Hypernatural Monitoring: A Social Rehearsal Account of Smartphone Addiction (2018)

The Sociality of Smartphone Use

When it comes to smartphone use, current scientific literature and intuitive wisdom are overwhelmingly pessimistic, warning us of the dangers these new technologies enable. According to current research, smartphone use is associated with depression (Steers et al., 2014; Andreassen et al., 2016), materialism (Lee et al., 2014; Twenge, 2017), and social anxiety (Billieux et al., 2015; Emanuel et al., 2015; Hussain et al., 2017), spawning a generation of anti-social, chronically anxious, self-obsessed ‘zombies’ (Lu and Lo, 2017). While these findings raise important concerns about the ‘dark side’ of smartphone use, they tend to focus on new technologies as the sole locus of addiction and pathology. We propose to bring this problem into a broader evolutionary focus, and will go on to argue that the current ‘smartphone obsession’ is neither grounded in, nor indicative of a paradigmatic shift in the psychosocial context in which human experience is invariably framed. Popular accounts, we argue, miss the mark on a crucially important factor: it is not so much smartphones themselves that are addictive, but rather the sociality that they afford. We insist that this drive for sociality is a fundamental feature of human evolution that predates smartphones by hundreds of thousands – by some accounts several millions – of years (Hrdy, 2007). Simply put, smartphone addiction is hyper-social, not anti-social.

There is ample evidence to support the claim that smartphone use is inherently prosocial, and by extension, that this prosociality is a core locus of smartphone addiction. First, the majority of smartphone use is spent on social activities such as social networking, text messaging, and phone calls (Li and Chung, 2006; Lopez-Fernandez et al., 2014). Even less interactive smartphone use, like information seeking or surfing the web, has now become implicitly social: ‘likes’, views, and comments are social indices of prestige and collective attention. Second, individuals who use their devices for primarily social purposes are quicker to develop habitual smartphone use (Van Deursen et al., 2015). These findings suggest that it is not just the smartphone itself that is addictive but rather the—direct or indirect—social interaction it enables.

Gendered dimensions of smartphone addiction provide further clues into its inherent sociality. Current findings in evolutionary psychology and social neuroscience indicate that women are on average more proficient at social cognition and tend to display more prosocial behavior than men (Eckel and Grossman, 1998; Andreoni and Vesterlund, 2001; Meier, 2007; Laasch and Conaway, 2009; Rand et al., 2016; Soutschek et al., 2017; see Espinosa and Kovářík, 2015 for alternate explanations). This gender discrepancy is maintained in smartphone use, with numerous studies showing that women use their phones for social purposes significantly more than men do (Tufekci, 2008; Van Deursen et al., 2015). According to our hypothesis, the prosocial nature of female smartphone use would render females more susceptible to addiction. Recent estimates confirm this view: females are more likely to develop addictive smartphone behaviors, experience more anxiety if they cannot use their smartphones, and feel less in control over checking their phones (Thompson and Lougheed, 2012; Van Deursen et al., 2015).

Imagined Other Minds Guide Our Expectations

Despite minor gendered differences in social cognition, it is not controversial that humans as a whole are a prosocial species. Beyond amply documented findings in developmental psychology attesting to the intrinsic co-evolutionary links between cognition and sociality (Moll and Tomasello, 2007; Tomasello, 2009; Tomasello et al., 2012), recent research on mind-wandering has shown that a large part of our spontaneous mental lives is devoted to rehearsing social scenarios. A recent large-scale investigation using experience-sampling, for example, demonstrated that nearly half of waking time is spent in mind-wandering episodes unrelated to the task at hand (Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010). Although science on daydreaming often describes the consequences of a wandering mind (e.g., Mrazek et al., 2013), it is likely premature to believe that a cognitive function that occupies such a large percentage of mental life does not confer some adaptive benefit. To explain the ubiquity of mind-wandering, Poerio and Smallwood (2016) have proposed that the phenomenon is evolutionarily adaptive, serving as a platform for offline social cognition. Supporting this view, research shows that all but a small fraction of daydreaming involves social scenarios (Mar et al., 2012; Song and Wang, 2012). Moreover, mind-wandering and social cognition rely on shared neural activation, whereby the neural activity that occurs during daydreaming significantly overlaps with that of core social processes like mentalizing and perspective taking – the very processes that enable an individual to socially flourish (Poerio and Smallwood, 2016). Recent models on the evolution of depression help confirm this social hypothesis for the mechanisms of ordinary cognition. In a series of influential papers, Paul Andrews and colleagues have argued that ‘depression’ (a disorder characterized by cognitive rumination) confers specific social advantages to help keep social problems in mental focus. Again, it is of note that women (who are demonstrably more proficient than men at social cognition) experience depression at much higher rates than men. Andrews and colleagues see this as further evidence that a significant part of mental life is dedicated to rehearsing social scenarios (Andrews and Thomson, 2009; Andrews et al., 2012, 2015). All in all, a growing consensus between developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and phenomenology strongly suggests that humans are almost always thinking about and through other people (Frith, 2002; Tomasello, 2009; Mar et al., 2012; Ramstead et al., 2016). The time is ripe, then, to elaborate a generalized social rehearsal theory of cognition. In the following sections, we expand on this theory and apply it to smartphone use.

