Video Transcript:

What do these two things have in common? Well, before I get to that, I should probably explain what this thing is. This is a Skinner box. It's been used in the past by psychologists to study behavior. As you can see, the box features a bar, and when the mouse presses the bar, it sometimes gets food, but other times nothing happens. Over time, the mouse learns that when it pushes the bar, it might receive food. So it pushes and pushes and pushes until it gets its food.

So then, what does that have to do with this? We're obviously a lot different from mice, but the principle behind both the bar pushing and the scrolling is the same. The behavior is repeated until some kind of reward is delivered. In this case, the reward is a post that we find to be funny, entertaining, or something we just plain like. We stop scrolling long enough to take it in, and then it's right back to scrolling in search of the next post that scratches that itch. Sound familiar?

Social media feeds are infinite by design. You could scroll forever and never run out of posts. This scrolling can sometimes feel automatic or mindless, more a result of conditioning than a constant choice. This leads us to spend more time on social media than we intend to. Sometimes it's more than we want to, and that can cause some issues. Let's say you wake up, get on your phone, and start scrolling. Scroll too long, and you might be late for work. In more extreme cases, it could cause you to neglect other aspects of your life or experience anxiety when you're away from your phone.

When you interact with posts on social media, you're providing data to these sites. They then take this data and use it to further personalize your feed, showing content and ads similar to what you've engaged with previously. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. A more personalized feed can introduce you to content you may not have seen otherwise. However, this design reinforces our scrolling behavior and greatly increases the amount of time we spend using social media. And this is more or less their goal. They are simply businesses who want their users to spend more time using their app or website.

The good news is, we aren't mice. We may push on that theoretical bar, much like they do, but we possess the intelligence that they lack. It's perfectly okay to use social media, but it's also important to be aware of when we're overdoing it. It may not always be easy to break free from the grasp of the infinite scroll, but it starts with awareness.