Why is watching TikTok addictive?

Although Douyin has launched an anti-addiction system, the effect of this system is actually not that great. For those of you who can’t stop watching TikTok once you pick up your phone, you may have become addicted to TikTok. Your behavior, cognition, and even your brain are undergoing some changes.

In early April, the short video app Tik Tok launched an anti-addiction system. After continuous use for more than 1.5 hours, a prompt indicating excessive usage time will appear on Douyin. At the same time, users can also set a time lock. If the usage time exceeds 2 hours per day, they need to enter a four-digit password to continue using it.

This function is like when I was a kid playing games and my parents kept nagging me: You have been playing for more than an hour, stop playing! You have played for two hours today and you can't play anymore.

Just like parental restrictions cannot prevent teenagers from becoming addicted to games, a feature like Tik Tok is probably of no use. After all, just wait for the prompt to disappear and then continue to swipe, and enter the password when the time lock function appears.

However, for those friends who can’t stop watching TikTok as soon as they pick up their phones, you may have become "addicted to TikTok". Your behavior, cognition, and even your brain are undergoing some changes.

1. How does Tik Tok make you addicted?

The reason I first downloaded TikTok was to watch an Alaskan kookaburra dancing the seaweed dance. During the time when I was using TikTok, I would just lie down on the sofa, put on headphones, open TikTok, and by the time I came to my senses, an hour or two had passed. However, apart from watching the new Husky video, I really don’t remember what else I watched.

I know I am not the only one who has had the experience of watching TikTok for an hour or two.

The "TikTok and Kuaishou User Research Report" released by Penguin Intelligence in early April showed that about 22% of TikTok users use the app for more than 1 hour a day.

The current ratio of daily active users to monthly active users (DAU/MAU) of TikTok has reached 0.45, which means that on average each person opens and uses the app 13.5 days per month, while the ratio for games with higher immersion levels is usually between 0.3-0.6.

Funny and interesting video content and full-screen immersive viewing experience are important factors that attract users to Douyin. However, the reason why you become addicted to Douyin is that it uses some large and small interactive details to surge the dopamine in your brain, leading to "behavioral addiction."

The physiological mechanisms of behavioral addiction and substance addiction (such as drug and narcotics addiction) are similar. They are the result of stimulating the same area in the brain.

In his book on behavioral addiction, "Can't Stop: How to Get Rid of Behavioral Addiction in the Age of Screen Scrolling", Adam Alter, a famous scholar and PhD in psychology from Princeton University, lists six components of behavioral addiction, namely:

1. Tempting target
2. Irresistible and unpredictable positive feedback
3. Gradually improving feeling
4. An increasingly difficult task
5. Tension that needs to be resolved but has not yet been resolved
6. Strong social connections

As a product that is being pursued by traffic owners and advertisers, Tik Tok has already met the above factors and is bringing users different degrees of inescapable rewards and stimulations, making some people "addicted to the behavior."

1. Unpredictable content

On the recommendation page of TikTok’s homepage, every time we swipe our fingers, we never seem to be able to guess what the next video will be? This mechanism can be called intermittent variable rewards.

Every time you swipe, will you see a cute cat or dog, a funny prank, a tutorial on a little trick, a celebrity’s life updates, or an advertisement? I guess only Tik Tok’s personalized recommendation algorithm knows the answer.

Maybe sometimes you don’t like the videos recommended by Tik Tok. At this point, some people might think: If you don’t like this video, just swipe away. A 15-second video is not very long. Even if the video is bad and uncreative, you can still hear the powerful and expressive BGM. Just watch the next video.

If you think so too, then this idea can be called "motivated perception", which will change the negative emotions we produce when using TikTok.

All of the above will allow users who watch videos on TikTok to experience the element of "irresistible and unpredictable positive feedback" in behavioral addiction.

2. Automatic loop playback

One of the important interactions in video playback on Tik Tok is automatic loop playback. As soon as you swipe your finger, a video appears in full screen with personalized background music. Are you a little overwhelmed?

This feeling of being caught off guard is actually scientific.

Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman believes that the part of the brain responsible for other basic senses will receive external stimuli first, such as auditory and visual stimuli, while the prefrontal cortex responsible for rational thinking will always be half a beat slower and not as fast as the former.

Therefore, our brain will indeed receive the music and images of the Tik Tok video first, and then think rationally: What is this video about? Should I like it or swipe it away?

The automatic looping of Tik Tok videos, the little red dots in WeChat Moments , and the colorful, dynamic floating icons used by more apps have all captured people's attention and time without them being prepared.

3. The "loop" caused by 15 seconds

Tik Tok videos are 15 seconds long, which usually cannot fully present a soundtrack, and the content of the video usually cannot show a complete story and plot. Therefore, many videos on Tik Tok give people a feeling of coming to an abrupt end. Many people will involuntarily watch them several times, and even have a deep memory of these incomplete videos.

This is a psychological phenomenon called the Zeigarnik effect, which states that people have an instinctive drive to get things done, and that things that have not been completed are more memorable than those that have been completed.

Psychologist Bulma Zeigarnik

In the early 20th century, psychologist Bulma Zeigarnik conducted a famous experiment: she asked a group of adults to do 20 short tasks, such as hands-on tasks such as modeling clay and building boxes, and intellectual tasks such as solving puzzles and math problems.

Zeigarnik had participants complete parts of a task and then interfere with other tasks that had not yet been completed. Afterwards, the subjects were asked to recall the tasks they had performed.

Data shows that the number of unfinished tasks remembered is twice that of completed tasks.

