How To Stop Scrolling

0:00Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus. This is the show that pits facts against phones.

0:13Today on the show, how do we stop scrolling? Just last week in a landmark case, Meta, which owns Instagram and Google, owner of YouTube, were found negligent for basically creating addictive products that harmed a young woman's mental health. A huge slap to big tech today. A landmark verdict that could change the face of social media. Deliberately and negligently designed their products to get young users hooked on the apps. They kept her endless scrolling, constant notifications, algorithms that learn exactly what keeps you watching. The tech giants have been ordered to pay her$6 million. They're appealing.

0:55but this case has reignited a huge conversation over how these apps can just suck us in. The young woman's lawyer said during closing arguments that these apps are, quote, Trojan horses. They look wonderful and great, but you invite them in and they take over. Which, away from this case, is exactly the way that a lot of our listeners have been feeling about these apps. I want to use my phone list. obviously like everyone else. I've been trying to quit for the last two years. It has gotten worse. I want to stop do scrolling. This feels like I'm constantly consuming something off of a screen. Surveys find that over half of adults in the U.S.

1:40want to spend less time on their phones. My mental health is just better when I'm off social media and it's hard to get out of the scrolling. So the question we have for this episode is this. given that so many of us feel hooked. Is there any way to unhook ourselves, to stop scrolling? Rather ironically, online, you can find tons of people claiming that they've found the answer. These are five really simple brain tricks that can help you break social media addiction and stop doom scrolling. The first tip is friction stacking. We need to create as many layers between us and that damn phone. If you can slay that dragon, if you can resist temptation, Well, you can do anything.

2:25So how do you slay that dragon? Is there anything that can actually get us off our phones that's science approved? When it comes to scrolling, a lot of us have been endless scrolling, constant notifications. And then there's science.

2:45Science vs. Scrolling will be right back just after the break. Don't look at your phone.

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4:34Welcome back. There's a lot of chat right now about how these tech giants have created social media apps designed to suck us in. Now we're going to talk about how to get unsucked. Time for the science. with Meryl Horn, senior producer. Hello. Hi, Wendy. It's been a while since we've been chatting about science. Yeah, yeah, it has. So have you been spending all that time on your phone? Sometimes it feels like that. Seriously, do you have a problem with scrolling, do you think? Yeah. The reason I wanted to do this episode was because I'd find myself, like, just staring at my phone for way longer than I kind of meant to, especially at the end of the day.

5:25And like it wouldn't, it wouldn't even feel like good. Like I would often feel like worse about my life or just crappy in general. And yet I'd spend all this time, you know, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. Yeah. And, you know, this is a feeling that many of us have had. And it is, it's kind of crazy to think about how pervasive this feeling is. So, Meryl, when it comes to this question of how do we stop scrolling, I mean, where do we begin? Well, first off, the research does find that scrolling itself is especially bad compared to other things we do on our phones. Okay. So, like, one study asked people, like, how they felt after doing different things on their phones and the researchers could spy on them to see like exactly what they were using their phones for.

6:13And they found that, yeah, it was like the scrolling that people said they regretted the most compared to stuff like communicating with their friends or like getting information. Yeah. You could also see this in how much they regretted going on certain apps. Like after they went on Instagram, they would say that I regretted that like 42 % of the time where when they went on a messaging app, they only regretted it 18 % of the time. And another study backed this up, finding something really similar, but this one looked at meaninglessness instead, which, you know, again, found that people said their experience was more meaningless if they had just spent that time scrolling compared to this other stuff, which helped me understand, like, why it feels so bad.

7:00But then why do we keep doing it, do you think? Because it's like, it does give us some kind of like short-term happiness a lot of the time to scroll. The whole reason we do it is because we're probably getting some kind of, you know, dopamine hits or, you know, those, the parts of our brain that light up when we're doing something rewarding or do light up when we like see social media. Okay. Okay. So that, I mean, that is why, yeah, we keep going back for more. So then, you know, what happens next? How do we stop? And, you know, I don't want to completely put the onus on us to work out how to unsuck ourselves from social media.

