The Psychology Behind the Urge to Check Your Phone
What behavioral principle stands at the core of all social media platforms and how to break this loop?
Do you think your smartphone takes a lot of your attention? I think it does. Recent surveys show that on average, American adults open their phones 58 times a day. That’s around five times per hour.
I don’t know if that sounds like a lot to you, but I guess we all would agree that maintaining focus with that amount of interruptions is close to a superpower.
I don’t think social media is inherently bad. I also think that quitting social media for good is neither realistic nor necessary. But I have to admit that the work gets done much slower when these platforms are available within an arm’s reach.
Not so long ago, I started seeing a correlation between the time spent on social media and my overall productivity levels. And the correlation was dramatic.
Every single workday without social media turned out 2 to 4 times more productive than otherwise 100% of the time.
But even though I know that social media may potentially mess me up, I keep checking Facebook throughout the day, most days. Why?
Because it was designed that way
Quoting a former founding president of Facebook, Sean Parker, “It’s a social-validation feedback loop […] exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
What makes social media so addictive? Lots of things. It’s an addiction machine that uses every trick from the book to make people go back again, and again, and again. But at the core of it are certain tendencies of animal behavior discovered at the beginning of the 20th century.
The two gentlemen who can answer this question are E. L. Thorndike and B. F. Skinner. Both psychologists developed their own complementing theories on how to condition behaviors based on their animal studies.
Thorndike’s Law of Effect
Edward Thorndike conducted a classic experiment in which he would put a hungry can in a puzzle box to test how long it would take the animal to get out and reach the food.
With every trial, the cats needed less and less time to get out of the box. Thorndike referred to this reinforcement of latch opening as documenting the Law of Effect:
“Any behavior that is followed by pleasant consequences is likely to be repeated, and any behavior followed by unpleasant consequences is likely to be stopped.”
And so Thorndike’s findings set the stage for further studies, one of which was Skinner’s operant conditioning.
Skinner’s operant conditioning
Decades later, Skinner picked up from where Thorndike left and went even further. He also conducted experiments placing animals in an upgraded puzzle box, but this time, he would identify three types of responses, or operant, that can follow behavior.
In one of these instances, Skinner studied the mechanism behind positive reinforcement by placing a hungry rat in the so-called “Skinner box”. The box had a lever on the side. As the animal moved around the box, it would accidentally press the lever. Immediately after, food would drop into a container next to the lever.
Soon enough, the rat would figure out a causal link and keep pressing.
The fact that the rat would get the food every time it pressed the lever ensured that it would repeat the action again and again. But it doesn’t stop there.
In further experiments, it was discovered that different reinforcement patterns had different effects on how fast the rat would learn and how long the behavior would persist.
The rat was placed in the box and it would perform its lever pressing action but in line with various ways of delivering reinforcement:
- The food would drop into a container every time the rat would press the lever (continuous reinforcement);
- The food would drop into a container only after it pressed the lever five times or every 15 minutes (fixed ratio/ fixed interval reinforcement);
- The food would drop into a container after an unpredictable number of presses/ unpredictable amounts of time (variable-ratio/ variable interval reinforcement).
And here’s what Skinner found.
“The behavior that would persist for the longest time without propping was variable type reinforcement.”
The rats that would get food on every press or every fifth press would stop doing it pretty soon after discovering that the pattern didn’t work. Yet, the rats that did not have a predictable pattern in the first place would keep pushing for much longer because they believed they would eventually get the food.
Human behavior has similar tendencies
The way we learn behavior is pretty much the same as the way the rats learned to press a lever. And the variable reward principle stands at the core of the most popular social media platforms.
You constantly check social media feed because you know that you will see something interesting, but you don’t know exactly when you will see it. So you kind of … keep pressing the lever.
To break the loop, you’ve got to add some consciousness in the mix. Every time you’re about to unlock your phone, ask yourself why you do it. And if there’s no legitimate reason for that, just put it back.
It might also be helpful to remove the cue completely. You can put your phone away while at work, disable social media apps, or even do digital detox every weekend or so. Whatever works. I combine them all.
So that’s it, operant conditioning and variable reward. These are the things that nudge us into checking our phones. And now that you’re aware of this “vulnerability”, you have the power to use this knowledge to your advantage.
