I heard about “ intermittent reinforcement” or “push and pull” technique but i can’t wrap my head around it.
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Sometimes you’ll get no Reddit upvotes, sometimes no replies, sometimes a ton of funny and interesting replies and upvotes and you’ll feel good – and keep coming back to try again. Intermittent reward is addictive. (hi! 👋)
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– If something never works, we get bored.
– If something always works the same, we understand it, and move on.
– If something works sometimes, but not always, we find it interesting, addictive, puzzling, exciting. It keeps us hooked.
Examples:
Playing a game with a lootbox, if it’s always empty that’s boring. If it’s always 5 credits, that’s boring. If it’s mostly 5 credits but *sometimes* the ultra gun, or level up, or 500 credits, that’s addictive and moreish and exciting.
Getting a kid to do chores, if the parents never reward it, it’s a chore. If they always pay $1 it’s no fun. If they normally do nothing but sometimes allow staying up late or seconds of dessert as a reward for doing a good job on the washing up, that just works better.
If you refresh Instagram and there’s never anything new, you close it. If you refresh and it’s always 3 new things which look the same, you get bored. If you refresh and sometimes there’s nothing, sometimes theres normal things, and intermittently there’s something really good – you get hooked and spend hours scrolling and refreshing.
Companies know that people behave like this, and they exploit it to keep you hooked so they can show ads. TV stations, social media apps, gambling apps, one-armed bandits, they design intermittent reinforcement into the game to make as many people hooked as possible.
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