Addiction: a tax for social media like tobacco

“Above all else, the most addict­ive aspects of smart­phones are their social func­tions,” states Samuel Veis­sière, an evol­u­tion­ary anthro­po­lo­gist and assist­ant pro­fess­or of psy­chi­atry at McGill Uni­ver­sity. His research focuses on the mech­an­isms behind smart­phone and Inter­net addic­tion; from dopam­ine and over-activ­a­tion of reward cir­cuits, to ‘hyper soci­ab­il­ity’ to hyp­not­ic sug­gest­ib­il­ity ¹. 

He explains that the phe­nomen­on is driv­en by more than just the dopam­ine hits that we receive from the vari­able rewards of noti­fic­a­tions – as is the com­mon the­ory. Rather, he argues that the habit of pick­ing up our phones has been ingrained through Pavlovi­an-type con­di­tion­ing. “When people are wait­ing for a bus, or exper­i­ence a situ­ation of bore­dom, they tend to pick up their phone and engage in mind­less brows­ing to seek stim­uli and rewards”. Samuel Veissière’s research aim is to uncov­er the “sub­stance” that makes many of us so addicted that we are will­ing to sac­ri­fice basic needs like food, sleep, and even sex.

Social media and pub­lic health

Whilst there is still some debate in the sci­entif­ic com­munity, there is an increas­ing body of evid­ence dir­ectly link­ing smart­phone and social media use to men­tal health prob­lems like anxi­ety and depres­sion. Stud­ies also point out links to impaired cog­ni­tion and memory and sleep prob­lems, going so far as to high­light an epi­dem­ic of loneli­ness and decreased face-to-face inter­ac­tion – which fur­ther impairs over­all health and well-being. One thing we do know to be a major factor is that smart­phones are largely used to access social net­work­ing sites, known to drive us to addict­ive and anxio­gen­ic loops of upward social comparison. 

In a the­or­et­ic­al paper pub­lished in 2019 in the pres­ti­gi­ous journ­al Beha­vi­our­al and Brain Sci­ences ², his research team presen­ted a new paradigm on the ‘co-evol­u­tion’ of cog­ni­tion and cul­ture. Sci­ent­ists have come to under­stand that organ­isms func­tion in the world by gen­er­at­ing ‘pre­dic­tions’ about beha­viours that dif­fer­ent envir­on­ment­al stim­uli afford. Hence, min­im­ising any unwanted sur­prises in an inher­ently uncer­tain uni­verse so as to ensure sur­viv­al. While sci­ent­ists were already describ­ing the brain as a “pre­dic­tion” machine, Veis­sière and col­leagues spe­cified that human brains and bod­ies do not nav­ig­ate the world alone, but col­lect­ively, by out­sourcing rel­ev­ant beha­vi­our­al pre­dic­tions to a net­work of oth­er brains. 

The basic idea is that humans (unlike chim­pan­zees!) are not very good at indi­vidu­al prob­lem-solv­ing, and instead need to draw on a large rep­er­toire of cumu­lat­ive know­ledge and skills passed down over the gen­er­a­tions. As such, human brains seek to con­stantly update their beliefs in response to what oth­ers around them are doing – which mater­i­al­ises as us com­par­ing ourselves to oth­ers and adjust­ing beha­viour accordingly. 

Veis­sière explains that human cog­ni­tion and cul­ture “already work like the Inter­net”, in that human minds are already designed to out­source (“browse” and “down­load”) inform­a­tion. We scan the social world for beha­vi­our­al guidelines and a sense of pur­pose and iden­tity. “Social media and most of the Inter­net provide such a guide. Even when we are not dir­ectly inter­act­ing with people we know – for example, when we watch You­Tube videos or scroll through a celebrity’s Ins­tagram or Twit­ter feed – we are identi­fy­ing socially rel­ev­ant inform­a­tion that will enable us to func­tion optim­ally accord­ing to the norms and val­ues of our group,” he states. 

