Have you ever parked your car, checked Twitter and were still in the car 10 minutes later? Have you ever woken up in the morning only to check your phone and think, “What the hell am I doing?”
You’re not alone. In fact, I’ve just described myself. At times, it feels like I am addicted to technology. My guest today is Adam Alter, a professor of marketing at the NYU Stern School of Business and author of the book “Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked.”
Technology is irresistible, and its alluring temptation is all around us. The devices we now use daily have been designed to make us rely on them and want more interactions from others using devices. Adam Alter is here to speak truth to power and help modify our addictive technology behaviors. And, I have to tell you, this message is timely. So if you have any issues related to technology and want to adjust your behaviors, sit back and listen to this episode of Punk Rock HR.
What Is a Behavioral Addiction?
Many people associate addiction with a dependence on substances, such as alcohol, nicotine or other drugs. But behavioral addictions, such as to gambling, can also be very destructive.
“It’s basically something that you want to do a lot compulsively,” Adam explains. “So in the short term, it’s something that you want to do that in the long term undermines your well-being.”
This can be tricky when it’s an activity that other people can engage in without issue. For example, email: “So it might be spending a colossal amount of time on email, despite the fact that it … makes it difficult for you to have relationships with certain people because you’re spending so much time in front of the screen,” Adam notes.
“Maybe you have physiological consequences. It changes maybe the posture of your neck or the shape of your spine, things like that. All sorts of different consequences.”
Reclaiming Your Time
So once you recognize the problem, then what? How do we fight back and protect our mental health? How do we maintain a healthy social life?
Adam recommends creating a little room between you and your tech: “You need to create spatial distance.” For example, if you’re at dinner, ask everyone to put their phones away. “Beyond reach, whether it’s in a different room, in a bag, wherever it may be, in a coat pocket.”
He also makes liberal use of “airplane mode”: “I try to put my phone on airplane mode for a pretty good chunk of the weekend. … It’s used as a camera without allowing it to intrude on my life.”
Overcoming an Addiction to Tech
Overcoming our collective addiction to technology and digital media will require a mix of self-determination, along with businesses and governments making the right decisions.
“I think most of us can make very simple behavioral changes that introduce healthier, happier habits,” Adam says.
But that doesn’t mean this is strictly an individual problem. As individuals, it’s difficult for us to constantly exert that kind of self-control, Adam notes. “What we need is an environment that fosters wellbeing.”
[bctt tweet=”“Would I allow some random human to follow me around and, whenever they want, to tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, check this thing out’? If the answer is no, that’s a pretty good reason to turn off your notifications.” ~ Adam Alter, on Punk Rock HR! “]
People in This Episode
KEY TAKEAWAYS
WHAT ARE SOME WAYS WE CAN LIMIT TECHNOLOGY USE?
According to Professor and author Adam Alter, there are several interventions which help. Some countries have governmental policies in place. Another way is limiting email use when you are not at work. There are also workplace policies aimed at protecting precious downtime, like out-of-office responses. Alternately, if you have to check your email, you can still forward your message on to another employee who is covering for you while you are away. Individually, the best thing to do is to establish barriers between times when using screens and when not. It is also a good idea to create spatial distance, with rules such as no phones at the dinner table or in the bedroom.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO REDUCE THE EMAIL BURDEN ON EMPLOYEES?
People need to have a chance to replenish themselves if they are going to do their best work. When people sleep at night, they need REM sleep to wake up feeling refreshed. In the same manner, if workers are always attached to their phones and emails 24 hours a day, they never have a chance to recharge. During the workday, if an employee is always disturbed with emails, they never have an opportunity to do good quality work or have time to think creatively and deeply about a project. So, one idea would be to have email servers release in batches only at certain times designating meaningful, dedicated periods of time for workers to focus on their tasks.
HOW ARE SOCIAL CLASSES IMPACTING THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY IN LIVES?
Alter says there is a socio-economic class gap emerging with how technology is consumed and the consequences for children. Parents most concerned about how tech is affecting their children tend to be wealthier, more upwardly-mobile, and better educated. He notes tech can be a very cheap babysitter so there are working-class parents choosing to give tech to their kids for eight hours a day. It is uncertain how this generation of kids will be affected.
