recent and you have a lot of confidence that's something that strengthened with this you have a what I would struck me as an unusual amount of confidence in our ability to kind of hack human psychology in this way to understand how we can hook people well you know to an extent like I spoke to some people who design games at the NYU game Center and they've had some very successful games and then I said to them well why don't you just keep making them and they said you can use the same formula and you fall short you know there are million things that you can't foresee they're a tiny little know they're a minutia that if you get wrong and you don't even know how you've got them wrong no one wants to play the game and you do it just right you follow all the rules and it works other times it won't work and it's really hard to distinguish and so it's not just a recipe book there's still some art to it and some people seem to be better at it than others yeah but we know a lot more and actually if you have enough people playing a game what you can do now is you can maybe test the game to within an inch of its life so you could say here's a game that 100 million people are playing and there are games like this and you say I'm going to release three versions of this mission they're all going to be a B and C slightly different from each other and I'd measure how long people are engaged and I find that mission a people spend 50% more time playing than the others then I take mission a and I have three versions of that I put the others aside and I tweak the mission a a few different ways if you do that 20 times and you keep testing the 20th generation will be this weaponized impossible to stop playing version you don't even need a good theory that helps you do that you just need a lot of people to play it and you need a lot of time and you need to be able to tweak it and so maybe the red button makes people do more than the green button and you add enough of those elements together you have games that people can't stop playing when you weaponize something like that though do you speed up the cycle of I'm sick of it and Eden can need more is that what you're is the kind of escalation cycle you were talking about earlier does that also become weaponized no I might get sick of the game quicker if you've tweaked it within an inch of your life well maybe but part of what you're looking for is continued engagement so there is going to be some decline and we know this for app developers for example when people buy an app about you know huge percentage of them are not using it on the second day and by the tenth day a very small percentage still use that app and that's true for games and also to other platforms so it's not just about getting them to buy in it's about getting them to keep using it so one of the metrics these game companies use is not do people say yes I want to play this mission but are they still playing a month later and so they're trying to deal with exactly that issues they're trying to dial down the tolerance factor to sort of sweet spot they want to hit if it's so much fun that it's overwhelming and eventually they're going to want to stop that's also a problem yeah is the most addictive thing though the most novel thing in other words so I can see how you can get you can see certain principles of addictiveness and engineer them into a product like a game and such but isn't that gives you X level of addictiveness we can want to get the X plus y level of addictiveness is that sort of is that a place you can reach only through serendipity and even is it an unpredictable is the truly addictive thing the thing that you didn't know beforehand was truly addictive probably to an extent partly because of tolerance and partly because there's a ceiling on most experiences until you tweak them and make them in some way more addictive or harder to resist so I think that's probably true that you have to tweak something to amp it up further but I think novelty in itself is not necessarily a good thing but over time things have to change and be updated yeah definitely other kids you get you get tolerance oh I want to ask another kind of foundational question which is I was confused when I read the book in a good way about the distinction between addictiveness addiction and distractibility so we can say one part of me says the problem with the Internet is I'm pulled in a million different directions I do this for five seconds mr. five seconds mr. five seconds nothing holds my attention and you hear that kids these days they can't focus move which seems to me the opposite of addiction right distractibility and then there is the addictive side which is I do the same thing over and over and over and over again and I can't reconcile these two arguments so people simultaneous people say the Internet is destroyed our attention and they also say and people are binge watching things on Netflix more than ever well I'm sorry binge watching is not distractibility it's the officer distractibility yeah I can't bend what binge watch but I'm so distracted I can't binge watch right other people have this other response to technology am I am I wrong to put these two things in different buckets I think to be distractible you need a really low threshold for boredom so something to pull you away from what you're doing I think people historically have probably had better better ability in general to focus and lock on one thing and do one task that required effort the difference with all these things is they don't really require much effort you can you know social media is bottomless Netflix you can just sit there and keep watching basically for the to the end of time so what makes us distractible I think is this the sort of addiction and these sorts of experiences that give us everything