The journey from Behavior to Habit: Digital Psychology & Persuasion Review
By: M Ehsan
Tags: Persuasion, Habit Building, Habits For Success

We have seen some fascinating products in the last two decades and they have taken over the world by storm. I am talking about the products that have taken the world by storm, look at the gadgets we have in our hands all the time. When phones were introduced who would’ve thought that this will become the giant industry that it is today. Facebook, When introduced a small chunk of a university was using it. Today 1 out of every 7 people on the face of the planet is using Facebook. This is insane. There have been far cooler apps, but those couldn’t get the same success as these apps, Why? That’s the question that I will try to answer in this article with the help of knowledge I acquired from CXL’s Digital Psychology and Persuasion mini degree.

Nir Eyal wrote an amazing book on this topic, although I can not explain all the material from the book. I will try to add as many details here as much possible. Nir Eyal introduced a model known as Hook Model that explains the psychology behind an app becoming a habit.

This model answers our questions and explains the journey of behavior to habit. We can drive behavior easily(compared to habits) but turning the behavior into Habit is the most difficult thing because it takes an average of 66 days for a behavior to become a habit. This also means that if you want to make a habit of waking up at five in the morning, you’ll have to force yourself to wake up at five in the morning for the first two months before that behavior becomes a habit. Anywhere let’s get to the hoops of the hook model and how you can apply them to your product.

Trigger:

We discussed the psychology of trigger in our previous articles too. A trigger is a notification or an email or a CTA, or a Tweet or anything that tells the user what to do. The journey of any behavior starts here before it becomes a habit and this step is working o autopilot.

External Trigger: These are the triggers that usually businesses show to a customer and the necessary information is also provided in this trigger e-g Click here, Signup here, Check out the article, etc.

Internal Triggers: Internal triggers are the most overlooked kind and the most effective triggers because these triggers take place inside the brain of your customer. These triggers are mostly derived from emotions in fact from negative emotions. You are getting bored “Let’s check Instagram” is an internal trigger and it will directly take you to Instagram. We don’t like getting bored that’s why this is a negative emotion and we want to get out to this and you know that Instagram will get you out of this emotion that’s why internal trigger has taken you to Instagram. Internal triggers are one of the most vital parts of transforming behavior into a habit.

Action:

Action is the reward that a user gets when he acts upon the trigger. “Signup here” user signed up and now he is rewarded by the thing he was promised. “Buy Now” and now he gets to enjoy that new phone from amazon in just one day as promised. Moving towards the internal triggers; feeling bored “Let’s check Instagram” now he is scrolling through new stories by Jessica.

If we want a user to take any action on our site, this cannot be taken care of by simply using a trigger. As explained by BJ Fogg, a behavior occurs by three things Motivation, Ability, and Trigger. If you ask a person to click “Buy Now” for an Apple iPhone and the person doesn’t have the financials to afford one, He will not click that button no matter how much motivation you provide him via your content. Similarly, If you ask a person to buy a Mavic 2 Pro and he doesn’t even know what it is he will not buy one even if he has a million dollars spare in his account because now the motivation was missing. That’s why Motivation, Ability, and Trigger always go hand-in-hand.

Reward:

This is the stage where the itch of the user has been taken care of. This is the most important step in the Hook model because it impacts directly the nucleus accumbens of the customer who is using your product. A person feeling bored, Internal Trigger, Starts to use your product. Now if his feeling of boredness has been eradicated his nucleus accumbens will light up which means that he has comfort at a psychological level and overtime whenever he will feel bored, his brain will more often use the trigger of Instagram because it has eradicated his boredom before and it will do so this time too.

All of the habit-forming products that you see will have this step and they will be affecting the nucleus accumbent of the user in one way or the other. Following are the three different time of rewards that these apps use.

Rewards can be divided into three variable rewards

Tribe Rewards: These rewards come from other people’s e-g Empathetic joy; you feel good when you see the success of other people. partnership; humans are always looking for a mate and this reward fulfills their that desire, cooperation, competition, etc.

Hunt rewards: Search for resources, search for information, etc. The whole gambling industry is running on this rewards system and that’s what makes it the most addicting type of variable reward. People are hunting for money when they know that they can win and even lose large amounts of money.

Self rewards:

These are the things that feel good in themselves. The human search for more knowledge, consistency, competency, and control. When you are playing angry birds you are getting more and better at it and are mastering new skills and are unlocking more rewards and are getting more and more control of it.

Investment:

When a user put his time or money into a product and it generates a future reward for it e-g when a person has 100,000 followers on Twitter, he will not be giving up Twitter for an even better app because he has spent a lot of time in the app and now we have an estate of huge followers on Twitter. When a person has a lot of his contacts inside the WhatsApp app, he is most likely to keep using WhatsApp even if it asks for a lot back. This is the principle that Facebook kept in mind when they changed the privacy settings of Whatsapp. They knew that even though people will be mad but most of their contacts and chats are on WhatsApp and they have invested a lot of their time on WhatsApp which’s why they are not likely to move away from WhatsApp.