WHAT ARE SOME MOTIVES DRIVING TECH ADDICTIONS?
There are several motives such as the boredom threshold. This may be just a few seconds of time as people don’t like to grapple with downtimes, however, downtimes are necessary in our lives. People need space to think about things, test ideas, or to think about the world more abstractly and broadly. Also, phones provide comfort for most people in moments of loneliness, anxiety, or depression. For those who experience loneliness, it would be better to cultivate connections with individuals.
Full Episode Transcript
Adam Alter
Historically speaking, most addiction was reserved for a small part of the population. I think what’s so fascinating about this is that because it affects so many of us, you can’t just go cold turkey on tech or screens, and that in some ways not being able to draw a bright line between using and not using makes it very difficult for us to monitor our usage and to use just the right amount.
Laurie Ruettimann
Hey everybody, I’m Laurie Ruettimann. Welcome to a special summer edition of Punk Rock HR. All summer long, we’ll be bringing you encore episodes of Punk Rock HR that I absolutely love. We’ve re-edited them, remixed them. We’ve made them a little fresh, but the conversation is really important. So if you’ve missed the episode the first time around, or you heard it, but you want to hear a fresh take, sit back and enjoy the special summer encore edition of Punk Rock HR.
How many of you have a job where you’re stuck to your computer or your phone all day long? How many of you step into an elevator and instinctively look at your phone? And how many of you have ever been out at dinner, and your child starts to cry, and you hand them an iPad? Whether you’ve answered email on vacation or you’ve picked a fight with someone on Instagram because you just can’t let a comment go, I’m here today to tell you that the technology all around us is irresistible, and it’s been designed that way to hook us. And that’s why I’m so pleased to have professor Adam Alter on my show today. Adam Alter is an associate professor of marketing at New York University Stern School of Business. And he’s the author of the book “Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked.”
If you’ve ever parked your car in the garage and then gone on Twitter and then, 10 minutes later, you were still in the garage and the light is off, or if you’ve ever been on Facebook and you refresh the feed over and over again to see the notifications, or if you ever wake up in the morning and think, “what the hell am I doing? I need to throw my phone in the toilet.” Well, you’re not alone, because that’s me. And I feel like I am tech addicted. So if you’ve got any issues related to technology and you want to learn how to modify your behavior to reclaim your day and more importantly, reclaim your evening so you can get some sleep, sit tight, and I’ll be right back with professor Adam Alter.
Laurie Ruettimann
Hey Adam, welcome to the show.
Adam Alter
Thanks Laurie. Thanks for having me.
Laurie Ruettimann
Well I’m a super big fan of a book that you’ve written and that’s why you’re on the show today. The book is called “Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked.” Can you tell us a little bit about the book and what it’s all about?
Adam Alter
Yeah. The book traces the rise of a kind of addiction that I think is relatively recent that’s known as a behavioral addiction. So traditionally addiction involved the ingestion of substances like drugs or alcohol or nicotine, some sort of substance that influenced the way the chemistry of the brain worked and that led to addictive responses, people craving a particular substance that they return to over and again, to their detriment. And from probably beginning with gambling in the ‘50s, ‘60s and so on as slot machines became more shrewdly designed, people developed some behavioral addictions, as well. And this book is about the rise of a particular set of kinds of behavioral addictions that reside on screens, tech-driven behavior, addictions. It’s really about where that rise came from, what it is about these products on screens that make it so hard for us to resist them, and then what we should do about that problem.
Laurie Ruettimann
Well, I’m interested in why you wrote the book for a number of reasons. I feel so caught up in this world that I know a little bit about technology addiction. And even though I know about it, I can’t seem to break my own patterns of behavior. So why did you write this book?
Adam Alter
Yeah. So that’s largely what it was for me, as well. I felt that I understood maybe the very surface level, the basic ideas associated with why I was spending so much time on screens. I think a lot of psychologists work this way. We sort of ask ourselves, “What am I doing that’s strange? Or that warrants a little bit of extra thought?” And for me, that was the amount of time I was spending doing certain things on screens. And I wondered, my first question always is, am I the only one? And obviously in this case, the answer was very, very clearly no. And then I wanted to understand better what the hooks were that kept me embedded. And also, as you say, what do you do about this problem? And that to try to understand better what was going on so I could unpack it and perhaps reverse it to some extent.
