Email: The Variable Reinforcement Machine

How often do you check your email per day?

Does checking your email make you more productive or less productive?

Oh, sure, we delude ourselves into thinking we're being extra-productive by obsessively checking and responding to our email, but in reality we're attending too frequently to our own desire for gratification and sabotaging our own productivity in the process.

As Dan Ariely explains in a postscript to Predictably Irrational, he smells a rat, and so should you:

Skinner distinguished between fixed-ratio schedules of reinforcement and variable-ratio schedules of reinforcement. Under a fixed schedule, a rat received a reward of food after it pressed the lever a fixed number of times -- say 100 times. Under the variable schedule, the rat earned a food pellet after it pressed the lever a random number of times. Sometimes it would receive the food pellet after pressing 10 times, and sometimes after pressing 200 times.

Under the variable schedule of reinforcement, the arrival of the reward is unpredictable. On the face of it, one might expect that the fixed schedules of reinforcement would be more motivating and rewarding because the rat can learn to predict the outcome of his work. Instead, Skinner found that the variable schedules were actually more motivating. The most telling result was that when the rewards ceased, the rats who were under the fixed schedule stopped working almost immediately, but those under the variable schedules kept working for a very long time.

If this reminds you of gambling, that's because gambling explicitly works under the very same schedule of variable reinforcement.

Go ahead, pull the "new email' lever. Take a chance. Most of the time you'll end up a loser, the proud recipient of yet another spam email, a press release you don't care about, or some irrelevant conversation someone has cc:ed you into. But not always. There are those rare few times when you'll hit the jackpot: you'll get an important bit of information you needed, or tentative contact from a long lost friend or associate, or other good news.

We're so ecstatic to get that single useful email out of hundreds that we can't keep ourselves from compulsively pressing the new email lever over and over and over, hoping it will happen again soon, like the caged rats in Skinners' experiments.

We desperately need to ask ourselves, and those around us, to revisit the purpose of email. Given what we know about the importance of flow to productive work, and how multi-tasking is largely a myth, is it worth the constant stream of minor interruptions?

We've overloaded email with so many meanings that it has imploded as a communication medium. Need an urgent answer to your question within a few minutes? Fire off a quick email and demand a response! Want to have a long back and forth discussion with several people? Email everyone! Do you have a new theory that you desperately want to explain to someone? Send it to them via email! Got a funny joke or picture you're dying to share? Email it to the office alias!

When we treat email as the kitchen sink of communication, appropriate for everything, it simply ceases to work at all.

Kathy Sierra was concerned that Twitter had the same variable reinforcement problem, but I think Twitter is in fact part of the answer to the problem.

Stop. Sending. Email.

Instead of abusing email as a "one size fits all" conduit for communication, be smart. Know when to escalate your communication to the right medium for the particular message you're trying to deliver:

• Broad kudos? Post it on a feedback forum or your blog.
• Need an urgent, immediate answer? Pick up the phone and call.
• Got something that needs a lot of touchy feely discussion? Set up a face to face meeting.
• Discussing a particular topic or product? Post it on a public message board.
• Is this more of a friendly, social thing? Try using a social network like Twitter or Facebook.
• Business proposal? Perhaps it would be smart to approach indirectly, through soliciting recommendations of business associates.

The real solution here is to move people beyond email silos wherever and whenever possible. Some amount of email is still inevitable, though. What steps can we take to turn our email from a dangerous variable reinforcement machine to something more … sane? Predictable, even?

• Turn off all notification and interruption features in your email client.
• Only check your email at regular, scheduled intervals.
• Set up your email client to automatically highlight those emails from friends and business associates who are historically known to send you useful email.

Before you send that next email -- or press the "retrieve mail" button again -- ask yourself: do I smell a rat?

9 Ways Marketing Weasels Will Try to Manipulate You

I recently read Predictably Irrational.

It's a fascinating examination of why human beings are wired and conditioned to react irrationally. We human beings are a selfish bunch, so it's all the more surprising to see how easily we can be manipulated to behave in ways that run counter to our own self-interest.

This isn't just a "gee-whiz" observation; understanding how and why we behave irrationally is important. If you don't understand how these irrational behaviors are triggered, the marketing weasels will use them against you.

