Social media and neuromarketing

The other day I came across a really interesting article about social media and how it uses our brains to get the most out of us. The article is quite long and it’s in French, so I’ve put together a good summary, because I think the information is excellent and well worth reading. In places it’s fairly technical, so I’ve tried to make it as easy to read as possible because… as we all know… that’s how information sinks in best. The original article was published in 2018 on the French blog The Brandnewsblog, which is no longer available online.

The big companies behind social media and other platforms (Instagram, Netflix, LinkedIn, Tinder, Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter… any of them and all the rest) use the way our brains work to capture as much of our attention as possible for as long as possible. Their main goal is to keep us connected most of the time. Because the more connected we are, the more dependent and conditioned we become, the more we buy, the more influenced we are and… the bigger their profits. That’s it, in broad strokes.

In this world everything has been carefully studied, and so-called neuromarketing is used, together with a certain amount of psychological manipulation, to get the most out of us. When I talk about neuromarketing, I mean the way these platforms manipulate our brains to achieve various ends. How? Let me explain. Bear in mind, though, that linking each mechanism to one specific area of the brain, as the original article does, is a simplification: in reality, each of these functions depends on networks involving several brain areas.

Notifications set off our alert systems. That’s right: the sound or sight of a WhatsApp message, a Facebook private message and so on are processed by our brain as if they were an alert (sensory areas and parts of the parietal lobe involved in attention play a role in this, among others). From an evolutionary point of view, our brain is primed to process any new stimulus as a possible alert, in case it signals a predator threatening our survival. Notifications aren’t designed the way they are by chance: the aim is for our brain to process them as alerts, so that they grab all our attention and push whatever else we’re doing into the background.

Hands up if you’ve never picked up your phone when a WhatsApp pinged while you were doing something else that was, quite probably, more important than that message. I certainly can’t raise mine.

Our brain’s reward system processes gratification: rewards, positive reinforcement. On social media, that translates into likes, followers, the number of times something you post gets shared… Every time we receive some gratification, dopamine is released in this system. Let’s just say dopamine is a substance closely linked to motivation and to the urge to repeat whatever we found pleasant. Just like when we exercise or have sex, to name a couple of other examples where we also release dopamine. It’s important to note that this release is immediate: remember that positive reinforcement is more powerful when it’s immediate, and this greatly increases the likelihood of the behaviour happening again; in other words, it increases the chances that we’ll become addicted to those likes.

Endless content keeps us hooked. All these platforms are designed so that we immerse ourselves in their content for as long as possible, cutting ourselves off from the outside world. Hands up if you have HBO or Netflix and have never binge-watched several episodes of a series you love… And hands up if you’ve never thought, after finally finishing your favourite series, “What a shame, now what?” Exactly. Their goal is to remove even the slightest cognitive effort and lull our senses. When that happens, we “switch off” from any visual cue around us telling us it’s “time to stop”, which is why we can stay hooked for hours.

Social media exploits our social side. We are social beings by nature. From an evolutionary perspective this makes sense: we need others to survive, and humans have a better chance of surviving in a group. Social interactions are rewarding for most of us, and social media makes a point of exploiting this by stimulating the brain areas involved in our social life (the original article mentions the precuneus, which is one of them). And some studies suggest that interactions on these platforms, such as getting likes, activate the same reward circuits as other social rewards.

The amygdala plays a part in the fear of missing out. This is where the well-known phenomenon of FOMO (fear of missing out) comes in. Here we’d be talking about missing an important piece of information, an experience… or similar. For example, missing the photos from last week’s party that someone posted on Facebook, missing the deal of the century because you didn’t check some website often enough, and so on.

The amygdala, which is involved in fear and in detecting threats, would play a role in this phenomenon, which in the past really mattered because it helped us survive. That anxiety or fear of missing something we consider important lives in all of us, to a greater or lesser degree depending on our personality, experiences and stage of life. What has been observed is that people who are more hooked on these kinds of platforms have stronger FOMO than those who are less attached to them. The stronger my FOMO, the longer I’ll stay connected.

Once again, it’s worth stressing that platforms and social networks aren’t harmful per se; in other words, they aren’t damaging in themselves, but they can become so depending on how we use them. As so often in life, the question is where we draw the line.