Most people are aware of this moment, but they hardly ever look at it. Your phone vibrates while you’re engaged in a conversation, a meal, or an idea. You chose not to examine it. You just moved your hand. It’s not a coincidence when your body reacts to a stimulus before your mind does. It was designed.
That engineering was dubbed “brain hacking” by former Google product manager Tristan Harris. He accurately compared the smartphone to a slot machine. The comparison is accurate. A lever is pulled each time someone unlocks their screen. A like, a comment, a new follower, or a message from a loved one are examples of rewards. There isn’t always anything. It is precisely because of this unpredictability and fluctuating reward schedule that slot machines are so hard to avoid. Almost all of the major apps that are currently installed on your phone use the same psychological reasoning in their notification systems.
Sitting with that thought is still a little awkward. Because it suggests that the slight buzz in your pocket isn’t an impartial occurrence. It’s planned, timed, and designed to elicit a particular feeling. There is a whole playbook of strategies used to maximize time-on-product, Harris stated candidly. One of the most useful tools in that playbook are push notifications, which are inexpensive to send, almost impossible to ignore, and closely linked to the brain’s reward system.
Perhaps too loosely at this point, the dopamine angle has been discussed extensively. The cumulative effect over years, however, receives less attention. Every day, the typical smartphone user receives dozens of notifications, each of which trains a small reflex and reinforces the notion that checking is always worthwhile because something significant might be waiting. That conditioning develops gradually and almost imperceptibly. It seems that most people have a deeply ingrained habit of checking their phones by the time they realize how automatic it has become.
This is especially intriguing—and concerning—because of how invisible the mechanism appears from the inside. No one sits down and decides, “Today I’ll let an app use intermittent reinforcement to change my behavior.”One notification at a time, it simply occurs among millions of people. In the early days of mobile, Silicon Valley developed these systems publicly, even proudly. The metric was engagement. The currency was attention. Push notifications served as the conduits for that focus.
Since Harris first brought up these issues in public, the discussion has somewhat changed. Now, terms like “digital wellbeing” can be found in phone settings menus. Certain platforms have introduced tools to restrict the frequency of notifications. Skepticism is on the rise, particularly among younger users who appear to be more conscious than older generations that their attention is being stolen. It is more difficult to determine whether that awareness results in real behavioral change.
However, it’s difficult to ignore the constant barrage of notifications. There haven’t been any significant changes to the systems. They’ve been improved. They are surrounded by softer language. However, the logic of the slot machine that Harris discovered years ago is still present, operating subtly in the background of contemporary life and waiting for you to check your phone once more.
