Library
Books, films, and orgs
The works that named and shaped what DarkBadge measures — growing as more apps are scored and more research surfaces.
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.
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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.
The neuroscience and behavioral theory underneath it all — why these techniques work on any brain, not just an undisciplined one.
Books
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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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.