7:40The big tech companies clearly have a role to play here. But while we're waiting for them to sort it out, Beryl, do you have anything that we can do for ourselves? I do, yes. So let's dive in and find out like what actually works here to stop scrolling. So to start, let's meet Chae Jong Kim. He's an assistant professor at Cheongnam National University in Korea. He's also had a problem with scrolling. For him, YouTube is the thing that would get him. I kept on watching, watching, and I end up watching something that I never intended. You just get sucked down these rabbit holes. Yeah, yeah. Scientists are people too.

8:20Yeah, but he has done a lot of work trying to figure out exactly what strategies work to stop. Like, how can people break these habits? Interesting, yeah. And so I wanted to start with the most hardcore intervention that he's come up with. Do you want to guess what they did to help people stop scrolling? Delete the apps. Put your phone in the bin. Buy a Nokia from the early 2000s. Nice guesses. I guess it wasn't that extreme in a way. None of these are crazy. Well, not too many people would sign up for a study, I don't think, where they had to like get rid of their phones. I would, Chaejung, if you want to go even more extreme, I'll sign up.

9:10Okay, so what did they do? So his approach was to just make an app that would kick you off your phone. If you go past a certain time limit, then you couldn't use your phone for anything except to make phone calls. Okay. So yeah, first, you know, there's about 40 people. And first you had to put in your goals for how long you want to spend on your phone. So like maybe you're using it for five hours a day and you want to get down to four hours a day. Then you got this special app. It's called Goalkeeper. And it had three different levels. So sometimes people would just get the easy levels, basically a control where you just get a warning message when you go past your time limit.

9:50But in another one, you just get kicked off your phone for a little bit of time. But then the third level is the intense one. So Chae Jung called this condition a strong lockout. And the strong lockout is what I was very interested. I'm eager to lock people out. Just because you want to make people suffer? Yeah, I want to see the greatest effect. So we lock them out until the midnight. after the time exceeded. It's interesting that he said it'll come back at midnight, like Cinderella, because that would be the worst time to then get access to your phone. It's going to interrupt with your sleep.

10:35At least just keep it off until 8 a.m. or something. That's true, but then people will be eating up their time for the next day. So, yeah, people were very aware of how much time they had left on their phone. Okay. And so everyone tried out these kind of different levels of the app for one week. And I first wanted to know, yeah, what happened when people were in the week when they had the really hardcore approach, the strong lockout. First, let's just look at, did it work to get people to use their phones less? Yes, it did. Yes, it did. It's quite effective. So yeah, people did use their phones for roughly 75 minutes less every day.

11:14So in that sense, it worked. Yeah. But then the caveat was that people really didn't like it, at least a lot of the time. Like they said they felt more frustrated and coerced compared to the control condition where they were just getting a little warning, but they didn't actually get locked out of their phone. And then they got really stressed out when they saw that the time was getting close to when they would have to get cut off. Yes, that's the point. Yeah, but I think the thing that was frustrating was that we use our phones for a lot of different things. Yes, of course. Yes. So when we get locked out of everything altogether, it can be really annoying.

11:52Yes. It's a big stick. It's a big stick. That's right. And there can be days where you're off Instagram, but you've got a lot of work stuff to do, blah, blah, blah. You're traveling. You want to listen to a bunch of podcasts. And then you just want to pay for the subway. Like I do all the sorts of things with my phone. I don't want to be locked out altogether. Yeah. And then there's one other super kind of hardcore study I wanted to tell you about, since you were interested in, you know, signing up for a study yourself where you just have to, like, get rid of your phone. So I talked to this researcher who set up this study where they wanted to cut the internet off people's phones for two weeks.

12:29But then when it was actually time to start the experiment and download this app that cut off the internet, a ton of people didn't actually go through with it. So more than 40 % of them just didn't even get the app, even though they signed up for this study. And then even a bunch of people who got the app kept cheating. They'd like re-enable the internet again and again and again during the study. So even though you think you might want something super extreme, it seems like for a lot of people, they don't actually want to do this. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I could see myself falling on my own petard or whatever that phrase is.

