How gamification of everything is manipulating you (and how to recognize it)

https://lifehacker.com/how-gamification-of-everything-is-manipulating-you-and-1848352808

Variable rewards and suspense

Behaviorists’ studies of rats and humans prove that both species are more motivated by intermittent, unpredictable rewards than anticipated ones. Rats will pull the lever more often if they sometimes get a food pellet than if they always get a food pellet, and gamblers would never play a slot machine that returned 89 cents every time they put in a dollar, even though that’s what will happen over time.

We love anticipation and suspense. We also like a pause between our action and the eventual reward or non-reward. This is the basis behind both slot-machine wheels spinning and Twitter’s load time.

I used to think Twitter just loaded a little slowly because that’s how long it took, but it turns out that it’s a feature not a bug. Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites reportedly artificially lengthen the time between when you click on the app and when the content shows up in it as a way to increase the sense of anticipation—and keep you coming back again and again.

Progress bar

Whether it comes from nature or nurture, we want to accomplish something. We like striving toward achievable, understandable goals. In a video game, you might have a progress bar that tells you how much XP you need to get to level 12. A consumer reward program works the same way. If we get a card from Starbucks that will give us a free coffee if we buy 12 other drinks, we’re more likely to buy coffee there than the spot across the street. We’re also more likely to fly on an airline if we are collecting frequent flyer miles. even if the ticket is more expensive.

Engagement and “streaks”

A cup of coffee or a new job title are tangible rewards, but often intangible or nearly worthless rewards are used to gamify employment or consumption, sometimes in the form of streaks. A streak offers nothing beyond the streak itself. The longer a streak goes, the more you’ll be motivated to keep it going, mainly because breaking it would cause you some tiny amount of disappointment. It’s a variation of the sunk-cost fallacy, where we keep paying into something that’s not worth the money because we’ve already put so much money into it.

Snapchat is notorious for this. If you exchange snaps with someone continuously, a number appears next to their name on the app. Each day you communicate adds a point, encouraging both parties to engage with their app until the magical day when a “100 emoji” appears. Congratulations! Hope it was worth it.

Competition

Competing against others is the basis of most games. It can be healthy, although it’s often an external drive: We want to beat other people or teams for the sake of winning itself, not because it’s beneficial to us. Many/most workplaces are competitive in terms of employees vying for recognition or advancement, but companies often codify competition with sales contests, leaderboards, and more.

Community

As much as we like to compete with others, we also crave a sense of community, a drive that corporations are eager to exploit. Like the rest of these gamification tactics, it’s not that companies are just discovering that people like to feel like part of a like-minded group, but the artificiality of attempts to manufacture “community” is concerning.

Apps or services might offer membership in tiered groups to users who complete specific tasks. Or manipulate the information you see to keep you feeling close to the ideological “team” you belong to, reinforcing social media echo chambers instead of challenging beliefs.