What Feels Better Than Winning?

(3 min. read)

When was the last time you checked your daily screen time on your cell phone? For some of us, including myself, it’s rather embarrassing.

We use our cell phones a lot. Sometimes for productive things, and sometimes for unproductive things, which is more often than we’d like to admit. In fact, the average screen time globally is 6 hours and 58 minutes.

For us Americans, we use ours slightly above the average amount at 7 hours and 4 minutes, and my generation, Gen Z, shamefully pushes 9 hours a day.

Clearly, there’s a habit (the better word is probably addiction) of using our devices as an extension of ourselves, as our lives and social connections are fully integrated with our cell phones.

So one might ask, “Who cares if we use our phones most of the day? Does it really matter?”

I would say that everyone is free to do as they please, but what I am interested in is how did we get so addicted?

And, more specifically, what psychological mechanisms do cell phone makers and app developers use to keep us hooked?

Well as it turns out, there’s a lot. Some you might expect, others are pretty inconspicuous and ingenious. The most powerful of which, is something that most people aren’t fully aware of yet they experience it on almost a daily basis.

Variable Reward

Variable reward is a reward that is not predetermined, and instead sometimes meets expectations, falls below expectations, or rises above expectations.

This releases dopamine in our brains and reinforces our actions, making us likely to continue performing the action that gives us this variable reward.

What draws us to act is not the reward itself, but the need to alleviate the craving for the reward.

So let’s run through an example.

I’ll use TikTok, as it is one of the most well understood and easiest apps to dissect for its variable reward mechanisms.

TikTok uses short-form, user-generated content to draw in its users by spiking their dopamine every few seconds in wondrous anticipation of seeing what shocking, interesting, funny, or outlandish content piece is next.

By having millions of videos to scroll, some good, some poor, our brains quickly succumb to scrolling and consuming content for hours, all because TikTok triggers certain mechanisms in our neurochemistry.

If you want to know why younger generations have far less motivation to achieve success in life than those in years past, look no further than these developers using variable rewards to trigger the chemicals in our brain that motivate us to do work. They harness this motivation to keep us scrolling for as long as they can keep us there.

Now the moral implications of using variable reward to generate revenue for a business is a topic for another day, but the point is that we must be aware of this behavioral mechanism if we do not want to have our attention and actions dictated by it.

Be conscious of variable reward, it is a powerful tool that can also be used as a weapon.

“Dopamine, N.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/8912919324.

Howarth, Josh. “Alarming Average Screen Time Statistics (2024).” Exploding Topics, Exploding Topics, 4 Dec. 2023, explodingtopics.com/blog/screen-time-stats#top-screen-time-stats.

Ashton Nichols