Laurie Ruettimann
Well, that definitely makes sense. Maybe we could start at the beginning and we can talk about, what exactly is behavioral addiction? What is it?
Adam Alter
Yeah, it’s a similar definition for me to substance addiction. It’s basically something that you want to do a lot compulsively. So in the short term, it’s something that you want to do, but in the long term undermines your well-being in at least one respect. So it might be spending a colossal amount of time on email, despite the fact that that makes it very difficult for you to get work done, that it makes it difficult for you to have relationships with certain people because you’re spending so much time in front of the screen. Maybe you have physiological consequences, it changes, maybe, the posture of your neck or the shape of your spine, things like that — all sorts of different consequences. And so a behavioral addiction is basically something that you do in the short term. You want to keep doing, you do it constantly, but in the long run, it’s actually bad for you.
Laurie Ruettimann
With that definition, it makes me feel like at some point a hundred percent of humankind can be called a behavioral addict. Is that accurate? Like what’s the data behind that?
Adam Alter
Yeah. It’s not quite a hundred, but it’s very high. And so that’s one really big departure from the traditional definition of addiction, which captures a very small part of the population. Not always; I mean, smoking at its height captured more than the majority of adults. So there are some addictions that are quite mainstream, quite democratic in that sense, they cut across a lot of different segments. Historically speaking, most addiction was reserved for a small part of the population. I think what’s so fascinating about this is that because it affects so many of us, you can’t just go cold turkey on tech or screens, and that in some ways not being able to draw a bright line between and not using makes it very difficult for us to monitor our usage and to use just the right amount.
Laurie Ruettimann
Our thinking is aligned. Because my next question for you is really about, how do you turn it off? Because many of us work in careers and organizations that demand us to be tethered to tech in some way. So if you have a true addiction, or even if you’re just like addiction-adjacent like so many of us are, right? How do you manage in this world when all of us could really use a break from technology?
Adam Alter
Yeah, it’s a good question. I mean, I think there are interventions that lie at the governmental level. So governments introducing legislation, that’s happening in Western Europe and East Asia, and not so much in the United States. There are interventions at the workplace level. So there are workplaces that are becoming very conscious of this issue and they are introducing interventions, like the concept known as ZMail, where between say 6 p.m. and 9 a.m., no emails should be sent internally unless it’s absolutely necessary. So having workplace policies that protect people, even vacation messages that say things like, “Thank you for this email, this person is on vacation. We’ve deleted the email, they will never receive it. Therefore, their inbox will not change while they’re away on vacation, but you can send it on to this other person who is taking their place in the meantime.”
So those are at the very, very macro level at the government policy level. There are some interventions at the workplace level, but given that not enough of that is happening, we have to, as individuals own some part of this, we have our own responsibility to manage our own usage. And so there are a number of things to do. I think the smartest thing to do is really to recognize that there need to be barriers between the times when you’re using screens and when you aren’t, and those barriers don’t exist for many people. If you ask American adults, how much of the day can you reach for your phone without needing to move your feet? In other words, your phone’s in your pocket or it’s on the table next to you, or it’s on the nightstand. About 75 to 80% of American adults say, “24 hours a day, I can reach my phone without needing to move my feet.” So the things that are around you, almost basically implanted into your body in some sense, those things are going to have an out-sized effect on your psychological experience of the world.
And if you don’t want something to have that big an effect on how you live, you need to create spatial distance. So the smart thing to do I think is to say something like, “At dinner time, no matter where I am, no matter who I’m with, no matter what I’m doing, whether I’m alone at home, whether I’m at a restaurant with friends, we will all put our phones far away, where they are beyond reach,” whether it’s in a different room, in a bag, wherever it may be, in a coat pocket. So that changes the complexion of dinner time. You can go beyond that, say things like no phones in bedrooms, no phones in the hour and a half before bed, since the light from the phone tends to disrupt sleep. One thing that I found very useful is on the weekend, I have two little kids, and I love being able to take photos when they do things that are photo-worthy, which means every five seconds.
Laurie Ruettimann
Right, of course.
