How technology hacked psychology so we can’t put down our cell phones

You’ve spent two hours, three, in an impossible position looking at your cell phone in the middle of a kind of trance. A notification made you unlock it and after jumping from one application to another for a few minutes, you fell into the black hole of the scroll infinite. You could hardly say what you have seen or if you have enjoyed any of the dozens of videos that have passed you by. What perverse mechanism has been capable of hijack your attention for hours?

The first thing you have to know is that not even rats escape this spell. In the 1940s, a psychologist named BF Skinner tried to find out how our brain’s reward system works by studying the reactions of laboratory rats with an experiment: the animals learned that if they pressed a lever, they got food. Easy, but it gets complicated.

The most interesting part of the experiment, known as skinner boxand the one that can most be compared to the time drain that social networks are is the following part: Skinner stopped rewarding the rats every time they pressed the lever and started giving them food sometimes and sometimes not. Was this enough to discourage them? Far from it: they had tried the benefits of intermittent reinforcement.

The logic of intermittent reinforcement

For rats, the possibility of food was enough, just as you have only received interesting notifications a few times out of the many times you look at your cell phone, or only one of the publications you have compulsively consumed has satisfied your curiosity. Intermittent reinforcement is a psychological pattern that is characterized because rewards are given unpredictably, so that it creates a hook and strong attachment.

“The mechanisms behind social networks are the same as those of slot machines,” David Ezpeleta, neurologist and vice president of the Spanish Society of Neurology, explains to Xataka.

He intermittent booster It is also a vice of toxic human relationships, where affection, attention, and validation are marketed. In the case at hand, both the rats with the food and you with the likes, DMsor finding something you want to buy, get a hit of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is released in pleasure-related situations, when the random reward finally appears.

“They are short-duration, high-intensity stimuli with the possibility of reward. For every ten times we look at the networks, perhaps we only receive a reward on one. And that possibility is more addictive than a sure reward ten times,” he points out.

“Technologies are capable of doing anything to keep you reading headlines, clicking links, adding favorites, commenting posts, retweeting articles, looking for the perfect GIF to answer a hater“, writes Marta Peirano in The enemy knows the system (Debate). The text is from 2019, and although some behaviors may have changed since then (who answers with GIFs anymore?) and neither TikTok nor the reels still dominated our attention, the mechanisms that go behind our hitch They are the same since Skinner.

There are more and more people who have a profile on some platform and use them for more activities. They are a source of socialization, entertainment and information: 49% of Spaniards between 16 and 30 years old say inform of what happens through social networks, especially Instagram, according to the latest Eurobarometer youth survey.

Don’t leave the platform

It is precisely this platform that has grown the most in Spain in the last year, followed by Tik Tok. The oldest ones like X (Twitter) and Facebook are in decline although the latter is still the second most used (after Instagram), according to a report from the CNMC.

Algorithms are the heart of this design. They are a set of hypercomplex, changing and opaque mathematical operations that decide what you see. They are not neutral or “objective”: they are machine learning systems that select and prioritize content that maximizes user interaction. That is, the algorithm observes what you devote the most attention to, and repeats that pattern to show you more of the same.

Social media algorithms have the ability to modify ideas, behavior patterns and, in some cases, contribute to the radicalization of thought, the polarization and to conflict: visceral reactions (anger, fear, indignation) generate more clicks, shares and comments than other types of content.

A study published in the journal Science shows that small changes in what is prioritized in a feed can accelerate feelings of political polarization in a very short time, evidencing how the technology behind the algorithm not only organizes content, but also shapes attitudes and emotions.

And what purpose does your anger serve them? Regardless of whether or not there is a black hand behind it that wants to direct our attention and our time to a certain focus, the main function of this machinery is to keep you within the current application. Don’t feel the need to consult a website, specialists or an encyclopedia: attention time is the economic value that is sold to advertisers.

Can we talk about addiction?

Another phenomenon that greatly encourages time to slip away between applications is the so-called Fear of Missing Out (FoMO), whereby it seems that if we do not see everything that happens we feel that we are not part of the conversation, generating problems such as anxiety and giving rise to a continuous and compulsive connection, driving dependence on device platforms.

But can we talk about addiction to social networks? For Ezpeleta, “you can talk about addiction when you need the stimulus and, when you withdraw it, anxiety appears.” And at least two important elements are needed: opportunity and habituation.

Each of these apps that fight for your time have something in common: they are on the same device, one that you use to wake up and that is the last thing you look at before going to sleep. For many people it is also a work tool, which is why it has become an appendage of the body, one that cannot be blamed in many cases. The constant opportunity to keep an eye on it, to review it, to escape with this tool is a condition that paves the way to addiction, as Ezpeleta explains.

Furthermore, the brain becomes accustomed to receiving constant signals and “develops tolerance and increasingly needs more and more powerful stimuli.” This reduces tolerance for waiting and boredom.

This has direct consequences about attentionespecially in adolescents. “When the brain gets used to quick, fragmented rewards, watching a two-hour movie, reading a book, or even facing a one-page text becomes unbearable,” says Ezpeleta.

In addition, there is a lot of scientific literature that links the use of social networks with mental health problems such as depression. A published study in JAMA showed that reducing social media consumption for a week reduced symptoms of depression by 24.8%in anxiety 16.1% and sleep problems 14.5%.

A report from the ANAR Foundation (Help for Children and Adolescents at Risk), which has followed the mental health of young people for years, detects that in a decade it has suffered by 3,000%. “They point to social networks as a key factor, although not exclusive, within a context of profound sociocultural changes,” says the neurologist.

They also directly affect intelligence. Since the 1930s, it has been found that each generation has scored higher in IQ than the previous one, a phenomenon called Flynn effect, but a study published in the journal Intelligence suggests that this trend has stopped and even reversed in the United States, which demonstrates lower performance in verbal, matrix reasoning, and mathematical skills.

One way to curb the negative externalities of social networks is to use them consciously about what they are: a small skinner box which works exactly as planned.

Image | camilo jimenez

In Xataka | TikTok wants us to disconnect from TikTok. Without leaving TikTok

In Xataka | “11 signs that you have ADHD and you don’t know it”: more and more people are self-diagnosing mental health problems

In Xataka | “AI psychosis” does not exist, it is just another invented diagnostic label: one that is here to stay

In Xataka | Ed Sheeran lives without a mobile phone. The reason is simple: disconnecting is increasingly a privilege of billionaires