by Mary Aiken
During her trial, she pleaded guilty and showed great remorse, and in a statement said that she hoped to attend college and make something of herself someday. Her own mother had died recently, she said, and Tobias hadn’t felt like herself ever since. She received the maximum sentence in Florida for second-degree murder: fifty years. She’ll be in jail for most, if not all, of the rest of her life.
As a forensic cyberpsychologist, I am interested in this sad and disturbing case for one reason: the role of technology in the escalation of an explosive act of violence. In a nutshell, that is extreme impulsivity, an unplanned spontaneous act. And in this case, with devastating consequences.
We are all impulsive to a degree. Some people are by nature more spontaneous than others, more likely to act on a whim without too much thought, whether the behavior is driven by joy or anger. One of the beliefs of our culture is that people reach the end of their lives and wish they’d taken more chances and risks. This may be true for restrained, risk-averse individuals. But extremely impulsive individuals would probably say the opposite: It’s not the things they didn’t do that they regret. It’s the ones they did.
There are risks that reward us and risks that ruin us. The same goes for the hours we spend online. This chapter will discuss many aspects of the Internet that are irresistible—whether it’s multiplayer gaming, email checking, social-network posting, or bidding on an auction site. Given a host of cyber effects, we may sometimes feel like slaves to our impulses. Why?
The Scale of Impulsiveness
What is impulsivity? It is defined as “a personality trait characterized by the urge to act spontaneously without reflecting on an action and its consequences.” The trait of impulsiveness influences several important psychological processes and behaviors, including self-regulation, risk-taking, and decision-making. It has been found to be a significant component of several clinical conditions, including attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, borderline personality disorder, and the manic phase of bipolar disorder, as well as alcohol and drug abuse and pathological gambling.
Researchers studying attention and self-control often assess impulsiveness using personality questionnaires, notably the common Barratt Impulsiveness Scale, which has been used for the past two decades and was updated in 2014 by a group of researchers at Duke University. It’s a really fascinating area of interest—and the test, a list of thirty simple statements to be agreed or disagreed with, can be taken in a matter of ten or fifteen minutes. The statements are easy to answer: “I plan tasks carefully,” “I am happy-go-lucky,” “I am future oriented,” “I like puzzles,” “I save regularly,” and “I am restless at the theater or lectures.” You can find the entire test online, but the results need to be assessed by a professional, so taking it on your own, you won’t wind up with a final score. Reading over a few of the statements will give you some insight into the three types of impulsivity, which can be physical (difficulty sitting still), cognitive (difficulty concentrating), and sensory (difficulty resisting sensory rewards).
A highly impulsive individual—in all three aspects of impulsivity—tends to be restless, happy-go-lucky, uninterested in planning ahead or saving, not future-oriented. In common parlance, he or she might be described as ADD or ADHD, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. When a child is diagnosed with an executive function disorder, like ADHD or other attention-related problem, one of the likely aspects of this is something described as suppressed response inhibition, which is generally defined as the inability to suppress an urge to do something, even when environmental contingencies demand it. In other words, the world is telling these children not to do something—“Don’t stand up on the bus!”—and telling them why it’s a bad idea, but their ability to restrain themselves just isn’t there.
A person who is diagnosed as having obsessive-compulsive disorder shares the trait of impulsivity and suppressed response inhibition with ADHD, but he or she finds urges extremely hard to control—and stop. This same trait has been observed in alcoholics, cocaine addicts, heroin- and other substance-dependent patients, as well as smokers. Recent studies have also found impulsivity to be positively correlated with excessive computer game playing and excessive Internet use in general.
Before I go into this subject any deeper, I want to discuss the difference between impulsive and compulsive. In everyday conversation, we tend to use these two terms almost interchangeably, as if they meant the same thing. But they are actually at opposite ends of a spectrum of behavior. While impulsive behavior is a rash, unplanned act, such as Alexandra Tobias’s rage at being interrupted while playing FarmVille, compulsive behavior is planned repetitive behavior, like obsessive hand washing or cranking, as discussed in the previous chapter about paraphilia.
