The Hacking of the American Mind

by Robert H. Lustig

  Perhaps the most egregious product placement to confuse the public is the one-hour viral YouTube video (now at 56 million views) Happy (12AM)1 posted by Pharrell Williams’s foundation using his song as the soundtrack. Within the first two minutes of the video, Pharrell enters a gas station convenience store at midnight and purchases two candy bars, a bag of potato chips, and a Red Bull, then offers them up to the audience, singing, “Clap along if you feel that happiness is the truth.” First of all, while pleasure can be found in a candy bar (double your pleasure with two?), happiness is nowhere in sight. And second, if you’re drinking Red Bull at midnight, your sleep deprivation with its concomitant cortisol rise will put you at risk for some big-time unhappiness down the road. Clearly, Pharrell’s view of happiness is colored by corporate sponsorship of his non-profit.

  What about the iconic happy hour? Is this pleasure or happiness? Which brings the customers into the restaurant—the $5 pupus, or the $5 drinks? Across the board, alcohol has grown as a percentage of sales from 9 to 15 percent, and in sports bars alcohol makes up 26 percent of sales. Alcohol has always been viewed as a sales lubricant for restaurants, even during a recession, because it’s the pleasure the public can still afford. But what about when that happy hour is at 10:00 a.m., and televised? NBC has broken all the rules about drinking on TV, and the fourth hour of the daily talk show is now dubbed the “TODAY Happy Hour.” Two middle-aged women drinking from large margarita glasses in the morning. This hour even won a Daytime Emmy Award. This would be funny except that women are 40 percent more likely to develop anxiety than men are and often turn to alcohol to cope. Hoda Kotb, the show’s cohost, says, “It’s a joke. The producers just keep coming up with ways of getting us to drink, it’s become our thing. It’s like a nonstop party from ten to eleven.”2 While this may seem lighthearted, the network is normalizing a behavior that could have serious health implications (e.g., breast cancer)3 for women, who are the target audience.

  Existential T(h)reat

  And now for something completely different. Imagine sitting naked in a bathtub on a cliff overlooking the ocean at sunset, with your partner in an adjacent bathtub. The dopamine surges in motivation for anticipated pleasure. Then, overwhelming fear and angst with the possibility of erectile dysfunction (ED). By introducing fear as part of the marketing campaign, Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra have all kicked it up a notch; ED drugs are expected to account for $3.2 billion in global sales by 2022, with more than half of those sales in the United States. There are certainly men who suffer from ED, and there are countless more who buy the product based on fear.

  Fear has been a primary driver of consumption since the inception of marketing. It started with car dealers and high-pressure sales tactics. Since then, virtually everything from mouthwashes to dishwashers to Hummers to Smith & Wessons are sold out of fear—either “fear of failure” or “fear of the unknown.” Overstock.com and Groupon are examples of driving sales through the fear that you might miss out. By combining a short-duration offering with the threat of scarcity and the “keeping up with the Joneses” factor, marketing makes sure that fear remains front and center. Because fear means stress, and stress means cortisol, and prefrontal cortex be damned, it’s time for the chocolate cake.

  Strategies That Sell

  Is this marketing or propaganda? Definition of marketing: the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising. Definition of propaganda: information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view. Since pleasure and happiness are clearly not the same thing, the conflation of the two is inherently biased and misleading. Therefore, advertising that implies that the selling of reward as contentment is by its very nature propaganda. Pleasure from hedonic substances and pharmaceuticals (masquerading as happiness) can be easily purchased. If you don’t know the difference between the two, it stands to reason you will lay your money down, and then they’ve got you. Like the pusher on the playground who gives you your first free hit, they’ll turn you into a customer for life.

  Old-style marketing (direct and telemarketing) was across-the-board and hit-and-miss, based on demographics, unsolicited contact, and the ability to generate fear in the consumer. With the advent of the internet, marketers honed their messaging to specific groups based on their previous “likes” and searches. And now the new discipline of neuromarketing is taking the guesswork out of the equation and increasing efficacy of sales. In neuromarketing, the brain responses of subjects to industry messaging are analyzed. This allows those companies to hone their messages to specific subgroups within the larger masses and generate even greater profits. It’s now public knowledge that Coca-Cola will use neuromarketing in all quantitative ad performance projects in the coming year to “spread happiness.” According to branding agency Kantar Millward Brown,4 facial coding will be the primary technique used to gauge consumer emotions. The technology is seamlessly integrated: they record the subjects’ faces while they watch ads within a normal survey environment, automatically interpreting their emotional and cognitive states moment by moment. Facial coding was originally the province of experts, who viewed slow-motion video of subjects to record fleeting “true” emotions that register briefly in facial expressions. Kantar Millward Brown’s system uses eye tracking and other phenomena to measure engagement, brand association, and motivation, among other metrics. And they use these data to target . . . you. Unilever (the conglomerate that owns Dove soap, Lipton tea, and Ben & Jerry’s) is also pursuing a similar 100 percent testing approach. If this sounds Orwellian, it is. And it’s here. And it works to drive dopamine and cortisol, in a pitch to get you to buy more. The problem is the more you buy, the unhappier you get.

