Using Variable Rewards to drive Behaviour Change

This is an interesting one - how do you motivate with rewards? Is it better to have a nice predictable, understandable reward system, or is something a bit more random better? The research actually suggests the latter. 

Here's an interesting article which discusses that very topic.

Here's an excerpt:

The human species possesses a disposition towards novelty - and tens of thousands of years ago, that drove us to explore new lands, try new foods and see what happened when we struck two rocks together.

But just as our craving for sweets, salts and fats were valuable in the Paleolithic era, when such foods were scarce, but are now warped in the age of carmel-drizzled kettle corn, our novelty-seeking tendencies can lead us astray.

Variable rewards are a particularly powerful “hook” for the brain. Casinos and many games use frequent but hard-to-predict rewards to keep their players coming back for more.

In this post, I want to talk about how variable rewards work and how we can use them to drive positive behavior change for ourselves.

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