You are being brainwashed by your phone.
It may seem like some tin foil hat level conspiracy theory, but there’s a reason why your phone is so addicting. The greatest Pavlovian hijacking the world had ever seen rests in the palm of your hand. It is your favorite combination of apps and pixels that preys on the basic needs, fears, and behavior of human psychology. Your phone is undoubtedly the most influential object you own. It’s your window to the world. Of course, you don’t want to believe it could ever harm you. But the compulsive way we check our phones is akin to gambling addiction, even substance abuse. There is a physical response to the kind of validation our phones provide, every like, message or comment is another surge of dopamine through our brains. And it is only human nature to be sucked in and to keep coming back for more.
Humans have a tendency to get addicted to things that feel good. Cellphones and gambling are just a few of those things. With all types of gambling there are three important factors that have to be present: consideration, chance, and the prize. The concept of a slot machine is pretty simple; pull a lever and hope for a reward. But relative to other kinds of gambling, people get ‘problematically involved’ with slot machines 3–4 times faster. What is it that makes slot machines so addictive? The key is intermittent variable rewards.
In 1948 behavioral psychologist B.F Skinner conducted a series of experiments using a device dubbed ‘Skinner Box’. Skinner placed a rat inside this box, and a lever on the side that either dispensed food or stopped an electric shock. The reward of food reinforced the behavior of pressing the lever. This positive reinforcement kept the rat pressing the lever unprompted. The experiment for negative reinforcement had the lever switch off the unpleasant sensation of an electric shock. In both, the rat quickly learned to perform the desired behavior through either reinforcement tactic. The rate at which the rat pressed the lever is known as Response Rate. How long the rat continues to press the lever after the reason to do so ends is the Extinction Rate. The type of reinforcement with the fastest rate of extinction is continuous reinforcement, the same action producing the same result over and over. However, the type of reinforcement which produces the slowest rate of extinction is the variable-ratio reinforcement, the same action producing different results. The rat may get a single treat, it might get many, it might get none at all. Even after the reward disappears the rat will still keep pressing the level in the hopes that the reward will return. An example of this in humans is gambling on slot machines.
Intermittent variable rewards are the cornerstone of slot machines. Every time you pull the lever there is a variable chance of reward. Sound familiar? What really makes our brains light up is the consideration factor that happens in the moments between pulling the lever and revealing the reward. The expectation builds in the uncertainty of the reward. While those pictures spin in little rows there is all the chance in the world of either winning or losing, and that’s what keeps people coming back for more.
The same principle applies with your cell phone. The reward changes from money to something perhaps more dangerous: pleasure. All pleasurable stimuli are rewarding, but extrinsic rewards, like money, are not inherently pleasurable on their own. Intrinsically rewarding stimuli is a want or desire. Dopamine surges when the brain is expecting a reward, it activates those parts of the brain associated with wanting and desire. Every time you open your phone there is a chance of new, rewarding stimuli. Likes, messages, tweets; nearly every aspect of your virtual life is connected to this dopamine-fueled reward system. With addictive drugs that have similar characteristics; nicotine, cocaine, or methamphetamines, the omission of the expected reward causes dopamine release to drop below its normal level. Of course, not every time you pull out your phone a new notification is waiting for you. Sometimes the notifications are bland, email updates about meetings or a new article about the weather. But, sometimes your phone buzzes and the reward is greater than expected. Possibly a new tinder match from your crush, the notification of your paycheck being deposited, or a friend asking what you want from Taco Bell. It’s the variability between losing, winning, and hitting the jackpot that keeps you coming back for more.
Initially the addictive nature of your phone comes from several key features: social approval, social reciprocity, instant interruption, and the fear of missing something important. This is where all those social media apps come into play. Social media outlets know how to capitalize on the human desire of belonging, a key feature of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. They break down the need to be approved or appreciated by our peers into a series of algorithms.
Apps like Facebook and Instagram manipulate the desire to belong with a variety of tactics. One way is notifications, an instant source of interruption. Notifications heighten the feeling of urgency and social reciprocity. Concentrating on work, projects, or even spending time with friends and family is interrupted by the contrast ping of notifications. This instant interruption draws you back into the screen to view whatever comment, tweet, or like your phone deems needs your attention at this moment. Knowing someone has just liked your photo may prompt you to check out their profile, and maybe like a picture or two yourself. There is a sense of chumming the social waters. Once you post a picture on Instagram, you might scroll through your feed and dispense likes on other friends’ posts to remind them of your presence. Basic social reciprocity is “you do me a favor — I owe you one.” And social sites are willing to do everything in their power to help this cycle go on. Facebook and LinkedIn exploit an asymmetry in perception. These media giants offer automated suggestions, recommending connections between potential collages or friends of friends to expand your social circle. Endorsing skills on LinkedIn for a peer prompts them to do the same back to you. LinkedIn’s list of suggested contacts urges you to connect with people you might not even personally know, but when you receive one of these requests back, it feels like you have been personally selected by this person. Facebook does the same, interrupting your feed with “people you may know.” Friending them creates the social obligation to friend them back. This creates new social obligations that people feel compelled to repay, even though the original actions were mostly unconscious responses to the site’s automated algorithm.
There are mechanisms built into social media outlets to capitalize on the vulnerability we have for social approval. One helpful tweak was displaying new profile pictures higher up on others feeds, for longer amounts of time. Changing your profile picture is a delicate time on social media, where that vulnerability for social approval is among the highest. We want to be approved or appreciated by our peers, and changing the symbolic emblem of our digital presence is a delicate time. By keeping the change higher up on friends’ feeds, it ensures that more people will see it, and rake in more likes and acknowledgements.
