Is technology like gambling? Why is technology addictive?
Adam Alter says mobile devices and wearable technology amplify the addictive potential of technology since they make it possible to engage in addictive behaviors no matter where you are. He identifies four common strategies technology developers use to capture and keep your time, attention, and money.
Let’s explore those strategies that keep you hooked on technology.
1. Technology Can Feel as Fun as Gambling
To explain why technology is addictive, Alter says that it’s designed to exploit the same psychological vulnerabilities as gambling, another behavioral addiction, to keep users engaged and coming back for more. He names four such design features: exciting audiovisual design, early hooks, variable rewards, and deceptive superiority to real life.
Exciting Audiovisual Design
Some gambling machines are designed to blare celebratory music and flash brilliant lights when a player wins. Alter explains that even if you suffer multiple losses in a row before a modest win, your brain is primed to interpret these audiovisual cues as a total victory—you feel like you’re winning big despite your net loss. This reinforces your desire to keep playing (and therefore to keep losing money to the gambling establishment). Alter says that video game designers use a similar principle to keep players hooked—they incorporate lively, entertaining audiovisual cues that make it easier for you to get engrossed in the game. But instead of losing money as you would in a casino, you lose a lot of time.
Early Hooks
Alter says that gambling establishments use early hooks to lure participants into the gambling cycle. Early hooks offer participants a chance to join at low personal risk while promising high rewards. For example, online casinos provide new users with free spins, enticing them to start playing without having to invest their own money. However, as users play, they become emotionally invested in the prospect of winning—this emotional investment drives them to continue playing even when the odds are against them or they’ve already suffered a net loss. Video game designers use the same strategy to incentivize players to sink their time, attention, and money into their games.
Alter explains that gambling and gaming developers use three kinds of hooks:
The simplicity hook: Games that use this hook, like Temple Run, are so easy and straightforward from the get-go that anyone can play them. Users gravitate toward them when they have a few moments to spare but find they spend much longer than they meant to on them.
The deceptive simplicity hook: These games seem easy at first but gradually introduce complexity—for example, by incrementally increasing the number of threats to your character’s survival, as in Don’t Starve. Since by the time you complete the easy levels you’re emotionally attached to the game, you’re incentivized to keep going no matter how much time and attention it costs.
The hidden pay-to-play hook: These games are free to download and play, but they incorporate mechanisms that encourage or require players to spend money to access valuable content, features, or advantages within the game. For example, The Sims Mobile (TSM) uses this hook—players are incentivized to spend money on virtual architecture, decor, and outfits.
Variable Rewards
Studies suggest that part of gambling’s appeal is not knowing whether you’ll win or lose. Uncertainty is thrilling—you produce much more dopamine when you’re surprised that you’ve won than when you expected to win. Alter argues that social media companies use this principle to drive engagement: You’re not sure what kinds of responses you’ll get from others when you make a social media post, so you’re driven to find out. Since everyone is driven to post and wait for responses, social media becomes an interactive ecosystem that’s difficult to pull away from.
Deceptive Superiority to Real Life
Alter explains that both gambling experiences and immersive technologies present a deceptively superior alternative to reality. Gamblers can easily fall victim to motivated perception, a psychological phenomenon where intense desire primes your brain to interpret the world in a way that aligns with your desires. As a result, gamblers irrationally believe they’re always about to win, even though they’re statistically likely to lose. Similarly, Alter says you might have an irrational belief that your social media use is a net positive when it’s not.
2. Technology Creates an Anticipation-Gratification Cycle
Alter explains that some technology is addictive because it induces a sense of anticipation—a thrilling sensation that captures your interest and stimulates dopamine release—that you feel compelled to gratify. The only way to gratify this anticipation is by engaging further in the technology—you have to log on or tune in to see what happens next. Often, once you do, the cycle starts over; as one source of anticipation is resolved, another piques your curiosity. This strategy is especially popular in forms of technology with narrative structure—Alter says it explains the popularity of the true crime genre, for instance—but developers use it in other ways too. For example, dating apps rely on the anticipation-gratification cycle to drive interactions between users.
