Why We Can’t Put Our Phones Down, and What to Do About It

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The final scene of the 2010 blockbuster movie The Social Network was prophetic. The cheerful serenading of the Beatles belies the image of Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, sitting in front of his laptop, staring at his Facebook profile with eyes glazed over, hitting the refresh persistently. Was this actually prophetic? According to scholars such as Jonathan Haidt, social-media-related mental health impacts began to hit hard in 2012, around two years after the release of the movie. However, there is ongoing debate about what social media companies knew and when. The image of Eisenberg repetitively refreshing is one that is eerily familiar to most of us. The only misrepresentation is that the vast majority of us are accessing social media through our phones now rather than on computers. Why is it that we seem to be so captured by our phones?

Why do they seem so addictive?

There are a plethora of reasons why our phones are so compelling. It is not just that our phones are designed to be that way, or that apps amp up (and even supersede) the effect. Technology has enabled testing, updates, and rollouts in an unprecedented fashion. A few companies, like Netflix, engage in a degree of openness about (some of) their testing, while most are secretive. What we can ascertain is that testing is commonplace, and tweaks to both software and hardware are relentless. The content is designed to appear never-ending too, with persistent novelty and the appearance of infinity with carousel interfaces. In terms of hardware, smartphones are designed to be incredibly accessible and easy to carry, making their integration into our lives seamless in a way that smart glass designers are trying to crack and have not yet done so.

It is now well known that neurotransmitters are involved, as we score hits of pleasurable signals when our notifications light up. The relative unpredictability of when we will receive these reinforcement mechanisms adds to their compulsive potential, while both positive and negative emotional activation play a role in this as well.

Areas that are less researched but are increasingly present in cultural expression are also worth consideration. 2013’s Her explored the unsettling dynamics of a human-AI relationship that might have seemed far-fetched a decade ago, but is unsettlingly close today with the proliferation of LLMs. On a more fundamental level, questions such as neurobiological pairing between humans and our devices demand research, in an age where pornography consumption that is mediated through these devices is so common.

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How to cool things

Writing in the New York Times, psychologist Angela Duckworth offers applicable insights from her research. Specifically in relation to phones, she cites celebrities who avoid social media by simply not having a smartphone, as well as her own research with her students, where she found that students who do not study with their phones near them perform academically better than those who keep their phones next to themselves. Underlying this advice is the concept of situational agency; you might not have the power to resist picking up your phone in the heat of an urge, but you can structure whether it is within reach or sight. Duckworth is among those who challenge the significance of willpower, with challenges to Baumeister’s strength model of self-control being relevant. Paul Dolan’s concept of focusing on how we design things rather than expecting our willpower to save the day echoes Duckworth’s advice.

Dolan’s ideas are informed by the dual system theory of cognition, and the underlying idea that psychologists, economists, and policymakers had traditionally placed too much focus on the effortful System 2. The pioneering work of Walter Mischel and his famous marshmallow experiment included two forms of self-control that some have likened to System 1 and System 2; his terms were hot and cool self-control. Mischel’s enduring and influential finding was that children who were able to resist sitting in front of a marshmallow for a period—in other words, were able to delay their gratification—ended up having happier and more successful lives across several important measures.

The problem now is that we are no longer staring at marshmallows, but rather, hyper-intelligent devices that are engineered to be compelling. They promise not only culinary gratification, but social gratification and more, as more of our lives become enmeshed with our smartphones. Perhaps it is time to stop trying to stare them down and listen to Duckworth’s advice to keep them out of sight and reach.