Adam Alter
Of course. But I don’t want the phone to be intrusive. So unfortunately with convergence, tech convergence, your phone is also your camera and your camera is your phone. So I try to put my phone on airplane mode for a pretty good chunk of the weekend. So I preserve its utilities. It uses the camera without it allowing it to intrude on my life. I think one useful test, a sort of litmus test is to say, would I allow some random human to follow me around and, whenever they want at their own will, to tap me on the shoulder, say, “Hey, check this thing out, you should see this thing.” If the answer is no, that’s a pretty good reason to turn off your notifications and to stop the device that you’re holding nearby, doing that. The best way is to keep it as far away from you as possible for as much of the day as possible.
Laurie Ruettimann
Well, your tips are excellent. And they remind me of something that’s been important in my own career journey, which is this concept of self-leadership right. Of really taking responsibility of taking accountability for my personal growth, my development, self-leadership is so hard, man.
Adam Alter
It is, it is.
Laurie Ruettimann
Which is why psychologists exist, right? So are these solutions realistic for most of us?
Adam Alter
See, this is the issue. A lot of people think that it’s either up to the tech companies to change what they do, or it’s up to the individuals. And I don’t think it has to be zero sum. And, I don’t think, it’s not a dichotomy. You don’t have to choose one. I think it makes sense for us as individuals to do everything we can, the world will obviously be only as friendly as it will be towards our needs. And the current environment is not very friendly towards those needs. And so, as a result, I think you’re asking the right question. Are we capable of this? I think we are. I think most of us can make very simple behavioral changes that introduce healthier, happier habits. And so we should do the things, for example, that I mentioned — saying dinner time is by habit, it is a time without screens.
I think most of us can achieve that. It might be difficult at first, but I think it’s easy to do. Are we able to truly improve our lives by resisting screens? There are so many smart people behind the design of these devices, [so] probably not in isolation, it’s something worth striving for. I think one of the issues is that, if you think about the analogy to, say, drug addiction, a lot of governments instinctively and as a sort of knee-jerk response punished the user of the drugs rather than the chemist who’s making them or the distributor of the drugs, the dealer. And I think that’s currently something a lot of governments are grappling with.
So governments in East Asia in parts of Western Europe are punishing users, so young users who played games for too long, instead of saying, we need to regulate the practice of creating games, creating the products at the level of the chemist or the distributor. They say things like, “Kids cannot be allowed to play games in public after 10 p.m.” And I think it obviously it’s a Bain-Aid solution, it does something, but it’s misplaced. I think part of the issue is, as you say, we as individuals, it’s difficult for us to constantly exert self-control. What we need is an environment that allows us and fosters that kind of well-being. And we’re not there at this stage.
Laurie Ruettimann
No, we’re not. And it makes me think about the relationship between governments and the businesses that do business in those areas, and this whole notion of profit margins and revenue that’s coming in and taxpayer dollars. Right? So if you have an organization, that’s either creating these environments, creating these screens, creating the technology, creating this whole habitual cycle that we’re all caught up in, or you have employers who don’t benefit from us turning off our phones. We’re kinda stuck because it’s not like it’s just government, as you said, and just employees, we’ve got to have employers in the mix, too. What’s your message to a responsible corporation that isn’t evil and that’s struggling with some of this, right? Because they certainly benefit in some ways from their employees always on the phone, but they don’t benefit, I think, from some of the negative behaviors and the outcomes of tech addiction. Does that make sense?
Adam Alter
Yeah, totally. It totally makes sense.
Laurie Ruettimann
Not said that out loud before, but I think it makes sense
Adam Alter
It makes total sense. I get exactly what you’re saying. I mean, the idea from the workplace perspective, I think, one of the historic measures of efficiency is how many minutes does it take a person to reply to email, right? That seems like a very blunt, very strong way of conveying that your workers are always working, which is a sort of thing you want from employees. You want them to be maybe not always working, but you want them to be efficient. So that’s problematic, obviously. And I think the way you convey this to businesses, there are a few things you can do. One thing is to basically convey the idea that people have finite resources, and they become less efficient over time as those resources get tapped out.