we need you don't need to exert any mental control to be entertained for an entire day using one of these small devices in your hand they give you everything you need you could sit on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook or snapchat all day and just case you've just Richard six things so if I'm on six things all day is it fair to say that I'm addicted to each of those six things or I'm easily distracted started from one to the other yeah I think I mean it depends how broad you want to go but people will say I spent way too much time doing this one thing that I wanted to all they´ll group them all together and say this is you know my social media activity I think to some extent they're substitutable and if different people will use different ones different apps for different purposes and so that's that's a big part of it I think that they people treat them as interchangeable to some extent so you may think of it as distractibility that people jump from one to the other but really it's just all the same activity on slightly different platforms as find of fulfilling the same basic need I think have you just defined addiction so broadly that anything fits into the addiction bucket whenever I don't be not separately but this is really a client refused to me a front a really really foundational question which is you're absolutely right there is a category of insanely addictive behaviors that come with the internet revolution and there is also distractibility now they may what I'm trying to understand is the way in which they are they do they fit together in some instance right it's distractibility the way we search for the thing that is truly addictive example is that just the is it the the initial that the corridor we go down in search of the thing that will grab our interest or are we being split in two between these two modes that we toggle back in which are both satisfying in different ways right if you're playing a video game for six straight hours you know on the plane that's delivering a certain very specific kind of satisfaction right that is simply very different from sitting in front of your computer and simultaneously looking at your Facebook and your email and doing five minutes of work at a time yeah I think that's a really interesting question I hadn't thought about this distractibility issue but I think part of what's interesting about this era is that there isn't just one thing that we can't stop doing it's not like there's a cigarette and we're all smoking cigarettes it's the fact that we have this jumping between different platforms and different experiences and different behaviors and that there are so many that individually people spend so much time on you know we were talking a little bit about how long we spend on our phones and the reason we have that conversation is not because there's one thing that we all do on our phones over and over it's that there are so many different things we do on our phones all day that their devices that deliver so many different experiences so what looks like distractibility I think is really just that's a symptom of this age that there are so many things we could be doing and they all do scratch a lot of them scratch the same itch for us psychologically yeah I think that's that still is the same kind of addiction even if you're jumping from one to the other it's doing the same thing for you this actually is interesting because I because of what I read in your book I downloaded you mentioned this app called moment yeah and I downloaded it this morning and what moment does it measure is how much time you spend on your phone every day and we were just discussing defected unite I had the exact same response to that you did and that that is that I download today then I looked at how much I use my phone and I was like holy it was my sense of my phone use was a fraction of what my actual phone use is and I'm wondering is that kind of delusion crucial to the maintenance of the addiction probably a big part of it right I mean I think people always talk about addiction the first thing was acknowledging that it's an issue and I think so much of the time we don't even recognize this so the guy who created moment is a guy from Pittsburgh named Kevin Hollis and he realized that he was seasoned app developer and he realized he was spending a lot of time with his wife where they'd be sitting across from each other with a glass of wine each and they were on their phones they weren't actually engaging and he decided to devise this app he designed the app and he started using it just himself and he noticed something interesting that he was when he estimated he was estimating about half of his true usage and so he gave it to about a hundred friends a beta version and he asked them to estimate it first what they were doing and the average was again half and then he released it to the world at large he spoke to people he said the same thing how much do you think you're using a phone and again it's about half so this is absolutely typical that on average we think we use our phones between 60 and 90 minutes a day the average in the u.s. population is 3 to 3 and a half hours which is a long time and it's a lot more than we estimated it's partly because the bits of time that we spend often it's in little splintered chunks throughout the day and we often don't even think about it as phone use it's just it's embedded in our lives it's just a part of what we're doing is it what if he found or has anyone looked at what is the effect of at giving people an accurate measure of their phone use is it to diminish your phone use yeah if you feel bad about it so that's what he does that's pretty big if yeah right well some people just say oh that's interesting I teach a high school class in the summer and I ask them to