In fact, it's already happening. Witness 10 Irrational Human Behaviors and How to Leverage Them to Improve Web Marketing. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Let's take a look at the various excerpts presented in that article, and consider how we can avoid falling into the rut of predictably irrational behavior -- and defend ourselves from those vicious marketing weasels.

1. Encourage false comparisons

When Williams-Sonoma introduced bread machines, sales were slow. When they added a "deluxe" version that was 50% more expensive, they started flying off the shelves; the first bread machine now appeared to be a bargain

When contemplating the purchase of a $25 pen, the majority of subjects would drive to another store 15 minutes away to save $7. When contemplating the purchase of a $455 suit, the majority of subjects would not drive to another store 15 minutes away to save $7. The amount saved and time involved are the same, but people make very different choices. Watch out for relative thinking; it comes naturally to all of us.

• Realize that some premium options exist as decoys -- that is, they are there only to make the less expensive options look more appealing, because they're easy to compare. Don't make binding decisions solely based on how easy it is to compare two side-by-side options from the same vendor. Try comparing all the alternatives, even those from other vendors.
• Don't be swayed by relative percentages for small dollar amounts. Yes, you saved 25%, but how much effort and time did you expend on that seven bucks?

2. Reinforce Anchoring

Savador Assael, the Pearl King, single-handedly created the market for black pearls, which were unknown in the industry before 1973. His first attempt to market the pearls was an utter failure; he didn't sell a single pearl. So he went to his friend, Harry Winston, and had Winston put them in the window of his 5th Avenue store with an outrageous price tag attached. Then he ran full page ads in glossy magazines with black pearls next to diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. Soon, black pearls were considered precious.

Simonsohn and Loewenstein found that people who move to a new city remain anchored to the prices they paid in their previous city. People who move from Lubbock to Pittsburgh squeeze their families into smaller houses to pay the same amount. People who move from LA to Pittsburgh don't save money, they just move into mansions.

• Scale your purchases to your needs, not your circumstances or wallet size. What do you actually use? How much do you use it, and how frequently?
• Try to objectively measure the value of what you're buying; don't be tricked into measuring relative to similar products or competitors. How much does buying this save you or your company? How much benefit will you get out of it? Attempt to measure that benefit by putting a concrete dollar amount on it.

3. It's "Free"!

Ariely, Shampanier, and Mazar conducted an experiment using Lindt truffles and Hershey's Kisses. When a truffle was $0.15 and a kiss was $0.01, 73% of subjects chose the truffle and 27% the Kiss. But when a truffle was $0.14 and a kiss was free, 69% chose the kiss and 31% the truffle.

According to standard economic theory, the price reduction shouldn't have lead to any behavior change, but it did.

Ariely's theory is that for normal transactions, we consider both upside and downside. But when something is free, we forget about the downside. "Free" makes us perceive what is being offered as immensely more valuable than it really is. Humans are loss-averse; when considering a normal purchase, loss-aversion comes into play. But when an item is free, there is no visible possibility of loss

• You will tend to overestimate the value of items you get for free. Resist this by viewing free stuff skeptically rather than welcoming it with open arms. If it was really that great, why would it be free?
• Free stuff often comes with well hidden and subtle strings attached. How will using a free service or obtaining a free item influence your future choices? What paid alternatives are you avoiding by choosing the free route, and why?
• How much effort will the free option cost you? Are there non-free options which would cost less in time or effort? How much is your time worth?
• When you use a free service or product, you are implicitly endorsing and encouraging the provider, effectively beating a path to their door. Is this something you are comfortable with?

4. Exploit social norms

The AARP asked lawyers to participate in a program where they would offer their services to needy employees for a discounted price of $30/hour. No dice. When the program manager instead asked if they'd offer their services for free, the lawyers overwhelmingly said they would participate

• Companies may appeal to your innate sense of community or public good to convince you to do their work at zero pay. Consider carefully before choosing to participate; what do you get out of contributing your time and effort? Is this truly a worthy cause? Would this be worth doing if it was a paid gig?
• When it comes to the web, make sure you aren't being turned into a digital sharecropper.

