Hey guys – I’ve decided to switch over the WordPress!

I know, it seems like a step backward. But, I want to try out some new snazzy stuff + build out a mailing list.

It’s my goal to teach you guys everything I know about psychology + behavior science, so you guys can use it to better your lives and your companies.

In the end, life is all about the behaviors we do, or don’t do. I hope that you stick along for the ride.

-J

Rewards provide organisms with a lot more information than punishments. 

Rewards say “even though hundreds of thousands of behaviors are possible, you should perform this one behavior more frequently”.

Punishments, on the other hand, say “you can perform any behavior you want, just don’t perform this one particular one”.

Rewards are thus more specific – they tell an organisms exactly what they should do. Thus, responses to rewards are more predictable than responses to punishments. A child that is punished probably won’t perform the punished behavior, but you can bet that they’ll continue to lash out in some other way.

I want to write about internal triggers, the topic of the TechCrunch post I wrote with Nir Eyal. 

I think that internal triggers are absolutely fascinating, but incredibly complex. They’re random/unpredictable by nature, which makes them all the more seductive. 

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Before we start to talk about internal triggers, it’s important for us to understand triggers in general.

Triggers are calls-to-action, reminders. An email telling you to go to the store and pick up groceries is a trigger. So are your mother’s persistent comments to “sit down and study”. Pop-up ads telling you to “purchase cheap viagra” are triggers – so are billboards encouraging you to “stop by the store to pick up some Coca Cola”.

Truly, anything can be a trigger. Any stimulus that causes an organism to perform a behavior is a trigger.

At this point, you might be rolling your eyes. You might be thinking that this concept is too vague to be meaningful. However, on that point I would disagree.

While some stimuli will cause a diverse array of behaviors, others will cause predictable responses. This is especially true when we’re dealing with people in highly-constrained environments – such as the internet. While an individual can perform thousands of different behaviors in the average physical/3D environment, most web environments only allow users to perform a constrained set of behaviors. Conversion focused web sites will often only allow users to perform 4 or 5 behaviors (this includes clicking to different informational pages), while retention/time-sink sites will allow users to perform up to 200 or 300 different behaviors (Facebook).

However large the set of possible behaviors in an online service, it’s still minimal compared to the field of all possible behaviors one encounters in the real world.  

This is a great thing, however. It allows us to design behaviors more effectively than we can in the physical/real world. Since we’re dealing with a relatively small number of variables, it means that we can painstakingly map out stimulus-response relationships between information and calls-to-action on our sites, and the tracked behavior of our users. This makes the internet one of the greatest behavioral laboratories on the planet – we’re dealing with individuals in constrained environments in which we can record/track everything. 

Of course this means that it’s going to be extremely hard for us to generalize our findings to “real” world – but since our lives are moving into the digital realm, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to be an expert in analyzing and designing online behaviors. 

Anyways, the point is that certain stimuli will produce fairly predictable responses in groups of people. This is especially true when the stimuli we’re talking about are explicit – such as billboards which tell you to “purchase Domino’s Pizza for your football parties”. 

As we said before, any stimulus that causes a behavior is a trigger – but for the purposes of the rest of this article, we’ll say that triggers are stimuli that produce predictable behavioral responses in the particular population in which we’re interested. That is, triggers are stimuli with a fairly constrained/uniform range of responses. 

Great. Let’s call this part 1 –  I don’t have time to finish this train of thought right now. I’ll continue it tomorrow.

Ignore behavior you don’t want.

Reward behavior you do.

Punishment is usually counterproductive.

**Behaviorist psychology has known this for decades.

Hey guys!

Thanks for visiting my blog.

I’m an applied psychology researcher from the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab and a product/UX designer.

I’m going to post thoughts and musings, and research-backed primers on different areas of applied psych, on this blog.

If you follow me on Tumblr, or subscribe to my RSS feed, I’ll be sure to provide you with interesting content.

Bringing no-BS psychology to the startup world is my goal. I hope you stick along for the ride.

Best,

Jason

What makes us fragile is that institutions cannot have the same virtues (honor, truthfulness, courage, loyalty, tenacity) as individuals.

-Nassim Taleb

The frequency and intensity of feelings of guilt seem to be correlated with degree of belief in free will. More on this to come soon.

Love this mindset.

We need to realize that most models and theories are incorrect. We need to realize that living is learning. “Doing” will teach you about what works, and what doesn’t, better than modeling and prediction ever will.

It’s all about times at bat.

We chalk up our success to our hard work and skill.

We chalk up our failures to external circumstances, randomness.