In my summary of Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, I supply succinct explanations of the principles of reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. These principles, alongside extensive personal experimentation, are the basis for my recommendations.

As an exercise to improve your understanding of the principles, see if you can identify which of the six principles justify each suggestion. Also, even though I use “girl”, these principles apply equally to a woman trying to “play the game” with a man.

1. Buying drinks is actually a BAD idea. Although we do so because we are subconsciously invoking the principle of reciprocity in our favor (men surveyed reveal that after buying drinks, they perceive improved sexual access to the recipient), women actually say that it makes them feel manipulated.
2. Only answer the phone sometimes, and unpredictably. Send your texts at unpredictable intervals. I implore you to use common sense…this tip only applies before you have solidified your relationship. But a healthy dose of unpredictability can revive a stale relationship.
3. Give sincere compliments tailored to their ideal self-image. (If she is working at a travel agency, but longs to be a chef, compliment her cooking abilities. If he is a struggling entrepreneur, tell him that he seems really resilient and powerful.) This is scarily powerful.
4. Improve your looks through teeth whitening, face wash, well-fitting and trendy fashion. I know this one is going to get me some flak from the “I want them to accept myself as I am crowd”, but I’ll just say: good for you, you deserve what you get. Even if people claim that they aren’t superficial, or that they wouldn’t respond to these tactics, they do. (I’m thinking of Larry David in the rabbi’s office where he says “He knows not what he says”, and the Rabbi gets furious and tells Larry not to try to quote the bible, but that’s a totally unrelated tangent.. so, onward.)
5. Approach desirable members of the opposite sex with confident body language, reflecting positive emotions and self-assuredness. This is especially important with your vocal tonality…if you say something forceful, with your tonality descending, you will be perceived as confident.What do I mean by descending tonality? It means that you shouldn’t be talking like this? You know what I mean? Like the person in class who always makes every statement sound like a question? Be authoritative.(Look forward to more posts on body language and microexpressions).This phenomenon, in which we respond to behavior bearing a few shallow feature characteristics of confidence, is a total bizarre glitch in human nature; this is why the archetypical charismatic dirtbag can be so much more successful in dating than people who have achieved materialistic success or exhibit more worthwhile character traits. Even if you have nothing to be confident of, you can practice the external features of it and reap the benefits.

Do you think this is manipulative? Of course it is. But your competitors (girls AND guys) are doing it. Guys, girls LOVE this stuff. Makeup is manipulative; plastic surgery is manipulative; Cosmo is filled to the brim with manipulative tactics. (Although I sincerely, honestly, integrously believe in what I wrote in the above paragraph, the astute reader will note how it actually involves the principles of social proof and scarcity.)

Do you want a mate who wouldn’t respond to these tactics? Good luck, it’s not going to happen.

If you decide to ignore these principles and “just let things happen organically”, the selection of your mate is still going to be engineered by these processes; they’ll just be outside your conscious awareness.  I’ll tell you a personal story.

I was once dating a girl whom I liked, but wasn’t crazy about, as she didn’t meet my predefined standards for excellence in a mate. But sometimes when I wanted to hang out, she wasn’t available (Scarcity), friends whom I respected advised me that she was really cool (Social proof), she complimented me (Liking), and after I spent enough time with her, I invented new reasons why I liked her, making adjustments to my self-image, distorting reality and constructing a new identity that she fit into. (Consistency and commitment). But after rationality returned, I realized I had been out-goaled. I ended up breaking up with her because in reality, she was not in alignment with my long-term intentions for an exclusive mate.

The mainstream, “Hollywood” wisdom is  “just settle! Love is imperfect! I like her enough! This is what the universe wants! It’s hard meeting people!” That’s definitely the easy thing to do, and most people I know engage in this practice. We’re getting manipulated by outside forces regardless, so why fight it? But I prefer to assert control over my destiny.

If this has been interesting to you, consider purchasing Influence by Cialdini. Or just read my summary of it here.

In my summary of Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, I supply succinct explanations of the principles of reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. These principles, alongside my fetish for sales manuals such as The Ultimate Sales Machine, are the bases for my recommendations.

As an exercise to improve your understanding of the principles, see if you can identify which of the six principles justify each suggestion. In some cases, more than one principle applies.