download moment at the beginning of the class so three and three three and a half hours is the American average but there are there are demographics that use their phones more the high school kids that I teach their usage is you know between 6 and 10 hours a day and when you add class time to that I assume there's overlap between class time and phonemes there has to be just there aren't that many hours in the day but I'm not sure that they care when I tell them like oh yeah look at that isn't that interesting they're like not really that's just what we do some of them some of them are like that's terrible and we should change but others don't care the ones who care how les talks about this he says that he spoke to his friends and the ones who felt bad about it they started to become more self-conscious and they noticed more they become became more accurate at saying oh this is now phone time and therefore I must have get I guess that I use my phone a couple of hours today or three hours and being more mindful about it is obviously the first step if you feel bad about it you're going to be more cautious about your use and they say they feel better about it I mean the other thing you can do is you know make a wholesale decision I'm going to go between 5:00 and 8:00 p.m. put my phone in a drawer and not use it and those sorts of basic rules that become habits over time are the best way to do it rather than just being sort of vaguely conscious about it you make these decisions you talked about you had mentioned it very briefly earlier and I want you to talk about more about stopping rules they are really fascinating about how so when you describe some of these addictions they sound so powerful that one immediate one the media thought is how can rules yeah possibly stand up to the face of an addiction that has such deep roots so you seem relatively optimistic about the potential of stopping rules talk a little bit about what a stopping rule is and why you why you think they can work yeah well so a stopping rule is this idea that humans will just keep doing the thing they're doing until there's some good reason to stop with there's a sort of cognitive inertia the way we operate in the world and most of the things we've done across time have had natural stopping rules built-in so if you're reading a newspaper if you spend eight hours eventually you're going to get through the whole newspaper if you read a book there are chapter breaks and there are times that suggest hey maybe now's a good time to stop and that's been true to think of traditional TV even long-form TV you used to have an episode once a week and so the time to stop was at the end of the episode and even if there was a cliffhanger you'd have to wait a week for the next one and that's the way the world worked for a really long time that's no longer true there are really no stopping rules have been eradicated from most experiences and it's very smart on the part of developers Facebook's feeders emulous Twitter's feeders endless instagrams feeders endless email never stops you know Netflix now has post play built-in so as we said you end one episode the next one begins and that's true of so many of these experiences and stopping rules are the biggest thing that drive us to move on to the next thing so they have been eradicated the bit to be optimistic about I think is that if there's a way to build them in and often there is you can design them into an experience and even at home you can sort of hack it into your experience with other with devices that don't have them then you have a way of managing your usage have you put stopping rules and clothes in your life well my my wife's here and so I got to be honest about this not so well which ones have you tried I've tried so I have a one-year-old son we have a one-year-old son and she had more to do with it than you did we have a one-year-old son and when he was a few months old he reached over and he swiped my phone accidentally and the picture on the screen changed he kind of looked at me he was like that was fun and that scared me because he was so young and he hadn't done much where he'd acted on the world in a way that was you know directed and where he got some response that he was looking for and so I try my very best to keep my phone away from him the American Association of Pediatrics says for the first 18 months to two years of a child's life try to keep them away from screens if you can and you know I'm not judgmental about this and not puritanical if you can't sometimes it's hard we were on a flight for 24 hours he had me Reiki got a screen but in general that's the rule and I try to stick to that so my stopping rule is around my son I try my very best so lovey you put it all in my son yes you I asked you a question about you and you segue to talking about your one-year-old about how you can manage to control his environment where he's my stopping rule I hope you could control the environment of you but wait I want I have a let's do a little investigation if your stopping rules take out your phone I want to know how many Twitter phone what if I said I don't have my phone on me no no how many Twitter people do you follow on Twitter do you know all right let's check this is a really interesting opportunity for you to investigate the successful habits of someone like me is not addictive I follow 304 people I follow 59 okay here's my first bit of advice to you Adam if you would like to rein in some of your addictive impulses get rid of 250 of them right it's not a good stopping rule you help me Whittle them that's nice no but I mean this is it brings me back to thing I started with which is it's so fascinating to me that you can be immersed in the sugar all this away now oh yeah okay you can be immersed in this world and write this brilliant