Here's How!
HABITS.
What both good and bad habits have in common, are their ability to help the brain preserve critical cognitive resources. This can then be used for more important mental tasks such as decision-making and self-control regulation.
It is often said that ‘habits die hard,’ and the reason for this lays in how habits form in our brain. When we do something we like and accomplish the task at hand, our reward system in our brain (the mesolimbic dopamine system to be exact), produces a hormone called dopamine. Dopamine (otherwise known as the happiness hormone) make us feel good, so we tend to repeat behaviors that give us pleasure. Over time, these behaviors (done repeatedly) turn into habits and become hardwired in the brain, making it both difficult and unpleasant to undo.
This habit-forming process is fundamental to how social media developers design mobile apps and online platforms.
THE ATARI MODEL.
ATARI stands for Attitude, Trigger, Action, Reward, Investment (so no reference to the 80’s video game computer).
AttitudeThis dimension of the model refers to the psychological profile of your user. Understanding your users’ personality, behavioral preferences, likes, desires, opinions and motivation (otherwise known as psychographics) will help you to understand ‘WHY’ they would use your social media site, product or service. Most (social media) mobile apps and online platforms collect user psychographic data.
TriggerTriggers are notifications that inform you to take action. Before habit-forming behaviors can be created, behaviors first need to be initiated. According to BJ Fogg’s Behavioral Model, triggers need to be easy to execute and appealing to do. Especially the appealing part is really important, that is why ‘Attitude’ precedes ‘Trigger’. If you know why someone will take action, your triggers can be designed to appeal to their immediate needs.
ActionOnce a successful ‘Trigger’ has initiated behavior, ‘Action’ can be taken to fulfill the task at hand and thus help fulfill that immediate need. Take, for example, clicking on an Instagram notification to view your friends’ latest pictures or seeing who liked your posts.
RewardThe most insidious dimension of the ATARI model is ‘Reward’. Getting 100 likes on your Facebook post or finding the perfect match on Tinder is just the reward you have been expecting for the effort you have put into achieving your goal. However, if you think carefully about your social media usage, you don’t always get rewarded for scrolling on your timeline. When rewards are unexpected, the science of human behavior shows us that people will continue that behavior in anticipation of a reward. Scrolling your timeline is like pulling the handle of a slot machine and playing the lottery.
InvestmentThe final dimension refers to the time, data, social capital, and/or money that is put into using the app as ‘Investment’. Behavioral Science shows that people don’t like to part with things or people where an investment has been made in. This is often referred to as ‘loss aversion’ in psychology. In addition, the fact of investing time or money into something validates our previous behaviors, self-justifying continuous use.
http://www.decadirect.org/2018/02/16/social-media-addictive/
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