1. Mail your customers a small gift, such as a seasonal greeting card that says “I like you.” Do so on a regular basis.
2. Tell your customers that you are offering the same deal to their competitors.
3. See if you can get potential leads to commit in writing to a future purchase.
4. Borrow a trick from the Chinese in the Korean War, and get customers to argue for the merits of your product. Make sure to not reward them with large rewards lest they rationalize their arguing as extrinsically motivated, rather than motivated by your character.
5. When negotiating, ask for more than what you want, but still be reasonable. Later, make a concession. Agreements in which concessions were made are more likely to get upheld at a later date; this way, both parties feel like they win.
6. Offer your visitors a free trial. Once using the app, they may begin to rationalize reasons why they like it. Moreover, once the trial expires, they will miss it; people value things that they are about to lose more than they value things they are about to gain.
7. However, when your visitors get a free trial, be sure to frame their behavior as a customer intent on a future purchase. This will affect their identity.
8. Show favorable testimony from satisfied customers, or other relevant celebrities.
9. Hire physically attractive sales representatives.
10. Research your sales prospects’ interests on Facebook, and send sales reps with similar personal interests.
11. Compliment your customers
12. Eat out with your customers or get them drunk: they will associate you, and your business, with the positive feelings experienced while undertaking these activities
13. Dress well.
14. Drive a nice car.
15. Use your title when introducing yourself and put any advanced degrees in your email signature.
16. Have an extremely expensive (but still reasonable) option, and present it first.

Do you think this is manipulative? Of course it is. But your competitors are doing it. (In case you missed it, that was an example of social proof and scarcity.)

Anyway, I recommend that you purchase Influence: Science and Practice if you are intrigued by this list. It’s specifically focused on the tactics of persuasion. You can get it from Amazon here.

Compliance is the act of responding in accordance with the explicit or implicit wishes of someone else. Compliance is fun when you consider it in the context of asking someone out on a date, listening to your teacher, or making the sale. Human nature is idiosyncratic, and compliance is no exception. Consider the study in which people asking to cut in line were much more successful if they tacked an empty reason onto their request: “Can I cut in line?” was much less successful than “Can I cut in line because I want to make copies?”

So why does this happen? Because we have precious limited mental resources and can’t afford to spend the time considering every decision rationally; therefore, we automatically subconsciously make decisions based on salient features of the current stimulus. In normal words, we make shortcuts based on limited information. Tricky scientists were able to make mother turkeys to act nurturing towards weird stuffed animals that made a pre-recorded “cheep cheep” sound because turkeys have an instinctive imprint to act maternally towards things that go “cheep cheep”. The bird goes “cheep cheep”, the mother turkey’s brain goes “click, whirr”, and preprogrammed behavior ensues. Whodathunkit, humans are much the same way, except we have different triggers to make us go “click, whirr”. They are:

Reciprocity
Commitment and Consistency
Social Proof
Liking
Authority
Scarcity

Reciprocity

When someone does something for us, we feel compelled to return the favor. This likely evolved so we could offer resources to people in need without actually losing them. If someone gives you a gift, you might feel obligated to him and later be more compliant than usual. One interesting property of reciprocity is that if someone makes a concession from an initial position towards you, you feel like you must make a concession from your position, towards them. This only applies when their first position is a reasonable one: otherwise, the concession-pattern is not activated.

Example: Boy Scout asks you to buy tickets to their Saturday night circus. You say no thanks. Boy Scout says, “Okay, please buy a chocolate bar”. You are more likely to agree.

Commitment and Consistency

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Now, there is much to be said for acting lest you be faced by “paralysis by analysis”, but we are more inclined towards rational decisions if we can change our decision based on updated information. However, this is not valued in our culture. Remember how John Kerry was demonized as a “flip-flopper”?

The way consistency applies is through our social identity. We always act in ways consistent with our identity, and indeed we may only see options available to us that are consistent with continuing to shape the way we see ourselves. We receive way too much information to consider all of it, so we tend to selectively process bits that conform to prior expectations.

The best way to get someone to comply with something in the long-term is to get them to own it: punishment/reward is a great way to shape behavior if a taskmaster is always present, but “intrinsic” motivation yields continued performance in the long run.

One other way that consistency is important is when decisions are made. Once you make a decision, you will start to rationalize reasons for it. Even if the original impetus for your decision no longer holds, your decision will rest on the legs provided by your rationalization-mechanism. Watch out.

Example: citizens who were asked to place a very small sign asking driver’s to be safe were much more likely to sign a petition for saving the environment. The act of agreeing to place a sign in their driveway shifted their self-image towards someone who is socially conscious.

Social Proof

Thinking for ourselves is difficult; we often make decisions based on the actions of others. Canned laughter in TV shows and the unfortunate Werther effect are both testaments to the principle of social proof. “Social proof” is the scientific term for the herd mentality. It is in times of personal uncertainty when social proof is most potent; when you are feeling unsure, you’re going to follow others.

