I find it remark­able how much my 3-year-old son — and pre­sum­ably by exten­sion most kids his age — go crazy for stick­ers. They don’t do any­thing, besides stick to a wall-chart. They don’t even nec­es­sar­ily have to lead to any bet­ter reward (10 stick­ers and we buy you a toy, etc.). It’s a com­pletely false econ­omy, and yet kids will mod­ify their behav­iour just to obtain stick­ers from their parents.

I started to won­der what age we grow out of that, and start to realise that the reward is so near zero that we’re effec­tively being tricked by our par­ents into behav­ing well for no reward.

My con­clu­sion is “never”.

Here is the sticker chart on my wall. Play­ers of Foursquare and its rivals mod­ify their behav­iour — to give a com­pany a com­plete list of their loca­tion his­tory so that they can use it for mar­ket­ing pur­poses. In return, for each ever more exces­sive level of location-sharing, you get a sticker on your wall-chart. And not even a real sticker, just a 100×100 JPEG rep­re­sent­ing your achievement.

The only rea­son Foursquare badges appeal to grown-ups and wall-charts in our bed­rooms don’t is that Foursquare is pub­lic and social — we can com­pare our badges with oth­ers’, and strive to have the most.

We never grow out of want­ing a sticker. We just com­pound it with pride, greed, and the desire to be bet­ter than every­one else. Isn’t that worse?