3. Technology Facilitates Pseudo-Connection
Humans are inherently social—we care about what other people think of us because, evolutionarily speaking, their support improves our chances of survival. Alter suggests that much modern technology, from social media to video games and beyond, appeals to this aspect of the human psyche. You’re incentivized to project a likable image, so you use a filter on your selfies. You also want to know that others think in the same way that you do, so you seek validation from others’ reactions to your online presence. However, you want to feel unique, so you seek out disagreement as well. But if that disagreement is insulting—for example, in video game trash talk—you might feel wounded, which drives you to seek more reassurance online.
Online interactions can’t satisfy your inherent social needs. They’re pseudo-connections; they lack the characteristics that make real-life interactions meaningful and fulfilling. For example, you can’t make eye contact or pick up on behavioral cues like body language over text, so some ideas could get lost in translation. Furthermore, children who communicate with others primarily online may miss out on learning how to decipher those cues and sustain in-person conversations in the first place. Alter offers an example: Teenage boys whose primary social outlet is video games struggle to regulate their emotions and relate to others, which prevents them from forming intimate relationships and can contribute to pornography addiction.
4. Technology Encourages Relentless Personal Growth
Alter argues that some forms of technology are designed to encourage the doggedly relentless pursuit of personal growth. This comes in two forms: skill mastery and all-around perfectionism.
Skill Mastery
Alter says that some technology is designed to give users the feeling of accomplishment that comes when you’ve overcome a challenge or sharpened your skills. This is especially common in video games—for example, in Minecraft, you might feel proud of the elaborate structures you’ve built. One way that game developers promote this feeling is by gradually increasing the complexity of the task so that you learn as you play and enjoy the process of becoming progressively better at the game. This can induce what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Flow) describes as flow—a period of blissfully intense engrossment that makes you lose all sense of time.
Game developers proactively prolong this state of flow by making it easy for players to stay in the game. A game might automatically restart when you lose or, more subtly, might show you how close you were to winning—feeling like you almost won is a powerful motivator to keep playing, since it suggests that victory is within reach. Alter says that other technology designers use this strategy, too, by overriding or distracting you from your natural cues to stop engaging. For example, on X (formerly known as Twitter), you can easily swipe to see a new batch of tweets. You might find yourself obsessively refreshing your feed as a major news event unfolds, hoping to achieve mastery (in the form of comprehensive knowledge) of the topic du jour.
All-Around Perfectionism
Some technology, like fitness tracking apps, helps you identify, quantify, and measure your progress toward goals in various areas of your life. Trying to reach goals isn’t inherently harmful, but Alter argues that the culture around goal-setting is toxic for three reasons:
It demands perpetual personal growth. Reaching a goal won’t satisfy you because until you reach a state of all-around perfection, there’s always more work to be done. When you reach your goal, you’ll just set another—and this means that you’ll never be satisfied with what you’ve achieved.
It’s numeric. Assigning numeric values to your goals can help you measure your progress, but these numbers are compelling, and it’s easy to hyperfixate on them to an unhealthy degree (for example, by pushing through an injury to beat a swim record).
It’s outcome-oriented. You’re more concerned with the achievement than the process of getting there, so you might not take time to enjoy the process. Furthermore, the joy you derive from the outcome itself is fleeting: Outcomes are short-lived compared to processes because they represent a single point in time. Once achieved, the positive feelings they evoke fade rapidly.
Alter says technology facilitates and amplifies the toxicity associated with perfectionistic goal-setting in three ways:
- First, some technology imposes arbitrary goals, as when a language learning app recommends that you complete three lessons a day.
- Second, some technology encourages obsessive progress-checking—for example, if a weight loss app prompts you to track your weight, you might feel compelled to weigh yourself more often than is healthy. Wearable technology can exacerbate this by providing constant feedback on your progress.
- Finally, some technology creates social pressure to perform by giving you plenty of opportunities to compare yourself to your peers (for example, you might notice your selfie got fewer likes than a friend’s).
