The Trick App Designers Use to Make You Check Your Phone More
What pigeons and slot machines can teach us about our psychological vulnerabilities and why this should be part of the Core Curriculum for the 21st Century.
Hello Bar-Setters!
You may have heard that smartphones are designed to replicate the addictive qualities of slot machines…
… or that slot machines earn more money each year than the movie industry, professional baseball, and theme parks combined.
But most of us hear this and think it doesn’t apply to us. We don’t appreciate just how addictive machine gambling is and, by default, how vulnerable we are to the machine gambling world’s tricks. It’s a world we’d do well to explore, given that we all subject ourselves to it every day.
In a brilliant chapter from The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford offers us a fantastic look at the power of slot machines:
It is not uncommon for heavy users to stand at a machine for eight or even twelve hours at a stretch, developing blood clots and other medical issues. Paramedics in Las Vegas dread getting calls from casinos, which usually turn out to be heart attacks. The problem is that when someone collapses, the other gamblers won’t get out of the way to let the paramedics do their job; they won’t leave their machines. Deafening fire alarms are similarly ignored; there have been incidents where rising flood waters didn’t dislodge them. The gamblers are so absorbed that they become oblivious of their surroundings.
Schüll interviews one woman who makes sure to wear dark clothing when she goes to gamble, so it won’t show when she urinates on herself. Once a gambler has taken possession of a machine, the thought of leaving it is intolerable, and so the urine-and-feces issue turns out to be a fairly common part of the machine gambling experience.
All of us, now, have a slot machine in our pockets—one that learns from our every swipe, click, and pause. Luckily, we’re able to take it with us when we need to use the bathroom.
An Honest Look at My Own Vulnerabilities
I’ve spent the past decade obsessing on how to help people overcome the manipulations of supernormal technologies and, yet, my smartphone still has its way with me.
On many occasions, I’ve used Instagram to promote my work, but I’ve found it hard to limit my use to just that. I always find myself checking back for likes and falling into the endless scroll. Inevitably, I decide it is best that I delete the app again.
Even when I get rid of my social media apps, I still find myself checking my phone at every glimmer of free mental space—at every bathroom break and moment of transition. Eager for something novel in my inbox, I’ll begin checking email like it is social media.
One time I took email off my phone. I started checking my podcasts app and going to the Safari internet browser to search “Chicago Bears news,” or to scroll through book reviews. It was only when I disabled Safari that I stopped the habitual phone checking.
But, of course, that was very inconvenient.
The Principle Behind it All
The compulsive feeling I’ve described (and which drives machine gambling) comes from a phenomenon called Intermittent Variable Rewards, which is nearly impossible to overcome. As Michael Easter, author of Scarcity Brain, explains, this is part of the bio-evolutionary scarcity loop that has helped us and other animals to survive. Easter cites experiments conducted by Thomas Zentall, where Zentall gives pigeons two different games:
In the first game, the pigeons hit a lever, and every other time they hit the lever, they get, say, 15 pellets of food. In game two, they hit the lever and they get food every fifth peck, but it’s random. So it could be like peck, food, peck, peck, peck… it’s a random rewards game just like a slot machine.
… what ends up happening is when you offer pigeons these two games, the pigeons all choose the gambling game. Like 97% (96.9%) of pigeons choose the gambling game even though that game ends up getting them far less food, like half as much food. And you see this in all different animal species.
Now, the reason for this likely tracks back to how we used to have to find food… if you think of us as hunter-gatherers and it’s a million years ago and we need food or else we’re going to starve, but the thing is we don’t know where the food is. Right? So we’re going to go to point A to look for it. Oh, it’s not there…. We’ll go to point B to look for it, it’s not there. Now we’re gonna go to point C, not there. Oh man, we’re gonna go to point D. Jackpot, ton of food. So this is effectively a random rewards game that kept us alive in the past…. Our brain has this natural attraction because if it didn’t, we would have been not quite as good at persisting in these long, crazy, hard hunts and sessions of gathering that kept us alive….
Zentall predictably turned pigeons into compulsive gamblers by subjecting them to intermittent variable rewards. Like it or not, Silicon Valley does the same to most of us.
This is an excerpt from a larger article that should be ready by next week. Since this important section doesn’t come until near the end, I’ve decided to feature it today. I’d file this topic under: Core Curriculum for living in the modern world.
Thank you for reading and sharing with anyone who you think would find this interesting!
Carry the fire!
Shane