Research reveals how compelling stories can make us better people.

Source: The Real-Life Benefits of Reading Fiction

Holly Parker, Ph.D.

People make decisions based on external cues they might not even be aware of

Photo by Brooke Cagleon Unsplash

Source: The Environmental Cues that Affect our Online Decisions

Liraz Margalit Ph.D.

Why do people tend to read a particular article on a news site while skipping another? When browsing through dozens of recipes on the web, what compels people to choose one over the other? What are the odds you’ll finish reading this article?

To understand the psychology driving human behavior, it’s important to note that incidental variables affect the way visitors evaluate a product more than one might imagine. Often, browsers are not aware of the environmental cues affecting their online decision-making. If asked, website visitors will generally explain their decisions as completely rational and based on a logic thinking process. However, when web users choose between several options, most of the time their decisions are based on automatic evaluations that occur without conscious awareness. They are often unaware of the variables that influence automatic decisions.

When dealing with a cognitivetask, we subconsciously evaluate the amount of cognitive resources required for that specific task. If we have the available resources and motivationfor the task, we will move forward with it. If, on the other hand, we don’t have the available resources or motivation for the task, we will skip it.

When Making Online Decisions, Visitors Tend to Choose the Easiest Way Possible

People are more likely to engage in a given behavior based on the amount of effort it requires. Thus, online visitors rely on the fluency of the information process to determine how they feel. People often misread the difficulty associated with processing information as indicative of their feelings about a product, and this misperception directly impacts their willingness to purchase a product or service, or to engage with a certain article.

When making online decisions, most visitors are applying a low level thought process, which is used when one is unable or unwilling to execute the cognitive assignment. For example, no matter how pleased a shopper is with a brand or product, the invisible cues delivered from online forms and questionnaires might cause the shopper to feel too mentally exhausted to fill them out. The low level process is governed by rules of thumb called heuristics, to infer the validity of the content that one is exposed to. Examples of such rules might include: “Messages with many arguments are more likely to be valid than messages with fewer arguments;” or “A message coming from a man dressed like a doctor may seem more valid than the exact same message coming from a guy in shorts.”

Online users tend to choose the easiest route possible and try hard to avoid high level processing. The surprising finding is that most users do so even when dealing with insurance websites, which demand high cognitive efforts. We’ve found that the lion’s share of online visitors base their decisions on simple intuitive calculations instead of going deeply into the details (more here). Internet users prefer to make decision as quickly and effortlessly as possible.

Thinking about thinking

 

Consider for example the identical exercise instructions shown above. When presented in an easy-to-read font, readers assumed that the exercise would take 8.2 minutes to complete. But when the instructions were presented in a difficult-to-read font, readers assumed it would take nearly twice as long, a full 15.1 minutes (Song & Schwarz, 2008b; PDF). Readers also thought that the exercise would flow quite naturally when the font was easy to read, but feared that it would drag on when it was difficult to read.

Similar results were obtained when people read a recipe for a Japanese lunch roll (Song & Schwarz, 2008b; PDF). When the identical recipe was presented in the elegant but difficult-to-read Mistral font, they assumed that it would require more time and more skill than when it was presented in the easy-to-read Arial font. Other research shows that font can influence whether people make any decision at all or delay the decision to a later time (Novemsky et al., 2007; PDF).

People equate the difficulty of reading instructions with the difficulty involved in the exercise itself. Similarly, ClickTale’s analysis of 10,000 of visitors to a major global brand’s website revealed that short articles with the ‘View More’ option attracted significantly higher percentages of visitors compared to the percentage of visitors who were presented with the same article in its full length. Since I cannot reveal our client’s identity, below I have selected sample web pages to illustrate the conclusions we drew based on our findings.

While watching recordings of anonymous web users’ online behavior for our clients, we saw the same pattern of behavior repeat itself again and again. When visitors would browse online publications, they would find an article, scroll all the way down, and then upon realizing its length, continued to browse without even considering the content of the article. In an instant, they decided it was too long. Meanwhile, when visitors were presented with just two paragraphs of the exact same article, along with a “Read More” button, the willingness to read the article significantly increased.