The underlying principle: if other people like it, it’s probably good. “The Wisdom of Crowds” is often correct, so it makes sense for us to base many decisions on others’ opinions. Unfortunately, it also makes us easily manipulable by marketers. Pirate celebrity Maddox nails this when he says  “The amount of forced enthusiasm you have for a commercial product is directly proportional to how big of an asshole you are”, and shows us a picture of “The Kashi cereal ‘Satisfaction Squad’”

(Maddox’s book seems awesome.)

One other example I’d like to give, just because of how powerful it is, is how when social outcast schoolchildren were shown a series of videos depicting a child going up to join a group of children, and then being happily accepted by the group, later became some of the most outgoing children in school. Social learning is a potent force, and we most effectively learn from people similar to us (our peers).

One more note: social proof is very similar to social contagion, which is an extremely powerful force that you can wield to your benefit. I’ll write more on this soon.

Liking

We are more likely to be compliant with someone whom we like. Various factors affect liking, including

• physical attractiveness
• similarity (remember this from the Games Criminals Play post?)
• compliments
• contact and cooperation: The more we are exposed to something, the more we like it. Also, if we need to cooperate with someone to achieve a mutually rewarding goal, we start to like them.
• conditioning: exposing someone to pleasurable feelings in your presence will make them like you, because they automatically associate you with the pleasurable feeling. See this post for more information on the neural mechanics of this phenomenon (scroll until you see the pictures).

I’m going to elaborate on contact and cooperation because this example from Cialdini’s Influence is so incredible and socially relevant. In classrooms, the traditional teacher-calls-on-student model is broken. Smart children raise their hands so they can get the teacher’s approval for being smart. But if a child gets the answer wrong, he will begin to resent the child who later chimes in with the correct answer. Et cetera. However, in the cooperative learning model, when students are each given discrete bits of information and forced to work together in order to assemble all of the information for the big test, cooperation ensues, students build self-esteem, and they like each other more.

Authority

We blindly follow people in positions of authority, and we have since the days of the Old Testament (Abraham goes to murder his son because “God told him to” but then stops not out of moral reproach but because an Angel told him to stop). Hospitals have a medication error rate in the neighborhood of 10%, mostly because nurses blindly follow doctors’ orders. Titles, clothing, and status (e.g., fancy automobiles) are indicators of authority that affect compliance levels.

Scarcity

We value things that are scarce. Things that are expensive or scarce send a social signal that “this thing is valuable! We should stock up on it!” Now, two important notes on scarcity:

• We most value scarce objects after we have already been exposed to them. We value 2 cookies much more highly if we first had 10 cookies, and then 8 were taken away, than if we only had 2 cookies from the start. (But we still value 2 cookies more than we value 10 cookies).
• Scarcity is even more powerful when experienced in the context of social competition: we value scarce things even more if other people want them, too (if the 8 cookies that were taken away were given to other people). This also ties into social proof.

A few scary studies about scarcity:

1)   Revolution is most likely subsequent to scarcity following an extended bout of prosperity; c.f. Russia in 1991 and the civil rights movement in 1962 (household wages of black families increased steadily in the 20^th century, but in the 1960s they started to decline. Then the civil rights movement became huge.)

2)   Banning an idea can make it automatically accepted! Students at a college were more accepting of co-ed dorms after a speech favoring them had been banned.

3)   Merchants advised of a future beef shortage were likely to purchase twice as much beef as merchants who were not informed; merchants who were informed of a beef shortage, and told that they were the only ones getting this information purchased six times as much beef.

Conclusion

How do we prevent getting manipulated like this? The good news is that compliance tactics are rarely effective on someone who doesn’t desire something at all. But learning is the first step. The next step is to consider ways in the past we have been duped by these mechanisms. Actually, do that later tonight… I don’t want you to associate the inevitable negative emotions (sorry) with my blog! Finally, we should practice mindfulness and awareness in the moment so we know when we are getting emotional/heated, and then learn to see this as a trigger for us to disengage, take some deep breaths, and try to be rational and consider our long-term intentions. Maybe I’ll even work on a fun Flash game where you can practice and internalize the principles! Feel free to email me if you want to collaborate on that.

If you want to learn more information about all these phenomena, you should read Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini. It’s available from Amazon for $12.47.

P. S. I have written up two additional posts on the application of these principles; one on sales and another on dating/”playing the game” to win.

My aunt and uncle gave me The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work as a present after I graduated from school last June; because it was hardcover, somewhat long, didn’t have an extremely appealing title, and it was written by someone with a weird name (“Alain de Botton? I haven’t heard of any Alain de Botton”), I put off reading it for a long time. Well, I finally read it, and the author has a lot to say.