book and yet even you on very fundamental levels are not are not implementing the advice you give in the book you have 300 Twitter followers and you should have 50 right yeah journalist of the New York Times invited me to write a modern love column about my my love hate relationship with tech based on the book because I don't I have this issue I mean a lot of us do and part of why I wanted to write the book is because it's it's such a tricky problem and even if you lay our solutions so it's so easy not to adhere to them and so I do try some things I have I have the intention to try some advert in the future but I haven't I'm not haven't been that successful like I still go to bed at night having answered every email which at times means I go to bed extremely late I just can't escape inbox zero it's it's just a part of the way I live my life you know what that I've always thought that you're the big thighs personality traits introversion extroversion creativity help me out neuroticism conscientiousness and there's openness conscientiousness extraversion introversion agreeableness neuroticism is right yeah do you think it's said now you think to say that in every age one of those traits defines the age and we're now in the neurotic age but this is essentially a kind of vehicle of our neuroticism it brings out every kind of compulsion obsession you know whereas you can think of the 50s are the agreeable age right the that could go on the the age of equi with the age of extraversion problems with the 70s this is the extent that I remember them but uh everything am i dating up none and not at all that's an interesting idea we should do we should study the dominant dominant of the big five across time true yeah we let's do some thing that you think I were in an erotic age though you don't I'm not sure I mean is it is it that when you're Roddick because we think we're addicted to all these because I'm suggesting we're addicted to all these devices or because they they are evidence that we're neurotic so I would argue that you know there's no there's no thing about us as humans that meant that this was an age where fifty percent of us would become addicted devices except this just happens to be when they were designed and created we reached a level of sophistication in product design that had happened to be in roughly 2000 when this all began and you know it infrastructure was developed enough that you could deliver these experiences there's a there's a therapist who works at a clinic in Seattle that I visited and she had gaming addiction issues for a long time before she became a therapist so now she only plays games that were made in the early 90s because they all crash every half an hour that's her said I've great set up in her stopping rule yeah she has a fern that was I think released I think she should be in an antique museum and when I tried to contact her it took me three months because she just doesn't use tech at all it was impossible to get hold of it mm-hm so you know we need these these we need these techniques that the people are no best suggests that we need these techniques because we're in that age where things have become just so sophisticated highly roll it back I was thinking about your book last night I was at the gym and they were two young women on the elliptical next to me having a conversation and their conversation was about a third person friend two of them at how whose name was Rachel and the one woman said Rachel's so annoying I told Rachel i'ma they both were I just started working and it's Rachel so I told Rachel you know I've just started this job don't text me and Rachel texted me like 40 times the nature but it maybe it was really interesting because what you were seeing in that moment were people was the collision between the social realities of someone's world the the kind of social realities that go back for as long as human beings have been working for a living and the new technology and it struck me that the part of what is it is it wrong to think a part of what we're seeing with these highly varied responses to technology is an absence of a social stopping rule in other words that girl Rachel hasn't yet used her phone in the social environment of her friends being at work right and they were whole thing when they talked was about how Rachel's gotta learn she can't text me about a sale at some place when I'm right and so Rachel there's a Rachel's confrontation with the rest of with the non teenage world yeah he has the effect ultimately of make hope hopefully for rachel has the effect of curing her addiction but I wanted to I guess their larger point I'm making is in some sense that we're seeing all of these behaviors in their infancy yes before we had a chance to kind of work through them on a social level yeah absolutely I think that's that's that's why this is such an interesting time because these experiences are very young these platforms are really young and we don't yet know how to live with them I think that's a huge part I'm not sure Rachel's in the wrong by the way we could talk about that separately but assuming she is yeah she hasn't learned enormous because there are really no norms about that like maybe you shouldn't have your phone with you at work because that was the other question I would ask the other girls like why we're not on the phone how hard is it in Rachel you know as the old guy I was like look let me tell you something okay you don't have the other phone next for you there's never occurred to her to do that which is the other mean is you absolute this is the second part of the norm we you can walk away from the phone yeah well I will say this the norms differ at different demographics of different ages for example so I did an interview where I spoke in a way that I thought would would appeal