Welcoming you to the age of behavioral addiction, also known as the age in which half of the population of the United States is addicted to at least one behavior We obsess over our emails, Instagram likes, and Facebook feeds; we binge-watch TV programs and films on YouTube; we work longer hours each year, and we use our smartphones for an average of three hours each day.
Most of us would rather have a broken bone than a broken phone, and Millennial children spend so much time in front of screens that they have difficulty interacting with real people.
Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked [Download pdf Below]
In this ground-breaking book, Adam Alter, a professor of psychology and marketing at New York University, traces the origins of behavioral addiction and explains why so many of today’s products are hard to resist. Alter’s research was published in the journal Nature.
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Although these remarkable items can bring people together from all over the world, their extraordinary and potentially harmful magnetism is not coincidental.
The corporations who design these products make incremental improvements to them over time, making it increasingly difficult for consumers to resist their appeal.
Alter explains how we can harness addictive products for good—to improve how we communicate with each other, spend and save our money, and set boundaries between work and play—and how we can mitigate the most damaging effects that these products have on our well-being as well as the health and happiness of our children by reverse engineering behavioral addiction.
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