These things that have not been completed but are remembered in the heart and make people feel nervous can be called "loops". Its positive effect is that it drives people to complete tasks, while its negative effect is that it can make people fall into an endless state of procrastination. It is also the element of "tension that needs to be resolved but has not been resolved yet" in behavioral addiction.

4. Likes are essential

In Tik Tok, the like button is placed right below the video uploader’s avatar, in a very convenient and important position. After someone who watches the video clicks the like button, a red heart will be dynamically selected to fill the button. These colors and forms of appearance can give positive feedback to the person who likes the post in a timely manner, making people feel that liking the post is also a happy thing.

However, the person who uploaded the video has a greater impact on the person who received a like. Seeing that the videos on the recommendation page have over 10,000 likes, if no one likes the videos you uploaded, it will not only make you feel uncomfortable, but also be like a public condemnation: your videos are not interesting enough, you don’t have enough friends…

In the experience of video uploaders, likes are also a kind of intermittent variable rewards. It will make people have a stronger desire to obtain it, for example: it will make people start to forward it to Sina Weibo and WeChat for promotion ; for example: they will open the application more frequently to check the dynamic notification page. (Is it the same as when you post a message on WeChat Moments and want to continue paying attention to comments and likes?)

Facebook is an early social application that used the like button. Sean Parker, one of its founders, once confessed to the public:

Every time someone likes or comments on your photo, you get a sense of satisfaction from dopamine.

There used to be an app called Lovematically, whose purpose was to like every picture in the user's information feed. After this product was connected to Instagram's API, it was immediately blocked.

The founder of this product believes that it (likes) is the cocaine of our generation. They have become the first generation of digital drugs that dominate our culture without being noticed.

5. Challenges that are not easy to complete

Zhang Nan, president of Douyin, once said in his sharing at Chaos University: Douyin’s product design has an interesting feature called “Challenge”, which is to use operational ideas to create product functions and special effects and complete the cold start of the functions. Many products have this function. Some are called topics, and some are called themes. In fact, it allows everyone to express themselves with a theme.

The "Douyin Assistant" in Douyin often launches official challenge activities. The number of participants ranges from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. Videos that rank at the top of the challenge generally receive hundreds of thousands or even millions of likes, as well as numerous comments.

Participating in a challenge requires spending time, energy, and manpower (many videos cannot be completed by one person) to shoot and edit a 15-second short video. In the process, people usually feel a sense of participation and even "hardship," which are necessary ingredients for the experience of behavioral addiction.

2. What changes will occur in our brain when we are addicted to a behavior?

If you develop a behavioral addiction to TikTok, the detailed experience is this: you cannot accurately predict when you will open TikTok, and after opening it, you don’t know how long you will use it, and you don’t know when you will close the app.

So, you decide to give up other activities and continue to watch Douyin, but even if you continue to stay on Douyin, you will no longer be able to enjoy the fun of watching Douyin as before.

Of course, it is also possible to replace "Tik Tok" with other Internet products, such as WeChat Moments and Sina Weibo.

Behavioral addiction, like other addictions, causes three changes in our brain: desensitization, sensitization, and degeneration of prefrontal cortex function. After the brain nerves adapt to a certain stimulus, they will want to continue to repeat this feeling, thus forming a craving.

• Desensitization occurs when a person continues to repeat the same behavior, and the stimulated area develops tolerance, and under the same stimulation, the amount of dopamine and dopamine receptors produced decreases.
• The sensitization reaction makes people more sensitive to information related to addictive substances. In the eyes of addicts, addictive substances become more attractive than other things.
• The degeneration of the prefrontal lobe function will weaken the addict's ability to control impulses and foresee consequences, making it impossible for him to control himself.

3. Is it your fault that you can’t close the app?

Tristan Harris, known as a design ethicist, believes that the problem of people's addiction to mobile phones is not that people lack willpower, but that there are many people working hard behind the applications with the purpose of "destroying your self-discipline."

Image from Simple Psychology

The definition of addiction is relatively negative. Dr. Adam Alter, the psychologist mentioned above, believes that:

A behavior is addictive only when the rewards it brings in the moment are eventually offset by its destructive consequences.

In other words, if watching TikTok really brings you joy and the time you spend on it does not cause serious consequences, it does not count as behavioral addiction. But this does not mean that we should just give up our attention and time if the consequences are not serious.

The phenomenon of behavioral addiction to the use of Internet products and electronic products has been raised by the psychiatric community, but has not received enough attention. At the same time, designs and products related to behavioral addiction are increasing.

There used to be a company in Silicon Valley called Dopamine Labs. They had two products, both of which were related to behavioral addiction caused by mobile phone applications .

A company called "Boundless Mind" sells API services to apps, using neuroscience theory and artificial intelligence technology to help app products optimize their interactions. Its slogan is "Make your app addictive with dopamine." Traces of the China Merchants Bank App page were also found in the promotional page of this product.

Another is an app that helps people quit their mobile phone addiction, called "Space". It also uses neuroscience theory and artificial intelligence technology, and is said to be able to "let you take back control between breaths."

Compared to this company that has been using the "underlying technology" of behavioral addiction as a selling point, selling both spear and shield, other Internet product designs are more obscure and low-key, such as: various message notifications of apps, automatic playback of the next episode of video websites, infinite scroll-down news sources of social applications, and hot tags and topics in information applications...

However, an interesting phenomenon is:

In 2010, Jobs told The New York Times that he would never let his children use an iPad.

Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter and Medium, said he wouldn't buy an iPad for his young children either.

Nolan, the villain in the movie "Ready Player One" and the boss of IOI, also doesn't like playing "OASIS" and doesn't even bother to remember the password.

The people who produce these high-tech products are just like Walter White, the drug lord in "Breaking Bad". They don't take drugs.

The author of this article @沈星佑 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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