A few days ago, I got pretty annoyed with some stuff on Facebook and wanted to stay away from it for a while. Unfortunately, logging into Facebook is too easy. Actually, somehow I'm always signed on on my laptop and blackberry. That, coupled with the fact that I addictively check my newsfeed and spend a lot of time in front of my computer, made it difficult to stay off of the site for long.
So, I decided to take a more "drastic" step: deactivation. While I guess you can never really leave Facebook, you can take your profile offline. Deactivation means that others cannot find you, message you or whatever.
Since I've deactivated, I haven't been on Facebook for a couple days and things are just great. But, at first blush, it might be a mystery to some as to why deactivation would work. After all, to reactivate, I'd just have to log back into the website (yeah, it's just that easy). So how could this have any effect on my Facebook behavior? I think there are a few reasons:
(1) I like marginal costs that are essentially zero. Deactivation raises the marginal cost of going on Facebook just a little bit, which might work to totally devalue what in my head should be a free experience (see here for a good discussion of this phenomenon in another context).
(2) Deactivation works for me as a self/pre-commitment device (see here for a broader discussion). I realized I'd feel a lot worse repeatedly deactivating and reactivating rather than just navigating from Facebook to another page and back. In the former case, I'd feel like more of a flake or diva for signing off a service and going back on, whereas that kind of behavior is more easily justified when you are already part of the service.
So behavioral economics has helped me get around my Facebook conundrum. Interestingly, various behavioral economics inspired "nudges" almost stopped me from establishing my pre-commitment device. When you go to deactivate, you are shown pictures of your five of your friends (from your jointly tagged pictures) with captions like "Mike will miss you," all below the question "Are you sure you want to deactivate?" Furthermore, below the pictures, you are asked to provide a reason for why you want to deactivate, and for all of the choices except "This is temporary. I'll be back" Facebook gives you a pithy statement about why you might want to reconsider.
Finally, see you on Facebook...at some point in the future.
1 comment:
I'm gonna try this out. Maybe for a week or so. I need to stop checking my facebook so much and chatting all the time.
They really know how to keep you hooked: I nearly lost my head when I thought about how life will be like without fb surfing. But its really distracting me.
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