Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked

Adam Alter

Mar 2017 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

“Irresistible is a fascinating and much needed exploration of one of the most troubling phenomena of modern times.” —Malcolm Gladwell, author of New York Times bestsellers David and Goliath and Outliers

“One of the most mesmerizing and important books I’ve read in quite some time. Alter brilliantly illuminates the new obsessions that are controlling our lives and offers the tools we need to rescue our businesses, our families, and our sanity.” —Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take

Welcome to the age of behavioral addiction—an age in which half of the American population is addicted to at least one behavior. We obsess over our emails, Instagram likes, and Facebook feeds; we binge on TV episodes and YouTube videos; we work longer hours each year; and we spend an average of three hours each day using our smartphones. Half of us would rather suffer a broken bone than a broken phone, and Millennial kids spend so much time in front of screens that they struggle to interact with real, live humans.
 
In this revolutionary book, Adam Alter, a professor of psychology and marketing at NYU, tracks the rise of behavioral addiction, and explains why so many of today's products are irresistible. Though these miraculous products melt the miles that separate people across the globe, their extraordinary and sometimes damaging magnetism is no accident. The companies that design these products tweak them over time until they become almost impossible to resist.
 
By reverse engineering behavioral addiction, Alter explains how we can harness addictive products for the 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 their most damaging effects on our well-being, and the health and happiness of our children.

Adam Alter's previous book, Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave is available in paperback from Penguin.

Ratings and reviews

In the era of internet, smartphone and social media addiction; though as consumers of these services we do seem to understand the consequences of abusing these resources, yet some cannot control their urges to constantly surf through the countless likes, retweets and snaps. Life as it was once simple and joyful, however aren't we supposed to be more social, open and relieving our social needs via social media and its likes? Well, Adam Alter brilliantly presents some of the aspects of human psychology that deals with how we fail to cope with the most trivial of things that devour us by time to emerge as behavioral addictions. I like how the book steps up and diversifies the different concepts using evidence from research in which the author utilizes to prove the fragile nature of humans. I highly recommend the book for those who're looking for a heads-up start on to the path of quitting their behavioral addictions in whichever domain they be and are aspiring to start a new beginning with self content astray from the thrill of fidgeting across multiple online interfaces.

super interesting.

About the author

Adam Alter is an associate professor of marketing at New York University's Stern School of Business. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave, and has written for the New York Times, New Yorker, Atlantic, WIRED, Slate, Washington Post, and Popular Science, among other publications.