Don’t Blame the Designers for Your Digital Addiction
So-called dopamine hacking is more sales pitch than science. What matters isn’t how our attention is captured, but what we pay attention to.
Earlier this month, during a visit to a YMCA in London, Prince Harry argued that Fortnite should be banned, complaining that the video game is “created to addict, an addiction to keep you in front of a computer for as long as possible.” The prince is just the most recent in a long line of folks who worry about what digital technology is doing to our brains. That group increasingly includes some of the people who brought these products to us in the first place — last year, Facebook’s founding president Sean Parker, who left the company in 2005, complained that the “like” button exploits customers by creating a feedback loop of dopamine rewards.
It’s true that the most effective forms of digital media can be so compelling to some users as to feel addictive. That’s because they activate the brain’s reward system — or mesolimbic pathway — releasing the neurotransmitter dopamine and providing a sense of pleasure or satisfaction. But the concerns raised by critics like Harry and Parker actually represent a crude overgeneralization about how our brains respond to electronic media. Using this intellectual…
