Skip to main content

The Tyranny of the Endless Scroll

People are fond of talking about social media use as an "addiction," and even describe the process of weaning ourselves off using it as "withdrawal." Research does suggest that social media use can produce a dopamine release in the brain's reward centers, and that it is particularly appealing for people (a) who have a generally less organized approach to life [low "conscientiousness" personality trait], and/or (b) have higher than normal levels of narcissism. Extroverts and introverts can both be heavy social media users, although for different reasons: Extroverts do it to enhance their self-perception or their own reputation, while introverts do it to compensate for difficulty connecting with people in other ways. 

Excessive social media use does have some documented negative effects, particularly for adolescents in terms of sleep deprivation, impaired academic performance, and increased suicidal ideation or behavior. High levels of social media use have also been implicated in the development of eating disorders among adolescent girls. However, social media also has some demonstrated positive effects, including the creation or maintenance of social connections, provision of information (particularly about health), and development of a sense of community. Interestingly, adolescents sometimes identify social media as a clear risk factor for others, but not specifically for themselves or their friend groups! 

Other negative effects of social media use have to do with the substitution of online relationships for real ones. If you have a teenager in your household, you might be accustomed to saying their name multiple times before you get an acknowledgement; if you complain about this state of affairs, you are likely to hear the counter-argument "but I was on my phone!" Adults also have difficulty unplugging from work at the end of the day, because email, Slack or Teams messages, texts, and other inputs keep on coming via our smartphones or watch notifications. Once engaged with a social media platform, the small dopamine bursts keep you engaged, perhaps for longer than you originally intended. Social media apps are also specifically designed to pull you back in with mechanisms like notification alerts, or gamification strategies that increase your engagement and make using the apps feel rewarding. But when social media serve up bad news, increased time spent on these platforms translates to worse mental health overall. The combination of ongoing use with negative consequences is what makes the behavior seem "addictive" to many people. 

To counteract social media's negative effects, some experts have recommended going on a "dopamine detox" by cutting off your social media use for a certain period of time. The evidence unfortunately is not supportive of that approach. One problem is that removing social media from your life doesn't actually decrease dopamine levels in your brain, even though using social media can provide a brief dopamine burst. The second problem with the "detox" approach is that people often return to exactly the same pattern of "addictive" use once their pre-set time away from social media has ended.

A better strategy to mitigate the negative effects of social media is to re-evaluate your relationship with the apps and your method of using them. A simple fix if you notice that you are distracted by social media checking or fear of missing out (FOMO) is to turn off notifications for those apps in your phone's preferences section. If you notice that you spend more time on an app than you intended, you can set a timer that reminds you of when you intended to stop. You can also manage preferences to control which types of posts you see, from which people, to avoid content that upsets or annoys you. All of these steps take a certain level of initial effort and self-awareness, but they can save your limited attentional resources over the long term. Limited social media use appears to be a more effective strategy for improving mental health than binge-and-bust cycles with intermittent avoidance of social media use.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chatbot Changes and Challenges in 2023

I wrote last summer  about artificial intelligence tools that are increasingly able to approximate human speech in free-form conversations. These tools then burst onto the public stage with the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT  at the end of November last year. As you probably know by now, the acronym "GPT" stands for "generative pre-trained transformer," which highlights the three most important aspects of this technology: (1) it generates novel responses that aren't based on an a specific algorithm or decision rule, but instead rely on pattern recognition; (2) it has been pre-trained  by consuming massive amounts of writing from the Internet -- much more than a human could read in several lifetimes; and (3) it transforms  those prior writing samples using a trial-and-error process that predicts the next phrase in a sequence until it has come up with a response that seems intelligible to humans. ChatGPT works much like the auto-complete feature in your email or ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Our Reactions to Robots Tell Us Something About Ourselves

Robot football players at a Valparaiso University College of Engineering event I have been thinking lately about robots, which creates an interesting asymmetry: They almost certainly have not been thinking about me. Nevertheless, I find that I often respond  to robots as though they have thoughts about me, or about their own personal goals, or about the world in which they exist. That tendency suggests an interesting aspect of human psychology, connected to our social minds . We are hard-wired to care what other people think about us, and we very easily extend that concern to robots. Here's a recent article about how the language-learning app Duolingo, which features an owl-shaped avatar (a kind of robot), uses "emotional blackmail" to keep application users engaged:  https://uxdesign.cc/20-days-of-emotional-blackmail-from-duolingo-4f566523e3c5  This bird-shaped bit of code tells users things like "you're scaring me!" and "I miss you" if they haven...
Post a Comment
Read more

Inside the Intuitive Mind: Social Support Can Facilitate or Inhibit Behavior Change

  This week I'm looking at another concrete tool in the behavior-change armamentarium, social support . I have written previously about the Narrative mind's strong focus on social cues , and indeed perhaps the Narrative system evolved specifically to help us coordinate our behavior with groups of other humans. As a behavior-change strategy, social support can be used in several different ways. Instrumental Social Support . The most basic form of social support is instrumental, the type of help that a neighbor gives in loaning you a tool or that a friend provides in bringing you a meal. This type of concrete support can be helpful for diet change -- e.g., here are some fresh vegetables from my garden -- or exercise -- e.g., you can borrow my tent for your camping trip. Although instrumental support is particularly powerful because someone is actually doing something for you or giving you resources that you don't have, it is also usually short-term (I probably don't want...
Post a Comment
Read more