TYB
Some here should probably read and comprehend this. Especially the anons who feel the need to flood the bread with their own posts. Who knows? It might help improve things a bit around here.
How did you learn about the scarcity loop, to begin with?
I started learning about the scarcity loop because I’m really interested in bad habits. My background is in science journalism, and writing about health and wellness. People always focus on building good new habits, but I’ve noticed that if you haven’t fixed your worst habits, you still have your foot on the brake. Basically, bad habits hurt people more than good habits help people. And there’s no better place to see this than Las Vegas, which happens to be where I live. This town is built on getting people to do excessive behaviors that often hurt them in the long run. Slot machines are the weirdest. They’re everywhere and people play them around the clock. I started digging into what makes slot machines so appealing, and that eventually led me to interview the guy who designed them. He’s the person who introduced me to the scarcity loop.
Describe it to me. How does it work, and how does it relate to things we do beyond gambling?
It’s like the serial killer of moderation — it’s designed to get us to repeat behaviors over and over and over. It consists of three parts: The first is opportunity, the second is unpredictable rewards, and the third is quick repeatability. To break it down more, you start with an opportunity to get something of value, something that improves your life. In the case of a slot machine, it’s money. Number two is that you have unpredictable rewards. You may get the thing of value at some point, but you don’t know when and you don’t know exactly how valuable it will be. With the slot machine, it could be a dollar, it could be nothing, it could be a million dollars. And then the third part is quick repeatability, meaning you can repeat the behavior immediately. The average slot-machine player plays 16 games in a minute, which is about the same amount of times that we blink. The loop feeds itself.
Gambling is just one example. The same scarcity-loop design has now been applied to lots of different technologies and things we do in our lives. Social media is one; there’s easy opportunity, uncertain rewards — what am I going to see next, how will people respond to my post — and quick repeatability. Robinhood, the investing app, blew up because it increased quick repeatability with stock trading. And it’s also how dating apps work. You swipe, swipe, swipe, match — opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick repeatability.
But then, how do you break the loop and stop it?
Part of it is to understand why you’re doing it in the first place. People don’t do anything that is irrational; the scarcity loop evolved to help us. The reason we do almost anything is that it rewards us in some way. As an outside observer, when I look at slot machine players in Vegas, I think, “That doesn’t make any sense to me. They’re just losing money.” But to them, it does make sense, on some level. Maybe it’s giving them entertainment. Or it’s providing an escape from whatever they want to escape from.
I also don’t want to shame anyone for this. People do things that give them a benefit, even if it’s a small one. It becomes a problem when the short term benefit comes with a bunch of long-term downfalls. For example, most people who gamble aren’t addicted to it; they’re just having a good time. But I think a lot of people can identify something that they do repeatedly that’s counterproductive, or that they wish they did less of. It’s a sliding scale. Like, I don’t know many people who would say, “I’m spending the perfect amount of time on my phone.” And once you become more aware of why you’re doing this, and the formula that’s at play, you can tweak it or change it.
moar at:
https://www.thecut.com/article/scarcity-brain-spending-interview.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us