 

The “Read More” option makes the article seem less demanding. It doesn’t overwhelm visitors and even entices them to continue reading the hidden content. The result is that visitors remain engaged with the article. The discernible differences in visitor behavior here indicate that the evaluation of the article has nothing to do with its content; it has everything to do with the way it is presented. Similarly, we see from online user recordings that the likelihood of adding an item to one’s cart is affected by environmental factors such as the density of the text, the font and size of the wording and the amount of product information available.

Darwin goes searching for the gas pedal in this evolutionary phenomenon of his.

Source: Why Are the Candy Crushes of the World Dominating Our Lives?

Liraz Margalit Ph.D.

What happens when an organic form of existence, after evolving for millions of years, meets the last word in planned and designed addictiveness?  Darwin goes searching for the gas pedal in this evolutionary phenomenon of his.

Smartphones have turned tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people around the world into players of videogames such as Angry Birds, Temple Run, or Candy Crush.  But as the games made their way to everyone’s pocket, reports of addiction to them also escalated.

The official position of the American Psychiatric Association is that sufficient data does not yet exist for determining whether a true addiction is involved.  But today reports are already widespread of mothers who were too engrossed in playing Candy Crush to remember to pick their children up from kindergarten, and many people testify that they feel addicted to casual games.  A survey by Ask Your Target Market found, among other things, that 28% play during work, 10% have found themselves arguing with their near ones about wasting time on playing, and 30% consider themselves addicted.

What exactly gives these games such a dramatic influence over people?

How does crushing candy differ from old-fashioned games?

In contrast to childhood games that involved human partners, or at least involved manipulating real objects in real space, smartphone games require nothing.  A central part of the expected gratification in old-fashioned games was deciding which game to play this time and making preparations (setting out the playing pieces, arranging the dollhouse, assigning characters, or determining who takes the first turn).

Even videogames for computers and for consoles are an entirely different matter from smartphone games.  In videogames, we generally assume a masterful role such as superhero, soccer player, warrior, or the like, fulfilling a fantasy and giving our senses and emotions an experience.  Such games boost adrenaline levels, and they awaken strong feelings of power as well as frustration, gratification, and enjoyment.

Playing smartphone games does not result from a desire to take part in any shared activity or to achieve any fantasy.  Their gratification derives from a change of mental state, a sort of detachment.  To select the app and start the game, no investment is required, no thought or intention, but merely the urge to play.

The urge appears just as hunger or thirst does.  Like them, it requires no handling in depth and no thought process.  Our primitive urges arrive from lower-level areas of the brain, such as the limbic system, which is involved in emotions and motivation.

How is the urge created?

The game designers seem to have arrived at a winning formula, dubbed the “ludic loop” and based on the fundamentals of behaviorism.

The principle is simple.  Significant feedback, in response to an action, encourages behavior that is repetitive if not obsessive.  A slot machine can provide a perfect representation of how the ludic loop encourages obsessive behavior.  You perform a particular action and receive reinforcement:  the machine responds with lights, changing colors, noises, and sometimes a monetary reward.  That reward causes us to repeat the same action again and again.

A smartphone game is generally simple and easy to understand, and it requires no cognitive resources, so that children and adults alike can easily understand the basic principles.  At the start there is a system of learning by stages, whereby each time the level of play advances a bit, the challenge is revivified and thus the ludic loop is renewed and the desire to continue receiving those fresh doses of gratification causes us to play again and again.

Opening the dopamine faucets

Our attraction to this kind of action is attributed to the neurotransmitter called dopamine, a chemical found in our brain.  Initially scientists associated dopamine with feelings of enjoyment (a high level of dopamine being visible during activities such as eating chocolate, sex, and hearing favorite music) but research in the past decade has indicated that dopamine has additional functions besides activating gratification and pleasure.  This molecule helps us in pattern recognition and it alerts us — by dropping to low levels — to a deviation from the familiar pattern we’ve learned (to a surprise, in other words).

