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How would your communications goals and habits change if your CEO managed you with electrical shocks? What if a device managed you with shocks, invited your friends to do so, and had access to your bank accounts? While the first scenario might be far off, the second is already here: Pavlok.
Pavlok is the latest in technology wrist bands and it doesn’t just track your activity, it shocks you into complying with goals you set. Let’s say you want to want to stop hitting the snooze button when you wake up – if you set that as your goal, Pavlok will shock you until you get up.
Ostensibly, Pavlok is about helping you achieve your goals and create positive habits. According to its site, “Pavlok will push you to stay on track and form [a] lasting habit” with negative feedback: shocks, monetary penalties, lost access to your phone, all “at the hands of your friends.”
We all know that habits can be tough to break, but is the equivalent to a shock collar taking wearable technology a bit too far? Experiments that use shocks on animals and humans to control behavior are already considered unethical, so putting a shock bracelet on the market seems like a bit of a gray area.
There’s also the issue of voltage; Pavlok shocks are up to 340 volts, and even less can be a deadly shock with direct contact to wires. While Pavlok presumably does not put the wearer in contact with wires, what happens if your wrist gets wet (making your skin a far more effective conductor) and you get shocked? What if there’s a malfunction?
Electrical concerns aside, creating new habits and achieving goals is not easy, but there are ways to do so without shocking yourself. For example, setting SMART goals makes it easier to track your progress and success. Developing new, positive habits also isn’t easy, and it certainly requires time, patience, and willpower; while it may seem like a wrist band might be able to crack the code on habits, the problem with positive or negative reinforcement is that it’s easy to become complacent. Sure, you might figure out how to not get shocked by Pavlok, but when the novelty wears off and you start leaving it at home, those new “habits” stand a good chance of not sticking.
That’s why sticking to proven habit-forming techniques like micro quotas and macro goals is probably a better tactic than pinning your hopes to wearable tech. Pavlok might believe that willpower isn’t enough, but research shows that motivation helps beget discipline.
While you probably wouldn’t want your CEO to put a Pavlok on you, comfort yourself by imagining what would happen if you put one on your CEO while they were being interviewed so you could shock them if they strayed from what you’d practiced. How would both of you fare?
