World of Education

Talking to Mike recently about the addictive factors in modern computer games, it became clear that they same tricks can be applied in every day lives. The typical tricks are a social environment to promote status/achievement comparisons, providing rewards (virtual and sometimes purely aesthetic — this can be a status indicator to others in the virtual world, but typically useful in some way in the game world), setting up achievement treadmills — rewarding repetition of sometimes arbitrary tasks — of exponentially growing difficulty, reducing the correlation between effort and instantaneous reward (proven to increase dopamine vs predictable results), and some amounts of complexity/richness to the world.

These games are so popular and addictive because  they serve as an escape from our multi-dimensional realities. In the real world we do not have clear paths to success, instantaneous reinforcement and rewards, or clear lines drawn between cause and effect.

I will use the specific example of our education system.  Most children, except for the truly intellectually curious, find school a chore and a necessary evil. The system could drastically improve if students wanted to learn as much as they wanted a suit of armor in World of Warcraft, and put in the requisite effort. A push vs pull inversion would require a complete re-imagining of the system. There are some educational games out there but they lack many (or all) of the components above which trigger our dopamine receptors and motivate our desires. Here are some simple ideas for how to manipulate the minds of students into learning, the same way they are manipulated into wanting to collect virtual gold coins to buy a virtual pair of pants:

social aspect: A system to publicly and regularly compare the progress (intertemporal) and raw (as well as relative) achievement levels of each student vs their class, school, etc. A standard metric system would need to be developed but this would grow out of the challenges/rewards set up throughout the system

reward system: Some rewards can be purely aesthetic, such as official titles signifying various levels of achievement in different academic subjects. Others would be actively useful in the system, such as extra time on an exam.

achievement treadmills: Whether we like it or not, a strong fundamental education is built off of repetition in order to deeply ingrain basic concepts such as multiplication, grammar, the law of gravity, etc. into our minds. This is perfect for a hedonic treadmill; we just need a system which marks levels of achievement from repeatedly solving problems of varying difficulty over and over with slight differences each time. Once a student has mastered a concept, they get to unlock a more complex concept and restart the cycle of learning, mastering, proceeding, etc. The key to making this enjoyable vs. a chore is the ability to go at your own pace (the more effort you put in, the faster you advance) and to compare your progress to your peers to foster competition.

The same tricks can be used in many facets of our lives, even after entering the “real world”. It just becomes up to us to setup the correct treadmills and reward systems to experience the hedonic effects necessary to stimulate the self-reinforcing “addiction effort-reward” cycle