Day 003. Breaking the Scroll: 91 Days Off Social Media & Rediscovering Life IRL

A special edition. Hacking Human Behaviour: The Psychology Behind App Addiction and Pavlov's Legacy in Modern App Design.

Day 003 of a special series this October.

Join in on the daily chronicles of a millennial on a social media detox; that’s me! I’ll publish what I observe over the next month, Monday through Friday, with no promises on what each day will bring.

This time, this series is my mini-revolt against the attention-grabbing, time-sucking digital overlords. It’s my little way of reclaiming the sliver of independence over my time, headspace, and attention by escaping the noise to reconnect with my thoughts, independence, and creativity.

It has been a cherished annual ritual since 2016, but this time, I’m committing to 91 days off Instagram. If your inboxes feel under siege, you can tweak your settings here. Otherwise, stay tuned—for a little while—to see what I’ll create.

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Ivan Pavlov’s classical conditioning theory,  awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology in 1904, has significantly influenced psychology, and surprisingly, modern app design.

Pavlov’s famous experiment with dogs showed how animals could be conditioned to associate a neutral stimulus (the sound of a metronome) with a physiological response—salivating and food. Eventually, the dogs salivated at the cue of the sound alone. Mesmerising!

This groundbreaking study revealed the power of conditioning in animals and laid the foundation for further research into human behaviour and the nervous system.

Why Pavlov’s Experiment Matters in App Design

Today, app designers and engineers apply Pavlov’s principles to extend user engagement and encourage longer app usage.

The objective is to answer crucial questions of consumer behaviour such as: How can we retain users? How can we extend user engagement? How can we keep people coming back? 

The most effective solutions lie in Pavlov’s ideas of triggering and conditioning through expected rewards: 

1. Trigger: Notifications (visual, auditory, or physical) serve as the conditioned stimulus.

2. Action: Opening and using the app is the desired behaviour. 

3. Reward: Social validation, new content, and dopamine hits act as the unconditioned stimulus.

These principles mirror Pavlov’s experiment: users learn to expect positive rewards from using apps like Instagram, just as the dogs anticipated food after hearing the metronome. 

Thanks @DavideBaraldi, Pexels.

Three Areas of App Design Borrowed from Pavlov’s Findings

1. Notification Design

   • Distinctive Sounds: Unique notification sounds prompts reflexive app-checking.

   • Visual Cues: Bright colours and eye-catching icons draw attention.

2. Building Associations

   • Feedback Mechanisms: Immediate responses reinforce desired actions.

   • Positive Reinforcement: Likes, comments, and achievements (like the infamous blue tick) create pleasurable associations.

3. Habit Formation

   • Repeated Pairing: Consistently pairing positive experiences (i.e. likes, comments, engagement, social approval, and validation) with the desired behaviour of checking the app strengthens conditioning.

   • Continuous Reinforcement: Regular positive rewards maintains expectations and the conditioned behaviour. Also enticing engagement, by the anticipation of the positive rewards.  

Social media apps are experts at serving engaging content, leveraging algorithms to fuel lasting habit formation. Even the act of refreshing a scroll, for example, introduces a layer of additional conditioning.

The slight delay before new content acts as a powerful visual cue. During this brief pause, the brain anticipates a reward, leading to a gradual build-up of dopamine. Once the new content is loaded, dopamine is released, reinforcing the association between app use and gratification.

This delay creates a moment of heightened anticipation, which amplifies the dopamine response when the reward (the content) arrives. This is further reinforced by positive associations like social validation, relevance, and likes, which, over time, deepen the conditioning that compels us to scroll for longer and return more often.

You can start to understand why Instagram is so addictive.

The Brilliance of Innovation

For all my warnings, I can’t help but admire the ingenuity of these innovators. It’s remarkable how human intelligence has arrived at a point where we can hack into each other’s psychology, neurology, and physiology to influence behaviour. 

What started as a lab experiment with a few dogs has provided the groundwork for how social media giants captivate billions of users worldwide. 

However, this success raises moral questions too: How do we ensure that these tech empires act with ethical responsibility? How can they become better custodians of humanity's well-being rather than solely focusing on power and profits? 

Ethical Considerations

With such power and influence comes immense responsibility. These companies are no longer mere corporations; they are global empires that control our time and attention. A large part of humanity’s future is in their hands. 

While these engagement techniques are effective, they can pull attention away from real-world interactions, fragment our attention spans, cost us our ability to focus, and foster compulsive app usage that is increasingly shown to be detrimental to our mental health. 

Thanks @BradleyHook, Pexels.

It’s hard to ignore the latest research, especially when it concerns children and young adults. Yet, the influence of these tech giants knows no borders. Their reach extends even into the emerging world of virtual reality, where the mental impact on future generations is still unknown. 

The effects on our attention spans, cognitive abilities, and social behaviors are already apparent—and we’ve barely scratched the surface on artificial intelligence and augmented reality. What happens when these worlds intertwine? What will the super app of tomorrow look like?

For us millennials, we are the last generation that still remembers life before social media and smartphones. The days when we spent most of our childhood, playing outdoors and entertaining ourselves. Back then we had greater autonomy over our minds.

Future generations will face even more immersive digital experiences, which will blur the lines between reality and virtual worlds, like Meta’s glasses and Apple’s Vision Pro. But even these technologies, are only still in its infancy.

The Bigger Question

I am generally enthusiastic about innovation and technology, but I am increasingly cautious about their impact on human connection and the state of ‘humanness.’ If so many, especially young people, are already suffering from loneliness and depression in today’s world, what will happen when these apps and technologies become more immersive?

As power and profit are seductive forces these tech empires contend with, we must ask ourselves: How can we better protect our minds and attention? How do we resist the growing influence of these tech giants while preserving our independence and individuality? And how do we safeguard not just our own interests but the greater good of future generations?

If we’re already struggling to manage our time and focus against today’s clever apps, what challenges will we face tomorrow when confronted with even more immersive worlds of virtual and augmented reality?

Thanks @AveCalvar, Unsplash.

To answer yesterday’s question, too: are we still the users in a world of infinite scrolling, or have we become the used?

We have indeed become ‘the used,’ enslaved by algorithms. Whether due to social pressure, global circumstances, or the way the world operates, it’s self-deception to think we remain free, autonomous, and in control.

We are the mercy of these technologies and, by extension, the companies and people—mostly men—who run them.

Even the technologists and innovators who created these systems are caught in the same cycle; they, too, become ‘the used’ of their own inventions unless they abstain from using the very products they’ve designed, which seems unlikely.

Interestingly though, some high-powered executives from the world’s leading tech companies choose to impose strict limits on their own children’s use of technology, particularly social media apps. I wonder why?

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Follow along…

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This series feels a lot like a public service announcement (PSA)—ideas I want everyone to be able to access. That’s why I’ve made it accessible and public for everyone to read.

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Thank you for spending some of your day with me.