Why Social Media Is So Addictive — The Science Behind Dopamine and Reward
By: Olivia Seargeant
A bunch of “screenagers” (https://www.healthline.com/health/social-media-addiction).
Have you ever caught yourself scrolling on Tiktok or Instagram for hours on end? Has your screen time gone up significantly since you downloaded social media platforms on your phone? Have you ever tried to delete your social media apps and failed?
Well, the good news is: you’re not alone and it’s not necessarily your fault.
To understand why social media is so addictive, we must first understand two things: how our brains process and remember rewarding stimuli and the effects of reinforcement schedules on this process. Once we understand these and the effect they have on human behavior, then we will be able to explain, in theory, why social media has become so addictive for humans.
It is human nature to seek out and return to experiences that are pleasurable. This constant search for rewarding experiences is mainly due to the neurotransmitter Dopamine, which is heavily involved in reward and motivation. There are multiple reward pathways that involve the release of Dopamine, and they are all activated when predicting or experiencing a rewarding stimulus (Haynes, 2018). If you keep experiencing the same stimulus and keep feeling rewarded, your brain remembers this. The repeated strengthening of these associations is a process called long-term potentiation, which is essentially how your brain learns. Your brain’s reward centers are repeatedly activated for a specific stimulus and it remembers the rewarding feeling after the fact, leading you to seek it again in the future.
Here are 3 reward pathways Dopamine is involved in and a summary of their functions. (https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones-battle-time/)
Long-term potentiation doesn’t just happen for physically rewarding stimuli. According to Trevor Haynes, this process occurs in response to successful social interactions (2018). And what is social media, if not a place to surround yourself with successful social experiences? Your friend comments on your Instagram post, you see a picture of your favorite celebrity, you see a video that makes you laugh on Tiktok — all of these are examples of how social media could elicit a rewarding experience that your brain remembers and encodes into long-term memory. In a study done with fMRI to see brain activity when viewing certain aspects of social media, neuroscientists found that there was more activity in the striatum when people received more likes than less likes (Montag, 2023). Because of the striatum’s role in reward processing and the fact that there are many dopaminergic projections found here, it can be inferred that higher activation could be the result of long-term potentiation based on rewarding stimuli (Boyle, 2024). Activation of the striatum is a huge indicator that seeing a reward, in this case more “likes”, triggers the reward pathways that stem from the striatum and project throughout the cortex.
However, the activation of Dopamine-based reward pathways doesn’t tell the whole story of why social media is so addictive; reward prediction errors and variable reward schedules are what really pull the strings behind society’s newfound addiction. Part of learning is in prediction. When we become accustomed to stimuli, we start to predict rewards before the reward is ever actually given. Reward prediction error encoding, as defined by Wolfram Shultz, is broken into two categories: positive and negative prediction error (2016). Positive prediction error is what happens when we experience more reward than our brain predicted, increasing the amount of Dopamine released in the brain (Schultz, 2016). Conversely, negative prediction error is what happens when we receive less reward than predicted (Schultz, 2016). Both of these ideas can be translated into the main concepts behind social media. Sometimes, your picture receives a lot of likes, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you see a positive comment, sometimes a negative one comes on your feed and makes you upset. But, it’s the variability of these instances that keep us coming back to social media because it is innately human to appreciate the suspense of the unknown. Additionally, in an interview with 60 minutes, it was explained that Instagram’s algorithms sometimes withhold likes in order to deliver them in higher quantities later on (Haynes, 2018). At first, when we don’t see the amount of likes we initially expected, it is considered a negative prediction error. Then, when we get a large amount of likes we weren’t expecting, we are faced with a positive prediction error, making us more likely to come back and keep checking the post. Instagram has people that understand the impact of reward prediction error and use it to leverage positive reinforcement over their users. That way, when their users do get “likes”, they feel even better about the post because they weren’t necessarily expecting them to come.
Social media platforms capitalize on this innate experience by using variable reward schedules — giving rewards at random moments in time and at little cost to the consumer. Haynes says that if humans predict that a reward will come at any given time and it is at no cost to them, we will search for that reward habitually (2018). An example of this phenomenon happens frequently to Facebook users. People who have used Facebook for a while and have multiple connections expect to be rewarded because of the predictability and the accessibility of the app (Haynes, 2018). This is a perfect example of a variable reward schedule because people don’t necessarily know that they will be rewarded when they open Facebook, but what’s the harm in taking five seconds out of their day to check their phone and find out? It is both the convenience factor and the unpredictability of the situation that keeps people interested. Furthermore, in an article talking with two psychiatrists out of Stanford, it was mentioned that people don’t have social media because of the reward they get from a like on their picture, they have it for the reward they get during the anticipatory period before the “likes” have yet to come (Qiu, 2021). This is why social media is so dangerous. People will always keep coming back because we want to experience this waiting period, because the reward is that much better.
Social media addicts and pathological gamblers have a lot in common. Gamblers don’t know on any given day that they are going to hit it big. Some days, they might lose more than they thought they ever would. Social media users don’t know what will happen when they open an app. They could see hundreds of likes and comments they weren’t expecting, or they could see nothing at all. This unknown and unpredictable nature produces more Dopamine than most physically rewarding stimuli ever would. This is why we keep coming back to social media: because our brain encodes the positive social experiences as more rewarding and easier to access than other experiences would be. When you take that into account, it’s no wonder why we are so susceptible to being addicted to social media. It is an accessible way to hit it big, for free, and our brains can’t get enough. So, the next time you give yourself a hard time for not being able to quit social media, remember that our brains are programmed to experience reward a certain way and that there are people who are employed by social media platforms to use this against us.
References
Boyle, M. (2024). Inner Zombie [Powerpoint Slides]. Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego. https://canvas.ucsd.edu/courses/53264/assignments/738177?module_item_id=2085007
Cherney, K. (2020). What is Social Media Addiction? [Photograph]. Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/health/social-media-addiction
Haynes, T. (2018, May 1). Dopamine, smartphones & you: A battle for your time. [Photograph]. https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones-battle-time/
Haynes, T. (2018, May 1). Dopamine, smartphones & you: A battle for your time. Science in the News; Harvard University. https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones-battle-time/
Montag, C., Marciano, L., Schulz, P. J., & Becker, B. (2023). Unlocking the brain secrets of social media through neuroscience. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2023.09.005
Qiu, T. (2021, September 14). A Psychiatrist’s Perspective on Social Media Algorithms and Mental Health. Stanford HAI; Stanford University. https://hai.stanford.edu/news/psychiatrists-perspective-social-media-algorithms-and-mental-health
Schultz, W. (2016). Dopamine reward prediction error coding. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 18(1), 23–32. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4826767/
