Our phones don’t have to make us feel miserable

Technology is on its way to getting a little bit safer. 

The US Senate on Tuesday passed a pair of bills — the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) — designed to protect kids online. It’s shockingly bipartisan: The vote to approve the package of bills was 91 to 3. That broad support is a big deal, but it’s far from a done deal.

The legislation, which still has to clear the House of Representatives, would create a sweeping set of rules requiring platforms to mitigate harm related to mental health and sexual exploitation, among other things. KOSA also calls for platforms to cut back on features that cause compulsive use, including notifications and auto-play. Critics of the KOSA, however, say that it opens the door to censorship, since certain kinds of speech could be blocked in the name of protecting children. 

Sorting out the best way to balance First Amendment rights and protecting kids online will take more time. The House has already gone home for August recess, and the presidential election this November will be on everyone’s mind when they come back to consider their version of KOSA, which is slightly different but also includes a duty of care to protect young people. 

Everyone can agree that keeping kids safe online is important, but one straightforward element of the legislation may help kids and adults alike: curbing compulsive use. 

Smartphones can feel almost addictive or at the very least like a bad habit. So how can we avoid spending hours staring mindlessly at a screen?

One way is to understand how and why you’re being compelled to spend so much time on smartphones. Another is simply to put your phone away. Seriously, like, put it in another room where you can’t see it or touch it until you really need it.

The slot machine in your pocket

You’ve probably struggled with staying awake scrolling at night instead of sleeping or felt triggered by the ding of a new notification. That’s largely because many apps, including games and social media platforms, have been designed to captivate your attention and keep you coming back.

The explanation for these kinds of behaviors can be traced back to the work of psychologist B.F. Skinner. While a graduate student at Harvard in the 1930s, Skinner invented a type of puzzle box — that psychologists and technologists now call a Skinner box — equipped to study the behavior of rats and pigeons. 

In one famous experiment, when the animals pulled a lever or tapped a piece of glass, they were given positive reinforcement, like a piece of food. Skinner realized that once they figured out the cause and effect, the animals would only pull the lever when they were hungry. But if Skinner introduced randomness into the equation, and the animals didn’t know if they were going to get a reward, they kept pulling the lever again and again, sometimes obsessively. One pigeon tapped the glass 2.5 times per second for 16 hours in search of a reward.

A little over a decade ago, Natasha Schüll, a cultural anthropologist and associate professor at NYU, wrote a book called Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. And she was surprised that lots of people were using her research to describe how social media traps people in the same ways that the blinking boxes on a casino floor do. In an interview, she compared certain apps to Skinner boxes and likened the experience of mindlessly browsing photos on Facebook to slot machines.

“You keep clicking as if you’re going to hit some little jackpot, where you recognize someone or it gives you some point of interest,” Schüll told me. “So you just keep going.”

She added, “There’s something that really puzzles the mammalian brain about that and keeps you at it.”

Our phones are full of Skinner boxes designed to draw us in and compel us to perform simple actions in search of random rewards. For the slot machine, the positive reinforcement is money. But in social media apps, as Schüll said, it’s less clear what we’re looking for, which might explain why we open up TikTok at bedtime, blink a couple of times, and two hours have passed. Why platforms want us to do this is very clear, however. The more time we spend using the app and engaging with it — tapping notifications, scrolling through videos, and so forth — the more data about our behavior the platform gets and the more money they can make by selling this data or access to your attention to advertisers.

To understand how these machines were designed to keep us hooked, we have to look at the work of B.J. Fogg, who pioneered the field of computers as persuasive technologies, or captology, in the late ’90s. He now simply calls it behavior design. In Fogg’s own words, “a persuasive computer is an interactive technology that can change a person’s attitudes or behaviors,” and Silicon Valley loves this idea. Fogg founded the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford, which has become a breeding ground for startup founders. One of its most famous former students is Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram. According to the Economist, “Fogg took ambivalent satisfaction from the example of Instagram, since he felt distantly responsible for it and perhaps distantly guilty.”

