To do, or not to do? How routines, rituals, and games drive behaviour
How do you decide what to do next?
In "Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes" – the shot-on-iPhone, seemingly single-take sci-fi comedy from debut director Junta Yamaguchi – a cafe owner discovers he can see two minutes into the future from a webcam's recording.
Afraid of causing a paradox, he and his friends are trapped into fulfilling their own as-seen-on-TV prophecies.
You and I aren't constrained by a reverse time capsule on how to spend our next moments, days, or years.
The challenge is the other way around: how can we shape our future actions from the present? How about influencing habits of people around us – our communities, customers, and more?
The other R&R
Depending on what routines and rituals you see in your schedule, they might be your polar opposites of rest and relaxation, the brick wall stopping you from enjoying life at your own pace. But by a broader definition, routines and rituals are everywhere, as effort-saving patterns behind long-term behaviours in groups and individuals.
What this means is routines and rituals are scripts – co-created by you and your environment and culture – that tell you what to do to get a defined benefit, at less cost than connecting behaviours and thoughts from scratch every day. Who doesn't like a bundle deal?
Behavioural scientist Nick Hobson defines rituals in his research by the qualities listed below.
When you want to encourage a habit, turning it into either a routine or ritual helps cement it. Sometimes, the line between routine and ritual is blurred. If you have a daily morning coffee, what goes into it, where do you drink it, and why do you keep doing it that way?
In marketing and beyond, "experience" is in vogue. People can have a pleasant experience with a product in two general ways:
Knowing whether to aim for a more ritual or routine experience calls for a solid understanding of your offerings and target audiences. IKEA can welcome visitors on a meandering tour of a home furnishing amusement park. A hospital, not so much.
State of play
Routine and ritual are the vehicles, but not the fuel. What's the simplest reason people do anything, outside of external pressure or reward?
Because they enjoy it.
Yet, enjoyment, like its less glamorous sibling contentment, has a half-life. It's a rare person who would want to live the same day over and over for the rest of their life, no matter how enjoyable their rituals and routines.
In other words, the occupant of the world's most comfortable chair will still fidget. Refusing to fool around is its own form of foolishness.
We get a rush from being playful because it's good for survival, even though it's apparently purposeless. It helps us understand and strengthen social bonds, find creative solutions, and come up with new ideas.
But what makes any behaviour playful? Scott Eberle's stages of play are a guide.
Just like "experience", "gamification" is another buzzword. It's one thing to borrow the format of games in shoppertainment, putting a bit of literal friction between a user and their coupon with a scratch card, but it's another to understand how design elements can satisfy different stages of play and apply them accordingly.
It's worth emphasising the importance of the anticipation stage. We can't see into the future to know we'll reach the stages of strength and poise. An all things, it's the promise of what could be that makes us take the first step.
If you want to get chemical about it, our brains make dopamine when we pursue something we expect a reward for, not when we actually get a reward.
And if we do get it? Again and again?
There's nothing left to anticipate. The future is already written.
Needless to say, it's no fun to lose every time, either.
This is the difference between a toilet and a slot machine: both of them have something to pull (or push), but only one of them should give the same result every time.
A variety of controls
What makes people continue behaviours that aren't strictly necessary? They may have enjoyed doing something before, but what will keep them coming back on their own?
The answer is variable rewards. Nir Eyal traces the concept back to B.F. Skinner's experiments with lever-pressing mice.
Assume you are a mouse, or person, with enough belief in their own agency, and in a more-or-less logical world with causes and effects. Having a general positive expectation, but still not being able to predict exactly what you'll get from your efforts, is more stimulating than clocking in and out for the same cheese every day.
Nir Eyal also goes on to sort variable rewards into three categories: rewards of the tribe (social acceptance and status – the Instagram cheese), rewards of the hunt (securing resources – the extra large cheese for resale), and rewards of the self (sensory gratification and self-efficacy – your favourite aged cheddar).
There's a term for how people can take the good, the bad, and the neutral for granted, if it's been constant long enough – "habituation". Think the traffic sounds in your years-long home compared to when you first moved in. On a shorter scale, the feeling of the clothes you put on earlier, which I am sure you are still wearing while reading this.
Conclusion
Putting it all together, we see:
That's a three-course menu of starting points for designing ways to influence your own or others' behaviour, in ways more pleasant and less intrusive than using post-its and calendar reminders like a productivity-themed homage to Christopher Nolan's "Memento".
References
Principal / Staff Product Management Leader | Tech Generalist | PhD | ???? in ????
3 年You should write more, hehe