Our pursuit of “likes” on social media is a bit like an animal working for treats, according to new research on “reward learning.”
“These results establish that social media engagement follows basic, cross-species principles of reward learning,” explains David Amodio, a professor at New York University and the University of Amsterdam and coauthor of the paper in Nature Communications.
“These findings may help us understand why social media comes to dominate daily life for many people and provide clues, borrowed from research on reward learning and addiction, to how troubling online engagement may be addressed.”
In 2020, more than four billion people spent several hours per day, on average, on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other more specialized forums. This widespread social media engagement has been likened by many to an addiction, in which people are driven to pursue positive online social feedback, such as “likes,” over direct social interaction and even basic needs like eating and drinking.
While social media use has been studied extensively, what actually drives people to engage—sometimes obsessively—with others on social media is less clear.
To examine these motivations, the new study directly tested whether the way our minds process and learn from rewards can explain social media use.
To do so, the authors analyzed more than one million social media posts from over 4,000 users on Instagram and other sites. They found that people space their posts in a way that maximizes how many “likes” they receive on average: they post more ..
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