Illustrated Podnotes - Adam Alter - The Psychology Of Tech And Phone Addiction

These are some illustrated podnotes to go with the Modern Wisdom Podcast - Adam Alter - The Psychology Of Tech And Phone Addiction.

Here is the introducti0n that accompanied the podcast:

Adam Alter is a Professor of Marketing at New York University's Stern School of Business and an author.

Most adults report that they are within an arm's reach of their phone for 24 hours a day. Our devices have slotted themselves into our lives seamlessly, but controlling our screentime is becoming increasingly difficult.

Expect to learn the psychological tricks tech companies are using to keep you hooked, what Adam thinks the best strategies are to control screentime, what our concerns should be with VR technology, why cliffhangers are so powerful and much more...

Below I’ve listed some of my own notes.

What are the hooks that get you?

The knowledge, the understanding  of what drives you, of what makes you happy and bring you wellbeing is important knowing what kind of things you can do to short circuit the hooks.

Variable rewards - The phone is like a slot machine that delivers jackpots every now and then - it might be in the form of an email, you post something on social media you get feedback.

But it’s unpredictable - and it’s got to be unpredictable because if it were predictable and you knew when the rewards were coming, they were the same size every time, the same intensity, we’d lose interest. Humans, and basically every other animal as well, are very sensitive to variable rewards, so those are baked in

It’s an unfair fight by a magnitude that you can’t understand. There are thousands of data analysts, some of the most powerful algorithms on the planet and several tens of billions behind every single swipe and press of your thumb.

You think that you’re dancing through the daisy field that is Facebook or Tinder or Tic-Tok, but it’s not - it’s very, very curated.

The endlessness of all these different platforms makes it very difficult for us to resist them, there’s no bottom to the news, to what people are sharing with you, what you can learn online.

Phones do everything they can to dismantle whatever self control resources you have and the only way you can fight back is by having habits and systems that mitigate that help you overcome  those many many attempts from tech companies to circumvent those systems.

What are cliffhangers so effective?

As a species we are completionists. The same reason that we keep approaching the goal until we reach the goal.

We want to know the end of a story, we don’t like things half completed - it’s imbedded in us.

If it feels unfulfilled it feels like we’ve wasted time, there’s the sunk cost fallacy - we invested time and energy into it so we want to see it through.

So people will read a bad book and want to finish - ‘it I’m hating this but I should finish because otherwise whatbwas that first half for I’ve wasted all thus time.’