5. Design for Procrastination

Ariely conducted an experiment on his class. Students were required to write three papers. Ariely asked the first group to commit to dates by which they would turn in each paper. Late papers would be penalized 1% per day. There was no penalty for turning papers in early. The logical response is to commit to turning all three papers in on the last day of class. The second group was given no deadlines; all three papers were due in the last day of class. The third group was directed to turn their papers in on the 4th, 8th, and 12th weeks.

The results? Group 3 (imposed deadlines) got the best grades. Group 2 (no deadlines) got the worst grades, and Group 1 (self-selected deadlines) finished in the middle. Allowing students to pre-commit to deadlines improved performance. Students who spaced out their commitments did well; students who did the logical thing and gave no commitments did badly.

• Steer clear of offers of low-rate trial periods which auto-convert into automatic recurring monthly billing. They know that most people will procrastinate and forget to cancel before the recurring billing kicks in.
• Either favor fixed-rate, fixed-term plans -- or become meticulous about cancelling recurring services when you're not using them.

6. Utilize the Endowment Effect

Ariely and Carmon conducted an experiment on Duke students, who sleep out for weeks to get basketball tickets; even those who sleep out are still subjected to a lottery at the end. Some students get tickets, some don't. The students who didn't get tickets told Ariely that they'd be willing to pay up to $170 for tickets. The students who did get the tickets told Ariely that they wouldn't accept less than $2,400 for their tickets.

There are three fundamental quirks of human nature. We fall in love with what we already have. We focus on what we might lose, rather than what we might gain. We assume that other people will see the transaction from the same perspective as we do.

• The value of what you've spent so far on a service, product, or relationship -- in effort or money -- is probably far less than you think. Be willing to walk away.
• Once you've bought something, never rely on your internal judgment to assess its value, because you're too close to it now. Ask other people what they'd pay for this service, product, or relationship. Objectively research what others pay online.

7. Capitalize on our Aversion to Loss

Ariely and Shin conducted an experiment on MIT students. They devised a computer game which offered players three doors: Red, Blue, and Green. You started with 100 clicks. You clicked to enter a room. Once in a room, each click netted you between 1-10 cents. You could also switch rooms (at the cost of a click). The rooms were programmed to provide different levels of rewards (there was variation within each room's payoffs, but it was pretty easy to tell which one provided the best payout).

Players tended to try all three rooms, figure out which one had the highest payout, and then spend all their time there. (These are MIT students we're talking about). Then, however, Ariely introduced a new wrinkle: Any door left unvisited for 12 clicks would disappear forever. With each click, the unclicked doors shrank by 1/12th.

Now, players jumped from door to door, trying to keep their options open.They made 15% less money; in fact, by choosing any of the doors and sticking with it, they could have made more money.

Ariely increased the cost of opening a door to 3 cents; no change--players still seemed compelled to keeping their options open. Ariely told participants the exact monetary payoff of each door; no change. Ariely allowed participants as many practice runs as they wanted before the actual experiment; no change. Ariely changed the rules so that any door could be "reincarnated" with a single click; no change.

Players just couldn't tolerate the idea of the loss, and so they did whatever was necessary to prevent their doors from closing, even though disappearance had no real consequences and could be easily reversed. We feel compelled to preserve options, even at great expense, even when it doesn't make sense.

• If your choices are artificially narrowed, don't passively get funneled towards the goal they're herding you toward. Demand choice, even if it means switching vendors or allegiances.
• Don't pay extra for options, unless you can point to hard evidence that you need those options. Some options exist just to make you doubt yourself, so you'll worry about not having them.

8. Engender Unreasonable Expectations

Ariely, Lee, and Frederick conducted yet another experiment on MIT students. They let students taste two different beers, and then choose to get a free pint of one of the brews. Brew A was Budweiser. Brew B was Budweiser, plus 2 drops of balsamic vinegar per ounce.

When students were not told about the nature of the beers, they overwhelmingly chose the balsamic beer. When students were told about the true nature of the beers, they overwhelmingly chose the Budweiser. If you tell people up front that something might be distasteful, the odds are good they'll end up agreeing with you--because of their expectations.

• Whatever you've heard about a brand, company, or product -- there's no substitute for your own hands-on experience. Let your own opinions guide you, not the opinions of others.
• Just because something is labelled "premium" or "pro" or "award-winning" doesn't mean it is. Research these claims; don't let marketing set your expectations. Rely on evidence and facts.