  The purveyors of hedonic behaviors, devices, and consumables are all looking for that winning formula to provide the public with some form of product (requiring continued purchase), along with an inherent hook that will maintain or even increase consumption and in which the market never reaches saturation to allow for continued expansion. Marketing genius Nir Eyal provides a window into the hedonic platform used by companies to hook us and keep us coming back for more.5 According to Eyal, every successful product consists of four intertwined concepts that drive an unending vicious cycle. (1) The trigger; that is, something that commands your attention even when you don’t want it to, like an itch. (2) The action; that is, a stereotyped behavior that somehow soothes the trigger, which is easy to perform, does not require thinking, and can be accomplished in mixed company. In other words, a scratch. For instance, clicking on your e-mail or Facebook account is easy to do, does not require thinking, and is currently socially acceptable. Conversely, soothing an incipient sexual urge may depend on the venue. (3) Variable reward, the most important part of the cycle. These can be social validation rewards like Facebook or Instagram; intrinsic motivation rewards such as points scored on video games; or sustenance motivation rewards (e.g., money or calories burned) in video poker or MyFitnessPal. If the variable reward is the result of a behavior, then it is the inconsistency of the reward that ultimately drives that behavior to become a habit. (4) The culmination is investment, which is really the only thing that drives company sales. We internally rationalize why we needed this reward in the first place (even though the reward was variable, and even though we had previously lived just fine without it), and that the cost of the product becomes well worth the new habit because we can now soothe the market-generated itch in a culturally acceptable manner.

  A “Slot Machine” in Your Pocket

  Neuromarketing is just one of many new technologies designed to amp up the dopamine to increase sales, but with the unintended consequence of making us miserable. Drunk driving, though still a common practice, is taboo. People utilize designated drivers or Uber. Unfortunately, society hasn’t bought into the concept of using a designated driver if you’re a compulsive texter. In 2006, a ni
neteen-year-old student engaged in texting while driving on an otherwise deserted road in Utah killed two astrophysicists in a head-on collision. Since then, fourteen states have banned the practice, yet it goes on unabated. MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) has yet to form a MACT (Mothers Against Compulsive Texting). But the death and accident rates are becoming increasingly similar.

  Apparently, the draw of the screen is just too much for most people; the cell phone is like a slot machine. With every ding, a variable reward, either good or bad, is in store for the user—the ultimate dopamine rush. As Robert Kolker wrote in the New York Times Magazine, “Distraction is the devil in your ear—not always the result of an attention deficit, but borne of our own desires.” We are distracted because we want to be. Because it’s fun and obfuscates real life. Why else would they sell so many smartphones? My wife says that I’m addicted to my e-mail, and I know looking at it doesn’t improve my mood. A good gadget is essentially a wondrous object, commandeering our focus with delight and surprise (Steve Jobs used the word “magical” about the iPhone when it debuted). The smartphone brilliantly exploits two types of attention: “top down” (what we want to focus on) and “bottom up” (what takes us by surprise).

  That need for surprise is what it’s all about. Surprise is visceral and immediate, and stokes our dopamine and our nucleus accumbens. But it’s fleeting, and rarely does any happiness come out of it. In fact, the frequent checking of cell phones, waiting for something to change, is linked to anxiety and depression.6 Of course, again, correlation is not causation. Do cell phones cause depression? Or are depressed people trying to eke out a little dopamine rush? Or both? I’ll tell you one thing: cell phones certainly don’t bring serenity.

  Mobile Madness

  Does cell phone use drive cortisol, the other bad boy in this paradigm? Cell phone use is linked with stress, sleep loss, and depression in young adults (although of course causation cannot be proven). A recent study in young adults showed that cell phone use was negatively linked to grade point average—the higher the cell phone use, the poorer the grades.7 They also found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that higher GPAs tended to correlate with more happiness, while more anxiety was linked to less happiness. Anxiety and happiness were assessed with two well-known questionnaires for assessing mental health: the Beck Anxiety Inventory and the Satisfaction with Life (SWL) index. Statistical analysis on these associations encouraged the researchers to suggest cell phone use is linked—via GPA and anxiety—to loss of happiness. Another study demonstrated that fourth and seventh graders who sleep with cell phones in their room get less sleep than those who don’t,8 although we can’t say whether they’re playing games on them or if the problem is just the glow of the screen. We do know that sleep deprivation increases food intake and risk of weight gain (see Chapter 9), driving further unhappiness. In a tragic example of distraction by technology, a South Korean couple obsessed with raising their two “virtual children” online let their actual three-month old daughter starve to death.9 It’s not only affecting teenagers. Rehabs are popping up treating “device addiction.” There have been reported cases of withdrawal. While opioids get the most press, internet and gaming addiction is leading to social devolution in large numbers.

