Dopamine Feedback Loop Technology and How it Affects Your Mind
Ever see someone just staring at their phone waiting for a notification? Almost zombie like, looking for some energy.
That is the mind of someone chasing dopamine (this is the same chemical produced in the mind of drug users who consume cocaine, meth and several other stimulants. It’s naturally produced as the “reward chemical”)
But unfortunately we are all here for one reason, dopamine. If your on Facebook or any other social media platform for more then 2-3 hours a day it’s, pretty much safe to say your affected by this new technological/psychological exploit. Only issue is it’s limitless, free, feels nice and all you have to do is engage and get involved. Don’t worry, once your dopamine receptors begin to burn out from over use you’ll need to find new and extreme ways to increase dopamine production by going deeper into the loop.
A dopamine-driven feedback loop is a self-perpetuating circuit fueled by the way the neurotransmitter works with the brain’s reward system. Feedback loops, in general, are circuits that return output as input to a given system to drive future operations and, in this case, behaviors.
Dopamine is associated with “seeking” behavior. It works to motivate people to seek out food, information and entertainment, among myriad other commodities and experiences. Once a target is achieved, the brain’s opioid system delivers a chemical reward that we experience as pleasure. Through experiencing this cycle repeatedly, people and other animals learn to anticipate pleasure from seeking, which perpetuates the loop.
Social media use provides a good model of the dopamine feedback loop. The search for information or entertainment drives people to scroll through their Facebook newsfeeds, for example, in anticipation of pleasure when something interesting pops up. It’s not necessary that there are a great number of interesting items in the feed because, as in operant conditioning, an intermittent reinforcement schedule is the most effective for maintaining target behavior. In this case, the desired behavior is keeping people scrolling as long as possible. The feedback loop also manifests through posts, as people post anticipating responses and are rewarded by Likes and other reactions.
Because the system doesn’t have a mechanism for satiety built into it, the behavior driven by the dopamine feedback loop can continue for much longer than the individual intends and, in fact, for much longer than they perceive psychological rewards.
Chamath Palihapitiya is among prominent social media experts decrying the way sites like Facebook exploit human psychology to the detriment of users. In his 2017 “View from The Top Talk” at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the former Facebook Vice-President of User Growth said “…we have created tools now that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works… It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave, by and between each other. And I don’t have a good solution. My solution is that I just don’t use these tools anymore. I haven’t for years.”
– https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/dopamine-driven-feedback-loop
“Chamath Palihapitiya, former Vice President of User Growth at Facebook, admitted to an audience of Stanford students that they felt “tremendous guilt” for their role in affecting users’ brains and thought patterns. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works.”
“Tech companies understand what causes dopamine surges in the brain and they lace their products with ‘hijacking techniques’ that lure us in and create ‘compulsion loops’,” The New York Times’ columnist David Brooks wrote.
“Snapchat has Snapstreak, which rewards friends who snap each other every single day, thus encouraging addictive behaviour,” Brooks continued. “News feeds are structured as ‘bottomless bowls’ so that one page view leads down to another and another and so on forever. Most social media sites create irregularly timed rewards; you have to check your device compulsively because you never know when a burst of social affirmation from a Facebook like may come.”
It seems these issues will only persist as social media growth continues. All once can hope for is that real life will simply get in the way, slowly removing people from the services. Eliminating social media use, the root of these feedback loops, piece by piece is necessary to take full control of your cognitive temptations.”
– https://outlook.monmouth.edu/2021/03/dopamine-driven-feedback-loops-what-are-they/
Sean Parker & Chamath Palihapitiya go more into detail about dopamine feedback loop developed and studied by them at Facebook. Both feel regretful for their role in pioneering this technology because of the detrimental effect it is having on mankind in terms of socialising and how we interact.
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