HABIT-MAKING DEVICES

HABIT-MAKING DEVICES

 

A variable interval is a type of simple schedule of reinforcement, in which a behavior is reinforced after an n amount of time, but not always on that n amount.32 Results are unpredictably looming, which heightens our curiosity and anxiety. For instance, pulling the lever of a slot machine might give us a payout after five minutes of playing the slot machine, or it might take several hours (or not at all). While slot machines are entirely luckbased, reinforcement schedules on our smartphones are not. The amount and type of notifications received will depend heavily on our individual profiles; the frequency at which you are receiving notifications will be informed by variables such as whether or not you are a heavy texter or emailer, receive news notifications from news apps, are active on social media, among other things. This smartphone profile also will likely impact your phone-checking expectations. Frequent texters or highly active social media users might anticipate more notifications because of the nature of their device usage. Of course, notifications can be configured in smartphone settings, which also will alter our reinforcement schedules. This unpredictability of reinforcement is what makes smartphonechecking so tantalizing. Couple this with a “fear of missing out” on something important, or FOMO, and this largely explains our phone-checking habits. But there is also the biological view of addictive and compulsive behaviors, which indicates there is a chemically induced activation of the brain’s neurological pathways that plays a role in this type of behavior reinforcement. Much of the literature on smartphone addiction talks specifically about dopamine, which has been described as the brain’s “pleasure chemical.” According to Dr. Greenfield, “all addictions whether it’s drugs, alcohol, gambling, food, sex, share the activation of mesolimbic pathways that have to do with dopamine and other neurochemicals that are elevated from pleasurable responses.” He has even referred to the smartphone as a “portable dopamine dump”33 because of the relationship between dopamine and pleasure-seeking activities. Dopamine, it is argued, is released in the brain following an enjoyable act, thus using feedback signaling to encourage a continuation of that act. An article in The Atlantic [A]chieving a goal or anticipating the reward of new content for completing a considered to have a direct effect on the brain’s dopamine system, and this perpetuates the direct comparisons between drug and smartphone use. (Consider this 2017 article from The Independent, which claims “giving your child a smartphone is like giving them a gram of cocaine.”35) But it is not that drug use itself is inherently pleasurable, but that it invokes neurological processes that perceive it to be so, further capitalizing on the addictive properties of drugs. Although dopamine often is associated solely with pleasure, such as euphoric drug use, more recent research indicates that dopamine might also be present in less-than-desirable behavioral outcomes and disorders. A 2010 study of pathological gamblers found a “recruitment of brain reward circuitry by near-miss outcomes.”36 In other words, near-misses such as almost losing all of your money in a betting scenario triggers the same type of dopamine transmission that is triggered by a monetary win. In this example, a near-miss outcome is not necessarily desirable, but it is preferable to the alternate outcome of losing all of our money. Others have suggested that “abnormal dopaminergic signaling” might help explain neuropsychiatric disorders such as ADHD.37 So, like our neurological processes, dopamine is complex and often misunderstood, yet it is widely cited as the central reason for our smartphone dependency, when in fact, Psychology Professors Christopher Ferguson