Why do we spend so much time on social media?

Astonishingly, the average person will spend nearly two hours (approximately 116 minutes) on social media every day, which translates to a total of 5 years and 4 months spent over a lifetime. It looks like we are hooked with all social media and similar is applicable for other addictive products like youtube, PUBG, etc. Secrets on how we get hooked to these products and how companies are leveraging psychological phenomenon to their advantages are aptly written by Nir Eyal with Ryan Hoover in their book ‘The Hooked’. The book is on habit-forming products and the universal design principles everyday products have utilized. The book has excellent insights about human psychology and behavior and is a recommended read for designers and product managers. Below are my takeaways from the book with some astonishing results and each point can be easily related to our addiction to social media.

As per a study, seventy-nine percent of smartphone owners check their device within fifteen minutes of waking up every morning. Perhaps more startling, one-third of American say they would instead give up sex than lose their cell phones. The technologies we use have turned into compulsions, if not full-fledged addictions. We are hooked to multiple products, and all of these products seem to utilize a framework called ‘The Hook Model’.

The Hook Model has four steps:

Trigger

A trigger is the actuator of behavior — the spark plug in the engine. There are two types of triggers, external and internal. Habit forming products start by alerting users with external triggers like notification. With enough use of the product, the trigger becomes internal, which lead us to use the app again. For example, every time we face boredom, we go to Facebook/Instagram.

External Triggers: External triggers tell the user what to do next by placing information within the user’s environment. They are of 4 types:

1. Paid Triggers: Advertising, search engine marketing, and other paid channels are used to get users’ attention and prompt them to act.

2. Earned Triggers: Favourable press mentions, hot viral videos, and featured app store placements are all effectively earned triggers to gain attention. They are usually free but require some investment of time.

3. Relationship Triggers: Word of mouth and product referrals from friends and family are some of the relationship triggers that are a crucial component of technology diffusion.

4. Owned Triggers: These triggers consume a piece of real estate in the user’s environment. For example, an app icon and app notification.

Internal Triggers: These tell the user what to do next through associations stored in the user’s memory. Emotions, particularly negative ones, are powerful internal triggers and greatly influence our daily routines.

To build a habit-forming product, makers need to understand which user emotions may be tied to internal triggers and know how to leverage external triggers to drive the user to action.

Action

Triggers drive users to take action and to form a habit action should be more natural than thinking. While there are many theories about what drives human behavior, Dr. B.J. Fogg, Director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, has developed a model that serves as a relatively simple way to understand what drives our actions:

1. For any behavior to occur, a trigger must be present at the same time as the user has sufficient ability and motivation to take action

2. To increase the desired behavior, ensure a definite trigger is present; next, increase ability by making the action easier to do; finally, align with the right motivator

3. Every behavior is driven by one of the three Core Motivators: seeking pleasure and avoiding pain; seeking hope and avoiding fear; seeking social acceptance while avoiding social rejection

4. Ability is influenced by six factors of time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, and non-routineness. Ability is dependent on users and their context at that moment.

Humans rely on heuristics to make quick decisions, and designers utilize them to increase the likelihood of the desired action. Following four are described in the book:

• The Scarcity Effect: The appearance of scarcity affects the perception of value.
• The Framing Effect: The mind takes shortcuts informed by our surroundings to make quick and sometimes erroneous judgments.
• The Anchoring Effect: People often anchor to one piece of information when making a decision.
• The Endowed Progress Effect: This phenomenon increases motivation as people believe they are nearing a goal.

Variable Reward

It is the third phase of the Hook Model, and there are three types of variable rewards: the tribe, the hunt, and the self. These are defined as:

Rewards of the tribe is the search for social rewards fueled by connectedness with other people.

Rewards of the hunt is the search for material resources and information.

Rewards of the self is the search for intrinsic rewards of mastery, competence, and completion.

When our autonomy is threatened, we feel constrained by our lack of choices and often rebel against doing a new behavior. Psychologists refer to this as reactance. Maintaining a sense of user autonomy is a requirement for a repeat engagement. Experience with finite variability become increasingly predictable with the use and lose their appeal over time. Experiences that maintain user interest by sustaining variability with use exhibit infinite variability.

Variable rewards must satisfy users’ needs while leaving them wanting to reengage with the product.

Investment

The investment phase is the fourth step in the Hook Model. Unlike the action phase, which delivers immediate gratification, the investment phase concerns the anticipation of rewards in the future.

Investments in a product create preferences because of our tendency to overvalue our work, be consistent with past behaviors, and avoid cognitive dissonance.

The investment comes after the variable reward phase when users are primed to reciprocate. Investment increase the likelihood of users returning by improving the service, the more it is used. They enable the accrual of stored value in the form of content, data, followers, reputation, or skill.

Investments increase the likelihood of users passing through the Hook again by loading the next trigger to start the cycle all over again.

There is also a nice case study in the book on “The Bible” app explaining how this application is using each step of the Hook Model to entice more users. I have intentionally missed some good part of the book so that people read the book, so to find out more read the book.