Two Google workers conducted a study of 19 people to work out what made smartphones so hard to put down - AP

Smartphones that work like "pocket slot machines" are turning their owners into addicts, a study funded by Google has found.

Research from two Google employees found that the “trigger, action, reward” design of popular apps has conditioned mobile phone owners to the extent that they feel “phantom” cues in which they imagine they have received a message even if the phone has not issued an alert.

Some participants in the study found they repeatedly refreshed an app hoping for new content to appear or posted on social media purely to “manufacture new triggers” in the form of responses, likes or shares from their peers.

The technology giant, which owns Android, a competitor to Apple’s smartphone operating system, conducted the research using 19 participants aged 18-65 in Zurich, Switzerland and California, US, to work out why people were becoming so dependent on their phones and how to counteract it.

All said that they found their smartphone "critical" making it difficult to disconnect, with one participant describing their phone as a "pocket slot machine".

The research suggested that features found on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter were likely to hook people.

Apps which have 'infinite scrolling' or recommendations were more likely to make participants use their phones more than they wanted to Credit: Reuters

While the study did not name individual apps, but highlighted "automatic triggers" commonly found on social networks, such as the "infinite scroll" that means users never arrive at the end of a feed.

“Some app or website experiences have engineered automatic triggers (for example, infinite scroll, recommended content), which maintain user engagement,” it stated.

“For both of these scenarios, users found themselves connected to their phones increasingly over time, more than they wished to.”

Last year Facebook admitted that passive scrolling through the social network made users more miserable, while actions such as commenting under a photo or writing a message to someone made people happier.

Research from the University of Michigan found that students randomly assigned to read Facebook for 10 minutes were in a worse mood at the end of the day than those who talked to friends or posted on the website.

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Mark Zuckerberg has tried to stop people from passively scrolling on Facebook by weighting posts from friends about news organisations or celebrities to prompt people to post Credit: AP

A second study from UC San Diego and Yale found that people who clicked on about four times as many links as the average person, or who liked twice as many posts, reported worse mental health than average.

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has since announced that he is changing the news feed to try and prompt people to have conversations. He wiped videos from news organisations, celebrities and prioritised posts from users’ friends on the home feed. It now shows recommended posts according to a users’ location, friends along with posts and pages they have viewed.

Instagram also has a recommendation feature called Explore, where users can scroll through infinite Instagram accounts outside of their follower circle to tempt them to click. Snapchat has a similar feature, named Discover.

The study, titled Toward JOMO: the joy of missing out and the freedom of disconnecting was presented at the MobileHCI conference in Barcelona, Spain.