Let’s describe these in cyber terms. When you constantly pick up your mobile phone to check your Twitter feed, that’s compulsive. When you read a nasty tweet and can’t restrain yourself from responding with an equally nasty retort (or an even nastier one), that’s impulsive.
What makes the Internet so alluring? Why do some individuals struggle more than others to pull themselves away from their mobile phones and computer screens?
Fun Failures
Why does anybody buy a Powerball lottery ticket if they know the chances of winning are one in 300 million? For some of the very same reasons that keep people playing any number of beguiling online activities. When we invest time playing League of Legends or spend money on the lottery, we know that there’s little chance of “hitting it big.” Sporadically, though, small rewards do come, and these intermittent rewards, as they’re called, bring us back again and again.
It’s an accepted fact in behavioral psychology that intermittent reinforcement is much more effective at motivating people than continuous rewards. If you are rewarded randomly for an activity, you are likely to continue doing it—far more likely than if you are rewarded each and every time. A famous study of pigeons demonstrated this: When pigeons were consistently rewarded for a certain activity, they did not necessarily continue the activity. But they were much more responsive, and much more prone to act, when given intermittent reinforcement. Maximum responsiveness was achieved when they were rewarded half the time.
Here’s how it works with scratch-off tickets: You are asked, say, to scratch off six squares on a card and reveal the numbers hidden underneath. You will win if you uncover three matching numbers. In terms of rewards, just the act of scratching off the hidden numbers is a little exciting. A drama is unfolding, and that creates expectancy, which has been found to deliver a little dopamine to the brain. Dopamine is an organic chemical released in the brain that helps us regulate movement and emotional responses, and is also associated with pleasurable feelings. More than 110,000 research papers have been written about dopamine in the past sixty years. In pursuit of the pleasure it gives us, we do things that release it. What is fascinating and underresearched is the role of technology in this process.
Most scratch-off cards are designed to lose. But they are also designed with many matching symbols. Why? You scratch the card, a sequence of matching symbols begins to appear, and you get excited thinking that you may win. For a thrilling second, or two, or three, you believe your card is a winner. In the gambling trade, this tease is called “a heart-stopper,” because it can give you a surge of excitement, a little buzz of pleasure. This is classic positive reinforcement. So even when you don’t win, that temporary buzz of excitement is enough to bring you some pleasure and reinforce card-scratching behavior. And later, the biochemical and psychological memory of that pleasure is enough to keep you in the feedback loop, and buying more lottery tickets. It’s not a huge blast of pleasure, mind you, but it’s just enough.
This is what conditioning is all about.
When any behavior is rewarded with pleasure, you are more likely to repeat it. The psychology of a casino slot machine works the same way. Three wheels of the slot machine are spinning—and showing you all those matchi
ng pairs. Two wheels stop. And if the symbols match, it’s a heart-stopper moment. The third wheel stops, and you lose. But somehow, it felt fun anyway.
In game design this is called “fun failure.” Even though you are failing miserably, you aren’t miserable. Why? That biochemical pleasure hit makes all the difference. And the mere act of anticipating winning is fun. This is what keeps people buying lottery cards, feeding a slot machine, or playing Candy Crush Saga.
Who hasn’t felt the draw of the cyber fun-failure vortex? Who hasn’t wasted time or money or both online and still managed to feel it was fun? There is more to it than heart-stoppers. Each type of online activity has its own attractions, extra built-in rewards that condition users to return.
Why is the mere act of searching online so hypnotically compelling? Why are the alerts and notifications on a mobile phone impossible to ignore? Since my interest is in forensic cyberpsychology—and therefore I am a bit more focused on pathological behavior than the average person—I have to look at how the various rewards of being online may have a dark side for some people, and what the implications are for the rest of us.
I Seek, Therefore I Am
If you start simply with psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous “hierarchy of needs”—the needs that demand our attention and motivate human beings to survive, adapt, and evolve—you’ll see them all met online in one manner or another: from physiological needs to needs for safety, love, belonging, esteem, self-knowledge, and self-actualization.
