"Prime your environment to make the next action easy." -James Clear
Remember the original Facebook?
(What was then called The Facebook…)
On February 4, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin launched a website that, for better or worse, changed the world forever. I was a college student when Facebook launched; as such, I was the prime demographic that joined the platform at the beginning of its meteoric rise.
Given what Facebook became, it’s incredible to look back at the original site’s simplicity. Watch this clip:
My first profile page included my photo, contact information, relationship status, and current courses at Maryland. I never imagined what it would become (one of many reasons Zuckerberg is a billionaire, and I am not.)
Social media gets much public grief, and for good reason. But my gut tells me that if Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, or Twitter were never created, something else would have been created by someone else with similar positive and negative effects. Platforms are easy targets.
As a rabbi, I would love for Jewish life to become so powerful that people would participate as automatically as how they reach for their phones. As such, while I recognize Facebook’s downsides, it’s also hard not to envy it.
Thus, in “honor” of Facebook’s birthday,1 we will spend the next few weeks diving into some key Moneyball-related terms that lie at the core of Facebook’s power and peril.
Priming
When I say “salt and,” you say…
When I say “peanut butter and,” you say…
When I say “doctor and,” you say…
If you said pepper, jelly, and nurse, you’re right.
Possibly.
In theory, there is no reason that you should be “right.” I could just as easily mean “Salt and Water” or “Peanut Butter and Bananas.” However, we are conditioned to associate one word with another when given a specific cue.
David E. Meyer and Roger Schvanevelt (M&S) are credited with first identifying the priming effect in a 1971 paper on word association, using some of the word pairs we used above with groups of high school students. M&S argues that it is not necessarily the case that the “meaning of a word is retrieved to make a lexical decision,”2 only that hearing a specific string of words leads one to associate saying another word. Although M&S does not use the word, their research influences what eventually becomes known as “priming,” the APA eventually defines it as “the effect in which recent experience of a stimulus facilitates or inhibits later processing of the same or a similar stimulus.”3
Using a parental example, as the parent of a two-year-old, I often operate with Sesame Street in the background. My daughter loves a video with Hailee Steinfeld called “I Wonder, What If, Let’s Try!”:
After months and months of watching, my daughter knows when she sees Hailee singing, she should sing the words, “I Wonder, What If, Let’s Try!” While it is unlikely that she knows who Hailee Steinfeld is or what most of the words in the song actually are, she has been sufficiently primed.
Plus: it’s super cute.
Returning to Facebook, one reason for Facebook’s effectiveness was their choice of word to describe the foundational relationship on the platform: Friend. Unless you are Voldemort,4 everyone wants friends, and few people would turn down the idea of more friends. So when someone sends you a “Friend Request,” all kinds of associations are triggered, making you more likely to accept friend requests and ask people to be your friend. Facebook could have chosen another word, but in all likelihood, it wouldn’t have the same impact.
While priming has been one of the top targets of those who worry about the replication crisis in the social sciences (with good reason),5 no one denies that priming happens in certain circumstances; the only debate is when and how it works. If you provide the right stimulus, you can get someone to do or say something on autopilot. And that’s when you get hooked…
Hooked
Like most heuristics, the goodness or badness of priming depends on how you use it. I associate “salt” with “pepper” because System 1 thinks fast and naturally pushes my mind to think of the most natural word association, even if I might be wrong sometimes. If my brain needed to survey hundreds of words every time someone said “salt and…,” my brain would waste time and energy on that instead of other, higher-level functions.
However, the right person, company, or institution could sufficiently prime someone over time to buy something or click something on autopilot,6 allowing that entity to reap significant monetary benefits. This is the subject of Nir Eyal’s book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.
If your first reaction to that title is, “Why would I want to build a habit-forming product?” I get it. Stay tuned for next week’s issue. However, Eyal’s purpose in Hooked is to teach people how certain companies and organizations can get people addicted to their products.
The key element of Eyal’s book is what he calls the “Hook Cycle,” a process where users become habituated to using a product to the point where using it becomes automatic. He writes: “Through consecutive Hook cycles, successful products reach their ultimate goal of unprompted user engagement, bringing users back repeatedly without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.”7 Below is a picture of the cycle:
Notice that the first step in the process is a “trigger,” which is a sibling of priming. If I get an email with the subject line “You NEED to See This…,” I want to find out what “This” is. Sometimes, it’s a video I want to watch; sometimes, it is a letter from the son of the deposed king of Nigeria asking me for money.
Priming cuts both ways.
However, let’s assume that you only want to use priming for “good” and automatically get the people you serve to engage with your organization. If so, you need to read this book.
And if you want to know how to manipulate them and feel guilty, read next week’s issue.
(See what I did there?)
Getting Your Users Hooked
Take a trip to the dark side…
380
I never heard of the term “atmospheric river” until last week when I was in California.
Los Angeles alone had 380 mudslides last week.
Stay safe.
What I Read This Week
Five Types of People Who Argue on the Internet: This is not a listicle but a detailed and nuanced article by Nate Silver. Definitely read.8
The Introvert Economy: Setting aside that introversion and extroversion are largely artificial distinctions, I really enjoyed this article in Bloomberg.
A More Effective Approach to Doing Good in the World: Want to do good in the world? Great! Do you want to succeed where others failed? Even better. But it’s harder than it looks.
Words to Avoid 2024: Big Duck publishes a great list of words people should use less, primarily because the words are over-used. We’ll see how hard it is to reduce my use of innovate, critical, and journey.
The Meme-ification of American Politics: Very true, and very scary.
I'm not sure if I should be honoring them, and I'm definitely sure they don’t care about me honoring them. But you get the idea.
Been a while since I made a Harry Potter reference, but here is what Albus Dumbledore said to Harry regarding Voldemort in the Half-Blood Prince:
“You will hear many of his Death Eaters claiming that they are in his confidence, that they alone are close to him, even understand him. They are deluded. Lord Voldemort has never had a friend, nor do I believe that he has ever wanted one.”
How sad it must be to not even want a friend. Sigh…
By the way, this is why Amazon’s previous patent on “1-Click” was so valuable. By patenting a way for a consumer to buy a product on their website with one click, Amazon made it even easier for someone to purchase items on autopilot.
Remember that cartoon that shows a man staring at his computer, and he yells to his partner/wife, “Help! Someone is wrong on the internet!” Amazing.