Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life
EXCERPT
“The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself.” It’s no surprise, therefore, that most of the top 25 websites in America sell escape from our daily drudgery, whether through shopping, celebrity gossip, or bite-sized doses of social interaction.The second psychological factor driving us to distraction is negativity bias, “a phenomenon in which negative events are more salient and demand attention more powerfully than neutral or positive events.” As the author of one study concluded, “It appears to be a basic, pervasive fact of psychology that bad is stronger than good.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nir Eyal is previously best-known as the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and now Indistractable. He also lectured Marketing students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Design School, and has built and sold two technology companies since 2003. For much of his career, Eyal has worked in the video gaming and advertising industries where he learned and applied (and at times rejected) the techniques used to motivate and manipulate users.