13:10Petard? Petard? Petard? I don't know. I'm just saying words. I guess that's a loaf of bread. So maybe we should go in the opposite direction. Like, what if all we need to do to stop scrolling is a little, like, reminder, like a gentle nudge? You know, something that just asks us, like, are you sure you want to be doing this right now? So Chae Jung has also tried this approach. Like in a different study, he created an app where people would just get a little pop-up window when they tried to open up certain apps and they could just get rid of this little pop-up with a little click of the button.

13:50Yes. Quite a few people have apps similar to this. Yeah. Yeah. I've tried this out before because the iPhone comes with like a screen time app that works similar to this. Oh, yeah. I have always wondered, does it actually work? Because the pop-up comes on and it's quite a low hurdle to just say, yeah, this is what I want to do. Yeah, it's easy to ignore, but it does give you that little nudge, right? Yeah, that's right. And so, yeah, he, Zhejiang, set up the study where first people had to put in a list of apps that they wanted to, like, stop themselves from going on to so much. So we call it, like, the blacklist app.

14:26So it could be, like, you know, Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. Got it. And then he looked at what happened when people got this little pop-up window. Did they decide not to go onto those blacklisted apps? It has reduced the use about 10 to 15 percent. Just from getting that little box that just says, do you want to continue? Yes or no? Yes, yes, yes. And that little stop have made you think and reconsider your use. So what have similar studies found? Does this gentle nudging work generally? We've got Chae Jung's study. Yeah, other studies do find that it can work a little bit like Chae Jung's, but then a bunch of other studies didn't find any effect.

15:12So, yeah, I found a review that kind of looked at all these studies together, and bottom line, it called this type of strategy, quote, barely effective. Okay. Okay, it's just too easy to swat that fly away. you sure you sure yeah i'm sure i want to stay on the app i i just automatically ignore it every single time so for me it wasn't surprising that it doesn't work great okay so i think yeah we probably we need to turn up the dial back up a little bit now right because you know maybe the problem with these kind of approaches the gentle nudge is that there's not enough like friction so i don't know if you've heard of this like a buzzword online right now influencers are like you know, to stop scrolling, you need to up the friction.

16:03Right. So the friction is too hot and the friction is too cold. We need the Goldilocks amount of friction to stop us from scrolling. And, you know, some of our listeners mentioned this sort of approach, like making it harder to use their apps, like having worked for some of them. Now what I've tried and to pretty good success is hide all the social media apps on your phone. That has really helped. I don't have to sound like a bullet solution, but the Brick app has really helped me. The Brick is something it's I've been getting ads for it a ton. It's like this little device that like you physically have to like go to to unlock your apps.

16:41That's sort of expensive. There's also cheaper ways to do the same thing. There's one called Touch Grass where you have to like go outside and like take a picture of yourself touching grass before you can use your apps. So this is a really common strategy, but let's find out what actually happens when people try this. Okay. In that study that Chae Zhang did, where people put in these blacklisted apps, in other cases, he made it harder for them to get to those apps. They couldn't just click it away. Okay. People would get a pop-up window where you had to enter in a string of numbers before you could go onto the app.

17:20Got it. So sometimes it was only 10 digits long. Other times it was a 30-digit long number that they had to manually put in before they got to use their app. I asked Chae Jong what this was like. Very frustrating. And our participant mentioned that, oh, there's one little thing. Once you failed to input 30-digit number at once, you have to retype it. You still have to start all over again. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so it's very frustrating. Yeah, I was imagining that's what would happen. Very frustrating. Very frustrating. Okay, so surely that stops you going on the app, right? That feels like enough.

18:04Yeah, yeah. So in the study, again, around 40 people, a few weeks long, he looked at what happened when they got these different kind of levels. And yeah, especially when they got the 30-digit number, a lot of the time they decided, I'm not even going to bother. Almost half the time they decided like, yeah, F this. It's not worth it to go on this app. And the other, the 10-digit number like worked okay too. So overall, it did work to get people to stop going on their apps as much. But there is a pretty big caveat to this, which is that once people were in the app, they then spent more time in it than they would have done otherwise.

