HOW TO CREATE A GOOD HABIT

THE 2ND LAW
Make It Attractive

I
8
How to Make a Habit Irresistible
N THE 1940S
, a Dutch scientist named Niko Tinbergen performed a series of
experiments that transformed our understanding of what motivates us.
Tinbergen—who eventually won a Nobel Prize for his work—was
investigating herring gulls, the gray and white birds often seen flying along
the seashores of North America.
Adult herring gulls have a small red dot on their beak, and Tinbergen
noticed that newly hatched chicks would peck this spot whenever they
wanted food. To begin one experiment, he created a collection of fake
cardboard beaks, just a head without a body. When the parents had flown
away, he went over to the nest and offered these dummy beaks to the
chicks. The beaks were obvious fakes, and he assumed the baby birds
would reject them altogether.
However, when the tiny gulls saw the red spot on the cardboard beak,
they pecked away just as if it were attached to their own mother. They had a
clear preference for those red spots—as if they had been genetically
programmed at birth. Soon Tinbergen discovered that the bigger the red
spot, the faster the chicks pecked. Eventually, he created a beak with three
large red dots on it. When he placed it over the nest, the baby birds went
crazy with delight. They pecked at the little red patches as if it was the
greatest beak they had ever seen.
Tinbergen and his colleagues discovered similar behavior in other
animals. For example, the greylag goose is a ground-nesting bird.

Occasionally, as the mother moves around on the nest, one of the eggs will
roll out and settle on the grass nearby. Whenever this happens, the goose
will waddle over to the egg and use its beak and neck to pull it back into the
nest.
Tinbergen discovered that the goose will pull any nearby round object,
such as a billiard ball or a lightbulb, back into the nest. The bigger the
object, the greater their response. One goose even made a tremendous effort
to roll a volleyball back and sit on top. Like the baby gulls automatically
pecking at red dots, the greylag goose was following an instinctive rule:
When I see a round object nearby, I must roll it back into the nest. The
bigger the round object, the harder I should try to get it.
It’s like the brain of each animal is preloaded with certain rules for
behavior, and when it comes across an exaggerated version of that rule, it
lights up like a Christmas tree. Scientists refer to these exaggerated cues as
supernormal stimuli. A supernormal stimulus is a heightened version of
reality—like a beak with three red dots or an egg the size of a volleyball—
and it elicits a stronger response than usual.
Humans are also prone to fall for exaggerated versions of reality. Junk
food, for example, drives our reward systems into a frenzy. After spending
hundreds of thousands of years hunting and foraging for food in the wild,
the human brain has evolved to place a high value on salt, sugar, and fat.
Such foods are often calorie-dense and they were quite rare when our
ancient ancestors were roaming the savannah. When you don’t know where
your next meal is coming from, eating as much as possible is an excellent
strategy for survival.
Today, however, we live in a calorie-rich environment. Food is abundant,
but your brain continues to crave it like it is scarce. Placing a high value on
salt, sugar, and fat is no longer advantageous to our health, but the craving
persists because the brain’s reward centers have not changed for
approximately fifty thousand years. The modern food industry relies on
stretching our Paleolithic instincts beyond their evolutionary purpose.
A primary goal of food science is to create products that are more
attractive to consumers. Nearly every food in a bag, box, or jar has been
enhanced in some way, if only with additional flavoring. Companies spend
millions of dollars to discover the most satisfying level of crunch in a potato
chip or the perfect amount of fizz in a soda. Entire departments are

dedicated to optimizing how a product feels in your mouth—a quality
known as orosensation. French fries, for example, are a potent combination
—golden brown and crunchy on the outside, light and smooth on the inside.
Other processed foods enhance dynamic contrast, which refers to items
with a combination of sensations, like crunchy and creamy. Imagine the
gooeyness of melted cheese on top of a crispy pizza crust, or the crunch of
an Oreo cookie combined with its smooth center. With natural, unprocessed
foods, you tend to experience the same sensations over and over—how’s
that seventeenth bite of kale taste? After a few minutes, your brain loses
interest and you begin to feel full. But foods that are high in dynamic
contrast keep the experience novel and interesting, encouraging you to eat
more.
Ultimately, such strategies enable food scientists to find the “bliss point”
for each product—the precise combination of salt, sugar, and fat that excites
your brain and keeps you coming back for more. The result, of course, is
that you overeat because hyperpalatable foods are more attractive to the
human brain. As Stephan Guyenet, a neuroscientist who specializes in
eating behavior and obesity, says, “We’ve gotten too good at pushing our
own buttons.”
The modern food industry, and the overeating habits it has spawned, is
just one example of the 2nd Law of Behavior Change: Make it attractive.
The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit-
forming.
Look around. Society is filled with highly engineered versions of reality
that are more attractive than the world our ancestors evolved in. Stores
feature mannequins with exaggerated hips and breasts to sell clothes. Social
media delivers more “likes” and praise in a few minutes than we could ever
get in the office or at home. Online porn splices together stimulating scenes
at a rate that would be impossible to replicate in real life. Advertisements
are created with a combination of ideal lighting, professional makeup, and
Photoshopped edits—even the model doesn’t look like the person in the
final image. These are the supernormal stimuli of our modern world. They
exaggerate features that are naturally attractive to us, and our instincts go
wild as a result, driving us into excessive shopping habits, social media
habits, porn habits, eating habits, and many others.

If history serves as a guide, the opportunities of the future will be more
attractive than those of today. The trend is for rewards to become more
concentrated and stimuli to become more enticing. Junk food is a more
concentrated form of calories than natural foods. Hard liquor is a more
concentrated form of alcohol than beer. Video games are a more
concentrated form of play than board games. Compared to nature, these
pleasure-packed experiences are hard to resist. We have the brains of our
ancestors but temptations they never had to face.
If you want to increase the odds that a behavior will occur, then you
need to make it attractive. Throughout our discussion of the 2nd Law, our
goal is to learn how to make our habits irresistible. While it is not possible
to transform every habit into a supernormal stimulus, we can make any
habit more enticing. To do this, we must start by understanding what a
craving is and how it works.
We begin by examining a biological signature that all habits share—the
dopamine spike.

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