You’re Involved In The Biggest Social Experiment Ever
When was the last time you visited Twitter or Facebook? In the last five minutes, maybe. How long have you gone without using your phone? Why are we so obsessed with them? We can’t seem to go a single day without checking our phones. It’s because they are designed to be addictive.
Smartphones have been developed over the past decade to steal your time, and to keep you feeling like you’re missing out. It’s all been achieved through creative (and morally questionable) design. How did we get to this point and what are the consequences of addictive technology?
B.F. Skinner and His Tapping Pigeons
It began with B.F. Skinner. An American psychologist who was fascinated with social engineering. He conducted an experiment involving a Skinner Box, in which he would place a pigeon inside a box with a disc. Every time the pigeon tapped the disc it would be rewarded with a pellet.
Once the pigeon learned it would receive a reward upon tapping the disc, Skinner changed the rules and rewarded the pigeon randomly when it tapped the disc. Skinner learnt that if you gave rewards randomly after performing the action, the pigeons would tap the disc far more often compared to when it was rewarded every time it tapped. The un-predictive nature encouraged the pigeons to tap the disc more.
This revelation formed the foundation for the design of modern day social media. This uncertainty forms the basis for how we as humans react to app notifications. We’ve become the tapping pigeons. Simply put, we never know how many social affirmations await us, so we tap the apps more often to see if we will be rewarded.
“We’re living inside of two billion Truman Shows.” — Tristan Harris, Time Well Spent
Today’s Technology
Since Skinner’s experiments, smartphones have evolved over the past decade to demand our attention. The ‘like’ button on Facebook is habit forming because sometimes, not every time, there will be ‘like’ notifications waiting for you. Through regular use of the app, you learn ‘likes’ make you feel good, make you feel valued.
We as humans crave attention, it’s hard-wired into us. When we see someone has ‘liked’ something we’ve posted, it makes us feel validated. That good feeling is dopamine being released into your system. This isn’t by accident, this has been designed and refined over the years to release the strongest hit possible with the technology available. Your body is telling you “whatever you just did, felt good — so you should do it again.”
The release of Dopamine is a clinical ritual to a cycle of reward and motivation. In order to keep that hit strong, social media platforms sometimes deny us the rewards to make us crave it even more. It’s the unpredictability that keeps us coming back, and with no guarantees we receive a stronger hit when we are rewarded. If we knew what notifications were coming through, we wouldn’t be so hooked. It’s this cycle that keeps us addicted.
But it’s not just the notification banners you receive on your phone’s lock screen. These triggers are everywhere and designers have been reviewing, refining, and experimenting multiple triggers on us to keep that craving alive.
The Triggers
On average, how many notifications did you receive on your phone in the past hour? Ask yourself; how many of those notifications have real value to you?
App designers are aware the power feedback has on a user. It’s been exploited to no-end to where our attention is now hijacked. The moment we hear a notification alert, we immediately stop what we were doing and pay attention to it. Often we aren’t consciously aware of it, it’s what we’re hard-wired to do.
The sound and vibration of a new notification has been specifically designed to draw your attention. It utilises you sense of sight, hearing, and touch to draw you in. Addictive apps then utilise this attention to keep you coming back to their platform through their various rewards.
Think about the colour of the red notification badge. That shade of red has been specifically chosen to trigger a subconscious reaction from you. You can’t help it, your brain responds to the colour red with a sense of urgency and importance.
We like warm colours, they please us. Designers know which colours trigger certain emotions. Can you find an app on your phone that has an unappealing colour?
“We’ve figured out how to change human behaviour with apps.” — Ramsay Brown, Boundless Mind
The Addictive Tendencies
These triggers and techniques I’ve been listing share many similarities to that of slot machines. They are three times more addicting than other forms of gambling precisely because of their psychological techniques. The bright colours, pleasurable noises, and movement are all designed to draw your attention and entice you.
These colours and lights are known as ‘The Juice’ by casinos. When you pair these sounds, colours and animations with rewards that make you feel good, you want to make risky decisions.
Some apps replicate the pull lever of a slot machine with the pull down to refresh function. Think about when you pull-down to refresh your Twitter feed—that was a conscious design feature. Even though the platform has lazy loading to keep content appearing as you scroll, they feature the pull to refresh design feature to create an illusion of control.
