Why Are Social Media Apps Addictive?
Here’s why you are hooked to your phone.
It’s Wednesday. You’ve been at work for hours & the clock just seems to have stopped moving. You take out your phone & take a look. A few minutes on Reddit or Instagram should liven up things, right? Before you know it, you’ve spent almost 40 mins going through the social apps on your phone & you realise it’s time to get back to work.
Or, due to the recent turn of events & the global pandemic situation, you’re working from home & realise no one’s watching so you continue browsing anyway.
How many times has this happened? You’re not the only one, almost everyone reading this has gone through this before.
Time really flies when you’re browsing on social media. ✈️
It’s worth noticing that even though we know we’re losing track of time, we don’t seem to mind the fact that we are less productive due to these apps & services.
You may not know it yet, but you’re addicted to your phone, to social media.
Have you ever wondered how companies such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Reddit manage to get you hooked to their apps & how a handful of companies are influencing your thoughts? Is there a certain pattern to our usage of these apps? Why do some apps succeed but others fail?
This is where the Hook Cycle comes into the picture. Described perfectly in Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, Nir Eyal, an American Author who talks about the intersection of psychology, technology & business. Having read his book about 24 months ago, I’ve come to realise the different ways social media apps have been successful at captivating our attention. The Hook Cycle perfectly explains why we are hooked to social media.
Before we begin, let’s understand what a habit is.
A habit is a routine of behaviour that we tend to perform subconsciously.
A habit can take days or weeks to form, a perfect example can be seen in the video below. It also goes on to prove that habits can be inculcated into you by anyone & anything.
Now that we know what a habit is & how anything can cause the formation of a habit inside our brains, let’s take a look at the Hook Cycle as described by Nir Eyal.
The Hook Cycle consists of 4 parts:
- The Trigger
- The Action
- The Variable Reward
- The Investment
A habit is formed when a person takes the above 4 steps again & again without a subconscious thought.
Once you understand the Hook Cycle, you will be able to recognize and control your triggers, which will help you break your habits of browsing mindlessly on social media.
Let’s take a look at each of the step in details.
The Trigger
A trigger is a push, a mechanism in your brain that makes you do something. Like in the above video, the chime of the computer became a trigger for poor Dwight.
Triggers make you do things & they are of two types, internal & external.
External Triggers are simpler, like a notification from an app that might say ‘Your friend just posted a photo’ or ‘Someone sent you a message’. External triggers are programmed to bring you into the app using nudges from the app. Notifications or emails are most effective at an early stage of a person using the app, they make the user want to open the app and see what’s going on.
It’s easier to fight the external triggers by reducing the number of notifications you’re subscribed to.
Internal Triggers, on the other hand, are much more sinister and harder to control. They target your emotions, your mindset and are responsible for creating the addictive connection between the app and your brain.
For example, when you’re feeling lonely or bored, you may instantly reach for the Facebook or Instagram app to make you feel better. Internal triggers are all about what the users want. Consider this, when you were a kid, you may have been addicted to a certain video game. Now, whenever you were bored, what is the first thing that would cross your mind.
I would not be bored if I was playing that video game. 🤔
BOOM! There’s your internal trigger. The game doesn’t call out to you & try to bring you in, YOU go to the game to resolve your feeling of boredom.
The Action
This is all about simplicity. How simple can an action taken by the user be when they’re entering into your app?
The simpler the action, the more likely the user is going to do it again & again.
For example, consider most social media apps. The action is to open the app & you’re presented with a never-ending scroll full of stuff you would like to see.
The simplest act of opening an app is guaranteed to give you memes & posts you love to see. Now imagine if you have to navigate through a few tabs before seeing the content you want to see, I can be sure you won’t be using that app or service anytime soon.
The Variable Reward
Rewards may or may not be monetary benefits, but they are of huge value to your user. The non-monetary reward may be a video that makes your user laugh their heads off! This is a temporary reward of genuine laughter, which the user may not get for the next few scrolls.
The word variable here is important.
A variable reward is a reward that you may or may not receive every time you perform an action.
A variable reward is a motivational factor for your user to keep using your app. Consider the way Google Pay started in India. They started by giving blue scratch cards to users, for transactions greater than ₹150 ($2), which gave you a chance to win between ₹0-₹1000 (~$13) instantly & orange scratch cards for transactions over ₹500 ($7), which could get you a huge ₹100,000 (~$1300) every Friday.
Pretty soon everyone was transferring money to their friends and family in expectations of getting a scratch card and winning a huge amount.
As per an 8-month-old report by TechCrunch, Google Pay has amassed 67 million monthly active users in India and has processed transactions worth $110 billion in the last year (2018–19).
Here’s a screenshot of my Google Pay rewards section.
Another interesting example of a variable reward is the pigeon experiment.
Dr B.F. Skinner, an American psychologist created a small box in which there was a small button which can be pecked by a pigeon and another opening below the button where the pigeon gets rewarded with food.
In the first set of experiments, he rewarded the pigeon every time they pecked. So basically whenever the pigeon was hungry, it used to peck the button and would be regularly rewarded with food.
Now he decided to do a small tweak. This time he rewarded the pigeons randomly both on the quantity of food rewarded and the frequency at which they were rewarded. So instead of the regular 1 peck and immediate food, this time he made it variable. So the pigeon’s reward was not immediate, and it got food at a random peck interval.
To his surprise, he noticed something unbelievable. Unlike the pigeons that received the same food at regular intervals, the pigeons that received variable rewards went crazy.
They started to continuously peck at the button compulsively. They were addicted to the variable reward and went pecking at the button without stopping!
The Investment
The small-sized ‘bits of work’ that you put into an app is your investment. This investment keeps you from moving away from the app since you are likely to lose all the ‘work’ you did here.
The simplest example would be Instagram. You have put in a lot of work over the years, uploaded perfect photos of you at the beach, your dinner your life moments. Would you delete all of it & move to a different app which is similar to Instagram?
Companies use this to create a community feeling, which also leads to economic moats. Economic moats, popularized by Warren Buffet, are distinct advantages companies have over their competitors that help them retain their market share. Your Instagram Profile with thousands of followers & hundreds of posts is an economic moat for Instagram. It makes sure you don’t move to a competitor application.
The hook cycle is achieved when you perform all the 4 steps above, you are finally hooked to the app/service & you can’t seem to let go.
Social Media Apps such as Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter etc all use the Hook Cycle to get you to use their apps mindlessly every day. They help you escape the looming reality of that meeting with your boss about your extensive phone usage in the office by taking your mind off it.
It’s a vicious cycle, you see.
But now that you’ve understood what the hook cycle is, and how companies leverage your emotions to get you addicted to their products, you can fight back by acknowledging the fact that you are addicted and need to pull away.
As a software developer, the hook cycle has given me a different perspective into creating apps & products that are addictive — in a good way.
😃
