How Technology Is Hijacking Your Mind

How Technology Is Hijacking Your Mind

Hijack 2:
A Slot Machine In a Billion Pockets

If you’re an app, how do you keep people running your app? Become a slot machine.

An individual checks their phone 150 times every day on average. Why do we act this way? Are we consciously making 150 decisions?

The primary psychological component of slot machines is one of the main motives: intermittent variable rewards.

All tech designers need to do to maximize addictiveness is connect a user action (like pulling a lever) with a variable reward. When you pull a lever, you either instantly obtain a tempting reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing at all. When the reward rate is most variable, addictiveness is at its highest.

Does this influence truly have an impact on people? Yes. In the US, slot machines generate more revenue than sports, movies, and theme parks put together. According to NYU professor Natasha Dow Schull, author of Addiction by Design, people become “problematically involved” with slot machines 3–4 times more quickly than with other forms of gambling.

The terrible fact is that a few billion people carry around a slot machine in their pocket:

  • We are playing a slot machine when we take our phone out of our pocket to check our notifications.
  • We are playing a slot machine when we pull to refresh our email to see if there are any new emails.
  • We are playing a slot machine when we swipe our finger down to scroll through the Instagram feed.
  • When using dating applications like Tinder, we play a slot machine by swiping faces left or right to check if we have a match.
  • By tapping the number of red notifications, we play a slot machine game to reveal what is underneath.
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How Technology Is Hijacking Your Mind

Because it’s profitable, apps and websites liberally scatter occasional variable rewards over their offerings.

However, sometimes slot machines appear by chance. For instance, email wasn’t purposefully transformed into a slot machine by some evil organization. When millions of people open their inbox and nothing is there, nobody wins. The designers of Apple and Google also didn’t want their phones to operate like gambling machines. It happened by chance.

However, it is now the responsibility of businesses like Apple and Google to lessen these effects by redesigning intermittent variable rewards to be less addictive and more predictable. For instance, they might provide users the option to choose regular times throughout the day or week to check “slot machine” apps, and then modify when new messages are delivered to coincide with those periods.

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