Social Media and Internet Notifications as Hyper-Natural Monitoring

In a series of recent papers, Ramstead et al. (2016; see also Ramstead et al., 2017; Veissière, 2017) have described symbolically enriched human worlds as organized landscapes of “cultural affordances” grounded in mutual, recursively nested expectations about shared standards of behavior. ‘Culture’, on this view can be conceptualized as patterned allocations of attention; that is, the practice of selectively paying attention, ascribing meaning, and guiding behavior to certain features of the world according to what we expect others to also expect and pay attention to. While what is made salient through collectively shaped attentional preferences acquires different values and affords different experiences from group to group, the capacity for shared attention extrapolated to large groups of generalized ‘like me’ others is a species-wide disposition – the very disposition, mediated by joint-intentionality, that gives rise to cultural forms of life among Homo Sapiens (Ramstead et al., 2016; Veissière, 2017).

On this view, over the course of normal cognitive and social development, humans learn to see the world through the perspective of other people and intuitively imagine context-relevant agents (usually imbued with prestige) to guide them in their actions (Veissière, 2017). From context to context and moment to moment, we outsource a large part of our thinking, feelings, and decision-making to sometimes explicit, most often implicit scenarios of the “what would so-and-so think, feel, or expect me to do” variety.

This reassuring feeling of being watched and guided by imaginary others has been hypothesized to play an important role in the evolution of cooperation, morality, organized religion, and large-scale social life (Whitehouse, 2004; Boyer, 2008; Norenzayan and Shariff, 2008; Atran and Henrich, 2010; Norenzayan et al., 2013). According to this view, often called the super-natural monitoring hypothesis, we fashioned our Gods and Spirits to better flesh out the imaginary agents that guide our ordinary cognition, consciousness, action, and moral attitudes.

Instant text messaging, email, and social media provide a platform for our hungry need to be connected, but also for our need to watch and monitor others, and better still, for our need to be seen, heard from, thought about, monitored, judged, and appraised by others. We might call this the hyper-natural monitoring hypothesis.

The prevailing – and hyperbolic – view on smartphone use is that it is a sly weapon, responsible for pandemic-like waves of mass loneliness, anxiety, insecurity, materialism, and narcissism among today’s youth – particularly the so-called ‘digital natives’ born after 1994 (Roberts et al., 2015; Weiser, 2015; Pearson and Hussain, 2015; Twenge, 2017). As Jean Twenge has pointed out in her recent book on digital natives (Twenge, 2017), the advent of electronically mediated childhoods in the West was also concurrent with a general shift in parenting culture, and the rise of so-called ‘helicopter parenting’¹ in particular. Drawing on extensive survey research, she points out that children and youth born after 1994 spent considerably less unsupervised time socializing with their peers than their forebears, and significantly more time on electronic devices. While precise causality behind these two correlated factors cannot be ascertained, we can only note that youth who otherwise do not interact with their peers “in real life” (irl in internet lingo) seek to do so with the means available to their generation. Online-mediated life, more to the point, is always, already real life, and as such, it is inherently social.

What current moral panics about digital media often fail to consider, thus, is that the desire to see and be seen, and judge and be judged is precisely about other people. There is nothing abnormal, as such, about seeking self-worth through other people’s point of view. We propose, thus, to think of this urge as fundamentally normal, and anchored in core mechanisms of social cognition that are distinct to our species. On our social rehearsal and monitoring view, smartphones simply equip us with a novel medium to channel innate human sociality. Their proclivity to induce addiction, in turn, simply points to how much others matter to us and how we want to matter to them.