A quick “book review” paragraph: it’s entertaining. The author’s formidable education allows him to pepper his prose with sentences like “She had the strong, almost masculine beauty one might have associated with the wife of a middle-ranking colonial administrator in Uganda in the 1920s”. Anyway, I learned about logistics of warehouse distribution; the process from start-to-finish of how a fish goes from the Indian Ocean to a British supermarket; biscuit marketing; an eccentric career counselor; how a Japanese television company paid $750mm to launch, from French Guyana, a satellite into orbit; an obscure British painter obsessed with the study of particular moments in nature; a fiend for power pylons; an accounting firm; oddball entrepreneurs; and the business of aviation. I was exposed to great quotes by Hegel; I learned about the Encyclopédie (how cool!); the megalomaniac former president of the Maldives. Also, I had to write down at least 25 words to look up later that evening.

But I’d like this post to be about the message of the book. Since the advent of the industrial revolution, it has been more practical for man to specialize in a specific labor skill-set than to be a well-rounded individual; e.g. Why should a doctor know about shoe repair? This is increasingly true in our global, service-based economy… if you need something done, a quick internet search will link you to the appropriate merchant. If you have a service to offer, a quick AdWords campaign will connect you with people looking to buy!

People have become more like commodities than individuals. Of course, some people, like the barely-profitable landscape painter, get to specialize in their dream career. Otherwise, though, people become alienated, cogs in a machine much greater than themselves. And even the higher-ups don’t seem to be too happy. In that sense we have become like bees, working in service to a great, buzzing hive.

No matter what we create, it will eventually be wiped away by natural processes; de Botton argues that work offers an escape from this depressing thought. Why not consciously give the hive a purpose: the distributed happiness of mankind? I always thought that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World got a bad rap; SOMA would be great. It’s just not sustainable.

Link: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work on Amazon.com.

In Dan Gilbert’s hilarious book Stumbling on Happiness, recommended to me by my friend James, Gilbert presents a bold thesis: we are horrible predictors of what will actually make us happy. When we remember happy events from the past, we often misrepresent how happy they actually made us, and when we project to the future, we take our present emotional state into account far more than is appropriate. Finally, we fail to consider the big picture, often considering false dichotomies when evaluating possible decisions: more on this later.

But first, a quick nerdy note about memory. When we remember something, we don’t remember the whole thing; instead, we encode the salient features, and reinvent the rest when it’s time to recall, using our imagination. For example, if you see the Oakland Athletics play the San Francisco Giants, you might encode that it rained and that it was an interleague game.

Another important property of memory is primacy and recency effects: we are most likely to encode features at the beginning of an event and features at the end. If we had a horrible experience camping, uncomfortable for the entire week of our wilderness trip, but on the last day there was beautiful sunshine, fish jumping out of the lake, and all the birds broke out into beautiful song, then we might remember the trip as wonderful, even though it was only fun for 1/7 of the time.

So if we want to predict what experiences we will enjoy in the future, we will remember experiences that we enjoyed in the past. Unfortunately, due to primacy and recency effects, we have a skewed perception!

When predicting our future emotional state, we tend to go on our present emotional state: for example, after eating chips, we estimate that tomorrow at the same time, we won’t be craving chips; that’s not true, though, we would crave chips equally as much as we did before we just ate them. Or when experiencing a horrible breakup, students polled estimated that they would take much longer to get over it than follow-up studies proved to be the case.

When evaluating future potential outcomes, we also use selective representation and create false dichotomies. When thinking about how happy we’ll be if our team wins the big game, we get confused: sure, we take into consideration our enjoyment after the match, but we neglect to consider how we’ll feel when later that night we have to study for the big chemistry test. Another famous example is the savings paradox: we would drive 20 extra minutes to save $50 on a radio, but we wouldn’t make the same long drive to save $50 on the purchase of a new car, even though the change to our total net worth ($50 saved) is the same.

Gilbert also tours us through some other fun psychological idiosyncrasies. One especially interesting thing I noted is that we quickly recover from personal offenses through rationalization; we rationalize bad things that happen to us. But if something negative happens to someone else, we are less likely to recover. For example, if Joe insults me, I might think, “Ha ha, Joe is such a kidder.” But if Joe insults my retarded sister, I might “Although he has a point, that was mean!” So if you want to really affect someone, the best way to do it might be to insult someone close to them.

See, explaining events dulls their emotional impact. This affects positive as well as negative emotional spikes. It also explains why “Stumbling on Happiness” is such an apt title; we are happy when we don’t think about it.

Though I think Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational does a much better of inventorying our psychological quirks, I appreciate Gilbert’s decision to include them: our quirks affect our decision-making; decision-making is based on emotions, seeking happiness and averting pain.