Smart­phone addicts

To meas­ure smart­phone addic­tion, Veis­sière and his team use a “prob­lem­at­ic smart­phone use” scale, which assesses the extent to which a phone inter­feres with every­day life.  To put things into per­spect­ive, only 0.6% of the world pop­u­la­tion are addicted to hard drugs like cocaine, opi­ates, and amphet­am­ines ³. In com­par­is­on, Veis­sière and his team found that over 40% of the sample in a uni­ver­sity stu­dent pop­u­la­tion showed signs of smart­phone addic­tion. Moreover, in a study of 24 coun­tries around the world, addic­tion rates have been increas­ing expo­nen­tially since 2014, with China exhib­it­ing the highest rates by far ⁴.

He com­pares smart­phone addic­tion with cul­tur­al assump­tions about smoking. “Fifty years or so into the future, I ima­gine we will see people in films stuck to their smart­phones and find it as unset­tling as we do now when we watch old movies where people are smoking in offices and trains.” 

“The arrival of the iPhone in 2007 pre­cip­it­ated our spe­cies’ trans­ition into the mobile digit­al niche,” he states, “which ushered us into deep, rad­ic­al trans­form­a­tions of all aspects of our lives that we have yet to fully com­pre­hend.” He con­siders smart­phone addic­tion to be a major pub­lic health and pub­lic safety issue going as far as claim­ing that, “the inter­net should be reg­u­lated as if it were a hard drug. All devices should dis­play large, evid­ence-based health-warn­ings, pre­scribed con­sump­tion quant­it­ies by age and at-risk group, and be heav­ily taxed over a set of hours per day.” 

For him, “chil­dren in par­tic­u­lar should be leg­ally pro­tec­ted from screens in the same way they are pro­tec­ted from tobacco, alco­hol, and oth­er drugs than can harm their devel­op­ment.  Inter­net time should be lim­ited to struc­tured research in schools.  Cur­rent pedi­at­ric guidelines pre­scrib­ing a max­im­um of two hours of a day for chil­dren are not con­ser­vat­ive enough.” He says that “par­ents who want to keep in touch with their chil­dren can give them a simple mobile phone, but no smart­phone before turn­ing 18 ought to be a new cul­tur­al trend.” 

Digit­al detox 

In the mean­time, Samuel Veis­sière says that the short-term solu­tion before we see pub­lic health inter­ven­tion is to pro­mote “self-reg­u­la­tion”. That is to say find­ing a healthy bal­ance between our digit­al and phys­ic­al lives.  In his most recently study pub­lished this year, his team car­ried out a beha­vi­our­al inter­ven­tion aimed at study­ing the effects of a ‘digit­al detox’ ⁵. “We meas­ured dif­fer­ent factors before and after par­ti­cipants stopped using their smart­phones,” he explains. The team wanted to find out wheth­er the neg­at­ive effects of smart­phones use could be reduced by tar­get­ing the mind­less, auto­mat­ic aspects of com­puls­ive smart­phone use. Their res­ults point to a marked improve­ment in well-being, sleep and work­ing memory as well as vast reduc­tions in screen time and prob­lem­at­ic smart­phone after a detox of just two weeks.

The par­ti­cipants of the study are mainly uni­ver­sity stu­dents in the 18–30 age brack­et – the cat­egory of people whose men­tal health is most affected by smart­phone use. So, whilst it may not be rep­res­ent­at­ive of some ‘high-con­cern’ groups like chil­dren, it does give an insight into what can be done to reduce neg­at­ive effects. 

“We used our res­ults to provide a list of ten simple steps which smart­phone users can apply to make it more dif­fi­cult for them­selves to con­nect,” the research­er advises. Much of the steps are designed to make the pro­cess of using a smart­phone more effort­ful and less pleas­ur­able, so as to decrease auto­mat­ic habits. Since his research indic­ates that smart­phone addic­tion is due to a con­di­tioned action, the reflex can be broken (or de-con­di­tioned) by mak­ing it more challenging. 

“These include remov­ing the touch ID to make it harder to open the screen; turn­ing off noti­fic­a­tions; switch­ing the screen to grey scale; remov­ing social media apps and lim­it­ing their use to a com­puter; and keep­ing phones out­side the bed­room when sleep­ing. Essen­tially, the object­ive is to reduce your phone use to func­tions that are neces­sary for work and fam­ily and try to move as many activ­it­ies as pos­sible to ritu­ally marked time on a com­puter, or face-to-face whenev­er pos­sible. A sort of ‘digit­al min­im­al­ism’, if you will.”