They just want you to spend as much time as possible with their products. The people who create video games wouldn’t say they are looking to create addicts. We’ll get a flood of dopamine that makes us feel wonderful in the short term, though in the long term you build a tolerance and want more.ĭo the designers of the new technologies understand what they’re doing? We are engineered in such a way that as long as an experience hits the right buttons, our brains will release the neurotransmitter dopamine.

If you’re someone who compulsively plays video games - not everyone, but people who are addicted to a particular game - the minute you load up your computer, your brain will look like that of a substance abuser. If you put someone in front of a slot machine, their brain will look qualitatively the same as when they take heroin. We’re biologically prone to getting hooked on these sorts of experiences. The definition I go with is that it has to be something you enjoy doing in the short term, that undermines your well-being in the long term - but that you do compulsively anyway. That number is sure to have risen with the adoption of newer more addictive social networking platforms, tablets and smartphones. A 2011 study suggested that 41 percent of us have at least one.

Where Snapchat will boast that its youthful users open their app more than 18 times a day.īehavioral addictions are really widespread now. Where teenage boys sometimes spend weeks alone in their rooms playing video games. Today, we have this phenomenon of behavioral addictions where, one tech industry leader told me, people are spending nearly three hours a day tethered to their cellphones. In the past, we thought of addiction as mostly related to chemical substances: heroin, cocaine, nicotine. What makes you think that people have become addicted to digital devices and social media?Ī. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity. We spoke for two hours last week at the offices of The New York Times.

Alter, 36, is an associate professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University who researches psychology and marketing. Not figuratively, but literally addicted.ĭr. In a new book, “Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked,” the social psychologist Adam Alter warns that many of us - youngsters, teenagers, adults - are addicted to modern digital products.

Irresistible book adam alter