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[Music] hi everyone thank you very much Adam for inviting me thank you to Wharton for
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hosting me so uh my name is Adam alter I'm a professor of uh psychology and marketing at NYU at Stern and this book
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is about addictive Tech and the rise of addictive Tech and the role that's playing in our lives the outsized role
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and I became interested in this topic about 3 years ago so when two things happened the first thing that happened
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was I read about this guy this guy's dong win he's a Vietnamese game developer and he designed a game that I
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could not stop playing um this is the game I don't know if any of you have played this game anyone having
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flashbacks this is Flappy Bird it's the simplest game in history all you have to
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do is make the bird not fly into walls it's incredibly straightforward but it's
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also massively addictive so nen designed this game and it was it was very very popular it took a little while to take
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off but when it did take off it did very well at its peak he was earning $50,000
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a day in ad Revenue which is not shabby if you're an independent game designer
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so he designed the game and I started playing it I found it very hard to stop and I got curious about it and I
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wondered if there was something about the game that made it hard to resist so I started to read some of the reviews
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for the game and they were really interesting so they there were this interesting mix what you see here
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is it's it's a it's a glowing review five stars is what you're looking for
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but it also is killing this person person which is a weird it's a really weird tension so this person says Flappy
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Bird will be the death of me let me start by saying do not download Flappy Bird keeping in mind this person gives
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it five stars um and they basically go on saying I went to the App Store I downloaded it that was my first mistake
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I played it once and said okay just one more time uh that one more time never ended I don't sleep I don't eat I'm
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losing friends all because a Flappy Bird so tremendous game um and what happened in the end was n had a
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conscious he grew a conscience and he felt so bad about it that despite the massive ad Revenue he pulled it from the
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App Store it was the number one game on the App Store he pulled it and he basically tweeted I'm sorry Flappy Bird
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users I will take Flappy Bird down I cannot take this anymore it is not anything related to legal issues I just
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cannot keep it anymore I also don't sell Flappy Bird please don't ask people were
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desperate there was like a black market for Flappy Bird so something here was going on with this this game and I'd
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played it for hours and hours on my iPhone now the second thing that happened paired with this suggested that
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there was something systemic going on here and what that was was I started to read a little bit about how Steve Jobs
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thought about the iPad as a delivery device and when he introduced the iPad in 2010 he said what this device does is
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extraordinary it offers the best way to browse the web way better than a laptop way better than a smartphone it's an
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incredible experience so that's obviously a glowing review of the product but at the same
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time when he was asked in 2012 what he thought about the iPad with respect to his kids this is Nick Bilton a tech
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writer for the New York Times Bilton said to him so your kids must love the iPad and job said they haven't used it
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we limit how much Tech our kids use at home so on the one hand he thought it was a wonderful device that's what he
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was telling the world but on the other he was really concerned about having this device in his home he didn't want
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to give it to his kids which is concerning perhaps because he knew that if they got hold of Flappy Bird it would
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be the end of them so something is going on here and what's interesting is beyond
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Steve Jobs other Tech Titans have said similar things so this is a school called the waldor school school of the
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peninsula which is uh in the Bay Area and there's something really interesting
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about this school it's one of the few schools around the country now that mandates a complete Tech ban no
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computers no iPads no iPhones nothing but what's really interesting about the
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school is that 75% of the kids there have parents who are SE Silicon Valley Tech execs so these are people producing
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Tech and yet saying that their kids should go to a school where there is no Tech they realize that something is
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going on here and you know they're right to have those concerns there's a lot of research
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suggesting that these concerns are well founded here's one of my favorite pieces
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of evidence a whole lot of people of roughly your age in their 20s and 30s were asked if you had to choose between
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a broken bone and a broken iPhone which one would you choose this is what they said
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54% said a broken phone which left 46% saying broken leg and what's really interesting about this is when you watch
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them make the decision even the people who say I'd have a broken phone agonize
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they spend time it's not like a snap decision where it's easy for them to
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make because these devices are so instrumental in their lives they know that not having them will be a really
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massive psychological pain for them um and so you you have this crazy statistic one of the reasons people say this by
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the way is they say while I'm recovering from my broken bone at least I'll have
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my phone to keep me company so that's concerning but let me give you a sort of bigger more reliable
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data set uh this is a program called moment you can all download moment for your phone some of you may have it
