Transcription
Have you ever noticed how, when you open Instagram or TikTok, all the notification symbols are red, even though that's not a common color used within the rest of those apps? Well, that is a very deliberate decision because psychological studies have shown that people respond quicker to red than any other color. We associate it with danger that requires immediate action.
Have you ever come back from a holiday when you've not been using your phone as much, and all of a sudden, you have way more notifications from X than usual, often about stuff that you've never even interacted with? These are called recapture notifications, designed to make you feel like you've missed out on so much that you need to get right back into a new session as fast as possible and reintroduce the habit of using the app regularly.
If you don't use Facebook anymore but you still have the app installed, I bet this is like 99% of your relationship with the app. It's a very similar trick to what shopping websites use when you abandon your basket halfway. Unless you've been very literally living under a rock for the last few years, you'll have guessed why social media companies do this stuff. Their entire business model is the attention economy. The more attention they get, the more better-targeted ads they can show, and the more money they make.
But here's the thing: if you've seen one of the thousands of videos all about social media addiction, they tend to boil it down to dopamine. They basically say that in order to get this attention, companies have got to persistently make the user feel good. They've got to persistently stimulate a user's production of dopamine, the reward chemical in their brain. But that is not the full story.
For example, you know how some apps have unique notification sounds and vibration patterns? Like Slack, for instance. Clearly, Slack wants you to know when you have an important work alert. But then how come apps like X don't use custom sounds and instead resort to your phone's default notification sound? I'm getting there, but the point is the reality of what these tech companies actually do to keep you addicted is quite a lot deeper and, to be really frank, more twisted than it first seems.
The psychology is very much not, "Oh, let's just make our app really good so people can't stop using it." So let's talk about it and then how you can be one step ahead.
Here's the thing with dopamine: the common perception is that when good things happen, your brain releases dopamine, and you feel good. But dopamine isn't just triggered when good things happen. Research conducted by Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist at Stanford, found that when monkeys were taught that if they pulled a lever when a light came on, they would receive a treat, their dopamine levels actually spiked more when the light came on than when they actually received the treat. This reveals that dopamine is, in fact, more involved in the anticipation of a reward.
Biologically, this makes sense because imagine if you only got that reward when you succeeded at something. You'd never learn how to do anything that you couldn't immediately perfect on your first try. Dopamine isn't there in our brains to make our existences filled with joy; dopamine is there to drive goal-oriented behavior that makes us want to aim for things and improve ourselves.
But here's the real kicker: when Sapolsky varied the experiment, randomizing the likelihood so that monkeys would only receive the treat on average 50% of the time when they pulled the lever, their dopamine levels skyrocketed to double, even though they were only receiving the reward half the time. This is called variable intermittent reward, and it's one of the most fundamental principles that social media developers use to keep you hooked.
Think about your own life. Have you ever had a crush on someone, and it feels like you can't think of anything except when you're going to get that next text from them? Now, let's say that you're in this zone, and you hear a Slack work notification while you're waiting. Your brain doesn't light up because you know it's not them. Well, I guess now in my case it actually could be because Rich is on our team, but you get what I mean.
Then let's say that you hear your phone's default notification sound. Your heart's going to start pumping. You'll immediately drop everything you're doing, all your priorities, and lunge for your phone, only to find it's Twitter letting you know that your friend tweeted a pic of their six out of ten lunch.
But do you see the point? Social media doesn't addict you by always giving you something good, which is the common perception. It addicts you by making you feel like there can be something great, that if you just keep checking those notifications and keep scrolling just for that little bit longer, you might win the lottery.
That's why many social media platforms actually specifically choose to not have their own unique notification sounds. It's to social media's advantage to have their notifications blend in with each other. It's the same way that Milo always makes the same noise for everything, no matter what the problem is, which compels me to always have to get up, go to him, and find out in case it is something serious. He knows what he's doing.
You might be thinking at this point, "Hey, this concept reminds me of something." Oh yeah, it's called gambling, and that's not a coincidence. Now, you know where else you find variable intermittent rewards in abundance? Slot machines.
Slot machines might not look like they have the biggest stakes. I was in Vegas recently, and I spent quite a while strolling around casinos. It was fascinating because while on the betting tables, where people were playing poker and blackjack, the minimum amount you could bet was between $10 and $50 per turn, depending on the time of day. On the slot machines, you could bet with as little as 5 cents, and yet slot machines still generate over half of an average casino's revenue.
How? Because they have been fine-tuned for decades to be the perfect attention traps. Just like social media, their profit is directly proportional to time spent on the device. Just like social media, they've gotten very good at maximizing that.
On a traditional slot machine, you pull a lever to spin, and just like the monkeys in Sapolsky's experiment, you're fed with a variable intermittent reward. You have no idea when you're going to win big. All you know is that if that lever is pulled enough times, then eventually, at some point in the future, it will pay off with a large jackpot.
So it makes it really hard to walk away, even if you might have to spend ten times as much as the jackpot amount to actually win it. Now, where do you notice that exact same action and feeling? Oh yeah, refreshing your feed on a social platform.
