Hooked
Highlights
The Brain Responds to Designed Environments (Neuroplasticity) → If a product encourages engagement, it creates a reinforced behavioral loop in the brain.
1: The Habit Zone
my morning run had triggered a behavioral script that instructed my body to carry out my usual run-related activities—all without mindful awareness. Such is the nature of ingrained habits—behaviors done with little or no conscious thought—which, by some estimates, guide nearly half of our daily actions.1
1: The Habit Zone
Habits are one of the ways the brain learns complex behaviors. Neuroscientists believe habits give us the ability to focus our attention on other things by storing automatic responses in the basal ganglia, an area of the brain associated with involuntary actions.2
Habits form when the brain takes a shortcut and stops actively deliberating over what to do next.3 The brain quickly learns to codify behaviors that provide a solution to whatever situation it encounters.
1: The Habit Zone
For example, nail biting is a common behavior that occurs with little or no conscious thought. Initially, the biter might start chomping on her fingernail for a reason—to remove an unsightly hangnail, for example. However, when the behavior occurs for no conscious purpose—simply as an automatic response to a cue—the habit is in control. For many persistent nail-biters, the unconscious trigger is the unpleasant feeling of stress. The more the biter associates the act of nail chomping with the temporary relief it provides, the harder it becomes to change the conditioned response.
1: The Habit Zone
many of our daily decisions are made simply because that was the way we have found resolution in the past. The brain automatically deduces that if the decision was a good one yesterday, then it is a safe bet again today and the action becomes a routine.
1: The Habit Zone
MBAs are taught that a business is worth the sum of its future profits. This benchmark is how investors calculate the fair price of a company’s shares.
1: The Habit Zone
A classic paper by John Gourville, a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School, stipulates that “many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new.”10
Gourville claims that for new entrants to stand a chance, they can’t just be better, they must be nine times better. Why such a high bar? Because old habits die hard and new products or services need to offer dramatic improvements to shake users out of old routines. Gourville writes that products that require a high degree of behavior change are doomed to fail even if the benefits of using the new product are clear and substantial.