How do some products capture our attention? What is it that companies do to make their products habit-forming? To answer these questions, let’s take a closer look at human behavior and evolution.
Your Brain Is Wired for Habit-Forming Products
Your brain has been in the making for 3.8 billion years. It is an incredibly powerful and complex piece of machinery that controls all the body’s activities, from breathing and listening to thinking and moving.
Though we’ve studied the brain for a long time, it remains to be the least understood organ in the human body. Questions such as, “What is consciousness?”, “Why do we sleep or dream?”, or “How do we store and access memories?” remain largely unanswered.
However, one thing scientists do agree on is that the brain’s primary function is to help you survive.
The amygdala, an almond-shaped structure located towards the bottom of the brain, is the fear center. When the amygdala senses a threat, it makes a split-second decision to activate the fight-flight-freeze response.
The Brain and Habit Formation
Fear responses can be adaptive when we face danger. To illustrate this, imagine you are walking through the grasslands of Africa, and you notice a herd of lions walking towards you. You believe they see you and that they’re going to attack you. This causes your amygdala to light up and leaves you with three options:
- Fight: To prepare for a potential fight ahead, your brain is signaling to speed up heart rate and breathing.
- Flight: Perhaps fighting is not a good idea, and you think it would be better to run. Your body supplies you with plenty of oxygen and increased blood flow.
- Freeze: Maybe the herd of lions did not see you, and if you stay still, you can avoid the danger. The amygdala will prompt you to keep tense, rigid muscles.
These three responses—fight, flight, freeze—are appropriate reactions to dangerous and potentially life-threatening situations. However, we live in a time where few of us get in situations where survival responses are necessary.
Today, life is safer than ever before. In everyday life, we don’t have to worry about getting attacked by predators and yet, our survival instincts remain and surface in daily life.
Companies know this and take advantage of our primitive needs for food, safety, and belonging—to list a few—to hook us to their products and services. With businesses leveraging a force that had over 3.8 billion years to develop and strengthen, are we really at fault for developing bad habits?
Why Is Food so Addictive?
One way that fast food companies make you crave their food is through what’s called the bliss point. The bliss point is the sensory profile of a food where you like it the most.
American market researcher and psychophysicist Howard Moskowitz discovered the idea of the bliss point when performing scientific research on how much he liked certain sugar solutions. He evaluated eight different sugar solutions at different concentrations and ranked each one according to 1) how sweet he perceived it to be and 2) how much he liked it.
Moskowitz discovered that when he plotted the data, it followed an inverse U-shaped curve: As you increase the sweetness, the liking goes up, it peaks, and it goes down again. The peak of that curve is the bliss point.
The bliss point does not just apply to sweetness but also for other basic tastes. There are bliss points for all kinds of profiles: sour, bitter, salty, spicy—you name it.
Things get interesting when you combine different ingredients. When you join flavor profiles in a way which the perception is that there is not too much nor too little, you can achieve a bliss point for a specific food. Typically, this is done for the “Big Three”: salt, sugar, and fat.
The Big Three are ingredients that activate the reward center of the brain because, as evolutionary theorists hypothesize, they were difficult to get for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. With rarity came an increased sense of value, and so over time, the brain learned that salt, sugar, and fat are important nutrients.
In combination, salt, sugar, and fat act synergistically, meaning that joining these three ingredients makes a food more addicting than any single ingredient by itself. Just the right amount of saltiness, sweetness, or richness is, therefore, what makes a food habit-forming.
How McDonald’s Makes Their Food Habit-Forming
The fast-food industry tries hard to make each of their products contain two or three of the Big Three ingredients at their bliss point.
Food scientists at McDonald’s, for example, have engineered their French fries to deliver a satisfying hit of salt, fat, and sugar. Besides frying them in vegetable oil, and seasoning them with plenty of salt, McDonald’s coats their fries in dextrose, a form of sugar. All three ingredients act synergistically to achieve a bliss point.
And when you count the calories of some of the menu items at fast food restaurants, you can see why this can be dangerous. A large order of fries at McDonald’s contains 490 calories, which is approximately 20% of the daily recommended calorie intake for women and 25% for men. With fast food hijacking our brain, so much that it activates the most primitive areas, it’s easy to understand why so many of us long for better habits that lead to positive changes.
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Why Social Media Is Habit-Forming
Products aren’t just physical goods, but they can also take the form of a service. Such is the case with the social media platform Facebook.1
We feel encouraged to share information on Facebook because of our primitive need for validation. We crave social interaction because our hunter-gatherer ancestors were safer, more likely to survive, and able to produce offspring at a later date.
When we see posts, pictures, or videos from people with similar interests, we feel a sense of belonging, causing us to strengthen new behaviors with the platform. It’s no coincidence that platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat are thriving. Just like fast food, social media taps into our primitive needs.
Pinterest and the Hook Model
Nir Eyal, author of the book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, uses the hook model to explain why social media can lead to the formation of a habit.2
Every hook starts with internal or external triggers, contextual cues that start a habitual behavior. An internal trigger is stored as associations inside the brain, an external trigger is an environmental event and situation.
Triggers are tied to actions, an automatic response that leads to rewards. The action is the “doing” of the habit, and it often requires the user to make an investment, such as time, work, or money.
When you apply this model to the image-sharing and social media service Pinterest, you see why the platform has amassed 459 million monthly active users.
The trigger can be external, such as emails or push notifications from the Pinterest mobile app, or they can be internal, such as feeling bored or lonely. The action of logging into the platform and engaging with content leads to the reward of validation and belonging. Last, the user makes an investment and pins, re-pins, likes, and comments.
The more often you repeat this cycle—trigger, action, reward, investment—the more familiar the behavior becomes, until eventually, a habit forms. Besides tapping into primitive needs, Pinterest and many other social media websites, tap into human psychology to make their service habit-forming.
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How to Choose Products and Services
The world’s most profitable businesses offer habit-forming user experiences. Even though we’ve only looked at two examples, fast food and social media, there are many more products and services that are intertwined with our daily lives: video games, streaming services, alcohol, and tobacco, for example.
The next time new ideas, tools, or items are marketed toward you, take a step back and evaluate the situation with a critical eye:
- What impact will this product or service have on my life? How does it affect my health, finances, and relationships?
- Does the product take advantage of a primitive need, such as food, safety, and belonging?
- How is the item marketed toward me? Does it fill a void or fulfil a need? If so, is it the best way to solve the problem?
- Does it add value? Does it move me closer to my long-term goal?
- Is the product or service habit-forming? Can you break it down into the hook model components: trigger, action, reward, investment?
Go through the list of questions and assess whether it is marketed ethically. Could it lead to a bad habit and affect your mental or physical health negatively, or does it add value to your life? Only if all boxes are check can you guarantee positive impacts and healthy consumption.
References
- Even though Facebook is a free open platform, at least at the time of this writing, it is an incredibly profitable business. Facebook earns most of its revenue from advertising, which is made possible by collecting consumer data, such as age, gender, language, and interests.
- Those who are familiar with the habit loop from the power of habit by Charles Duhigg might see similarities between the two models. It goes over behavioral design, explains how habits work, and shows how daily habits shape the quality of our lives.