And by having them attached to a device 24 hours a day, they are never replenished. They never get those resources back. And so that you’re always working with workers who are working at 50 or 60% of capacity or whatever metric you use. That’s not ideal. No one wants that from their employees. They don’t want their employees to be unhappy, because burnout is a problem, as well. But I think even more than that, if you think about what email does, we know that people in the workplace respond to the average email within six seconds. So most emails that are responded to, that means they’re opened and checked. And what that does is again, it’s this analogy of having someone who’s tapping you on the shoulder, imagine you’re trying to get work done, and you need to think carefully about something. And you’re really pouring your brain into this idea. And someone taps you on the shoulder and says, “Hey, check this out.” And they do that as often as we get emails, which for a lot of people in the workplaces, every couple of minutes or maybe more, so what you’re doing is you’re basically working always at this incredibly shallow level.
You never get deeply embedded in the work you’re doing. You never produce your best work in the same way that, if someone’s trying to sleep and you want them to get into that deep kind of REM sleep, that really replenishing sleep. If you keep waking them up, they’re always going to be at that surface level. They’re not going to get a deep sense of rest and relaxation, and that’s going to be true about how people work. So I think the case that you can make for relieving the burden for employees is incredibly strong. You just have to have an employer who’s willing to listen. And when I’ve spoken to employers, and I’ve spoken to a few, almost all of them apply the idea immediately. Because it’s hard to argue with.
Laurie Ruettimann
Yeah, it’s hard to argue with, but it’s also hard to implement because there are so many pressures in the work environment. And I wonder if things won’t change until consumers demand change. And so do you see any movement in consumer communities to push technology companies or even employers to do this whole thing differently? Or is that still not bubbling up?
Adam Alter
I think it’s absolutely happening. I mean, obviously, this it’s going to be different by industry. Some industries where things move at a scale of every few seconds, changes are happening in the financial services industry. Sometimes things happen fast, you need people attached to their screens for certain parts of the day. This question about what consumers are demanding is a really interesting one. And I think we have become much savvier as consumers of tech. There is much more being written about these issues. When I first tried to sell the rights to my book, there were people who said, “You know this is not something anyone cares about.” And this is only maybe five or six years ago. So I got some pushback, and that’s surprising, but things evolve really fast. You don’t have to convince anyone that this is an issue anymore. I used to spend the first 20 minutes of every talk saying, “Let me tell you why you should be concerned about this.”
If I did that in a room in an audience of reasonably savvy people, they’d laugh at me. So I think we’re all on board with the idea that this is a concern. I think consumers are much more demanding than they used to be for the good, I think that’s great. They’re better educated. They realize this is a concern. There is so much written out there about this now that I do think they’re demanding more, and I think employees are starting to demand more in the workplace too. And as a workplace, one of the ways you get leveraged, you develop a competitive advantage, I think, is by saying, “I care about your well-being in the long run.”
And there are lots of ways of demonstrating that in all sorts of workplace policies, but I think one of them is how you handle tech. Do you batch emails? Do you say to allow you to do good work, I’m going to release emails from my server at 10 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. and between those times, as soon as you’ve dealt with whatever came through that batch, I want you to do as much deep work as you can and then, from 6 p.m. to 9 a.m., you won’t get any emails from a workplace.” I would choose that workplace over all other equal workplaces. And I think a lot of people feel the same way now.
Laurie Ruettimann
Absolutely. Earlier in the conversation you made a comment that behavioral addiction is bigger than necessarily like the addictions we’ve had in the past, although you brought up smoking and that over half of the population in many countries have smoked at different times in our history. And I see a lot of parallels with this world of technology we’re in, but I also see some parallels. And, especially in reading your book, that wealthy elitist individuals who know better, don’t give their kids technology. And when I think about the consumers and the way technology is being pushed out there more and more, I see it being pushed downstream, downscale. Right. So can you talk a little bit about class in the role of technology and how that’s all playing out in 2019 and 2020?
