Library
Books, films, and orgs
Nir Eyal's Hooked lays out the four-step trigger-action-reward-investment loop product teams use to build habits — DarkBadge treats it as a map of the mechanisms it scores. That's one of the works below; the rest name and shape the same field.
Featured
Hooked
Nir Eyal · 2014
Nir Eyal's blueprint for building habit-forming products, structured around a four-step "Hook Model": trigger, action, variable reward, investment. Written as a how-to for product teams — DarkBadge treats it as a map of the mechanisms it scores.
How this relates to DarkBadge →
Why this matters
Hooked is the playbook: a four-step formula for building products people can't put down. The NPR piece traces that formula back further, to the slot machine design it borrowed from. Everything else here either names one of these tactics in more detail or backs it with research.
Books
The Anxious Generation
Jonathan Haidt · 2024
Jonathan Haidt's case that the phone-based childhood — replacing a play-based one in roughly five years — is the best-supported explanation for the synchronized rise in teen anxiety and depression. Four norms proposed: no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, more free play.
How this relates to DarkBadge →
Hooked
Nir Eyal · 2014
Nir Eyal's blueprint for building habit-forming products, structured around a four-step "Hook Model": trigger, action, variable reward, investment. Written as a how-to for product teams — DarkBadge treats it as a map of the mechanisms it scores.
How this relates to DarkBadge →
Irresistible
Adam Alter · 2017
Adam Alter on the rise of behavioural addiction and the design patterns that drive it — infinite scroll, variable rewards, social feedback loops. Argues these aren't incidental side effects but the deliberate product of A/B-tested engagement engineering.
How this relates to DarkBadge →
Dopamine Nation
Anna Lembke · 2021
Anna Lembke, a Stanford psychiatrist, on the brain's pleasure-pain balance and why constant small hits of dopamine — from a phone as much as any substance — push that balance toward craving. Makes the direct case for scheduled abstinence as a reset.
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The Power of Fun
Catherine Price · 2021
Catherine Price on reclaiming genuine fun and attention from the phone's substitute for both. Distinguishes real "fun" (playful, connected, in flow) from the passive scrolling that displaces it, with a practical plan for making room for the former.
How this relates to DarkBadge →
Broadcasts
Sites & Orgs
Research
Ego depletion and self-regulation research
Roy Baumeister
Self-control behaves like a limited, depletable resource — resisting one temptation leaves less willpower for the next. Grounds why an app doesn't need to be irresistible in every moment, just outlast a user's already-taxed self-regulation.
A neural substrate of prediction and reward (Nature, 1997)
Wolfram Schultz · 1997
Landmark finding that dopamine neurons fire on the *prediction* of a reward and its uncertainty, not just its delivery — the neuroscience behind why unpredictable rewards (likes, loot boxes, feeds) are more compelling than predictable ones.
Variable ratio reinforcement schedules
B.F. Skinner
Skinner's classic finding that an unpredictable reward schedule — a payout after a variable, unknown number of actions — produces the strongest, most persistent, hardest-to-extinguish behavior. The same schedule that runs slot machines and infinite-scroll feeds.