There's something more exciting and, oh come on, this time for sure about pulling that screen down to refresh than just clicking a refresh button. How often do you find yourself just going for one more spin? I'm not going to lie to you; sometimes I do this action just for fun because of how tactile and responsive they've made the feeling of it. Yes, that is not an accident either.
Slot machines have only gotten better over time at engineering your attention. Nowadays, they are so intelligent. They give people options of how to gamble to give them the illusion of control, which makes them take bigger risks. When people face big losses and are ready to leave, the machines kick up and start teasing them with very near misses, making them feel like they're working towards a goal and they're now so close to getting it.
The machines are also processing in real time. New slot machines are fitted with powerful chips that can subtly manipulate the odds as you play to keep the up and down smoother, to make sure you stay on the device as long as possible. Trust me, the more you look into it, the scarier it gets.
In the exact same way, social feeds are using the exact same type of highly secretive, highly complex algorithms to decide what content to show you to keep your attention for as long as possible. Probably the worst current offender of this is X. Ever since Elon Musk bought the platform, researchers have found, with what you and I already see on our timelines every day, that the new algorithm is designed to actively promote content that will make you angry and disgusted, and therefore more likely to engage and keep scrolling.
It's slowly deprioritizing what you came on there to see in the first place and prioritizing the sticky web that's going to keep you on there for as long as possible, to the point where, I mean, normal comment sections barely even exist anymore. When you click a public post and scroll down, you're essentially just in yet another feed within the feed.
But here is where it gets really dark because it goes beyond the slot machines. Casinos themselves are designed to eliminate any and all stimuli that might prompt someone to make a choice outside of their games. Because if you can make a choice, then you can choose to leave.
Just as an example, almost all walkways you find in a casino are gently curved without right angles so that you can remain in that mindless flow state instead of reaching a stopping point where you might actually mentally check in with yourself and decide that you want to go. This same logic is crucial to social media design. Once you have a user's attention, you don't want them deciding to leave, so you might as well stop them from even thinking about it.
To achieve that, what every single one of these social media platforms does is eliminate any and all friction in the experience to make the easiest thing to do in any given moment to just keep floating along. A great example of this is TikTok's user interface. The second you enter the app, a video is playing. You don't need to choose what to click on. The vertical video takes up most of your screen automatically, whereas usually, to full screen a video, you'd have to either consciously switch your phone to a different orientation or click a fiddly button in the corner.
All of the important toggles for interacting with the content and going deeper into the app are at the bottom of the screen, right where most people's thumb would naturally be. So you don't need to choose to dive deeper into the experience. As you probably guessed, the only action that is made less easy is leaving.
When you're on Android and you're trying to use the back gesture, you actually have to swipe away once to indicate that you want to leave, and then the app will actually show you a completely different TikTok to try and grab you again. Then you have to swipe away a second time to confirm it.
Crucially, you can scroll through videos infinitely. It will never end, with every single piece of content also auto-playing, eliminating yet another choice, which all leads to, you guessed it, doom scrolling. Just like the curved walkways in a casino, this provides you with no natural point to stop and check in with yourself.
That's why we all end up in these scrolling sessions where we completely forget where we are, who we're with, and the entire passage of time until some sort of external trigger comes in to remind us.
Now, the thing that really gets me about all of this is that we know these are deliberate decisions, and we know this very well because there are people out there blowing the whistle on it. Like AAR Raskin, who actually invented the infinite scroll in 2006. He figured at the time that it would make for better search engine results. You know, clicking through to the next page was just a little bit of friction that he saw he could eliminate to smooth things out.
But he didn't realize what it would be turned into, and now he's found out. Raskin has publicly apologized a million times for inventing it and has now gone completely the other way to found the Center for Humane Technology with ex-Google ethicist Tristan Harris. He went from working at something literally called the Persuasive Technology Lab when he studied at Stanford to then working at Google, trying to change them from the inside, only to quit when he realized he couldn't.
You might have seen this guy give testimony multiple times in U.S. Congress talking about what these big tech companies do. But also, Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, has publicly called Facebook's business model a social validation feedback loop, exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. He has himself admitted that we understood this, and we did it anyway. Yikes.
So now that we understand the beast from the inside, it's not like the companies are going to change of their own accord. What I would recommend is, on a personal level, you take control. Take 20 minutes once to go through and disable all notification types that don't actually serve you, which just exist to prod you into mindlessly starting a new session for a few minutes.
I promise you, you don't need to know every time a friend comments on another friend's Instagram pic that you haven't even interacted with. Turn off autoplay wherever possible, and if you're on an iPhone, use the scheduled summary feature, which means you're not missing notifications; you're just saving them all for later.
The key thing is just to reintroduce a little bit of that friction back in yourself. Even just pushing your most distracting social media apps from your home screen to the one page next to it is already enough to reduce your unintentional usage time.
That's all I'm trying to save you from. I think there are loads of great things to be entertained by and to learn from on social media, but I don't want you to feel manipulated against your will by hyper-intelligent algorithms that understand your psyche better than you do.
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