But it wasn’t the academics who built the Skinner boxes in our pockets. It was, at the end of the day, software engineers who probably paid less attention to psychology textbooks than they did to how we actually used these apps.

The features that keep us hooked and how to avoid them

In the latest version of the bill, KOSA includes a provision for tech companies to change the way their platforms are designed in order to keep kids from spending so much time using their apps. The legislation specifically mentions “automatic playing of media, rewards for time spent on the platform, notifications, and other features that result in compulsive usage of the covered platform by the minor.” If the bill becomes law, the features that result in compulsive usage will probably still exist for the rest of us, and that seems like a problem. 

If you know what the features that cause compulsive use are, you can stop yourself from getting sucked in. 

Autoplay and notifications are obvious ones that you can — and should — turn off in your phone. (Here’s a handy guide that covers how to turn off autoplay in a wide range of apps, and here are some tips for managing notifications.) Endless scrolling is a similar feature that’s not so easy to turn off. Some apps, like Instagram, have a feature that will prompt you to take a break or set a daily limit. Apple and Google both offer suites of features to limit how much you’re using certain apps. (In iOS, it’s called Screen Time, and it’s Digital Wellbeing in Android.)

Even if you are able to pare down some of the features that compel you to keep using an app, others are practically inescapable: algorithmic feeds and personalized content, for example. Algorithmic feeds are designed to keep you scrolling, searching for an unspecified reward — not unlike one of Skinner’s rats pulling a lever in search of a treat. 

While KOSA would give kids the option to turn this off easily, it currently takes some work to do it in apps like Facebook, Instagram, and X. Personalized content, however, is virtually impossible to avoid, since most social media apps are designed to learn what you like and suggest more content like it. That’s what powers the algorithms that not only feed you content but also personalized notifications, recommendations, and of course, ads.

Inevitably, software features that cause compulsive use aren’t just in social media apps. They’re everywhere, from your banking app to your favorite mobile games. Those red dots indicating you have unread notifications? That’s a cue that you might be missing out on a reward. The pull-to-refresh gesture that you might use to load new content? There’s no technical reason for that to exist; it’s just compelling you to engage with the app more directly (the gesture even mimics the pull of a slot machine handle). The buttons to like and favorite things? Well, first of all, research shows they cause anxiety. But they also give algorithms feedback so that they can deliver even more personalized content and continue to keep you on the app.

So do all these tricks and features really make these apps addictive? To call an algorithm “addictive” makes social media sound like a drug you just can’t quit, and it brings to mind US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s recent call for warnings on social media platforms that hearkens back to similar warnings on cigarette packs. The idea that social media is addictive also makes it seem like there’s nothing we can do to stop ourselves from using it.

It’s more productive to think about social media overuse as a bad habit that you can break, according to Wendy Wood, provost professor emerita of psychology and business at USC Dornsife College. Features like notifications and algorithmic feeds full of personalized content are designed to be habit-forming, and when you’re stressed or tired, people lose the ability to ignore certain impulses and control their habits, according to Wood.

“Using that label addiction makes people feel more out of control, makes people feel like they are less able to change their own behavior,” Wood told me. “It pathologizes something that has positive as well as negative effects … and it really depends on how people are using it.”

Of course, she’s talking about adults here. Kids are different. There is research that links certain changes in brain function with heavy social media use in some teens, and the American Psychological Association is on record saying young people face a higher risk of harm from social media use since their prefrontal cortex is not fully developed, meaning they can’t regulate emotions the same way an adult would. And those are only a couple of examples from a growing body of research on the strong negative effects social media has on children and adolescents.

Another easy suggestion to keep yourself or your teen from getting pulled into the vortex of notifications, endless streaming content, and algorithmic hypnosis? Put your phone in the other room. Researchers at the University of Texas found that the mere presence of a smartphone can reduce cognitive ability. It’s also just a distraction, a reminder that there is a virtual world of limitless, unpredictable rewards within your reach. 

But you can’t pull the lever if you can’t see it or touch it.

A version of this story was also published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!