to the youth and I got a tweet from someone it was just one word one hashtag hashtag old people vibes that's when I thought I'd been connecting so I don't even pretend to understand though you're the teenage norms with respect to tech this reminds me actually I was recently reading a book about the early days of the telephone the conventional telephone right cellphone the traditional telephone is that exactly and you know what's really interesting is you see a version of this in a different form it's not about addiction but it's about it takes about the phone's invented in 1870 something it's not until the 20s that the phone companies realize that the phone is an instrument of social interaction in fact for most of the first 40 years the phone's history the phone company actively discourages people from gossiping on the telephone yeah they don't they totally didn't misunderstand what this is and they're thinking of it entirely in very specific business terms and the whole notion that you would just get on a phone and gab with your best friend it's not just something they hadn't occurred to them it had occurred to them and they thought it was wrong yeah it should be discouraged like stamp it out but that so there's a case where developing an accurate understanding of how we ought to interact with the technology took 40 years yes I think it does it takes time that's obviously you know about good business decisions and bad business decisions but there's also a cultural norm issue that when this new thing appears and it takes over the world we don't really know what to do with it in the beginning yeah and we use it badly sometimes we don't use it to its potential for good and we use it for the bad and it takes time to iron that out not just in the business world but in the world at large and I think that's what's that's a lot of what's going on here you know it's really interesting to me that some tech companies don't think they're addicting you to something I don't think they're putting something out into the world that will harm you I don't think it's not the language they use at least it's about engagement and you to engage because if you don't people I'm going to use your device but you know that I I think you know think of Big Tobacco if we go back to your example for a long time they had a pass because it was legal to smoke and so if they produce products until we really knew how bad they were and what they were doing to people we gave them the pass I think we're in that early period now where we don't hold tech companies to a higher standard there's a guy who used to work at Google and Tristana Harris and he it was a really interesting guy his first role was sort of product philosopher and his role was just to tell Google about the higher-order ideas associated with their products like what should this really achieve in a very abstract kind of way and he ended up becoming the guy who'd go into meetings and say that's a really interesting new product but it's going to upset people and hurt them and we should maybe dial it back and he ran into as he said inertia and so now he's an external consultant but one of the things he suggested which i think is really wise is that we need a Hippocratic oath for design and for technology that if doctors above all should do no harm then no matter what we do there should be a Hippocratic oath in any profession but especially in one where you're releasing products that are hundreds of millions or even billions of people are using yeah so I think that's where the norms need to go where we all demand that from the companies that produce the experiences that were all engaging with yeah I think Adam we should take questions now so I think there's a there are microphones microphones in the aisle if they don't want to come forward go ahead I'll just uh I'll start off I have to go catch a train so I wanted to get my question and my name is David I work for a software company I and so the addition the idea of addicting people to something is actually a potential business strategy for us be honest about it there are different kinds of experiences on phones and on laptops and tablets that range from simple to the complex and there are some games where you have to have dashboards and all kinds of things why there's other ones that have just very simple interfaces can you talk a little bit and not necessarily in the software context but about the correlation such as it exists between simplicity and of the interface and the experience and your likelihood to be addicted by it I think the general rule is that something that is simple and that doesn't demand a lot of you is more likely to become an addictive experience and that's partly because the motives that we're trying to satisfy with these experiences are things like boredom where something that just visits itself upon you and occupies your time is pretty appealing so generally simplicity I think is harder to resist for us when it's the right blend of simplicity and certain other features it can't just be simple but things that are complex that demand a lot of us can't les they're generally less likely to become addictive that's my sense hey my name is Paul I'm an undergrad here I think you guys for doing this and just buy your book looking forward to reading it so you mentioned Tristan Harris at the end of that and I know he has a movement called time wah well 1/10 right and so it's all about just like people should I guess use their phone less and sort of set it up in a way where you aren't using your apps as much yeah do you think that ever becomes something sort of mainstream where it's not weird to say like I don't have a Facebook or something like that right so as an analogy I say I went to the gym this morning to workout right that's not weird that's just me taking