18:51You know what this is like, Meryl? What? It's like when people are waiting in line at an ice cream shop, and then when they get to the front, they have to get all the friggin' tasters. To take their time, yeah. Exactly, exactly. But we're still waiting in the line, Heather. Yeah, it's exactly like that. Is this what happened? Yeah, okay. Yeah, here's Chaejong. So once they got in, so hey, once I got in, I want to use this for 30 minutes instead of like 10 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 minutes, three times of 10 minutes sessions. So the frequency decreased, but the total time remained the same. So overall, people didn't actually spend less time on their blacklisted apps.

19:40so like I mean maybe this is still helpful if your goal is to go on to your apps less often to like kind of do that checking checking like habitual checking less yeah but if your goal is to spend less time on your phone it might not work to do this kind of friction approach and then one final thing from the study I thought was interesting they looked at what people did when when they did decide to not go on to that naughty listed app it turns out about half the time people just went to some other app instead. So they were still on their phones often just doing something else that maybe they thought was better for them because they didn't put it on their blacklist.

20:18Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that feels right. I mean, if you're sitting on the toilet, you've got to look at something. You've got to do something. All right. So here is what we have learned thus far. If you want to stop scrolling, adding some friction is a good idea, but if the hurdle is too low, like a little pop-up, it's not going to work. If the hurdle is too high, once you jump it, watch out because then you might be spending more time scrolling because you're so proud of yourself for putting in those 30 digits. Yeah. Right. Yeah, that might sort of backfire once you get in. So is there any Goldilocks amount of friction then?

21:04Well, there is actually an approach that nothing to do with friction at all that I found that it seems to be the best way to stop scrolling, according to the science that I found. So I'll tell you what that is after the break.

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23:16Welcome back. Today we are talking about how we can stop scrolling. Meryl Horne, senior producer at Science Versus, has been looking into this and I think you've promised us a solution to our scrolling dilemmas. Am I overselling? I mean, I think, no, I think it's a solution that's definitely worth trying. Yeah, and it is something that is even easier than a lot of the things we've been talking about to try. Let's jump in. So next, we're going to meet Dr. Leah Kristen-Vickard. She did a study on this. She's a researcher at the University of Coplands in Germany. And like basically all the researchers that I talked to about this, Leah also got into this for personal reasons.

24:00She's a psychologist. In psychology, we don't do research. We do a me-search. Oh, yes. Me-search. As you can imagine, I have a problem with my phone on my own. So I realized, especially during COVID, that this is a research topic that could really help me with my usage pattern, using my phone, using social media in a healthy and beneficial way, and not only doom scroll the whole day. What has she uncovered? Well, so the idea for her came up in a meeting she was having one day with some students where they were basically brainstorming ways to stop scrolling. One of the students talked about, OK, but have a look at our old phones, like the first phones we ever had.

24:51It was like in Europe we had these old Nokia phones. It was a black and white phone. We used it to text somebody. We used it to call somebody, maybe play a game, but that's it. And then we discussed, okay, like, how can we arrange that nowadays? Can we make our phones crappier like they used to be? Not to make it more crappy, but to make it less attractive. And we realized all those saturated colors, your blinking red push on notification button, all of those colors keep you distracted and keep you on your phone. So yeah, the colors. We know from studies that people generally prefer bright colors.

25:36It's probably why our apps are all rainbow colored. And so the idea was maybe if we get rid of these bright colors, make our phones black and white or put it in grayscale, we'll use our phones less. Have you heard of this approach, Wendy? I guess I know some people, obviously, who have their phone on grayscale, but I didn't know that this was a tactic to get them to stop using their phones so much. Yeah. So do you want to try it, Wendy? Sure. Sure, sure, sure. All right. And if listeners want to try this too, so on both iPhones and Androids, it's under accessibility. So Wendy, you have an iPhone?