Variable reinforcement explains why people compulsively check email

Evidence

According to Skinner, we, too, in most aspects of our lives, are like pigeons pecking at a button to receive little snacks. And this, according to the cognitive scientist Tom Stafford, explains the check-in impulse behind email and other online technologies. Unlike a food pellet, email isn’t always rewarding; in fact, it is often annoying (though with fewer people and less spam, it was surely more rewarding back in the 1970s). Once upon a time, there could be no new email for days at a time (few of us have that problem now). Much of what we get is uninteresting or indeed difficult to deal with. But every so often we get a message we are very glad to have. That such “rewarding” email comes unpredictably does not dim its allure or keep us from looking for it. On the contrary: as Stafford points out, the most effective way of maintaining a behavior is not with a consistent, predictable reward, but rather with what is termed “variable reinforcement”—that is, rewards that vary in their frequency or magnitude. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 653

Think for a minute about activities that entrance their practitioners, like gambling, shopping, or fishing. They all, in fact, have variable and unknowable reward schedules. A slot machine that rewarded every pull or even every third would offer no thrill; and no one hunts cows for sport. But take away the certainty and the real fun begins. Likewise, Stafford argues, “checking email is a behavior that has variable interval reinforcement….Everyone loves to get an email from a friend, or some good news, or even an amusing web link.” It is enough to have had such an experience a few times to get you regularly fishing for it; constant checking is thus reinforced, “even if most of the time checking your email turns out to have been pointless. You still check because you never know when the reward will come.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 655

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to slot-machine psychology and to modern notification design; ties to later attention-merchant tools like infinite scroll and pull-to-refresh. — connects to: Likes function as variable-reward dopamine reinforcement driving user compulsion — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1459; Facebook’s design intentionally exploits variable-reward dopamine hits to maximize user time. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1437; Email’s adoption functioned as large-scale operant conditioning preparing users for later attention harvesting — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 656 (+1 more)
• SEED: Article angle: variable reinforcement as the mechanistic link between Skinner’s pigeons and the smartphone’s pull-to-refresh gesture.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 653; Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 655

Broader Connections

• Email’s adoption functioned as large-scale operant conditioning preparing users for later attention harvesting #corroborates (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 656
• AOL deliberately engineered email to exploit its habit-forming check-in pull #corroborates (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 715