The Business of Dopamine — How Corporations Exploit Your Brain for Profit
In 2021, attention and engagement is the name of the game. All of the applications you use and abuse on a daily basis are designed to keep you hooked, and to keep you coming back. Corporations do this by exploiting certain vulnerabilities in your brain that allows them to dictate the terms of engagement (literally) that you have with your phone or devices. This has created an international, omnipresent market for your pleasure and attention, something I like to call — The Business of Dopamine.
In simple terms, dopamine is essentially a chemical (a neurotransmitter) that is responsible for feelings of satisfaction and aversion, among other processes in your brain. This chemical is often held responsible for short bursts of pleasure experienced in your brain, and also the feelings of pleasure you get from anticipating any reward or favorable outcome. All in all, dopamine may be the single most behaviorally-influential chemical that your body produces. The problem is, companies have discovered methods to manipulate the patterns in which your brain can release dopamine, and stimulate feelings of pleasure and gratification on a micro level.
When your brain is anticipating any reward, this anticipatory state usually results in your dopamine receptors firing, giving you micro-bursts of pleasure periodically. This anticipatory state in itself is what social media platforms and game developers try to stretch out, and exploit.
Exhibit A — Dopamine in Mobile Gaming
Remember Candy Crush? If you don’t, your parents most definitely do. Candy Crush used to be one of the first games on smartphones to reach near-ubiquitous status. After its release in 2012, the game amassed nearly half a billion regular players at its peak — making it more valuable than the entire Star Wars intellectual property ($4.05 billion), when it was acquired by Activision in November 2015 (at around $5.9 billion). What Candy Crush had perfected was a formula to give its players the best bursts of satisfaction, while at the same time keeping its players salivating for more levels and more….Candy Crushing?
This formula eventually came to be adopted by most free-to-play games on the market, but was very clearly put into practice in its full glory by King in Candy Crush. Colorful, satisfying images on screen, with satisfying pops and combos, made the game intensely rewarding, while at the same time giving the player incentive to come back to the app, whenever they had time to kill.
When this stage of quasi-hypnosis is achieved, that’s when Candy Crush starts justifying its $5.9 billion price tag — with advertisements. More number of players being constantly engaged means more advertising revenue. The basis of this twisted cycle has been appropriated, and ported onto countless games and applications on the App Store and the Google Play Store.
Worried about the fact that the constant dopamine reception will give you less and less satisfaction as you progress through the game? No worries! Most free-to-play mobile games have integrated mechanisms to disallow players from spending too much time on the application, mostly through things like ‘Energy’ values, which measure time spent playing on the app, and lock you out for a while, maybe until the next day.
Yup, that’s right, as ridiculous as it may seem, these developers need to prevent you from over-playing their games, so as to keep you addicted. Once the player is ‘addicted’, or even lightly nudged into playing the game regularly within moderate time periods, he/she is stuck in the game’s exploitation ecosystem.
Similar tactics are used by social media giants, to achieve similar goals.
Validation is a basic human need, felt by us all, irrespective of who we are, how much money we make, or what we do. This emotional dependence on validation by others, is the basis on which massive social media platforms make their bread and butter. Be it the ‘Like’ button on Facebook and Instagram, or an upvote on Reddit, or a retweet, all users of social media crave these agents of validation on some level. Receiving such validation gives us a massive kick of dopamine, far more pleasurable and effective than when we pop a few candies on a screen.
This makes the perfect platform for social media giants to leverage this need for validation into more engagement, and in turn, far more advertising revenue.
Exhibit B — Social Media
What was the purpose behind bringing in new features like YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels? Attention span maximization.
Have you ever scrolled through Reddit or Instagram, and looked at a long, text-heavy post, and immediately ignored it and scrolled through? This is probably because your brain has been conditioned to view and like information that is easily consumable, immediately. This may not necessarily mean that your apps are actively making you dumber. However, it is not only true, but is also extremely evident that your apps are changing how you perceive and consume information in the first place. Reprioritizing your mental interests to prefer something that gives you a quicker hit of dopamine, instead of something longer, more accurate and more detailed — that’s exactly what gets you hooked to the app, and is exactly what makes the company more money.
Whenever we’re focusing our attention on our apps (Instagram, YouTube etc), the dopamine receptors in our brain fire every single time we see something we’re interested in. The subject of the reel or short may not even be relevant, but just the potential of the content being something interesting or rewarding is enough to get us metaphorically salivating. Exposing our attention to something that’s long, well fleshed out and detailed would eventually lead to us being bored. This is exactly why we mindlessly scroll through Instagram, or consume hundreds of Shorts in one sitting. Every individual piece of content carries with it the potential of pulling the user into a rabbit hole of easily-digestible, highly rewarding content, which is exactly what keeps users coming back for more. One can argue that this is also the reason as to why Reels and Shorts have far greater potential to go viral, than a 12 minute video essay on YouTube.
Many of you reading this probably didn’t even reach this part of the discussion. This may be so, either because the article is badly written, or (hopefully) more likely because your brain has been conditioned to seek instant gratification, with minimal investment or effort.
But what can us average users even do to break through this complex network of traps and dopamine-fueled incentives?
Many have suggested dopamine fasts, which are not definitively proven to be effective in re-wiring our brain. The only way to progress forward, may be to change our approach to social media itself. If we as the users make a conscious effort to value substance over instant gratification, the dynamics of social media, and incentives for creators may change according to such trends.
Project Tinker is a Bangalore based startup aimed at helping ideators with the tools they need to build amazing ideas. To learn more about our services and philosophy, visit project-tinker.com