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already it's designed by a guy called Kevin Kevin holes from Pittsburgh and he
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designed it because he felt that he was spending too much time on his phone it measures how long you spend on your
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phone every day and how many times you unlock your phone so basically he AB tested it with his friends and he asked
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them how long do you think you're spending on your phone and his friend said about an hour and a half on average
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turns out they were spending an average of 3 hours a day on their phones which is pretty striking and and what that
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means is if you look at the waking hours in the day for the average person the dark blue is the hours we
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spend at work the light blue is the hours we spend doing survival activities like eating and bathing which leaves the
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white bit and that's the bit that you can do lots of interesting things with
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or you can fill it with the black bar which is how long we spend on average on our phones now so that's we're left with
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that little sliver of white to engage with other people to have social interactions to talk to our loved ones
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to do the really important things in life we're not leaving ourselves much time to do that stuff because phones get
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in the way 3 hours a day on average for people so this is a problem now all of this falls under the banner of
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Behavioral addiction behavioral addiction is basically the drive to engage in some Behavior that's rewarding
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now but that has really strong negative consequences in the long run and they can be in a lot of different spheres
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they can be physical mental So Physical if you do say you play games for 45 days
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straight as one person I'm going to tell you about did that was bad for him he
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put on 40 pounds of fat because he didn't move um mental social Financial social because our relationships break
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down and financial obviously because people overshop and they don't work as much as they should and there are a lot
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of different kinds of experiences that fall under this Banner there are things like um compulsive use of phones emails
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social networks uh video games overwork OV exercise compulsive shopping gambling
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and what's interesting about this is if you want to know how many people in the
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population at large have at least one of these issues you may feel that you have
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one of them there was a study published in 2011 U Mark riffi British researcher found that as of 2011 41% of all adults
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have at least one behavioral addiction and he predicted that number would rise and I'm sure now six years later that it
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has risen significantly it's probably over the 50% mark because now iPads have
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really taken a hold and when you ask people who work in behavioral addiction treatment they all say the biggest thing
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to happen in behavioral add ition was first the Advent of the iPhone and then second the Advent of the iPad so I think
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that number is probably risen so let's talk about what you can do about this um
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there are a few things that probably won't work cold turkey is one of them if you search cold turkey there
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actually is a cold like a a cold turkey you have that option there on Google Images which is nice um so cold turkey
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doesn't work for a lot of reasons one of them is that you can't function in the
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world and not use Tech it's just very hard you can't work or it's very hard to
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work it's very hard to travel it's hard to just go about the business of
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everyday life not to mention the social consequences of not using Tech so cold turkey is tough also um if you stop
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using Tech the motives that that Tech is is dealing with for you so let's say you
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are looking for social connection if you don't get that social connection through
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Tech you're going to need to find it somewhere else or soothe yourself some other way so there's some evidence that
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if you try not to use Tech just going cold turkey you end up developing other forms of addiction to compensate so
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that's dangerous the other thing you can't do in the long run is one of my
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favorite techniques this is min SEI and uh he's a tech entrepr entrepreneur who
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lives in New York and he went on Craigslist and he advertised for a position that he paid uh a significant
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sum of money this woman was paid to follow him around and when he did something he didn't want to do she was
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paid to slap him so so she punished him every time he opened his Facebook or his email and
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here you can see that that form of punishment in action he ended up designing a device that I he sent to me
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it costs $500 you wear it on your wrist and you can program it to give you a zap
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when you do something you shouldn't be doing it is so incredibly powerful that
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I hit the roof when I first use it so I've never used it since but people who
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do use it swear that it works really well but I don't think that's a long-term solution either so here are
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some things you can do one of them is basically a series of techniques known as behavioral architecture the that just
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as an architect creates a building or designs a building you can design your own life in such a way that you can
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minimize harm and maximize good so here are some things you can do with respect to tech one of the things you can do is
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for part of the day remove it from your life completely so what I've tried to do
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is between 5:00 p.m and 8:00 p.m. I put my phone in a drawer and I Don't Go Near
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it same with my iPad I try not to use the TV um so I try to remove Tech Al together for part of the day that's one
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option but some tech is going to be with you and so you need to make sure that you do whatever you can to minimize the
