Categories of Variable Rewards and their Applications

Key Insight

Variable rewards, central to habit-forming products, are categorized into three types: Tribe, Hunt, and Self. Rewards of the Tribe are social, driven by our inherent need for connectedness, and to feel accepted, attractive, important, or included. Platforms like Facebook leverage this with an uncertain stream of content, comments, and 'likes,' providing variable social validation. Stack Overflow motivates software developers with upvotes and badges for answers, conferring status, and League of Legends uses 'Honor Points' awarded by players to encourage positive behavior and community recognition.

Rewards of the Hunt stem from our evolutionary drive to acquire resources and information, rooted in ancient 'persistence hunting' techniques used by groups like the San people. In modern society, this translates to the search for money, physical objects, or valuable information. Machine gambling, specifically slot machines, exemplifies this by offering monetary payouts at random intervals, compelling continuous play. Online feeds like Twitter provide an unpredictably mixed stream of information that users scroll endlessly to find relevant content, and Pinterest uses visually intriguing, often partially hidden, images to fuel a continuous search for desired items.

Rewards of the Self are intrinsic, driven by a personal desire for gratification through mastery, competence, and completion, even for tasks that can be painstaking. Video games exemplify this by allowing players to level up, unlock special powers, and progress through quests, satisfying the desire for competency. Email systems provide variable rewards through the fluctuating count of unread messages, with applications like Mailbox enhancing a sense of completion by facilitating 'inbox zero.' Codecademy utilizes instantaneous feedback on single functions, turning the difficult process of learning to code into an engaging challenge with variable success and progression.