care of my physical health but but if I say oh I'm not on Facebook someone's gonna look at me funny right so how does that ever evolve are we just down this path forever yeah I mean again it's all about norms there are so many people on Facebook now that it's actually a statement not to be since I released the book three four weeks ago however long ago it was I've had probably 500 emails from tech companies that are designing products that you add to existing platforms that make them less addictive and maybe five emails from people who told me that they absolutely do not use tech which is weird because they're emailing that aside that aside assuming that that's the first time they've emailed in years it's so unusual that it becomes the defining feature of who they are you know it's really it's an uphill battle to say that I'm never going to use technology it's so that's why saying go call Turkey on tech isn't it's for so many reasons that not a good idea for most of us but one of the really good reasons is that you just can't exist in the working world the world where we travel the world will you pay for things you know there are so many reasons why we need technology now Facebook isn't as indispensable but to many people it feels like it is because it's it's the the way they connect with other people and so what you're signalling when you say you don't use Facebook is that you you're disconnected from other people in a particular way that's again going so against the grain and so until that becomes more acceptable as a sort of hipster statement which I think it has become now I think we're at that point it's it's going to be different from saying I don't go to the gym oh I do go to the gym hi my name is Jeff Robins I teach a research writing course on technology at Rutgers and I was wondering that the ethical aspect of innards you mentioned in your book that elite Silicon Valley technologists they send their children to the Waldorf School yes which discourages so and you also mentioned tonight that we said we develop but it's not we it's a very tiny portion of humanity that's developing so is is there an the problem with the possible harm for addiction and ethical aspect to it or an ethical issue I think it's moral you know a lot of tech people say they don't bat an thought about this before and they read the book and they say oh that's interesting that's a new thing for me to consider but then there are people and I mention a lot of them in the book and the including the people who send their kids to these tech free schools this tech free school is in the Bay Area and 75% of the kids who go there are the kids of Silicon Valley tech execs so they're they're choosing to send their kids to a school that doesn't have tech which is really interesting I mean it says something if they're publicly telling us to use their products but privately sending their kids to a tech free school then I think it is a moral and ethical issue you know we would we would ask questions about anyone who says publicly to do one thing but privately one that their kids near that thing and so yes it's absolutely in a moral and ethical issue hi there and this question is for both of y'all and I'm curious about the addiction to running and if it's a positive or negative addiction and how that's manifested in society today you want to stop well there's a stopping rule exhaustion and injury yeah they in my case both have been very powerful that's very fiction yeah I mean it's an interesting question there there has been a big rise in exercise addiction on the back of fitness devices I spoke to some experts who treat this kind of addiction and it's risen it you know we were we are so worried rightly and we should be much more worried about the obesity epidemic and people who don't exercise at all but there's this new group of people who just can't stop and they exercise through major injuries and it's becoming prominent enough that there are people who specialize in it so yes that's that's also I think becoming an issue it is still smaller certainly smaller than the obesity epidemic or people who don't run or if you don't exercise at all but it's become a thing on the back of these new forms attack yeah hi I'm DVM and undergrad at Stern um so you talked a lot about content on phones and the ease of delivery as kind of driving addiction um so we see like new content delivered on phones a lot but to go back to kind of smoking analogy we see like the same content but in new delivery system in remotes like something like e cigarettes right so my question is in your opinion which is the more dominant driver of addiction kind of changing the content or changing the delivery medium well I think the in the case of phones they as delivery devices changed the game completely I mean we wouldn't be in this position without them and when you talk to experts who treat these forms of you know screen based addictions they they will say that the two watershed events were the introduction of the iPhone in ten years ago in our 2007 and the introduction of the iPad in 2010 but there's this massive spike especially with the iPhone not immediately because the first versions were little clunkier but in time they saw this huge rise so you need to have the vehicle because if you're going to leave whatever these addictions are at home they'll take up generally less of your time - you tether yourself to the home most of us have to go out of the home so that the vehicle is really important but if we didn't have Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and snapchat and email and all the things that we can't stop doing on the phones there wouldn't be a fiction either I think they're both absolutely necessary yeah I this is a question for both of you it's a little bit odd but it's old-world kind of