As trivial as it may seem, there’s something inherently rewarding about receiving a “like” on Facebook, a “favorite” on Twitter, or an “upvote” on message boards and social media sites like Reddit.
These various signs of digital approval serve as basic reinforcers to the human brain. Like Pavlov’s dogs, we’ve been conditioned to find the very sound or sight of these things chemically rewarding.
Simply put, the “like button” shows that people value us in one way or another, whether it be about our physical looks through the form of a “selfie” or our opinions through the form of our words.
If you’ve ever had to face the challenge of training a truly unruly dog, you’ve probably heard of clicker training before. This is a method of training animals where a clicker (a small noisemaker) is associated with a reward (dog treats) so it can later be used to positively reinforce certain behaviors on its own.
When a dog hears a clicker, her brain tells her she’s getting a treat. More specifically, the noise produces a spike of dopamine in her brain, making her feel a sense of joy.
Stupid Dog!
While it’s easy to see ourselves as mentally superior to common canines, you may want to hold off judgment on poor old Spot for just a moment. After all, the human brain rewards us in a very similar fashion.
Have you ever noticed the rush you get from checking your email, googling a subject of interest, browsing your Twitter feed, receiving a text from your love interest, peeking at what your friends are up to on Facebook, or other similar internet-fueled activities? Did you notice that the anticipation of receiving the information you had sought out was often more gratifying than receipt of the information itself?
A biologically-based need for seeking drives these Internet activities that you come to crave. The culprit that propels your seeking behavior is a simple organic chemical, or neurotransmitter, called dopamine.
That’s Krista Peck, M.S., in “The Role of Dopamine in Internet Craving.”
Peck, alongside a growing number of academics in the field of psychology, argues that Facebook and similar forms of Internet reinforcement serve as mechanisms for a kind of Internet addiction — what some medical professionals now label Internet addiction disorder (IAD), problematic Internet use (PIU), or compulsive Internet use (CIU).
Here’s the crux of Peck’s argument:
Dopamine is a key player in the brain system concerned with reward-driven learning. Dopamine has many functions in the brain, including roles in behavior and cognition, voluntary movement, motivation, punishment and reward, sleep, dreaming, mood, and attention – just to name a few!
Dopamine is released by rewarding experiences such as food, sex, drugs, and neutral stimuli which become associated with these things.
New studies suggest that dopamine regulates the motivation to act. Recent observations indicate that the brain is more active when people are anticipating a reward rather than receiving one. This is because we are wired to seek, and to really enjoy the thrill of the hunt.
Examples of seeking behavior can be seen in various human activities, such as rainforest tribes hunting and gathering to ensure survival, young adults ritualistically going out on weekends to find fun and potential sexual partners, and comparison shopping when looking for the perfect new piece of furniture to add to your home.
In the digital age, we have various ways to send and receive information – which can be a blessing and a curse. We have tools that allow us to satisfy our information-seeking cravings with instant gratification.
The Internet can ensnare you in a dopamine loop since it makes the process of reward-seeking so quick and easy. Before you know it, you have several tabs open in your Internet browser so you can monitor and engage with your various social media channels while you try to get some work done. Over time, you may add more channels and/or check them more frequently.
This all starts sounding a lot like addiction, doesn’t it?
It’s difficult to contend with Peck’s assertion that we have indeed become addicted to the web. GlobalWebIndex recently polled 170,000 Internet users, finding that the average person spends 6.1 hours a day online!
Of this time spent, nearly 28% of online activity goes to social media, with Facebook accounting for the vast majority. All said and done, about 20% of the time we spend online goes to Facebook.
On its own, this figure might not seem so great, but when you consider the incredibly vast size of the web, it’s astonishing how much we tend to gravitate towards just one website.
Now, there are countless reasons why this may be the case, but if we’re to take years of academic research in psychology and neuroscience seriously, Facebook’s “Like” button is no doubt a contributing factor.
As dog training company First Class Canine says:
The like button is just like a clicker. It is a conditioned reinforcer that increases the behavior of the person who posted.
In other words, for all us Internet addicts out there, Facebook is like the heroin of the web. It gives us that much-desired dopamine fix in a way nothing else out there can.
Why? Because social approval from people we know is one of the most powerful positive reinforcers there is.
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Positive Punishment
During a question-and-answer session streamed live on Facebook earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook was testing alternatives to the “Like” button.
“People have asked about the ‘dislike’ button for many years,” Zuckerberg said at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. “Today is the day that I actually get to say we are working on it.”
While seemingly trivial, the implementation of a “Dislike” button could have profound effects on Facebook as a company — so much so, in fact, that it could create a shift in social culture that drives users away from the site.
So much so that I personally wouldn’t touch this stock now until we see how the “Dislike” button roles out.
Coming back to First Class Canine’s parallel between clickers and the “Like” button:
In fact, there is probably no dislike button on Facebook because of the fallout associated with positive punishment. The dislike button would end up being a positive punisher causing people to post less and have a negative experience with Facebook.
I couldn’t agree more.
Just to clarify really quickly, positive punishment has nothing to do with masochism, as the name might suggest. It simply means a form of punishment where something is added rather than taken away. A slap on the wrist, for instance, is a form of positive punishment, while taking a piece of candy away from a child would be negative punishment.
When it comes to disapproval buttons on the web, these are forms of positive punishment: It’s an added, adverse stimulus that tells us we’re doing something wrong.
And as countless experiments with laboratory animals and studies with humans have shown, positive punishment decreases the likelihood of the preceding response. In the case of Facebook, this could mean expressing a certain kind of opinion or perhaps even using the service altogether.
It’s difficult to imagine Zuckerberg and company not considering these consequences, but the proposed implementation a dislike button is certainly worrisome for Facebook investors.
When Facebook’s “Like” button appeared in 2007, people quickly asked for an alternative to the cheerful thumbs-up symbol and have been ever since. Just because users are asking for it, though, doesn’t mean it’s good for the company’s bottom line.
Until next time,
Jason Stutman
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