Our use of social media, specifically our efforts to maximize “likes,” follows a pattern of “reward learning,” concludes a new study by an international team of scientists. Its findings, which appear in the journal Nature Communications, reveal parallels with the behavior of animals, such as rats, in seeking food rewards.
“These results establish that social media engagement follows basic, cross-species principles of reward learning,” explains David Amodio, a professor at New York University and the University of Amsterdam and one of the paper’s authors. “These findings may help us understand why social media comes to dominate daily life for many people and provide clues, borrowed from research on reward learning and addiction, to how troubling online engagement may be addressed.”
In 2020, more than four billion people spent several hours per day, on average, on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other more specialized forums. This widespread social media engagement has been likened by many to an addiction, in which people are driven to pursue positive online social feedback, such as “likes,” over direct social interaction and even basic needs like eating and drinking.
While social media usage has been studied extensively, what actually drives people to engage, sometimes obsessively, with others on social media is less clear.
To examine these motivations, the Nature Communications study, which also included scientists from Boston University, the University of Zurich, and Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, directly tested, for the first time, whether social media use can be explained by the way our minds process and learn from rewards.
To do so, the authors analyzed more than one million social media posts from over 4,000 users on Instagram and other sites. They found that people space their posts in a way that maximizes how many “likes” they receive on average: they post more frequently in response to a high rate of likes and less frequently when they receive fewer likes.
The researchers then used computational models to reveal that this pattern conforms closely to known mechanisms of reward learning, a long-established psychological concept that posits behavior may be driven and reinforced by rewards.
More specifically, their analysis suggested that social media engagement is driven by similar principles that lead non-human animals, such as rats, to maximize their food rewards in a Skinner Box — a commonly used experimental tool in which animal subjects, placed in a compartment, access food by taking certain actions (e.g., pressing a particular lever).
The researchers then corroborated these results with an online experiment, in which human participants could post funny images with phrases, or “memes,” and receive likes as feedback on an Instagram-like platform. Consistent with the study’s quantitative analysis, the results showed that people posted more often when they received more likes — on average.
“Our findings can help lead to a better understanding of why social media dominates so many people’s daily lives and can also provide leads for ways of tackling excessive online behavior,” says the University of Amsterdam’s Bjorn Lindstrom, the paper’s lead author.
1. Björn Lindström, Martin Bellander, David T. Schultner, Allen Chang, Philippe N. Tobler, David M. Amodio. A computational reward learning account of social media engagement. Nature Communications, 2021; 12 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-19607-x
Razi Berry is the founder and publisher of the journal Naturopathic Doctor News & Review, which has been in print since 2005, and the premier consumer-faced website of naturopathic medicine, NaturalPath. She is the host of The Love is Medicine Project docuseries, The Natural Cancer Prevention Summit, The Heart Revolution-Heal, Empower and Follow Your Heart, and the popular 10-week Sugar Free Summer program. From a near death experience as a young girl that healed her failing heart, to later overcoming infertility and chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia through naturopathic medicine, Razi has lived the mind/body healing paradigm. Her projects uniquely capture the tradition and philosophy of naturopathy: The healing power of nature, the vital life force in every living thing and the undeniable role that science and mind/body medicine have in creating health and overcoming dis-ease. You can follow Razi on social media: Facebook at Razi Berry, Instagram at Razi.Berry and join the Love is Medicine group to explore the convergence of love and health. Look for more, and listen to more Love is Medicine podcast episodes here.
