EXCESSIVE PHONE USE INFORMATION
Who is at Risk?
Phone addiction is an issue that affects people across all demographics. 6.3% of the overall population is addicted to their phone, while 16% of adolescents are addicted. Although, 47% of Americans admit they are addicted to their phones (Howarth 1). One study found that age and gender were the two biggest factors that differentiate how phones are used. This study found girls use their phones much more often (Adamczyk 39).
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Why We Get Addicted
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As we all know, phones have many practical uses that benefit society on a daily basis. Quick communication and access to a wealth of information is not actually the main cause of phone addiction. It is almost solely the work of social media platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and more.
Social Media: A Science
While this may seem extreme, these sites use the same neural mechanisms used by slot machines and cocaine to keep us addicted and using their sites as much as possible. The reason we are so attached is because of the vast social environments we have in our pockets at all times. As humans, we have evolved to be social beings. To reinforce this behavior, when we have a positive social stimuli or interaction, dopamine is released motivating us to do more of whatever action caused it. Before phones, there was a fraction of the amount of potential negative or positive social stimuli compared to how much there is now (Harvard 1). But now, every notification, message, or like we get, has the potential to be a positive social stimuli causing a release in dopamine.
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This leads to a feature of our dopamine neurons which are taken advantage of by casinos and social media sites the same. This is called "Dopamine reward prediction error coding" (Schultz 1). To explain this I'll use slot machines as an analogy. When you play slots, the time between pulling the lever and finding out the result gives your brain time for the dopamine receptors to become active, making the game feel rewarding by just playing. But if you keep losing, your brain stops releasing dopamine, and you might not want to play anymore. So, casinos need to make sure there's a mix of winning and losing to keep people interested. This is similar to getting notifications on your phone. As long as enough of the notifications are positive social stimuli, you will be excited to see whatever notification you get next. Even though most notifications are not insanely exciting or are not positive stimuli, because of the low cost of checking our phones, we often check them anyway. Programmers for these social media sites know these things, and design their platforms taking full advantage of them.