Adam Alter
Yeah. So one of the big questions obviously is what happens to children when they spend from age, say 3 months old on, they spend eight hours a day in front of screens. How will that generation of kids look different from every generation that came before it? But we don’t really know the answer to that, partly because this is such a young problem. And partly because it’s really just difficult to measure, you can’t randomly assign kids into, “you at birth will be assigned to use your phones zero hours a day, you will be assigned four hours, you 12 hours” and so on. So you can’t do the perfect experiment, but there are hints that there are things we should be concerned about. And as you say, the parents who have the resources, the capacity, perhaps the education to do the most about this, they tend to be the people who are either wealthier or upwardly mobile, better-educated. And so you’re finding that there’s a class gap. That’s emerging a socioeconomic class gap that’s emerging and how we consume tech and the consequences for our kids.
If you’re a working-class or a poor American, and you’re trying to work out, what do I do with my kid? And it turns out, there’s this incredible babysitter. This device known as the iPad. I can give my kid this device for the next 15 years, 10 years, say, eight hours a day, it’s the cheapest babysitter you’ve ever had. And it works really well. Kids will sit in front of that thing for eight hours a day. The question is, what will that generation of kids look like having done that? So I think you’re absolutely right to point out this concern that there may be a tech class gap that’s emerging. It’s a new problem. We haven’t really been able to measure it much yet, but I know there are researchers who are concerned about it.
Laurie Ruettimann
Yeah. And I’m absolutely concerned about the impact to the workforce. And we have two competing messages going on around future workers. One is that everybody has to learn how to program or take STEM classes. And then there’s another competing line of thought, which is, future workers need to be critical thinkers and be rooted in the humanities and art and culture. And so I worry a little bit that we’re creating like a bifurcated system of workers going forward. One that is trying to mimic a robot and compete with a robot, which they’ll never do. And then others who are like ultra-human and there’s this, I don’t know, there’s some confusion around it and where that’s going. And these are the things that keep me up at night because I worry, as future HR professionals try to grapple with this, where are our talent pools going to come from?
Adam Alter
Yeah, I think that’s a good question. I mean, I think one of the really good tests to ask yourself, “Is the thing that I’m doing on the screen now, can that be done off of a screen? Can it be done without a screen?” So there are some schools, some of the Waldorf schools in the US, in particular, that do not expose kids to any screens in the school environment until they’re about 13 or 14 years old. And when they do it’s to learn to code, as you said, coding is an important skill today. These kids are only using screens for the thing that they need to be used for because all the other forms of education, where kids are given iPads as a knee-jerk reaction as a sort of ostentatious display of how many resources the school has, I think most of those uses are actually not wise.
You can teach math without screens. You can teach reading, you can teach so many things without screens, and everything we know about cognitive psychology suggests that kids will probably learn better without them. You engage more, you include more deeply material that you write by hand that you think about more, that you have the ability to interact with in a way that’s a little bit more direct and immediate than you have with screens. So I think most of the time, the screen is a detracting factor, except in the cases where it has to be used, like coding, you couldn’t do without a screen. I think there is a strong case to be made for using screens to learn to code.
Laurie Ruettimann
Yeah, that makes sense to me. As we start to wrap up the conversation, you’ve talked about some solutions where we can limit our exposure to tech, we can set some guidelines for ourselves. You talked about how this is realistic and how it is possible for human beings to do this. But I come from the world of human resources, where people are terrible. So before I tell somebody to limit themselves in their exposure to technology, are there other behavioral things that we should be teaching people to do that will then inform their ability to turn the tech off?
Adam Alter
I think one really useful thing to do is to try to understand what it is the tech is doing for you. I think for most of us, the psychological need that is met by tech is just boredom. Our boredom thresholds as a species have never been lower.
Laurie Ruettimann
Can you define that? What is a boredom threshold?
Adam Alter
Yeah. The boredom threshold is basically how much it takes, how much downtime it takes before you’re truly, you feel bored, bored enough to find something, to soothe the boredom. And the idea that you get into an elevator for three seconds between two floors, and every single person in the elevator, maybe through awkwardness, but to a large extent through boredom will pull out a phone, it says something about the species that we don’t like to grapple with downtime, with moments of idleness, even very brief moments of idleness that I think were a part of everyday life, that many, many generations, maybe thousands of years, humans dealt with that, they learned to grapple with. And I think we need to be able to do that. I think a lot of creativity comes from those moments of downtime, those moments of boredom, where you’re butting up against an idea.
