How To Break Anything

Thoughts and insights on culture and human behavior, living blissfully at the intersection of rationality and irrationality (but mostly irrationality) 
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behavioral economics

 
March 8, 2010

How games/reward mechanisms work, and an interesting perspective on the definition of "game"

via cracked.com

5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted

This article is fascinating and of course hilarious, being Cracked (though I'm not prone to calling these types of things "creepy"...). Some things it calls to mind:

  • Sheena Iyengar's The Art of Choosing, a brief section where she makes a bit of a case analogous to the "you're in a prison" idea of The Matrix
  • Skinner Box? There's an app for that.
  • Seth Godin's Linchpin, and the work culture we've created to indoctrinate employees:

 

Why do so many of us have that void? Because according to Everything Expert Malcolm Gladwell, to be satisfied with your job you need three things, and I bet most of you don't even have two of them:

Autonomy (that is, you have some say in what you do day to day);

Complexity (so it's not mind-numbing repetition);

Connection Between Effort and Reward (i.e. you actually see the awesome results of your hard work).

 

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Filed under  //   behavior   behavioral economics   game mechanics  

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February 16, 2010

"Why can't you just *tell* someone about the meaning of something (presumably important)?"

GS: Why can't you just tell people what the meaning of, say, polluting is?

GN: You can. It's called propaganda.

GS: Why shouldn't we use propaganda then? Why do you have to let people discover the meaning of such things for themselves?

GN: The discovery of radical alternatives happens in smaller steps and in individual minds and hearts. For example, I love baking and I used to do a lot of it in my big old gas oven. Then I put a sensor in my kitchen and learned that a lot of CO2 gets produced. Even after I turn the oven off, hours afterward, CO2 was still sitting in my kitchen to a tune of 2,000 parts per million. The cookies were long gone and I was still sitting in a soup of gas. Once I became aware of that, my wife and I got  a convection oven instead, and now we bake with that. I bake less and the oven is a little smaller, but I don't have a CO2 lake in my kitchen anymore. It became actionable to do less because of harm reduction, essentially.

via citris-uc.org

Greg Niemeyer is an artist and game programmer working with interactive art at UC Berkeley. He integrates game mechanics and behavioral economics into projects that get people to change their behavior. I love the above quote from his interview with CITRUS, referencing one of his latest sensor projects that allows people to easily monitor their own air quality.

We try to force meaning onto people all the time. It's not just called propaganda. It's also called advertising.

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Filed under  //   advertising   behavioral economics   game mechanics   meaning  

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February 13, 2010

Economics is about value, not about money

via annoyinglyboring.com

It's generally assumed that economics is about money, which is incorrect. Economics is about value; it just happens that sometimes money is valuable. This is why behavioral economics has little to do traditional financial dynamics with and more to do with traditional social/psychological dynamics.

I was talking not too long ago about how it tends to be frustrating to get dollar coins back from change machines.

You'd think a dollar coin would be just as valuable as a dollar bill, but it's not. This is because it's easier to lose small metal coins. I was telling my friend that I'd gladly change my dollar coins for bills instead, were I able to find someone who'd find the exchange of equal value (not bloody likely).

Economics is about value (irrational), not strict numerical comparison (rational).

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Filed under  //   behavioral economics   value  

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February 8, 2010

"Choice," engineered and constructed like a well designed building

Behavioural economics is described (by Thaler himself) as ‘ libertarian paternalism’. This is the idea that while people should be able to live their lives as they want, “it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people’s behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier, and better”.
via wearesocial.net

I find the counterintuitive reality of how we make decisions compellingly beautiful.

If you'd like, there's a rather wordy explanation of behavioral economics below:

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Filed under  //   behavioral economics   decisionmaking   irrationality  

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