Thirty years ago, Shull set out on a bold mission: to understand how these games exerted this magnetic effect. What characteristics can literally prevent you from thriving?
she spent 15 years dissecting the inner workings of video slot machines. She also interviews everyone up and down the industry, from marketers and mathematicians to software engineers and executives, as well as people who use these devices on a daily basis.
Through her research, she discovered four key features that, when combined together, help keep people on gambling devices. These characteristics induce a trance-like or dissociative state known as “machine area” or “dark stream”, in which people lose track of time and place.
To Shull’s surprise, around the beginning of 2010, the same features began appearing in phone and tablet apps, including social media, gaming and video streaming platforms. “These are not normal products for children like a pair of shoes or a toy,” she says. “They bond with the kids.”
Here are four features that make this superglue:
Trait 1: loneliness
“When the connection is just between you and the machine, it removes the social cues needed to stop,” Shull says. It’s harder to notice when the activity no longer serves the person playing or scrolling.
Studies have found that children who regularly use screens alone in their bedrooms have a higher risk of developing what psychologists call problematic use. That is, they continue to use an app or play a game even when it damages their health. For example, the app may interfere with their sleep or friendships, but the child still feels compelled to stay on the app.
Feature 2: bottomless
The videos continue to appear on TikTok and YouTube. Photos, comments and likes keep popping up on Instagram. Apps have seemingly endless content for you to view, and everything is displayed or played automatically.
“There’s no natural stopping point,” Shull says. So you never feel complete or satisfied.
You want another one of somethingendlessly. And that feeling gets even stronger with the third ingredient thrown into the mix.
Feature 3: Speed
The faster people play video slots, the longer people gamble, Shull found in her review of research conducted by the gambling industry. Speed has a similar effect on social media and video streaming apps, she says. The faster people can scroll, watch, and then watch again, the harder it is for many to pull away from an app.
“The speed of the feedback can make it feel like you’re merging with the screen. You don’t know where you start and the machine ends,” Shull says. “The speed really just pulls you into that flow.”
For social media, the speed at which we can find “new” material has jumped with several technological advances, including the invention of higher-speed Internet and infinite scrolling.
Trait 4: annoys or gives you almost whatever you want
That last ingredient is perhaps the most important, he says Jonathan D. Morrowneurologist and psychiatrist at the University of Michigan. It all depends on how apps choose content for you.
Here’s how it usually works. First, the software uses AI to determine what you hope to find or see. “Even if you don’t know what you want, the app does. It’s very good at finding it,” says Morrow.
But then, he says, the app withholds that reward: “Apps don’t give you that. They give you something close to that, and a few clicks later, the algorithm gives you something even closer.”
They rarely – if ever – give you what you’re looking for. “They give enough to keep you engaged, looking at the app and interacting with it for as long as possible,” he adds.
This tease gives you the feeling that you will soon get what you are looking for. “So you’ll be out there all day trying to get the next big thing. There always is.” opportunity you’ll finally get what you want,” says Morrow.
A prescription for overuse
When an app combines these four characteristics—loneliness, bottomlessness, speed, and irritation—it creates a kind of recipe for overuse for almost everyone, Shull says. Shull sometimes gives his NYU students this list of design features. “I say, ‘Pick a website or an app. Then, using those criteria, rate how harmful it is.’
But the recipe is particularly harmful to children, she adds: “It’s a cruel set-up, especially when it comes to children. Children are obviously more vulnerable.” So she and Morrow agree: Kids need help regulating their use of these apps, but they also need protection from harmful design.