If you don’t let yourself grapple with that moment, if you just pull out a screen that visits itself upon you, you don’t have the vista of space ahead of you that allows you to think of things maybe a little differently from how you did before, or test ideas, to really think. I think very few people will kind of zoom back and think about the world more broadly, because everything’s right in front of your face. The minute you may have done that, thought more abstractly and broadly, this happens and you pull this out, you pull out your device and you’re gone, you’re disengaged, and you can’t do it.
Laurie Ruettimann
So we’ve got boredom. I would also think that there’s a component of loneliness in our society that’s driving this as well. Can you speak to that?
Adam Alter
Yes, absolutely. So boredom is the first of those motives. I think different people have different constellations of motives that drive this, but loneliness is a huge one. The sense that we’re very separate from other people and separated from them. That, again, will vary by person. Anxiety is a big one. Depression will be part of this. There’s this really interesting work suggesting that what a pacifier does for a toddler or an infant is what the phone does for an adult. That just as comfort is found in a binky or a blanket or whatever, it may be some sort of comfort object for most adults now and teens, as well, and even kids, phones serve that need.
They are in moments of anxiety or discomfort, the thing you turn to, and they do bring you a measure of, I guess they soothe you. And so I think once you understand the psychological motive that’s met by these devices, you then are better equipped to work ways around it. If it’s about boredom for you, you’re going to find a way of dealing with the boredom that doesn’t involve the phone. If it’s about loneliness, cultivate connection to the extent you can. I know that’s pretty flipped to say that, connection is hard.
Laurie Ruettimann
And a lot of people think technology makes connection easier. I mean, there’s that chicken-and-an-egg thing going on right now. Right? We feel we can connect with people all over the world through that phone, and yet the phone can be so isolating.
Adam Alter
Yeah. It’s such a thin connection. It’s like gruel. I mean, there’s just no real meat to it. There’s no substance to it. So I think you’re right, there is that illusion of connection that comes from the phone. But once you understand the motive, I think you’re in a better position to work out how to deal with it without using a phone. And that’s not something that many people do. I think it’s a good first step.
Laurie Ruettimann
Well, I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. I really enjoyed the book, “Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked.” Before I let you go, you’ve also written another book that’s come highly recommended to me and I haven’t read it yet, but it’s called “Drunk Tank Pink.” Do I have that right?
Adam Alter
Yes, that is right, yeah.
Laurie Ruettimann
Tell me a little bit about that book.
Adam Alter
“Drunk Tank Pink” was the first book I wrote. I wrote it a number of years ago, and it’s basically about all the features in the world around us that shape how we think, feel and behave at home, in the workplace, when we’re out and about in town, wherever we are, it’s a sort of attempt to group together all the research I did for the first, maybe 10 or 15 years of my career.
And it basically makes the case that we have the sense that we operate with a huge degree of free will, that we know exactly what we’re doing and why. And actually, there are a lot of these very subtle forces that shift us constantly. And I wanted to try to unpack that for people who maybe didn’t realize how much that was happening. “Irresistible” is the sequel to that, in that it looks at one very big powerful force, but that first book was a compendium of forces, from the colors we paint the walls around us to the weather conditions, to the names we give our kids and our businesses, things like that. It’s a different book, but it’s, I guess, similar ideas, some similar ideas.
Laurie Ruettimann
Yeah. I mean, exploring the world of control and self-limiting behaviors, right?
Adam Alter
Exactly.
Laurie Ruettimann
And all of that is very interesting. Thank you so much for your time today. People wanted to learn more to find you on the internet to connect. How do you recommend that they go about doing that?
Adam Alter
Probably not surprised to hear I’m not on social media much. I do tweet occasionally. My Twitter handle is adamleealter, A-D-A-M-L-E-E-A-L-T-E-R. The thing about academics is you can find us everywhere. Everything’s public. So if you search for my name, you’ll find my homepage, my academic home page, my personal home page. It’s all right there.
Laurie Ruettimann
Hey everybody, I hope you enjoyed that episode of Punk Rock HR; whether you’re new to it, or you heard it before, everything you need is always in the show notes, and you can find them at laurieruettimann.com/punkrockhr. Now, I hope you’re having a great summer, and it was an honor to spend some time with you today. Thanks again for listening. And we’ll see you next time on Punk Rock HR.