  From World of Warcraft to Call of Duty to Pokémon Go, video games have been linked to bingeing, and even a few cases of excessive sleep deprivation resulting in death. The Chinese have noted white matter changes in teens and young adults who binge on the internet, and have labeled this phenomenon Internet Addiction Disorder.10 But is this really addiction (see Chapter 5)? Internet and gaming disorders are not yet sanctioned as valid psychiatric diagnoses but are now being considered. In these behavioral addictions, both the nucleus accumbens (NA) and the prefrontal cortex (PFC) are severely dysfunctional.11 Does this lead to depression? One study tracked teens in alternative high schools for one year post-graduation. Those who exhibited anhedonia (difficulty experiencing pleasure) at baseline were more likely to indulge in internet game bingeing and to manifest signs of depression one year later.12 So which came first, the video gaming or the anhedonia? Were these the same kids who’d be listening to Depeche Mode and wearing Goth clothes thirty years ago? Are students who graduate from alternative schools already self-selected for behavior problems?

  The Bully Pulpit

  Smartphones have ushered in yet another method of misery for adolescents. School bullying dates back to the advent of organized school in the eighteenth century. Bullies always wielded an advantage over the bullied, which imbued them with a sense of perceived authority. These advantages could be physical, such as size, gender, age, or weight; or social, such as clothing, cliques, or academic status. Nearly 160,000 kids stay home from school every day because of fear of bullying. Bullying has always been an issue, but more and more schools have adopted no-bullying policies. Thus, the bullies have gone underground. Cyber-bullying, the newest hip way to express rage, has become all the rage. Nowadays, you rarely hear about the bloody nose—rather, you hear about the suicide. More than one in three young people have experienced cyber-threats online, one in four have been bullied repeatedly online, and over half of adolescents have participated in some fashion. Yet most young people do not tell their parents when cyber-bullying occurs. While teenagers have always been spiteful, the ability to hurt people online while maintaining a geographic distance has made cyber-bullying rampant. One Florida twelve-year-old girl was terrorized by as many as fifteen girls who picked on her for months through online message boards and texts. One message said she should “drink bleach and die.” Instead, she jumped off a cement factory tower.

  “Like” Sitting Ducks . . .

  In particular, digital technology has created a relatively new and ubiquitous form of psychological stress. Do you spend time on Facebook or any type of social media? It’s become the social norm to act/comment without thinking, posting the newest inflammatory memes or tweets, without considering context. We’re becoming more of an immediate-gratification (dopamine-driven), knee-jerk reaction (PFC inhibition) society—making our lives about the number of likes we can receive.

  This is especially true in adolescents and young adults. At the extreme, teenage digital media abusers exhibit the “descent into Hades” (Chapter 5); interestingly, for boys it’s video game addiction, while girls instead appear to suffer from social media addiction.13 While not all scientists agree on the criteria for these disorders, and whether these qualify as their own disease processes,14 there is more than enough data to demonstrate a correlation between internet use and depression. For adolescents who perceived that they had few friends, internet use for communication (e.g., texting) provided “some” form of communication; while for those with no friends, internet use for non-communication purposes (e.g., “surfing”) predicted more depression and more social anxiety over time.15 Maybe because they spent all their time comparing themselves to an elusive ideal, or staring at the photos of their peers going to parties they weren’t invited to?

  The “Like” button made Facebook the most accessed website on the entire internet. That “Like” button wields more power than virtually any fist, but new data suggests it damages both the Liker and the Likee. Girls in particular post selfies, waiting in anticipation for the Likes to roll in. When they don’t, there’s an obvious problem in social standing. Although Facebook isn’t as hip now as it was a few years ago among adolescents, the newer sites, like Snapchat and Instagram, basically do the same thing. One recent study demonstrated association between the use of Facebook and the development of depression, but only in those teen girls who used Facebook as a surveillance tool to compare themselves to others, which, realistically, is most of the adolescent population.16 (More on Facebook and social media in Chapter 16.) So is this cause or effect? If you’re an insecure teen already predisposed to depression, you might be prowling the internet to see what and who other kids are Liking. Your cortisol is already doing a number on your PFC, your sero
tonin receptors are already diminished—but the “Like” button takes teenage angst and misery to new heights (or depths). Adolescence is a painful time. Cell phones and the internet may encourage networking and creativity, but it comes with a cost.

  In a seven-year follow-up study of over four thousand teenagers, total media use correlated with the prevalence of eventual depression, especially in boys.17 More media use meant greater risk for depression. One major question that these data continue to pose is the issue of cause or effect; in other words, does internet exposure lead to depression, or do kids with risk for depression rely on the internet as an outlet for their anxiety and for self-expression? It’s a pretty difficult issue to prove, and we don’t know for sure, especially with how quickly technology changes. But in human studies, the nucleus accumbens and the PFC show characteristic changes with excessive internet use18 (see Chapter 14), suggesting that the enhanced motivational value and uncontrolled behavior is being driven by structural changes in the brain, which are themselves driven by internet use. AND THAT IS WHY WE MUST EXPRESS OURSELVES IN ALL CAPS WHEN WE WANT TO BE HEARD!!!!!!!!