Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked

Irresistible is NYU marketing and psychology professor Adam Alter's 2017 book arguing that a wide range of everyday products — smartphones, social apps, video games, streaming platforms — are engineered using techniques he associates with behavioral addiction, drawing loosely on principles also seen in gambling design. Alter describes recurring design features he links to compulsive use: removed 'stopping cues,' unpredictable rewards, and incremental goals, and reports that technology executives who build these products often restrict their own children's access to them. The book frames heavy, compulsive screen use in children and teens as a pattern parents and educators should be alert to, and closes with practical suggestions — device-free periods, notification limits, redesigned defaults — framed as harm reduction rather than abstinence. TechKids Foundation includes it as a widely read framing of how product design is associated with problematic screen habits, not as clinical or diagnostic evidence.

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