Have you ever felt like you were addicted to being online checking the notifications, chatting or watching funny YouTube videos? Well, in fact that is perfectly normal, in part, because of dopamine.
What is dopamine? And how does it affect the way we behave?
Dopamine is a neurochemical created in various parts of the brain and it is critical in all sorts of brain functions, including thinking, moving, sleeping, mood, attention, motivation, seeking and reward. Dopamine causes you to want, desire, seek out, and search. Therefore, when a notification shows up you get a great spike in these neuro transmitters. This gives us an ‘Instant gratification’ which, immediately, raises satisfaction and happiness, available at the click of a button.
It gives users a false sense of fulfilment so that the feeling of that pleasure soon disappears. People enjoy the rush of their phones vibrating with a new notification because it’s unpredictable; you don’t know exactly when they will, or who they will be from and that is why you get hyped.
As time goes by, it becomes harder and harder to stop looking at email, stop texting or stop checking your phone to see if you have a new notification, and that is why this behaviour is so addictive.
Is social media similar to a drug?
It seems that spending too much time checking Facebook and other digital communities, receiving likes and comments, can have a similar impact on a person’s cognitive stability as doing drugs, such as cocaine.
“Facebook likes and comments activate similar parts of the brain as opioids, where each like or positive comment activates the reward system and the brain releases dopamine”, said Dr. Tara Emrani, a psychologist at NYU Langone Health. “So, arguably, the feelings/experiences of the brain, as a result of Facebook likes or comments, is similar to those resulting from cocaine, even though less intense”. As worrying as this sounds, research has shown that giving a kid a smartphone or a tablet is the equivalent to handing them “a gram of coke.”
Does social media, deliberately, use the power of dopamine to addict users?
Absolutely, take the example of Instagram’s implementation of a variable-ratio reward schedule (in which a response is reinforced after a certain number of responses). Instagram’s notification algorithms will sometimes withhold “likes” on your photos to deliver them in larger numbers. Thus, when you make your post, you may be disappointed to find less responses than you expected, only to receive them in a larger bunch later on, and consequently get higher amounts of dopamine.
The case of Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg reportedly recalled how he came up with the idea for Facebook after seeing a dopamine-addicted lab rat starve to death. “I remember watching that frail, malnourished creature lie on its deathbed, actively avoiding food in favour of a shot of stimulants straight to the brain—it was such an epiphany for me,” said Zuckerberg, adding that experiments in which rats refused to eat, drink, or sleep because they would rather expire than stop feeling pleasure inspired him to start Facebook at the age of 18 at Harvard University. “That moment when I saw rodents obsessively pressing a button for dopamine no matter how much researchers tried to wean them off it, I knew we had just hit on something amazing. Looking back, I’m proud to say that drug-addled corpse lying on the bottom of its cage launched the largest social network in the world.”
In fact, two former Facebook executives have recently criticized the company for the tactics it uses to keep people addicted. They argued that the social network exploits users by administering a “dopamine hit” in the form of Comments or Likes.
To conclude, it is extremely important to know how to use social media and technology, in general, otherwise it is surprisingly easy to get into a vicious cycle where the “digital heroin” will eventually consume your real life.
In the YouTube video below, Simon Sinek, a motivational speaker and marketing consultant, identifies social media as having heavily addictive consequences, talking about the effect of dopamine in our brains. Check it out!
Sources:
Mind & Technology 