Why I Addictive to google pay?

Google pay is my go-to app for making payments online. It’s almost as if the app was Addictive. This is too hard to resist and so I wanted to find out why. Why is the damn thing so addictive?

And it hit me. Scratch cards…

Most payment companies like Paytm and others offer a fixed cashback on every transaction. It’s their way of hooking users to their platform. You know what to expect walking into the deal. And so every time you are rewarded for completing a normal transaction you feel elated and you are likely to go back to the platform once again.

However, Googlepay doesn’t do that. It offers scratch cards if you were to complete a minimum transaction on the platform. Not like a fixed cashback offer, a scratch card is much like a lottery ticket. In most cases, the scratch card doesn’t pay you anything. You don’t get anything. However, on the other side, you may hit the jackpot, you get a massive Gift. In my case, I once got Rs. 600 for a transaction worth Rs. 192, I made on Zomato. I was jumping for joy that day. I told everyone in the family about my luck and saved a screenshot too.

If you know anything about lotteries, you know that the house always wins. company will keep offering you big payouts if they want to stay in business for long. I won the jackpot, yes. But i began to realise that the probability of me winning BIG once again is now easy. In fact, since then I’ve won a total of Rs. 55 and I’ve probably used Google Pay more than 100 times already.

So why do I keep going back? Why is my monkey brain preferring a lottery ticket over PayTMs offer of a sure cashback?

Well — Variable rewards.Every time we receive a reward our brain releases a good dose of happiness — dopamine. In small doses, it helps us be happy. In large doses, it can lead us to addiction. (our brains crave dopamine. So apps that help trigger the neurotransmitter get all our attention.)

Back in the 1950s, BF Skinner a famed psychologist ran an experiment where he offered lab rats food pellets if they pressed a lever.

Lever A would bring down pellets of the same size every time.

Lever B would offer pellets of different sizes i.e. sometimes you’d get a smaller pellet, sometimes a larger one and sometimes nothing. And the rats kept going crazy for the randomized lever. They wanted to gamble as well. This experiment provided the scientific basis for using — ‘Variable Rewards” to condition human behaviour.

Same way, Our brain releases more dopamine when we won non-fixed rewards than the fixed reward. and this is the reason why I keep going back to Google Pay in search of that jackpot. It’s an addiction. I can’t stop myself. Also, ever since I won that Rs. 600 I’ve been going on and on about how Google Pay is absolutely the best. Nobody’s ever given me a cashback of 600. And almost nobody has credited it directly to my bank account.

So Google pay is a wonderful app 

You got me. You got me good ☺

Inspiration: qrius and Navigate news