Why are we drawn to screens?

Supernormal Stimuli are things that amplify the effects of normal stimuli. Brookes and Lasser (2018, pp 62-63) use a study by Dr Tinbergen on Stickleback fish to illustrate the point. He found that Stickleback fish responded very aggressively to the colour red as it was this colour that was displayed in the throat of rival Stickleback males when they were attempting to attack a territory. Tinbergen then started to introduce other objects with the red stimulus such as a small piece of wood, roughly the size of a Stickleback fish and noticed the same response. He then introduced objects that were nothing like a Stickleback fish but still had a red stimulus on them. Often they acted more aggressively to these exaggerated versions of the stimuli and often ignored the real threat of another real male Stickleback in preference of attacking the 'super-normal stimuli'. In this sense our screens have become a super normal stimuli for social connectedness. We are social creatures, we are programmed to want social connectedness. However, we need face-to-face interaction in order to have our needs met. The rewards of online social interaction are short term and don’t satisfy our most basic needs of social interaction. Unfortunately, we find it hard to distinguish this and because the phone is easy, always available and immediate we often choose it over the face-to-face interaction. This is a double whammy when it comes at the expense of a person we are with and we ignore them to answer the phone as it disrupts the social interaction which we know can be detrimental if it occurs frequently over a long period of time.

Novelty is a very basic survival mechanism. We are drawn to new things because in our hunter gatherer days it would help us identify new sources of food or danger etc. It evokes a reward system response. The constant source of novelty in the form of news, update on games, next levels, buzzers, notifications constantly appeals to our sense of Novelty which triggers the reward response. This means that, at a very fundamental level, it is very hard to resist.

Again this is a survival instinct when movement could indicate food source or danger. Those types of movement are natural stimuli but things like TV and video games are super-normal stimuli. They are beyond what would necessarily occur naturally and we find them very hard to resist. An example of this may be at a restaurant when a TV is on in the background and people automatically are drawn to watching the screen despite all of the other stimuli around them including the potential for face-to-face interaction.

An example of a fixed reinforcement schedule would be a lab experiment where a rat pushes a lever and every three pushes food comes out. This stimulates the reward system of the brain and pushes us to find patterns for when we will be rewarded. Variable Reinforcement Schedules are something like a slot machine where the reward is given out every so often but there is no clear pattern to it (Brooks and Lasser (2018). However, because we want the reward we are pre-programmed to look for a pattern and keep attempting the task until another reward is given, convincing ourselves we can understand the pattern and get the reward more often. It’s the same for notifications, buzzers, alarms etc on phones and tablets. They activate that basic reward system in the brain when we hear them and it activates this compelling urge to check the phone. We can actually become so conditioned that the mere sight of a phone can evoke this reward system and provoke us to check the phone even when a notification has not sounded or check our own phones when someone else’s phone buzzes.

This is very real for kids if they feel their peers are off having social interactions and rewards and that they are not part of. It can have a very real effect on well-being but the ironic thing is that even if their friends are having online social interactions, they aren’t really having their basic needs met in any real way.