Motivation, addiction and Angry Birds

Motivation. If asking me about how I’m dealing with the work pressures that come with an Executive MBA, a psychologist might remind me that my motivation is driven by intrinsic and extrinsic factors. That is to say, my behaviour can be driven by my own unsatisfied needs and by my response to an external stimulus.

We all have needs that influence our behaviour. In his oft-cited theory, Maslow created a framework to describe how this might work in practice. Since needs are many, he categorised them from basic physiological needs (eg water) through to the more complex pinnacle of his hierarchy, self-actualisation (ie fulfilling potential). Maslow explained how somebody advances up to the next level of need only after the lower-level need is at least minimally satisfied. As such, unsatisfied needs influence/motivate behaviour, satisfied needs do not.

While I find it comfortably cogent, this theory has always seemed a little bit too neat to me. Enter Herzberg, who added a suitable layer of complication by blending in extrinsic factors. His findings revealed that while ‘motivators’ such as achievement, recognition and authority were more likely to cause satisfaction, distinct ‘hygiene factors’ such as administration, supervision and salary were more likely to cause dissatisfaction. Therefore, Herzberg showed that one must attend to both types of factors and not assume that an increase in satisfaction automatically leads to decrease in dissatisfaction.

Lo and behold, people are complex. So how does business all too often attempt to cut through this complexity? Money, of course, and in all its polite guises. (Dynamic performance management, anyone?!). As a budding b2b marketer, I learnt early in my career that to understand buyer behaviour, you had to consider whether a decision-maker might be rewarded for a particular behaviour that his/her company wants to perpetuate? Is an incentive silently at play?

To an employer, incentives may feel like a clean method of control, but again they are also complex. Studies show that if the person receives an incentive immediately, the behavioural effect of the reward is greater than if left for a while. (Think weekly sales commission vs annual bonus.) Furthermore, a repetitive action-reward combination can cause the action to become habit, whether required or not.

Eureka! So this must explain why I can be distracted during my daily commute by the seemingly pointless game that is Angry Birds, at a time when I am committed to completing an MBA for which there is plenty to read. Apparently so, according Griffiths, a professor of psychology at Nottingham Trent University.

“Addictions… are about constant rewards. I’ve never met anyone addicted to a bi-weekly national lottery, because there’s only two chances a week. On a slot machine, when you can gamble 30 times a minute, that’s very rewarding. On a game like Angry Birds, it’s every few seconds.”

“It’s also incredibly simple,” says Griffiths. “When you can pinpoint where you went wrong, this is called a near miss. It’s used all the time in terms of how scratch cards and slot machines are designed. When we fail to win, we create a reason in our mind why we didn’t. The losses effectively become near-wins and… the only way you can get rid of that frustration is to go back to the start and play again.”

I feel used. Where’s my iphone? I think most businesses are missing a trick.

Richard Samuel

www.cassreflections.com