A Brief Venture into the Neuroscience of Addiction

The exact nature and neurochemical correlates of smartphone addiction are currently unknown (Elhai et al., 2017). Key insights from the neuroscience of learning and addiction, however, can offer important insights into our attachment to the strange flickering and buzzing bricks that seem to regulate our lives.

As we have seen, smartphone use is at once constitutive of and constituted by a complex landscape of sociality. This landscape, however, is also modulated by notifications from dozens of applications that deliver beeps and buzzes, mostly to alert us that another human has interacted with us. We should now consider where and how ‘addiction’ fits in this picture. Social interaction (digital or not) activates the dopaminergic reward circuits in the basal ganglia (See Krach et al., 2010 for a review). It is important to note that these same circuits are implicated in addictive drug use (Belin et al., 2009), compulsive video-gaming, and reward-seeking in general (West et al., 2015). These are circuits that are also responsible for associative learning: the process by which an individual learns to associate two stimuli (Hebb, 1976; Seger, 2006; Yin and Knowlton, 2006). For associative learning to occur, an initial exposure to a new stimulus must occur alongside a reflex-eliciting stimulus. With a smartphone, nearly all notifications that the user encounters elicit a social value and thus activate the dopaminergic reward circuit, leading the user to anticipate and seek these rewarding notifications. With each occurrence this link grows stronger, and the user will anticipate and seek these rewarding notifications, paving the road for habitual behavior.

The dopaminergic system regulates two functions that govern addiction: the anticipation of reward and outcome evaluation (Linnet, 2014). An important finding about dopamine and addiction, however, is that dopaminergic surges typically occur before the reward, or more precisely when a cue (e.g., a beep indicating that one can press a lever) signals the reliable delivery of a reward (e.g., from pulling a lever). Because arousal decreases with frequent and predictable exposure, reward anticipation is a much more powerful mediator of strong addictions than outcome evaluations of the stimulus itself (Fiorillo et al., 2003; van Holst et al., 2012). According to this finding, addictions become strongest when we cannot figure out the pattern of when to reliably expect them (van Holst et al., 2012). Behavioral scientists call these addiction-inducing patterns intermittent reinforcement or variable ratio schedules (Zuriff, 1970). Neuroscientists have identified that a cue triggering a behavior that yields a reward 50% of the time is by far the most anxiety-inducing of delivery schedules. A reward delivered 75% of the time, for example can be reliably expected to deliver most of the time. A cue signaling a reward that delivers 25% of the time can similarly be expected not to deliver most of the time. Such high-predictability schedules (when the brain can reliably predict what is going to happen) typically trigger low arousal. At a 50% delivery rate, a reward schedule is still predictable enough to be enticing, but unpredictable enough to be anxiety-inducing (Fiorillo et al., 2003).

The point to take home here is that arousal is more highly correlated with reward anticipation than with the reward itself. When rewards become most unpredictable, in turn, arousal typically becomes negative, giving rise to anxiety (Figure ​Figure11).

FIGURE 1

Dopaminergic Activity in Response to Uncertain Stimuli (adapted from Fiorillo et al., 2003, Figure ​Figure3C3C). Average Sustained activation of dopamine neurons in a primate as a function of reward probability, whereby the greatest dopaminergic activity occurs when the reward is present half of the time.

Indeed, the beeps and buzzes of smartphone notifications provide just such an intermittent, variable, unpredictable, but uniquely desirable schedule of rarely met anticipation rewards, thus providing chaotic patterns of reward anticipation that trigger very strong modes of arousal. Because of the deeply social nature of the rewards our phones make us crave, we often become entrenched in vicious cycle of addiction (Figure ​Figure11).

Cravings as Prediction Errors

According to predictive-processing and free-energy theories of cognition, we do not immediately perceive the world as it is. Rather than directly respond to environmental stimulus, we first process information through our expectations. Immediate perception, in other words, first occurs through behavioral self-predictions modulated by prior experience (Friston and Kiebel, 2009; Ramstead et al., 2016). On this view, our brains generate statistical models of the world based on prior learning to provide us with predictions of what will arise in experience and how to act accordingly. In doing so our brains predict upcoming sensory states and compare them with actual sensory states, minimizing the differences between these distributions through constant updates of priors and actions (i.e., learning) (Ramstead et al., 2016, 2017). As our perceptual system constantly attempts to reduce uncertainty by computing abysmal amounts of disordered information to make it predictable, discrepancies between prediction and perception – prediction errors in the lingo – become commonplace. Cravings, on this view, could be conceptualized as prediction errors (Tobler et al., 2006) (Figures ​Figures2,2, ​,33).