So what is the best way to determine what makes us happy? Two things. The first is to poll ourselves at random intervals, recording our activity and our mood, and then doing more of the activities that truly make us happy (but with some variation: too much of a good thing will lead to habituation, dulling our enjoyment). The second is to ask other people what they enjoyed. Believe it or not, we may even predict our own satisfaction at worse-than-random. Playing on an important theme that has held continuous throughout my studies, we are not the unique and beautiful snowflakes that we like to think we are; humans are more similar than they are different. So if someone else reports a good experience, if it is vaguely contextually similar to our situation, we should listen to them, no matter how personally “different” from us they are.

Stumbling on Happiness is worth a solid 4 stars out of 5. It is funny and informative and useful, but not necessarily life changing in and of itself. If you are in pursuit of your own happiness, I strongly recommend reading it. It is available for $10.85 at Amazon.

I recently watched this awesome presentation by Sebastian Deterding. It’s called “Just add points? What UX designers can (and cannot) learn from games”, and I really recommend watching it (in full screen.. click “menu” in the bottom left-hand corner of the widget).

But if you don’t have time to watch the slideshow, or are impatient, and want to return to it later, you can skip to my notes and analysis, below.

Welcome back.

So it seems to me that there are nine important principles at play here:

1) Presence of S.M.A.R.T. goals

SMART stands for specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and timed. It is crucial to have both short-term and long-term goals. A short-term goal is going from level 2 to level 3; a long-term goal is peaking at level 99. Having a long-term goal seems to set the context for the behavior. If it’s specific and measurable, you can tell whether or not you have achieved it (achievement is a binary state); if it’s actionable, you can act in order to advance your progress; if it’s realistic, it is practically achievable. I have no comment about the necessity of a “timed”, except that a timer can add some fun by placing parameters that make you work within constraints.

2) Actions to achieve our goals are explicit, and prepackaged so we can directly execute on them.

I learned this lesson when I was an intern at a software company in Silicon Valley. I was debating with my boss about what kind of copy should go on our new site, MaviShare.com. This was in the days before data-driven decision making became universally embedded in start-up culture (the correct answer to the debate is really “who cares? Try it and see, and let the results speak for themselves”). Anyway, he asked his MBA girlfriend (now wife), and she said, “People like steps.” It’s a lesson I took to heart.

How often are we overwhelmed by tasks just because they seem so impossible due to their enormous imposing size? What’s bad about the size is not that it’s really long, or really wide, but it’s this ambiguous amorphous monstrous blob.

Humans don’t like to think. It’s not a good use of our mental resources; we use social proof to determine the best course of action. “Which way is the right way off the train platform? No need to look for myself, just head in the direction of the herd!”

This is the basis for our parents asking us if we would jump off a bridge if Jimmy did it too, after we get caught vandalizing the school locker room and swimming pool.

Unfortunately, if you want to be a leader, by definition, you need to be ahead of the pack. Being ahead of the pack means that you can’t look to the pack for direction; you have to set your own course of action. Sometimes this means being stupid and trying arbitrary things and hoping to get lucky that your process worked … but more often than not, to advance requires developing critical thinking skills, and “thinking for yourself”.

Back to difficult, imposing tasks: we don’t like to think. We like to be able to just “do”. This is why people study hard, get good grades, go to college, get a job, date, get married, and die: because even though these things aren’t easy, they are straightforward, socially acceptable and bear some external rewards.

The solution to a difficult and ambiguous task, by the way, is to try to chunk it into discrete steps. This is a theme that will be developed throughout the article, so back to games: in a good game, the only thinking we have to do is to decide which action should be done next. Sid Meier, creator of the game Civilization says: “A game is a series of interesting decisions.”

3) Clear relation between action and goal: the action will *definitely* bring us closer to the goal

Fun games operate on the principle that our actions will definitely bring us closer to the goal. If you go and slash rabbits (action), you will definitely gain experience points (relation), and you will eventually level up (goal).

This is the reason so many people, including myself, have failed at difficult, uncharted things like entrepreneurship. There’s no guarantee that our next step will bring us closer to the goal. For example, we could easily invest 6 months into building a product that nobody wants to buy. Now, that specific problem can be ameliorated through processes of customer development, but the general problem still exists.

If we get a job, we’re probably going to get paid for our labors.

If we build a product and take it to market, we’re probably not going to get paid for our efforts. So where’s the motivation? It requires a lot of risk, and the human brain is not wired to consider long-term rewards! The nucleus accumbens, which may play a large role in the distribution of the phenomenon of pleasure and reward seeking, is part of the ancient limbic system, which motivates lots of behavior. Long-term goals require premeditated planning by the prefrontal cortex.

Hint: to live optimally, we should do things that are beneficial in the long run but are still enjoyable in the present moment.

Hint 2: it may be possible that through the practice of mindfulness, we can enjoy every moment. I will have to re-read Buddha’s Brain in order to figure out the scientific explanations for this.

