The Digital Ghost on Your Screen
Why You Just Opened an App You Closed 2 Seconds Ago
You close TikTok. You lock your phone. You set it down on the desk. Exactly three seconds pass, and before you even realize what your hand is doing, you’ve picked the phone back up and opened TikTok again.
The Glitch? ~Motivating Operation
You aren’t glitching. Your brain has just been perfectly optimized by a Motivating Operation (MO).
In behavioral science, Motivating Operations, a concept formalized by Jack Michael and expanded by researchers like Laraway and colleagues (2003), are the environmental invisible hands that dictate how much we want a reward, and how hard we are willing to swipe, click, or scroll to get it.
While older textbooks talk about MOs in terms of being hungry or thirsty, tech companies in this day and age have mastered how to manipulate these operations digitally. Here is how your screen secretly controls your momentum.
The Dopamine Drought ~ Establishing Operations
An Establishing Operation (EO) is a state of deprivation that temporarily turns up the value of a specific reward (value-altering effect) and makes you aggressively hunt for it (Behavior-Altering effect).
- Digital boredom is the ultimate EO. The second your brain experiences a micro-moment of under-stimulation, like waiting 20 seconds in an elevator, a state of deprivation is established.
- The psychological value of a single “like,” view, or text message instantly skyrockets. Because the value is so high, your behavior alters, forcing you to subconsciously reach into your pocket to check your phone. Tech algorithms don’t actually need to change the content on your feed to keep you hooked; they just have to wait for a moment of real-world quiet to act as the perfect EO.
The Notification Ghost ~ Conditioned MOs
We also look at Conditioned Motivating Operations (CMOs), which are learned triggers.
- Think of the little red notification badge on your apps. It doesn’t give you a reward by itself, but it acts as a trigger that alters the value of clicking that app.
- A clean home screen offers low motivation to click. A home screen littered with red dots creates an immediate, itchy urge to clear them. The tech industry designs these visual triggers to alter your internal motivation state on command.
Screen-Time Burnout ~ Abolishing Operation
Thankfully, the system has a built-in circuit breaker called an Abolishing Operation (AO). This is a state of satiation that temporarily tanks the value of a reward, making you completely indifferent to it.
- Ever spent hours doomscrolling only to suddenly feel a wave of intense disgust toward your phone?
- That is digital satiation. Your brain has been flooded with so much visual input that the value of digital stimulation drops to zero. The AO kicks in, your phone suddenly feels like toxic sludge, and you throw it face-down on the couch to go stare at a literal wall just to recover.
You don’t have a weak attention span; you are just living in an environment explicitly engineered to trigger your Establishing Operations.
The next time you find yourself mindlessly opening an app for the twentieth time in an hour, take a beat. The app didn’t magically change in the last two minutes, your internal environment did.
-Natasha Joseph of the Support Approach Team
Research
Caragnano, G., Morford, Z. H., & Nastasi, J. A. (2021). The ubiquity of social reinforcement: A nudging exploratory study to reduce the overuse of smartphones in social contexts. Cogent Psychology, 8(1), Article 1880304. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311908.2021.1880304
Laraway, S., Snycerski, S., Michael, J., & Poling, A. (2003). Motivating operations and terms to describe them: Some further refinements. The Behavior Analyst, 26(2), 407–414. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03392082
Michael, J. (1993). Establishing operations. The Behavior Analyst, 16(2), 191–206. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03392623