But once they reel you in, what makes you stay? Compulsive phone checking is one thing, but what factors make you zone out of reality and into the screen, scrolling for hours, even after the social rewards have stopped?
One factor is that the way content is presented has changed. These days we are living in the era of the never-ending feed. Cornell professor Brian Wansink ran a study proving you can trick people into continuously eating past the point where they are no longer hungry, or even consciously desire food, as long as you present food to them in an automatically refilling bowl. With bottomless bowls, people eat 73% more calories than those with normal bowls and underestimate how many calories they ate by 140.
When the feed never ends and you can keep on scrolling forever, there is no need to take a break, or to make the conscious decision to stop. There isn’t the choice of “just one more page.” The world is nonstop. It is a pretty strong sense of FOMO that keeps us falling deeper into the trap of social media, even if the rewards decline. The fear of missing out keeps us scrolling further and further down the page.
Major sites eliminate as many reasons for you to leave as possible. Youtube has autoplay and video suggestions. Watching one video on Facebook generates a playlist of more. Instagram shows “videos you might like” right on the search page, and underneath that, the endless, ever-refreshing explore page. If tech companies keep serving up an infinite hyper-personalized content, why would you ever want to leave?
MIT anthropologist Natasha Schüll spent decades studying the world of gambling and casinos in Las Vegas. She discovered that most people playing the machines aren’t there to hit the jackpot and go home, they aren’t in it to make money. For them it is all about getting into the zone. Schüll describes this as “the machine zone.” It’s almost a hypnotic state, a never-ending feedback loop. Hit the button, something happens. Hit the button again, something similar happens. Hit the button again, maybe you win, maybe you don’t.
The machine zone is the more sinister side of a concept Mihály Csíkszentmihályi described as “flow state.” The concept states that in the flow state there is a goal, rules for achieving that goal, and feedback on progress. A key feature is that the task has to match your skill level, so that there is “a feeling of simultaneous control and challenge.” Csíkszentmihályi compared the flow state to jazz music, every action following inevitably from the previous one. He hypothesized that humans have a natural desire for flow. But the gambling machines Schüll studied exploited that desire associated with meaningful pursuits into something mindless.
Journalist Alexis C. Madrigal compares the machine zone created in Las Vegas casinos to a state induced by the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Ironically this takes the social out of social media. “Characterized by a lack of human connection… your interactions are mechanical, repetitive, and reinforced by computerized feedback.” Madrigal states, “Facebook and slot machines share the ability to provide fast feedback to simple actions; they deliver tiny rewards on an imperfectly predictable ‘payout’ schedule. These are coercive loops.”
The question is, who benefits from all this? Who benefits from the trance captured in the endless feed? Slot machines have an easy culprit, the casino wants to make money. Buy cell phones are less straightforward. We are living in the age of the attention economy. In the modern era, one of our most personally valuable resources is time, and it is the scarcity of this that the tech world works to capitalize on. How much you like a service is generally measured by how much time you spend on it, regardless of how engaged you actually are. The more time you spend on a site means more money for that company. Revenue comes from advertisements. The more ads you see the more money Facebook, Youtube, or Instagram makes. Ad impressions add up. While you might think seeing the ad for the same product over and over is getting annoying, what it is really doing is getting imprinted in your mind. What advertisers want is for their product to be the first one you think of in their respective category. For example, Coca Cola does not really need to advertise for awareness. People know that Coke is just about the gold standard classic of the soft drink world. But just wait for Christmas to come along and you will be flooded with polar bears and Santa sipping on iconic curved bottles. They want to maintain their status on top. Other brands are scrambling to get their names anywhere close to this level. We’re already becoming familiar with a new crop of services: Blue Apron, SquareSpace, Audible.
While some overtly advertise their products in clearly labeled advertisements, there are sneakier ways companies slide their branding in. Sponsored content on news sites comes with a small disclaimer of implied bias or promotion. Native advertising, ads that look like the content you are expecting to see, blend seamlessly into environments like Instagram. Opening the app, I almost instantly come across a delightfully staged fall apple cake, complete with gold whisk and rustic red handkerchief. And, creeping into frame, there is a pack of Country Crock Buttery Sticks. Posted from a pseudo-mommy blog the caption reads, “Soft and creamy- you don’t have to wait for them to soften! …That means I was able to spend less time trying to keep little fingers away from this apple cake” with a recipe listed helpfully underneath.
Over the years the algorithms have shifted; one of the latest features is the “best content first” approach. The sites will display the information the algorithm believes is most personally relevant to you first, verging away from the traditional chronological format that came before. While diverging from the chronological approach has boosted egos by helping our new profile pictures rake in more likes, it also has more sinister applications. When a company controls order of content, they control what content you actually see. Your feed is dictated by whoever is pouring money into the advertisements. It could be Country Crock trying to get you to buy their pre-softened butter or it could be more sinistar, like Russian operatives buying political campaign ads.
Unlike the designers of slot machines, cellphones and social media doesn’t have strict rules or ethical standards for the tactics they use. Simple features that we now take for granted didn’t start out with malicious intent. Your first AOL email account wasn’t trying to get you hooked on hit after hit of electronically delivered dopamine. But once companies learned they could, they designed programs and sites so that you would. This is one of the most widespread addictions of all time. But before anything can be changed, we’ve got to admit that we have a problem.
