At the end of the seventies, the entrepreneur of pinball machines and jukeboxes Yes Redd, born 1911 in Mississippihe had an intuition: he was observing some kids of the time while they were playing pioneers Atari video games, remaining glued to the monitor for hours. Faced with this scene, he continued to ask himself what attracted them so much, given that victory in a match did not entail any financial reward.
This doubt it gave him an idea: transforming the old mechanical slot machines (which had little success at the time) into a sort of digital video game with a screen, programming them so that players could bet on more than one row and on a greater variety of symbols.
In this way, the chances of win at least small amounts they rose to 45%, a much higher percentage than the old slot machines (where wins were rarer but larger), still ensuring that most of the money remained at the bank. Redd understood two things: from video games he had learned the need to speed up the winning cycle to keep slot machine users hooked; from human psychology he understood that people who play a dollar, but only win 50 cents, they do not perceive a loss of 50 cents, but a win of 50 cents. A phenomenon called loss disguised as gain.
This phenomenon has since also been investigated on a scientific level. At the time, however, it was above all at the basis of the enormous (and still ongoing) success of slot machines, to which Redd also added loud, cheerful sounds, flashing lights and fun graphics. Lights, sounds and colors emitted both for authentic victories (when the winnings exceed the investment) and for the aforementioned disguised losses, thus psychologically conditioning the players.
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As journalist Michael Easter explains in the essay Never enoughjust published by ROI Edizioni and which investigates how human beings have fallen victim to the same mechanism that keeps us glued to slot machines in a multitude of other sectors, “Redd had identified a powerful peculiarity of the human mind. The behaviors we perform in rapid succession, from gambling to binge eating, from excessive purchasing to binge-watchingcompulsive ingestion of alcohol and many others, are manifestations resulting from scarcity loop, which consists of 3 parts: opportunities, unpredictable rewards, rapid repeatability”.
Why is our mind so conditioned by the scarcity loop? “We evolved in difficult contexts, which had a common feature: they were environments that offered little, in which scarcity was ubiquitous – Easter wrote in the essay – Some fundamental resources for our survival, such as food, information, mutual conditioning, goods and properties, the time of our past life on Earth, what we could do to feel good were scarce, difficult to identify and impermanent. People who survived, and therefore passed on their genes, they were trying to achieve something more. They tended to eat in excess, to accumulate objects and information, to try to influence others and their environments, to pursue pleasures and to satisfy survival instincts excessively”.
Since then, human beings (at least in some parts of the world) have entered the era of abundance. And now this psychological mechanism is often used against us: “It is used to capture attention, to incite continuous use and repeat behavior – Easter explained to us – The mechanisms of the scarcity loop are what make it fun, but it is also behavioral pattern which is most addictive.”
And in fact, from slot machines onwards (without forgetting the traps into which this mechanism had already made us fall before, as in the case of drugs, food or alcohol) the scarcity loop has been exploited in a myriad of sectors, which above all have to do with the world technological: “All the social media are based on this mechanism, as are the sport bets. It too shopping online leverages elements of the scarcity loop. There are also elements of it in the world of information and in many other fields”, Easter explained to us.
The author, who for his investigation went as far as Iraq, to investigate the spread of a drug called Captagon, and then to Bolivia, New Mexico, Montana and elsewhere, shows in the essay how this psychological mechanism is also used in smartphone designin apps (an example is the wheel that turns when you update your email on the iPhone), in social networks, in online shopping and in the “incredible offers” of particularly unscrupulous companies like Temu (which in reality are a real loss in disguise da Vincita), in the world of cryptocurrencies and also in the dating app.
But if this mechanism is so powerful and comes used by the giants of Silicon Valley (and not only) against us, is it possible to avoid being trapped? “If we were not attracted to it, our species would have become extinct – Easter told us – This does not mean that we are powerless: if a behavior caused by the scarcity loop is making you live badly and suffer, the way out is to change or remove any of the 3 parts that make up the loop. In the book I explain how this can be done in a variety of sectors.”
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The most surprising thing is that the same mechanism which is so often turned against us can also work in our favor: “Many apps use the scarcity loop to incentivize people to have positive behaviors, for example in the world of physical activity. And it is abundant in many too activities that keep us in contact with naturesuch as mushroom picking, bird watching or fishing.”
The difference is that in these latter cases no one designed the scarcity loop to make us dependent on something, but it is naturally integrated into the activity we are carrying out. In short, the loop is present for better or worse in a myriad of activities we carry out every day. To escape its more negative implications, the first thing to do is to become aware of its existence.