The system centers around expectations.  Dopamine cells are constantly creating patterns of action based on experience.  After repeatedly crying and each time hearing Mommy’s steps approaching quickly in the corridor at the sound, the baby internalizes a pattern whereby crying receives a positive reinforcement (Mommy) and the dopamine level in the baby’s brain increases in response to Mommy’s footsteps even before she arrives.  Each time the dopamine cells predict wrongly (Mommy doesn’t arrive) the brain sends a special electrical signal called the habenular signal in response to the erroneous prediction.

The purpose of these cells is to predict events.  They always want to know which actions foretell a reward.  From the dopamine cells’ standpoint, the virtual world is no different from the real world.  Gambling machines and smartphone games are patterns to be predicted and identified.

When we are playing at a gambling machine or at Candy Crush, our brain cells strive to decode the mechanism’s pattern of action.  They want to understand the game, to decode the secret of success, to discover the criteria that predict an upcoming reward.

Expecting a rerun, excited by surprise

Although the dopamine cells respond when they recognize a familiar pattern, they are more excited at unexpected rewards (three or four times as excited, as measured by the strength of the dopaminergic firing).  In other words, the reward is more pleasurable the more surprising it is.  A burst of dopamine, intended to turn the brain’s attention to new stimuli, is important to survival.

The reaction to the unexpected has strongly roots in our evolution.  When we receive unexpected cash on a randomized basis, it forces us more strongly into obsessively repeating our action than cash on a predictable basis would.  The behavior was demonstrated by Skinner, one of the pioneers of behavioral psychology in the 1950s.  When his lab rats received an unexpected reward from pushing a pedal, they would continue pushing it even after the reward stopped arriving.  Once a causal relationship was established, it stubbornly retained its force.

Technology defeats evolution

Although the dopamine cells that deal with prediction try to understand the game’s reward system, they are fated for surprise time after time.  From the dopamine cells’ standpoint, the stakes are life and death:  in order to survive in the world, they need to identify its patterns.  They ought to give up on the gambling machines and similar games in order not to waste their dopaminergic strength on phenomena that have proven quite unpredictable, but instead of losing interest in random rewards, the dopamine cells become addicted to them.  When we receive the reward, we experience a burst of pleasurable dopamine deriving largely from the unexpectedness itself.  The dopamine cells cannot crack the pattern, they cannot accustom themselves to it, and they cannot learn or internalize it.

The illusion of control

Gambling machines and games like Candy Crush are not always governed by rules or control.  The player may have the impression of understandingthe game, and may try to construct a strategy, but the random fruits that encourage that impression issue from a generator by no set pattern or comprehensible algorithm.  They obey nothing but a dumb little chip that produces numbers by what is known as engineered randomness.

In this type of game, the randomness treads the fine line between the purely random and the illusion that control is available to whoever discovers a certain hidden logic.  Such a pattern encourages the player to think it is possible to plan upcoming moves strategically.  The false sense of controllability is a powerful motivator.  When people enter its circle of power, they can be made to repeat the same behavior again and again even with no reward and with no apparent stopping point.  There is no specific goal, but only the pleasure of the little emotional roller-coaster.  The game creates pleasure from within itself.

The little Mary Poppins in each of us

Although game theory is still in its infancy, psychological insights are already embedded in game design according to a certain formula for success.  We are aware of the basic components underlying addiction.  Those components can explain the similarity among such popular games as Tetris, Bejeweled, and Candy Crush.

Matching and arranging random shapes that appear on the screen — attempting to find a pattern based on shape, or to arrange shapes in a way that fits —is beyond question a tool for gratification and pleasure at the deepest level. Matching shapes or patterns is a basic human obsession, drawing from the same source that encourages babies to fit shapes into holes.  We have a basic need to arrange objects.  It seems that the urge to tidy up a mess and restore the status quo ante resembles a sense of mission.  Arranging objects on the screen feels like setting matters right and restoring order.

And a point of positivity to end on

The purpose of exploiting pleasure-giving mechanisms does not need to be something like encouraging addiction.  The limbic loop can help in treating or preventing psychological damage.  Playing Tetris after watching a disturbing movie has been found to reduce the likelihood of flashbacks.  Games that encourage obsessive behavior can serve as a cognitive immunization against post-traumatic stress disorder.  Furthermore, the more stressed our society becomes, the more we require stress relievers, and particularly those we can carry with us everywhere.