** THE 2ND LAW : Make It Attractive **
Chapter 8 : How to Make a Habit Irresistible
Case study: Niko Tinbergen’s study on motivation based on herring gulls (birds). Baby gulls usually peck on a small red dot on their parent’s beak when they want food. It was found that they also do the same on a fake beak with faster reaction as the dot is bigger.
It’s like the brain of each animal is preloaded with certain rules for behavior, and when it comes across an exaggerated version of that rule, it lights up like a Christmas tree. Scientists refer to these exaggerated cues as supernormal stimuli.
Humans are also prone to fall for exaggerated versions of reality.
People loves fast-food as it gives a lot of calories even though we’re living in a calorie-rich environment unlike our ancestors who need to eat as much as possible because they don’t know when they’ll get to eat next. Placing a high value on salt, sugar, and fat is no longer advantageous to our health, but the craving persists.
Look around. Society is filled with highly engineered versions of reality that are more attractive than the world our ancestors evolved in.
- A primary goal of food science is to create products that are more attractive to consumers - the most satisfying level of crunch in a potato chip, the perfect amount of fizz in a soda > Finding the “bliss point” for each product—the precise combination of salt, sugar, and fat that excites your brain and keeps you coming back for more.
- Stores feature mannequins with exaggerated hips and breasts to sell clothes.
- Etc
They exaggerate features that are naturally attractive to us, and our instincts go wild as a result, driving us into excessive shopping habits, social media habits, porn habits, eating habits, and many others.
If history serves as a guide, the opportunities of the future will be more attractive than those of today. The trend is for rewards to become more concentrated and stimuli to become more enticing.
Compared to nature, these pleasure-packed experiences are hard to resist. We have the brains of our ancestors but temptations they never had to face.
If you want to increase the odds that a behavior will occur, then you need to make it attractive. Throughout our discussion of the 2nd Law, our goal is to learn how to make our habits irresistible.
We begin by examining a biological signature that all habits share— the dopamine spike.
THE DOPAMINE-DRIVEN FEEDBACK LOOP
Scientists can track the precise moment a craving occurs by measuring a neurotransmitter called dopamine.
Case study: James Olds and Peter Milner ran an experiment by blocking the release of dopamine in rats. As a result, the rats lost all will to live. They wouldn’t eat. They wouldn’t have sex. They didn’t crave anything. Within a few days, the animals died of thirst.
They further tested by giving the rats some sugar. The rats liked the sugar just as much as before; they just didn’t want it anymore. The ability to experience pleasure remained, but without dopamine, desire died. And without desire, action stopped.
Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop. Every behavior that is highly habit-forming—taking drugs, eating junk food, playing video games, browsing social media—is associated with higher levels of dopamine.
When it comes to habits, the key takeaway is this: dopamine is released not only when you experience pleasure, but also when you anticipate it. And whenever dopamine rises, so does your motivation to act.
THE DOPAMINE SPIKE
Your brain has far more neural circuitry allocated for wanting rewards than for liking them. The wanting centers in the brain are large . By comparison, the liking centers of the brain are much smaller.
Desire is the engine that drives behavior. Every action is taken because of the anticipation that precedes it. It is the craving that leads to the response.
These insights reveal the importance of the 2nd Law of Behavior Change. We need to make our habits attractive because it is the expectation of a rewarding experience that motivates us to act in the first place. This is where a strategy known as temptation bundling comes into play.
HOW TO USE TEMPTATION BUNDLING TO MAKE YOUR HABITS MORE ATTRACTIVE
Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
Case study: Ronan Byrne connects a bike to Netflix such that Netflix will only play if he paddle hard enough.
Temptation bundling to make his exercise habit more attractive.
Case study: ABC encouraged viewers to make popcorn, drink red wine, and enjoy the evening while watch their shows.
Associating the thing they needed viewers to do (watch their shows) with activities their viewers already wanted to do (relax, drink wine, and eat popcorn).
Over time, people began to connect watching ABC with feeling relaxed and entertained.
Temptation bundling is one way to apply a psychology theory known as Premack’s Principle, “more probable behaviors will reinforce less probable behaviors.”
You can even combine temptation bundling with the habit stacking strategy we discussed in Chapter 5 to create a set of rules to guide your behavior.
The habit stacking + temptation bundling formula is:
- After [CURRENT HABIT] , I will [HABIT I NEED].
- After [HABIT I NEED] , I will [HABIT I WANT].
**Chapter Summary **
- The 2nd Law of Behavior Change is make it attractive.
- The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit-forming.
- Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop. When dopamine rises, so does our motivation to act.
- It is the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets us to take action. The greater the anticipation, the greater the dopamine spike.
- Temptation bundling is one way to make your habits more attractive. The strategy is to pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do.