4) Our status is clear: spatially, in terms of our skills/possessions, in relation to our goals (points and mission stats), in our relation to other players (leaderboards)

We like to know where we are and how we are doing, in absolute terms as well as relative terms. We want to know our location and where we are and how to get to other places, but we also want to know where we are in relation to our goals. And we want to know how we’re doing in comparison to our peers, in order to get some social context. These desires may make sense when viewed in the context of evolutionary biology; it’s useful to know where you are, and through social proofing/social conditioning, we can better understand our rank. (Expect a post on social rank very soon, and expect a detailed post on social conditioning eventually, as well).

(By the way, Grand Theft Auto IV implements this extremely well, which may partially explain why it received such excellent scores from review sites as well as through social consensus.)

It’s fun to know what resources we have access to, where we can go, and where we’re at in our progress towards our goal, all at the same time: having all of these things visible (via attention) enables the information to flow to the reticular activating system, or RAS. The RAS is what shapes our beliefs of what is possible. All the relevant info shapes our decision-making, guiding our beliefs of what is possible, and therefore enables background charting of possible courses of action. Remember Sid Meier’s rule: “a game is a series of interesting decisions”.

5) Excessive positive/negative feedback

Excessive feedback is good because it stimulates learning. We learn through associative conditioning. Some layman’s neuroscience: when neurons fire together, they wire together (see “Hebbian synapses” for more info). Popular neural pathways are more easily accessed. This is why the principle of “spaced repetition” is so important to learning, and why cramming is a doomed technique in the long-run: you’re not giving yourself ample opportunity to build up strong connections over a variety of conditions.

Think of memory as a weighted directed graph.

Let’s say that node A represents ZacharyBurt.com, node B represents Saturday evening, node C represents my explanation of Hebbian synapses, and node D represents Monday afternoon. Let’s also assume that you’re reading this article on a Saturday evening, because you want an intellectual edge before you go out to the bars.

Since all of these things have been connected together, they “wire” together and are given a weight of 1.

But then let’s assume you go ahead and read this article again, on Monday afternoon. Nodes A (“ZacharyBurt.com”), C (“Hebbian synapses”), and D (“Monday afternoon”) are going to wire together:

Notice how there’s now a stronger link between A and C? Therefore, if you want to recall how Hebbian synapses work, you’d best bet to try to think of ZacharyBurt.com! But even better, you will have a better memory of Hebbian synapses in general, because there are now more, stronger pathways to node C than there were before.

This is also the same principle of why actually understanding something is beneficial for recall, for example, in math. Not only can you deduce your results through ratiocination but you have a better understanding of how everything fits together because your information on the new principle fits into the connected graph filled with nodes representing previously learned principles. If you just memorize a fact through rote memorization, a better analogical device to represent the storage of information might be a disconnected graph.

That was a lengthy detour, but remember, we said excessive feedback is good because it stimulates learning. If feedback is excessive, it becomes akin to a strong node in our memory-graph, and learning is facilitated: there’s a clear connection, evinced by the strong node, between what we were doing (the process of playing the game) and our results.

Another reason excessive feedback is good is because it is damn enjoyable: as humans, we love novel stimuli. It’s intrinsically interesting. Why? Because it helps us predict the future…introduction of a new stimulus (a novel/different/interesting stimulus) is unaccounted for in the response-reward architecture, so we pay attention to it.

P.S. If you want to study some graph theory, I recommend this book.

6) Challenges get successively harder

If something is too easy, it bores us (our attention lets our working memory wander due to low levels of dopamine). If something is too difficult, it frustrates us, and bores us (we are unable to chunk it into working memory). So we want to stay in our “flow” zone.. see Csikszentmihalyi for more info on this.

6B) CHUNKING: easy challenges train you on basic skills, hard challenges require you to mix easy + difficult skills

In order to do a difficult skill, we must first learn all of the basic essential components. It’s another “secret” of life: if you want to live great, MASTER the fundamentals. As Brian Johnson says, ask yourself, “What is fundamental for me?” As in… when I do this thing, I have a good day. Now…practice those related skills! And if they’re too difficult, break them down into sub-skill components!

For example, in basketball, if I want to drive to the rim, and then pass the ball behind my back before laying it up into the net, I need to be able to:

• Dribble
• Perform a layup
• Pass the ball behind my back

I need to be able to do all those things consistently before I practice the new skill of combining them together in a fluid motion.