An experiment was conducted by Nancy Cheever at The University of California, within their Social and Behavioural Sciences division. They measured a person’s stress levels to having their smartphone go off without being able to access it while trying to concentrate on an educational video. The results showed a spike in stress levels every time the phone made a text message sound.
This happens every time your phone alerts you, you feel anxious without being consciously aware of it. Your stress levels increase and your anxiety rockets.
“It’s exactly the kind of thing a hacker, like myself, would come up with because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” — Sean Parker, Former President of Facebook
Bottomless Vortex
When scrolling through your Twitter homepage, you experience infinite scrolling. Unlike consciously navigating to a new page (pagination), infinite scrolling continuously loads new material as you scroll. As you scroll, you are conducting the same continuous motion that becomes habit forming. It becomes a rhythm that you unconsciously continue to do. More tweets are loaded as you scroll down, giving you more content to read, to in turn keep you scrolling. But do we feel more satisfied with the content we’re reading if it’s seemingly never ending?
We require visual cues to know when we’ve had enough. This mirrors the 2005 refilling bowl study. Two groups of people were given a bowl of soup to eat. The first group ate from a bowl that was noticeably refilled by a server. While the other group ate from a self refilling bowl unknown to the user. The individuals that ate from the self refilling bowl ate 73% more soup than the other group, yet they felt no more satisfied.
These refilling principles are everywhere. Think about video autoplay on Netflix and YouTube. These features are automatically enabled to keep you engaged on their sites and before you realise it, you’ve watched an entire TV series. These functions take control away from you, making it harder to stop. If you aren’t given ‘stopping cues’, you will continue to scroll while still feeling unfulfilled.
The New Normal
One third (over two billion) of the world’s population have signed up with Facebook. Facebook, and other social media platforms, have refined their sites to suck as much time out of you as possible, and sell your attention to advertisers. You are meant to feel unfulfilled when you close the app, you are supposed to want to revisit.
This is the new normal for us; we check our phones multiple times a day, craving the rewards these apps give us.
Facebook has recently been in the news with Cambridge Analytica and sharing of people’s data without their knowledge. Since the negative press, Facebook launched an extensive apology marketing campaign to repair their brand, claiming they are ‘changing Facebook for the better’ while failing to explain how they plan to do this.
Facebook know you will still use their platform, they had to make sure their brand was still reputable. As Sean Parker, the Former President of Facebook, once said; “It’s exactly the kind of thing a hacker, like myself, would come up with because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. I think the inventors, creators, it’s me, it’s Mark, it’s Kevin sister on Instagram, it’s all of these people understood this, consciously, and we did it anyway.” [2]
Technology is extremely powerful, it changed the rules of communicating, shopping, interacting, connecting and living within the span of ten years. Yet these capabilities have evolved to where they are being exploited for profit, not for improvement.
“It literally changes your relationship with society [and] with each other. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” — Sean Parker, Former President of Facebook
Are You Addicted?
As Tristan Harris, Founder of Time Well Spent, put it; “We’re living inside of two billion Truman Shows. Where you wake up and everything is coordinated just for you and you don’t even realise it.” [3]
Harris is part of the Center for Humane Technology. An organisation raising awareness on the impact certain feedbacks have on us. They have even provided some tips on how to minimise the amount of feedback a device gives. This tips are intended to reduce the addictive tendencies smartphones have over you.
I personally adopted a number of their ideas, in particular disabling all notifications aside from human interactions and my phone has been far less distracting as a result. I’ve updated my home screen to only show functional apps, such as my calendar or notes app. Any apps where I can get lost spending hours on are hidden from my view and I have to find them through the search function. This makes my choice to visit social media a conscious one.
All apps are racing for your attention, and they are very efficient at it. Their focus is on stealing your time. Review how much time you spend with your phone. Which apps consume most of your time? Ask you self whether they deserve it?
Credits
Cover photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels
[1] Facebook Here Together (UK) — video by Facebook
[2] Sean Parker — Facebook Exploits Human Vulnerability (We Are Dopamine Addicts) — video by Ewafa
