This is Your Brain on Instagram

Nearly half of the world population – 3.8 billion people – now use social media platforms, and the numbers are on the rise. In 2020, the average person had 8.6 social media accounts, compared to 4.8 in 2014. The average time spend on social media platforms is currently 144 minutes per day. The most popular platforms worldwide are Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WeChat and the new kid in the block, TikTok. Every day, 95 million photos and videos are shared on Instagram, 500 million tweets on Twitter, and 500 million stories on Facebook. But what makes social media so addictive?

A lot has to do with the happiness hormone, which makes us feel good – dopamine. We tend to repeat behaviours that give us pleasure, and over time, when done repeatedly, these behaviours turn into habits. Our brain forms habits to preserve critical cognitive resources, which can then be used for more essential mental tasks such as decision-making and self-control regulation. The dopamine is released when we receive likes, which act as social rewards.

Most social media platforms can be used without monetary compensation; we just have to trade off our data in exchange, which is then used to sell advertising. Most consumers do not think much about the impacts this has, but for example, in 2020, about 97.9 percent of Facebook’s global revenue was generated from advertising. Although an increasing number of people are still signing up on social media platforms and the time spend on them is still rising, the competition of our time is fierce – after all, you cannot sell advertising without active users on the platform. Hence, habit-forming must be accelerated.

For example, Instagram has responded to this by manipulating its notification algorithms. Sometimes the likes on our posts are withheld at first, only to be delivered later in even bigger bursts. Getting less engagement – likes and comments – than expected makes us disappointed at first, as well as more eager to check the notifications; however, when we receive the sudden influx of social appraisal, our brain will release even more dopamine than it would initially have. This use of a variable reward schedule takes advantage of our dopamine-driven desire for social validation. The balance of negative and positive feedback signals is balanced until we become habitual users.

The variable reward schedules were introduced in the 1930’s when psychologist B.F. Skinner found that mice were most responsive to reward-associated stimuli when the reward was given to them after varying responses, preventing their ability to forecast when they would be rewarded. Humans function very similarly. The developers of social media platforms have worked very hard to make us form habits, such as having us checking our phones when we feel even slightly bored.

The clever designers and developers have plenty of other tricks to feed our social media habit, too, such as reward prediction errors, which most of us are familiar with from casinos. These prediction errors also serve as dopamine-mediated feedback signals in our brains. If you have played slots, you have experienced intense anticipation while the wheels turn. Only this anticipation can create a rewarding feeling, which negative outcomes can sweep away, as the dopamine is lost. To keep the slot players and social media users engaged, the balance between positive and negative outcomes must be maintained.

Social media is here to stay, and it definitely has plenty of advantages, particularly during the global pandemic; we can keep in touch with family and friends near and far, follow topics close to our hearts and share our lockdown experiences with others. However, if you feel that you spend too much on social media, remember that while old habits die hard, we can indeed train our brains to adopt new habits. Try switching off the app notifications, logging out of your social media accounts while not using them, setting time limits, or temporarily removing the app altogether. After all, the purpose of the habits is to allow more brain resources for cognitive decision-making, not make the decisions for us.