How your phone hooks you: dopamine, infinite scroll and the slot machine in your pocket
Variable rewards: why your phone works like a slot machine
Most posts in your feed are dull, and that may be part of the trick. A famous experiment with pigeons shows why a reward you cannot predict pulls harder than one you can. Then one small move put the same trick in your pocket.
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Meet Miva, your friend. She designs the joke app you scrolled last night, and you test it for her. Her boss wants people to open it more often. Her first idea: show only the best jokes.
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Then she reads about the psychologist B. F. Skinner. In the 1950s, he studied pigeons in a box. When a pigeon pecked a small button, a little food sometimes dropped into a tray.
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One pigeon got food after every peck. It pecked at an easy pace. Another got food after a random number of pecks: sometimes 3, sometimes 20. It never knew which peck would pay, so it pecked fast and hardly stopped.
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Then the food stopped for good. The first pigeon soon gave up. The second one went on pecking long after. For that pigeon, any peck might still be the one.
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Skinner saw the same trick in gambling halls. A slot machine pays back some money at random times, so people keep playing. A reward that comes at random like this is called a variable reward. Each try might be the one, so there is always something to want.
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So Miva keeps the dull jokes in, and she adds one move. You pull the feed down and let go. A little wheel spins, and new jokes may appear. This move is called pull to refresh.
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Pull, wait, and see what you get. Most pulls bring nothing much, and now and then one brings a great joke. It is the lever of a slot machine, in your pocket.
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Pull to refresh was invented in 2009 by Loren Brichter, for a Twitter app, and almost every feed copied it. Years later, he said in an interview that it is addictive. When he made it, he said, he was not mature enough to think about that.
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Brichter also said apps no longer need it: they can load new posts by themselves. Miva's boss likes that idea very much.
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Quick check
Two snack machines break and stop giving anything. Before that, the first one always gave a snack. The second one sometimes gave two, and sometimes none. At which machine do people keep putting coins in longer?
Show the answer
At the second one. People are used to getting nothing from it now and then, so a miss does not tell them it is broken.
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Go further
Two names for what you saw.