One of my many personal intellectual interests is efficient consolidation of procedural and other memory. Evidence suggests that sleeping is crucial for the improvement of skills: not just any sleep, but REM sleep following SWS. So one practical implication is that polyphasic sleep, which I believe encourages REM rebound (skipping SWS, non-dream sleep), could be a deterrent for the advancement of memory and skills. What use is all that extra time studying when you would be better off sleeping? It could be a real case of less is less and less is more. J

So, back to game analysis: once you learn easy skills, then you can learn more complicated skills that require the combination of different easy skills. The practice of advanced skill is intrinsically fun. Why? I’m just going to take Martin Seligman’s word for it, but when I find the answer, I’ll let you know.

8) Social comparison: facilitates social learning, and motivates competition [who's in the game, and at what level?]

We love comparing ourselves to others. It’s a very ego-based form of existence (ha!! I brought back the ego!!), and the spiritual ego thrives off of comparing ourselves to other people: judging, liking, disliking … all ego. When we take the ego too seriously, we begin to believe that it is real (“we like this thing”, or “we have this opinion”) even though it might just be a sentiment rooted in the moment.

I know who I am because I am different from you. Therefore I have this preference, which is tied into my identity. I don’t quite understand all this spiritual ego business in a systematic way, yet – but I’m working on it. I’m about to read Goffman’s Presentation of Self book, and that may shed some insight. Then, I can reread the Practical Neuroscience of Buddhism and visit its section on multiple Selves. Then maybe I’ll be more clueful. But remember, I’ll have to sleep, so my memory gets consolidated.

Back to games: I feel that to engage in game-play is essentially egoic. It has nothing to do with pursuing our highest truths and values. When we play fun games, we decide to dumb ourselves down and we become the equivalent of rats in cages.

OK, so you might now bring the argument, “doesn’t everything essentially boil down to experiencing reward in one way or another? Even writing this blog, you are playing your own sort of game.  And besides, who cares if I am being manipulated by my own psyche if I am enjoying it?” These are all valid points. I am being judgmental of game-playing, but I assure you, I have played many games in my life, and will probably continue to do so… they’re just so fun and addicting. However, when I enter the Now (commonly referred to as “transcending the ego”), and cast aside all aspersions and other judgments, I feel good, so I have no motivation to do anything).

Aside: maximum short-term and long-term happiness is the ultimate currency in this life. Anything we desire, be it money, sex, food, admiration, glory … ultimately boils down to happiness. But our core value can’t be happiness; happiness can only stem from living in adherence to our core values (so sayeth Stephen Covey).

But let me get back to the point: if we already feel good, what motivation do we have for doing anything? Why not just sit in a cave and chill out, and drop out? Some people do this. I think, though, that it is important to live in society so we can help bring other people out of the cave. If I don’t make money, I can’t live; if I can’t live, I can’t blog; if I can’t blog, I can’t share my ideas; if I can’t share my ideas, other people will suffer. (Of course, I could probably live a radically different lifestyle, with very little money, very few possessions, do my blogging at the library, and forage for food…this is something I’m kinda-sorta always thinking about in the back of my mind. I might be able to live in highest service to my values that way. But not necessarily; maybe living a consumer lifestyle enables my contribution potential. Also, I feel it’s lame to drop out of society until you have succeeded… maybe I’m just rationalizing, surrendering my prefrontal cortex’s control to the amygdala. Ultimately, at the end of the day, it’s all about my truest values,  so knowing them should elucidate the situation, but I have to say that I am only 22 and still discovering them. So I am still chaotically meandering through my life, easily prone to distractions. But I assure you that values-discovery is a top priority. Dr. David Hawkins says, “Straight and narrow is the path…Waste no time.” My interpretation: if we are living by our truest values, the path is probably very clear.

And now, back to games. I’d like to add one more principle that wasn’t in the slideshow. It makes for an ADDICTING game but not necessarily a fun one: variable ratio reinforcement schedules.

Are you familiar with operant conditioning (OC)? How about classical conditioning (CC), such as with Pavlov’s dog? In CC, when you pair an unconditioned stimulus with a conditioned stimulus, you get a conditioned response. Unconditioned stimulus = food, Conditioned stimulus = bell, Conditioned response = salivation. Pretty straightforward. It’s all about the network-graph, remember?

Operant conditioning works somewhat differently: it affects voluntary behavior. It refers to the ways in which reward affects our willingness to perform an act. If we are always rewarded for something, then we can predict the future and will only act when we want the reward. However, if the reward appears only occasionally, we will act more often, because we are unable to predict when we will receive the reward.  This explains why I repeatedly tap my spacebar after waking my Macbook from its sleep state: my Mac wakes up at seemingly random intervals!

Anyway, if the reward appears at a variable ratio (every 3^rd act, or every 10^th act) we are most likely to be constantly “pecking” and unlikely to stop. Our brains just aren’t naturally well suited to pick up on these patterns, just as our brains aren’t naturally well suited to understand probability and statistics.

