B. J. Fogg, founder of Stanford’s Persuasion Lab, whose students went on to work for Facebook, Instagram, Uber, and Google, developed a psychological model that combined three factors to prompt a particular behavior: trigger, motivation, and ability. Take Facebook photos, for example: You get a push notification that you've been tagged in a photo (trigger), you want to make sure you look OK in the pic (motivation), and you can easily and immediately check the photo on your phone (ability).

Tricks That Keep You Glued to Your Smartphone Push Notifications

Alerts that flash across your phone, even when the screen is locked, play to the same desire for social connection as when a friend calls or texts. Except the demand to drop everything and redirect your attention comes from an app, rather than a loved one.

Pull-to-Refresh

Apps are capable of continuously updating, but this slot-machine-like gesture provides the illusion of control and the allure of unpredictable rewards.

Variable Rewards

The uncertainty of what you’ll find when you respond to a notification or pull down to refresh is what keeps you coming back for more.

Infinite Scroll

Without visual cues to indicate an end point, humans don’t know when to stop. We’re looking at you Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And looking ... and scrolling ... and looking ... and scrolling.

Autoplay

Netflix’s autoplay feature, which automatically loads the next episode, is one example of the way that companies encourage you to stay engaged. Uber pulls a similar move with its drivers, by sending them the next fare before the current ride is over.

Bright Colors

App icons and tiny red dots are eye-catching for a reason.

Short-term Goals

Snapchat’s Snapstreaks feature shows the number of days in a row that two people have communicated with each other, prompting an unhealthy obsession for teenage users, who feel compelled to keep the streak alive.

Gamification

Turning something into a game typically involves three elements: points, rewards, and a leaderboard. Fitbit, the wearable that nudged millions of people to complete 10,000 steps a day, has all three.

A former student of Fogg’s, Nir Eyal, developed his own model. In his book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, Eyal lays out a four-part process: trigger, action, variable reward, and investment, arguing that negative emotions can be powerful triggers. Boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion, and indecisiveness cause a slight pain or irritation, prompting us to engage in mindless action to make the negative sensation go away. Positive emotions work too. On an app like Instagram, for instance, the trigger could be the desire to share good news.

The engine driving these feedback loops is the same mechanism that makes slot machines attractive: The uncertainty of what you’ll find when you respond to a notification or pull-to-refresh is what keeps you coming back for more. In his book Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, Adam Alter says the loop is powerful not just because of the occasional wins (like a fave), but because the experience of a recent loss (no faves) is deeply motivating.

There’s nothing inherently nefarious about the models. The same structure can be used to persuade people to make better choices, like the way FitBits turn fitness into a game or apps that nudge you to meditate. In that light, the power to change behavior doesn’t look so bad, but it still gets at the underlying question: Can persuasive technology override our free will? Fogg himself warned the Federal Trade Commission about potential political and social consequences of building “persuasion profiles,” a year before the iPhone was released. “We can now create machines that can change what people think and what people do, and the machines can do that autonomously,” he testified in 2006. “Whenever we go to a Web site and use an interactive system, it is likely they will be capturing what persuasion strategies work on us and will be using those when we use the service again.”

A few years later, a warning came from a more unlikely source. In 2010, Steve Jobs told The New York Times that his kids hadn’t used an iPad, which was just hitting the market. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home,” he said.

On their own, the crises around fake news and election interference may not have shaken us from our screentime stupor. But a cadre of whistleblowers, who got wealthy off the products they now warn against, revealed the underlying connection. Algorithms value engagement---and content that hits us low on the brain stem, inspiring fear and anger, tends to get more of a reaction. All Russia had to do to sow division was spike Facebook’s NewsFeed with stories that activated our lizard brain.

“I’ve spent many hours and weeks and months and years thinking about whether anything I’ve done has made a net positive impact on society or humanity at all.” —Loren Brichter, inventor of pull-to-refresh mechanism

And, as we are learning, the impact of these sticky algorithms is especially acute on kids: In iGen, published in 2017, Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, noted that, according to a study she conducted, eighth graders who are heavy users of social media have a 27 percent higher risk of depression. Other experts, like Andrew Przybylski, a psychologist at the Oxford Internet Institute, caution that Twenge’s data shows correlation between depression and social media, not causation. Still, two major Apple shareholders, a hedge fund and a pension fund, cited Twenge’s study in January 2018 when they wrote an open letter to Apple urging the company to assist with more rigorous research into smartphones’ effects on children and to build better controls for worried parents.

The letter says that blaming parents or arguing that the research isn’t definitive misses the point; it cites data from the nonprofit Common Sense Media showing that the average American teenager with a smartphone spends more than 4.5 hours a day on the device, excluding texting and talking. "It would defy common sense to argue that this level of usage, by children whose brains are still developing, is not having at least some impact, or that the maker of such a powerful product has no role to play in helping parents to ensure it is being used optimally.”

The Future of Addictive Technology

Concerns around tech addiction are increasingly complex. What if smartphones and social media don’t just addle our attention span and waste our time, but can also shape and twist what we know and what we believe? As our awareness of the potential danger grows, the tactics used to keep us hooked are advancing in tandem. Artificially intelligent algorithms, armed with an unprecedented amount of personal data, are particularly hard to resist.

For example, YouTube’s algorithms recognized that progressively more extreme content keeps users stuck to their screens, so its autoplay feature recommends increasingly incendiary videos. This led Zeynep Tufekci, a professor at the University of North Carolina, to call the video-sharing site, which now gets more than a billion views a day, “the great radicalizer.”

YouTube’s recommendations to keep us engaged will only get more sophisticated. The company is testing deep neural networks to improve the process, and studies show the changes increased watch time dramatically. Meanwhile, Netflix, which already personalized thumbnails to get us to watch, is now exploring personalized trailers. The company is reportedly using machine learning and AI to automatically generate trailers from the most compelling scenes in a show, based on individual preferences. If you normally watch rom-coms, for example, it will show you the most romantic moment in an action movie.

Tech companies, facing public pressure on a new front seemingly every week, have at least acknowledged the consumer backlash. After the letter from shareholders, Apple defended itself in a public statement, saying, “We think deeply about how our products are used and the impact they have on users and the people around them. We take this responsibility very seriously and we are committed to meeting and exceeding our customers’ expectations, especially when it comes to protecting kids.” In March, the company launched a page for families and is expected to improve parental controls in the next version of iOS.

“I can’t control [Facebook]. ... I can control my decision, which is that I don’t use that shit. I can control my kids’ decisions, which is that they’re not allowed to use that shit.” Chamath Palihapitiya , Ex-Facebook vice president of user growth

Still, it’s not clear if companies are really willing to watch engagement numbers drop. For instance, Facebook shareholders tried the same move as Apple shareholders, asking the company to shut down its controversial children’s product, Messenger Kids, which is aimed at kids as young as 6 years old, but to no avail.