Your apps can refresh on their own. So why do we still pull down? The man who invented the gesture has an answer, and when someone told him it works like a slot machine, he said, “I agree 100%.”
It’s not an accident. It was planned that way.
We start with a pigeon: the 1950s experiments showing that rewards you can’t predict keep animals, and people, coming back. Then the story of pull-to-refresh, a clever fix for a tiny screen in 2009, and what its inventor told The Guardian years later. We hear from the designer of infinite scroll, a former Facebook employee and a co-inventor of the Like button, and what Facebook says in reply. Then the data twist: people guess they check their phones about 37 times a day when the real number is closer to 85, and in one study 89% of phone checks were started by the person, not by a notification. Finally, four simple ways to take the lever back.
CHAPTERS
0:00 The pull
0:23 The pigeon box
1:49 The gesture
4:25 The endless feed
6:26 Who pulls the lever
7:39 The counter
8:01 Beat the design
9:08 Planned that way
SOURCES
1. Paul Lewis, The Guardian (Oct. 6, 2017), ‘Our minds can be hijacked’: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia
2. Hilary Andersson, BBC News / Panorama (July 4, 2018), Social media apps are ‘deliberately’ addictive to users: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44640959
3. Tristan Harris (2016), How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind, from a Magician and Google Design Ethicist (essay, Medium / Thrive Global)
4. Ferster & Skinner (1957), Schedules of Reinforcement, Appleton-Century-Crofts: https://doi.org/10.1037/10627-000
5. B. F. Skinner (1953), Science and Human Behavior, Macmillan
6. Andrews, Ellis, Shaw & Piwek (2015), Beyond Self-Report: Tools to Compare Estimated and Real-World Smartphone Use, PLOS ONE: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0139004
7. Heitmayer & Lahlou (2021), Why are smartphones disruptive?, Computers in Human Behavior: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2020.106637
8. Kushlev, Proulx & Dunn (2016), “Silence Your Phones”: Smartphone Notifications Increase Inattention and Hyperactivity Symptoms, CHI ’16: https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858359
9. Fitz, Kushlev, Jagannathan, Lewis, Paliwal & Ariely (2019), Batching smartphone notifications can improve well-being, Computers in Human Behavior: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.07.016
10. Holte & Ferraro (2020), True colors: Grayscale setting reduces screen time in college students, The Social Science Journal: https://doi.org/10.1080/03623319.2020.1737461
11. Apple Newsroom (June 4, 2018), iOS 12 introduces new features to reduce interruptions and manage Screen Time: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/06/ios-12-introduces-new-features-to-reduce-interruptions-and-manage-screen-time/
12. Pull-to-refresh and Loren Brichter (background): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull-to-refresh
Phones, slot machines, the pigeon box, charts and characters are illustrations drawn for this channel. The Screen Time screen is redrawn, not a screenshot. The 37 and 85 figures are averages from one study of 23 adults.
Image credits: Loren Brichter by Jean Whitehead, CC BY-SA 3.0 · Tristan Harris at Collision Conf 2018 by Stephen McCarthy/Collision via Sportsfile, CC BY 2.0 · Nir Eyal (TNW Conference 2014) by Franklin Heijnen, CC BY-SA 2.0 · 2017 portrait BJ Fogg by Wikiwisesw, CC BY-SA 4.0 · AzaRaskin2019 by Techtorontorer55, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Justin Rosenstein in 2018 by Collision Conf, CC BY 2.0. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Have you checked your screen time yet? Tell me in the comments.
Planned That Way: the hidden design of everyday life. New video every week.
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