Anyway, this is the principle that slot machines use to addict their players. Use it to addict people to your games.

Some other notes from the slideshow:

Work is what we should do, and work-applications ought to facilitate productivity. Games are voluntary; therefore, they’re “play”. Easter eggs, or, non-functional excess, introduce a feeling of “play” – and there’s no reason you can’t introduce them into your serious work applications to make them more enjoyable.

In the game “Monpoloy”, the mechanics of gaining and losing money lead to a poverty gap dynamic, creating a poor experience aesthetic for the losing player. Good games should be fun for both the winning and losing player. Zachary Burt’s opining: Moreover, good games should be flexible enough to allow for previously poorly performing players to compensate for their bottom-position through superior performance and play.

In conclusion: if you want to accomplish a task, see if you can turn it into a game for yourself. Things that don’t become game-link are un-fun, and don’t get done. This is similar to the workplace principle of “if it’s not a process, it’s not going to get done”. We exhibit better performance and enjoy more when we “play” instead of work. I have already began integrating some of these concepts into ZacharyBurt.com (hint: Jesus wasn’t oviparous but apparently I am!), and I am going to start working on creating “fun” games/applications that incidentally improve your life. Feel free to help brainstorm with me, or contact if you would like to collaborate (I have programming-skillz). How much better would we all be, btw, if rote repetitive questing in games like World of Warcraft used the same skills that were actually applicable to other areas of life through skill transference? (Right now, I’m actually referring to games specifically designed to improve your life.. such as making Gratitude fun, and competitive!)

Today I read “42 Rules for Sourcing and Manufacturing in China” by Rosemary Coates, a businesswoman with over 20 years experience in international trade in Asia. Why would I be interested in reading such a book? Two reasons:

1)   Economic growth in China is exploding. It represents an abundant resource of cheap labor / materials and there is tremendous opportunity there.

2)   I am currently working on manufacturing glow-in-the-dark key caps (marketed to women, so they can find their keys in their purse). After presenting RFQs to factories both in the US and abroad, it became clear that Chinese factories offer way cheaper prices, at least for injection molding-related stuff. But I also realized that there was a lot of stuff I didn’t know: and like I say, it’s worst to get screwed by not knowing what you don’t know. This book helped me realize a lot of what I don’t know.

Coates highlights the importance of understanding cultural differences between the Chinese and Americans. The Chinese culture is somewhat paradoxical, its heritage a mix of Communist and Confucianism.

Although the government is socialist, the Chinese operate with a very capitalist mindset, valuing hard work to get ahead and extreme competitiveness. Indeed, Coates hints that many of the famous government monitoring may be for the purpose of gaining competitive advantage in market negotiations! Moreover, the socialist roots value crediting inventions to the entire populous, explaining the Chinese ethical stance towards copying and stealing ideas: why not? Coates recommends strategies for dealing with IP theft, such as having individual components assembled in different factories, and only manufacturing older product-models abroad.

Confucianism was the prevailing philosophy in China for a long time, and it helped engrain certain values such as unequal relationships between elder/superiors and inferiors and the importance of saving face in social situations. Chinese labor management works very much like this: superiors tell the inferiors what to do, and then they do exactly that. To deviate from precise instructions would embarrass the superiors. And although China is graduating 800,000 engineers per year, they are not being taught critical thinking skills; Chinese education emphasizes rote memorization. If a young Chinese student were to challenge a teacher, then the teacher might lose face, so no asking questions.

Other implications of this culture of respect include advice to handle business cards with great respect, a recommendation to answer questions about your income, weight, and marital status, and understanding when a Chinese partner may be prevaricating: it’s likely that you will never be told “No” outright, out of concern for potential embarrassment. So if you get a lot of vague responses, be sure to politely address your concerns, without any direct accusations.

One other thing I found particularly interesting was the importance the author placed on guanxi, which roughly translates to “networking”, though I think “clout” might be more apt. Relationships in China are built on trust and business favors, and it can take a year or more before sufficient trust has been accumulated to proceed with business processes. Coates encourages consulting firms that understand guanxi well to assist you in your ventures overseas.

I also learned lots about safety and environmental regulations, acronyms for International Commerce Terms (“incoterms”), geography, relative population growth, what to screen for when evaluating a factory, and more. Really, if you are thinking of doing business in China, I recommend getting this book. Even if Coates’s perspective may be inaccurate at times (the book was published very recently, in November 2009, and even makes mention of Twitter), you will probably learn things you did not know. One last pearl: Chinese factories often have high turnover after the Chinese New Year (based on the lunar calendar), so defect rates are higher before and after the holiday; your QA process should account for potential problems there.

If you want to read “42 Rules for Sourcing and Manufacturing in China”, you can buy it for $19.95 on Amazon.