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pull of that text so here's one thing you can do I don't know if you heard
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that it was subtle but there was the ding sound that a lot of us have when we get a new email and that for us ignites
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a set of responses that makes us feel really good most of the time it's a sort
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of reward response so one thing to do is to turn that sound off that's pretty
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effective another thing you can do is turn off all notifications on your phone because what you're doing then is your
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resting control from your phone and you're you're taking it yourself you're
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deciding when to go to the phone because if you have push notifications your phone is guiding you which is the
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opposite of what you want to happen another thing to do is to make sure that your homepage on your phone doesn't have
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any of those addictive apps for you if it's Twitter or Instagram or Facebook or
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whatever it is remove them put them in a folder in the third or fourth page and make sure that you type in the search
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bar the name of that app because that's a willed behavior that basically means
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that the only time you will go to this device is because you you've willed it
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you've decided that it's something that should happen it's not that the the app
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or the icon is reminding you to check it which you'll do reflexively uh and the
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fourth thing you can do this is a little small but if you look at the bottom there this is a Facebook post you can
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see this person has 10 likes three shares and seven comments there's a a program now known as a the Facebook
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demetricator which removes all the numbers so if you look at what happens when you activate the demetricator it
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doesn't give you numbers it just tells you that these things have happened but
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not how much and so you don't obsessively return to check over and over and over again it's proven to be
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pretty effective so those are some things you can do um also at the cultural level there are some things we
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should do and this is a bigger conversation obviously one of them is exemplified in the behavior of this
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design firm in Germany they have tables that are Tethered to the ceiling and at 6 p.m. every day no matter what you're
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doing the tables rise to the ceiling and the place the place turns into a yoga studio so You' better be finished with
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your work you have no option so that's one thing we could do is sort of mandate
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that work ends at a particular time or do our best to do that another thing we can do is you know a lot of businesses
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when I tell them this say we obviously want our programs to be addictive because that's how we compete in the
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marketplace well here's one solution these 100 calorie packs in the food industry are very popular people will
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basically pay more to buy less food because what they're paying for is self-control they're Outsourcing
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self-control to the companies that make the food now if if social media platforms offered are slightly more
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expensive I guess they're currently free but if they said for 10 bucks a year you
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can get a version of this platform that has fewer of the hooks that will addict you effectively you're resting they're
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resting self-control from you and doing it for you people would pay more for that so the businesses might be happy
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and you would get a better version of the program that's one option and finally there are people who are known
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as design ethicists at these big companies and a lot of them believe there should be a hypocritic oath for
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Designing Tech that just as doctors are supposed to do no harm when you're designing Tech you should make sure that
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you consult with behavioral experts who explain to you what you should be doing to minimize the addictive hooks that are
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conveyed in these products and the last thing is to understand what it is that makes you addicted in the first place
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because addiction isn't just about that rise in dopamine it's not just about
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taking the drug or doing the behavior it's what it does for you it's what it
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soothes and this is Isaac viberg he's uh a gamer from way back he's a straight A
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student he did very well in school he played football he was kind of the the All American guy
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and things went wrong for him when he started playing World of Warcraft there 100 million people who've
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played this game and signed up for accounts half of them have developed addictions it's probably the most
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addictive experience in the world um and Isaac had a real problem with this he's
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the guy who spent 45 days playing and the key for him was to work out what it was that was driving that so some people
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play World of Warcraft because they're bullied and it allows them to choose a
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really dominant Avatar and so they do really well they feel better because they've got a dominant Avatar That
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Conquers missions and does does really well on missions um other people are lonely and so they form Guilds of
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friends on the platform and for him that was the main thing and so he realized that if he could cultivate social a
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social life outside of the game he that addiction would would wither away and that's what happened for other people
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it's about low self-esteem and conquering quests it makes them feel efficacious and so the key is to work
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out what is the underlying psychological issue that you soothe with these behavioral addictions and the biggest
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thing I think of all is nature it's the anti- behavioral addiction it's the
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perfect place to go it's sort of anywhere where you go where you have no idea what year it is is a good solution
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and so I think that's that's the biggest cure of all thanks very [Applause]
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[Music] much