Don’t get me wrong, I am madly passionate about this wonderful, exciting digital world that we live in and my small part in creating it. But I am concerned for the psychology of the children and teens that are growing up with these new digital behavior patterns, and the consumers and citizens they will become. If you look around it quickly becomes clear that eliminating delayed gratification has become a cultural goal expressed through our technological life. Remember delayed gratification? It was someone saying no to you as a kid. It was not being able to get what you want immediately all the time. It was having to work or wait for something that was really important to you. Seems like a kind of quaint and old-fashioned idea today. The difficulty is that it is precisely the delay in gratification that builds the character that people and societies need to rise above their baser instincts.

Janet Metcalfe from Columbia University describes Hot and Cool psychological systems. The Hot system is reflexive, fast, stimulus driven and emotional. It starts at birth with things like the desire for food and is triggered by basic stress type stimuli. The Cool system is reflective, complex, slow, develops with maturity, the hippocampus and frontal lobes, and is characterized by self-control. This Cool system is how we make deeper evaluations, plan for the future, think through complex issues, rise above our base instincts and put off short term gain for long term goals. Baby boomers have no problem doing this; it’s ingrained in their childhood experience. But imagine the i-generation saving for retirement.

It’s not that kids are not as smart as they ever were. The issue is rather that we are creating psychological patterns that are making them dumber. By reinforcing the digital behaviors that provide immediate gratification, we create grooves in their psychology that become the roads most traveled. Habits like exchanging reading for social networks, texting rather than writing, being unwilling to wait for a result. It’s basically reinforcing baby stimuli, the same simple patterns we responded to at our mother’s breast. It’s done with food too by pandering to the desire for sweet, salt and fat tastes. It might have been OK as babies, but the idea is that we should mature and learn self-control and self-regulation in order to defeat our vulnerabilities. Unfortunately the trend appears to be not going in the right direction. Grades are dropping in general, but particularly with kids addicted to social networks and we are seeing the beginnings of a different type of consumer. These are people who don’t have the patience to hear a brand’s story, who can’t tolerate the process of evaluating and comparing value propositions, and who can be more easily manipulated by Hot stimuli into making faster, less considered decisions.

For brands with complex value propositions I wonder how we will get the attention of these new consumers, because one can only make life insurance so simple before the story loses all its power and relevance. Of course it will probably force us to focus on the more emotional rather than analytical elements of a brand story and to pay very close attention to the balance of Hot and Cool dynamics in content and messaging. Whatever the tactics I am seeing signs that this is going to be a real problem and I don’t see a counter-balancing force. My hope, however, is that somehow, it will be like the digital fears of old when everyone worried that people on computers would become isolated and anti-social. Maybe I am doing what older generations have always done and seeing these new behaviors through an old value system. I don’t know, but time will certainly reveal all.