9. Leverage Pricing Bias

Ariely, Waber, Shiv, and Carmon made up a fake painkiller, Veladone-Rx. An attractive woman in a business suit (with a faint Russian accent) told subjects that 92% of patients receiving VR reported significant pain relief in 10 minutes, with relief lasting up to 8 hours.

When told that the drug cost $2.50 per dose, nearly all of the subjects reported pain relief. When told that the drug cost $0.10 per dose, only half of the subjects reported pain relief. The more pain a person experienced, the more pronounced the effect. A similar study at U Iowa showed that students who paid list price for cold medications reported better medical outcomes than those who bought discount (but clinically identical) drugs.

• Price often has nothing to do with value. Expensive is not synonymous with quality. Investigate whether the price is justified; never accept it at face value.
• Don't fall prey to the "moneymoon"; just because you paid for something doesn't mean it's automatically worthwhile. Not everything we pay money for works well, or was even worth what we spent for it. We all make mistakes when buying things, but we don't want to admit it.

What I learned from Predictably Irrational is that everyone is irrational sometimes, and that's OK. We're not perfectly logical Vulcans, after all. The trick is training yourself to know when you're most likely to make irrational choices, and to resist those impulses.

If you aren't at least aware of our sad, irrational human condition, well ... that's exactly where the marketing weasels want you.

If It Looks Corporate, Change It

Are you familar with happy talk?

If you're not sure whether something is happy talk, there's one sure-fire test: if you listen very closely while you're reading it, you can actually hear a tiny voice in the back of your head saying "Blah blah blah blah blah...."

A lot of happy talk is the kind of self-congratulatory promotional writing that you find in badly written brochures. Unlike good promotional copy, it conveys no useful information, and focuses on saying how great we are, as opposed to delineating what makes us great.

Happy talk is the kudzu of the internet; the place is lousy with the stuff.

And then there's the visual equivalent of happy talk. Those cloying, meaningless stock photos of happy users doing ... something ... with a computer.

What is going on here? Given the beatific expressions, you'd think they were undergoing some kind of nerd rapture. Maybe they're getting a sneak preview of the singularity, I don't know.

It's unclear to me why companies (and even some individuals) think they need happy talk, stock photos of multicultural computer users, or the occasional headset hottie. Jason Cohen provides an explanation:

Even before I had a single customer, I "knew" it was important to look professional. My website would need to look and feel like a "real company." I need culture-neutral language complimenting culturally-diverse clip-art photos of frighteningly chipper co-workers huddled around a laptop, awash with the thrill and delight of configuring a JDBC connection to SQL Server 2008.

It also means adopting typical "marketing-speak," so my "About Us" page started with:

Smart Bear is the leading provider of enterprise version control data-mining tools. Companies world-wide use Smart Bear's Code Historian software for risk-analysis, root-cause discovery, and software development decision-support.

"Leading provider?" "Data mining?" I'm not even sure what that means. But you have to give me credit for an impressive quantity of hyphens.

That's what you're supposed to do, right? That's what other companies do, so it must be right. Who am I to break with tradition?

I'm not sure where we got our ideas about this stuff, but it is true that some large companies promote a kind of doublespeak "professionalism". Kathy Sierra describes her experiences at Sun:

By the time I got to Sun, using the word "cool" in a customer training document was enough to warrant an entry in your annual performance eval. And not in a good way.

I cannot count the times I heard the word "professionalism" used as justification for why we couldn't do something. But I can count the few times I heard the word "passion" used in a meeting where the goal was to get developers to adopt our newest Java technologies. What changed?

Some argue that by maintaining strict professionalism, we can get the more conservative, professional clients and thus grow the business. Is this true? Do we really need these clients? Isn't it possible that we might even grow more if we became braver?

It's a shame that this misguided sense of professionalism is sometimes used as an excuse to put up weird, Orwellian communication barriers between yourself and the world. At best it is a facade to hide behind; at worst it encourages us to emulate so much of what is wrong with large companies. Allow me to paraphrase the simple advice of Elmore Leonard:

If it looks corporate, change it.

The next time you find yourself using professional text, or professional stock images, consider the value of this "professionalism". Is it legitimately helping you communicate? Or is it getting in the way?