IRRESISTIBLE

The Rat That Fell in Love With Pain will be a singularly fascinating book that holds a mirror up to our behaviors and our thinking and shows us what we look like in a way we’ve never seen before.

Welcome to the second age of addiction – the age of behavioral addiction. No longer is a tiny percentage of the population addicted to a substance. Today, approximately 90% of us are addicts. While substance addiction certainly still exists, the new stuff that’s got its hooks into us is neither illegal nor socially condemned. Still, it’s robbing us of our time, relationships, physical health and emotional well-being. This breed of compulsions and addictions that barely existed before the turn of the 21st Century has us obsessively playing, watching, bidding, betting and shopping our lives away. In his second book, The Rat That Fell in Love with Pain: The Sudden Rise of Behavioral Addictions and How it Affects Us All, best-selling author Adam Alter explores the history and psychology of addiction and explains how and why it has emerged from the dark corners of society only to run rampant across every demographic group. “Addicted” is now an unnervingly common part of our lexicon, used to describe anything from our Pavlovian response to a cell phone buzz to our binge-viewing long-form television series. Though the problem of behavioral addiction may have arisen with the internet, our obsessions are also seeping into non-tech arenas, as the desire to record our every move causes compulsions of its own. We fret over footsteps, calories and pounds because self-tracking lets us monitor them. We get tattoos or accumulate new clothing because Instagram provides immediate positive feedback from friends and strangers. Advertisers, television networks and game developers have always used some form of market research to appeal to new audiences, but today, they are able to exploit scientific findings about our psychological weaknesses in order to build rabid, addicted fan bases. By nature, we hate the imbalance of incomplete patterns, so show-runners create television episodes with cliffhangers. We love near misses, so slot machine designers and lotteries make it appear as if we’re about to win big every time. The cascading effects of these and many, many other corporate decisions have had an increasingly harmful impact on our health and the fundamental fabric of society. The Rat That Fell in Love with Pain provides the understanding and tools necessary for us to combat these addictions and reverse the alarming trends. Adam Alter is the New York Times best-selling author of Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape Our Thoughts, Feelings, and Behaviors. He is an associate professor of marketing and psychology at NYU’s Stern School of Business and psychology department. His work has been featured in the mainstream media, on PBS and BBC, and in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist, and he has also written for Psychology Today, The Atlantic, and the Huffington Post. Alter received his B.Sc in Psychology from the University of New South Wales, where he won the University Medal in psychology, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology from Princeton University, where he held a fellowship in the Woodrow Wilson Society of Scholars.