FIGURE 2

Cue-activated reward anticipation and prediction errors and subsequent dopaminergic activity (adapted from Keiflin and Janak, 2015). (A) Before the cue is conditioned, the unexpected reward results in phasic activation of dopamine neurons and a positive reward prediction error. (B) Once a reward is conditioned, the cue (and not the reward) results in a positive reward anticipation and increased dopamine activity. (C) When the cue occurs but is met without the expected award, the result is a negative prediction error and a reduction of dopamine activity below baseline.

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FIGURE 3

(A–D) Presents an extrapolation of the data presented in Figure ​Figure22 to the present issue of smartphone addiction, whereby the dopamine activity increases at the anticipation of reward, and is reduced below baseline in cases where the expected reward is not met.

As we mentioned above, associative learning and free-energy models can explain the pervasive expectation that the anticipation of smartphone notifications predicts an upcoming social reward. In turn, the intermittent schedule of smartphone notifications promotes stronger anticipations and more compulsive expectations, subsequently inducing prediction errors and affective disappointment.

Notifications are cues for checking behavior that eventually becomes habitual, even without the initial alert (Oulasvirta et al., 2012; Elhai et al., 2017). Recent studies reveal the magnitude of this habitual checking behavior, with the average individual spending over 3 h a day on their smartphone (Alter, 2017), tapping, typing, or swiping an average of 2617 times every day (dscout, 2016). The majority of users go on to experience prediction errors in the form of hallucinations that their phone is vibrating, a phenomenon entitled phantom phone (Sauer et al., 2015). These prediction errors reinforce habitual phone checking behaviors, which are a common gateway to smartphone addiction (Oulasvirta et al., 2012). Prediction errors can also occur in more subtle, but equally frequent and distressing way when precise patterned expectations are not met: a beep that we hope may be a message from a loved one or a Instagram ‘like’, for example, may turn out to be an incoming spam email or a message from one’s boss about an overdue task.

Set Intentional Protocols

Many smartphone users feel trapped by their phones (Harmon and Mazmanian, 2013). The first step toward freedom from phone Hungry Ghosts, as we have seen, is to regain control of the pattern and make it predictable again. Switching off all sounds and notifications can help to ‘un-ring’ Pavlov’s proverbial bell and cull habitual checking behaviors. As we described above, smartphone addiction is mediated by the grasp of intermittent reinforcement schedules of social rewards. With this in mind, setting regular intervals to check one’s phone can reduce the strong cravings that arise from chaotic patterns of reward anticipation. When it comes to instant phone-mediated communication, we can also make our intentions and expectations transparent, and agree on protocols with others. Clear workplace communication policies, for example, those that prohibit evening and weekend emails, or setting clear expectation for time-windows in replying have been shown to be effective in reducing stress and increasing productivity (Mark et al., 2012). Similar ‘policies’ and clear expectations for when to text or not to text – what we call ‘intentional protocols’ – can be devised among friends, families and lovers.

The authors wish to thank reviewers Giulia Piredda and Yasmina Jraissati and Associate Editor Maurizio Tirassa for their insightful comments and help in refining the argument presented here. We are much indebted to Maxwell Ramstead for his contribution to free-energy perspectives in our early work on Internet-mediated sociality and for pointing us in the direction of the predictive-processing literature on addiction. SV wishes to express gratitude to Danny Frank for inviting him to present an early iteration of the social rehearsal theory of smartphone addiction at the Psychotherapy Rounds of the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. Both authors are immensely grateful for the continued support and mentorship offered by Laurence Kirmayer at the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill.

Funding. This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (MS) and the Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives Inititiative (SV).

¹“Helicopter parenting” is used as a derogatory term to describe obsessive parental supervision in most dimensions of children’s lives. Although the phrase first appeared in the l960′s (Ginott, 1965/2009), it is often said to characterize the post-1980s childrearing culture of “hovering around” one’s child. “Lawnmower parenting” (where one paves the way for children in all aspects of their lives), is sometimes used to describe more extreme forms of helicopter parenting. In November 2017, the Economist reported that parents in the United States and nine European countries (except for France), now spent 50% more time with their children than in 1965 (The Economist, 2017).

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