stuff where I saw addictions and it's just always struck me I was always curious in your perspective so one was the first time I went to Texas I went to a bingo parlor and just saw how fascinated people were with that game and I realized that overlaps in the gambling a little bit but it was also struck me that it was always like they were always close enough that they felt that they were going to win so would always drew him back and the other parallel I saw was you know having the misfortune of trying to pick up the game of golf and people will pick up will do one shot in a game of complete mediocrity and that one shot will remind them to say I got to come back to the course because I just remember that one shot I just didn't know how that would sort of you know parallel with any of the research or work you've done they both rely on variable feedback where sometimes you win and sometimes you don't and I have had that experience with golf I'm a terrible terrible golfer ruku but I'll hit one shot out of every hundred that is so sweet and beautiful that it could have been hit by pro and that that is why I keep playing when I do it just doesn't happen often anymore but that's why I used to keep playing you know that was enough to hook me and a lot of people describe especially players like men you are great at the game describe the game that way and people who get better they just have a different ratio but still you dust the ball occasionally where you hit it where you don't want it to go bingo is similar in that first of all you have that sense of almost winning a lot of the time because you see you have you've got four in a row but you don't have a fifth or whatever and that also is a cue that you were almost there and that drives you as well but again sometimes you win sometimes you don't it is it is largely a gamble and hitting a golf ball for me at least this is a total gamble now is it par these forms of addiction and they're just typical just human behavior some people do they become addicted to gambling certainly there are people who can't stop playing golf but they do I mean they usually rein it in to some extent it there are a lot of things that a very small number of people can't stop doing but I don't think there are many things that a huge part of the population can't stop thank you did you have well I was going to say in a in a moment of self-promotion that the second season of my podcast revisions history has got a whole episode devoted to golf and the obsession of golfers in which I make the argument that it is it's a it's it's the crack cocaine of rich white guys I mean and I don't think you can objectively look at the behavior the thing about a game of golf it's four and a half hours and that's just the time on the course so you have rich white guys who presumably have lives leap president noted state leave their demanding jobs when they should be you know draining the twelve and they go and they spend four and a half hours hitting a tiny white ball around on a piece of pest decided grass I mean the whole thing is bananas so if there's no other way to explain it it's all for that one shot it's all for that one shot yes hi professor alter I took your course last semester and I have a question for both of you and Malcolm I wanted to go back to your Rachel example how she was texting her buddies forty times during a day and I'm currently getting my MBA at night and I work full time and I'm in a group chat with some of my classmates and we're like texting about schoolwork and just life in general and I in my job I was at a cubicle but we recently shifted to more of an open floor plan and I found that in my previous position in the cubicle I was using my phone every so often over the course of the day and then in the new open floor plan I felt a little bit more self-conscious that I was sitting much more closer to my manager to other colleagues and I have a the person I'm sitting next to always uses his phone and then the woman that's it on my other side never uses your phone so I felt at that load the economy between should I be texting should I be emailing on my like first schoolwork or should I put it away and I actually put my phone into my desk drawer and I only check about like once an hour so I felt that was my stopping point because I felt that I didn't want prying eyes but in terms of that stopping point do you find that it's or internal or external forces that cause you to reach that point I thought the story is going to end up with you somehow knowing Rachel I know a number of Rachel's to act right the same so are stopping rules internal or external that's what you're asking to some extent we do get there eventually but they tend to be more powerful will AZ they're often built into an experience and that's what helps us stop it sometimes when we're thinking about something for example you're trying to reach a conclusion you're trying to do a math puzzle or whatever you know when you reach the point where you feel confident and that's the stopping rule and its internal it's about the way you feel about the process of thinking about it but you know what I'm focusing on here is much more about the experience bringing the stocking stopping rules to you or destroying them but they can come from inside like you could feel embarrassed about using your phone and that's your stopping rule so it could be internal or external speaking of stopping points I think I am the stopping point I wish we did not have to stop but I hope you will all join me in thanking Adam and Malcolm you

Channel: NYU Stern

Views: 25,803

Rating: 4.8576512 out of 5

Keywords: new york university, nyu stern, stern school, adam alter, irresistible, malcolm gladwell

Id: nRcUsqFjG-I

Length: 62min 41sec (3761 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 25 2017