Online anonymity offers you a sense of safety. Joining an online community, or participating in a multiplayer online game, can give you a sense of belonging. Getting your Instagram photos or Facebook posts “liked” meets a need for esteem. But that’s just the beginning of social-networking rewards and pleasures. According to psychiatrist and author Dr. Eva Ritvo in her article “Facebook and Your Brain,” social networking “stimulates the release of loads of dopamine as well as offering an effective cure to loneliness. Novelty also triggers these ‘feel good’ chemicals.” Apart from getting high on likes, posting information about yourself can also deliver pleasure. About 40 percent of daily speech is normally taken up with self-disclosure—telling others how we feel or what we think about something—but when we go online the amount of self-disclosure doubles to 80 percent. According to Harvard neuroscientist Diana Tamir, this produces a brain response similar to the release of dopamine.
Searching online—whether you are hunting down a piece of information, shopping for a pair of shoes, or looking for an old classmate or professional contact—rewards you in another powerful way. Which brings me to a favorite subject of mine, the fascinating real-world work of Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, who coined the term affective neuroscience, or the biology of arousing feelings or emotions.
Panksepp conducted laboratory experiments on rats and discovered what he calls the “seeking” system, something that drives both humans and animals to seek information that will help them survive. Dopamine-energized, this mesolimbic seeking system encourages foraging, exploration, investigation, curiosity, craving, and expectancy. In other words, dopamine fires each time the rat (or human) explores its environment. Panksepp, who has spent decades mapping the emotional systems of the brain, calls seeking “the granddaddy of the systems.” Emily Yoffe in Slate explains: “It is the mammalian motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or hole to venture forth into the world.” Seeking is so stimulating, according to scientist Temple Grandin, that animals in captivity would prefer to hunt or seek out their food rather than have it delivered to them.
If we think about this in Darwinian terms, Panksepp is essentially arguing that a number of instincts such as seeking, play, anger, lust, panic, grief, and fear are embedded in ancient regions of the human brain or are, as he describes them, evolutionary memories “built into the nervous system at a fundamental level.” To Panksepp, these instincts may be considered adaptive traits so fundamental, and so essential to our survival, that they may even constitute what we think of as our “core-self.”
I seek, therefore I am?
You don’t need to sing the joys of seeking and exploring to police detectives, investigative journalists, and research scientists. Way before the advent of the Internet, they were experiencing the thrills and rewards of discovery. The drive to seek and explore has kept the human race alive and fed for centuries. But it’s Panksepp’s work that provides us with a biochemical explanation: The dopamine rewards of seeking and foraging have probably made human beings highly adaptable to new environments. We are rewarded for exploring. One could easily argue that the same reward system, or reinforcement, has made human beings more adaptable to the new environment we are still discovering online.
Addiction is explained in Panksepp’s work as an excessive form of seeking. Whether the addict is seeking a hit from cocaine, alcohol, or a Google search, “dopamine is firing, keeping the human being in a constant state of alert expectation.” If you think about it, cyberspace is like outer space—infinity in terms of seeking. With our evolutionary memory driving us toward exploring and making sense of this new environment, cyberspace, are we trying to evolve at the speed of technology? And if the biochemical rewards of seeking online are the very ones that can make losing the lottery feel like “fun” to a vast number of the population, what does this mean for individuals who struggle with compulsive gambling or other addictions or ADHD?
Hard to resist. That’s how many of us find the Internet. It’s always delivering a wild surprise, pulsing with breaking news, statistics, personal messages, and entertainment. The overwhelming evidence points to this: A combination of the fast delivery, exploring opportunities, unexpected information, and intermittent rewards creates a medium that is enticing, exciting, and for some individuals totally irresistible. Now let’s add in the design aspects of the apps, ads, games, and social-networking sites—the alerts, push notifications, lights, and other visual triggers that signal us like primitive mating calls.
Check Your Email, Check Your Email,
Check Your Email Again. Now…
The Latin word addictus was once used to describe the stretch of time an indentured slave had to serve his or her master. The servant with the sentence was called “the addict.”
We’ve all observed it firsthand: the otherwise polite and well-meaning friend who chronically checks her phone while you’re trying to have a lunch conversation. Does she really mean to be so rude?
Her connection with you—and the real world—is competing with the little buzz of pleasure she gets every time she checks her in-box. Most of the emails, texts, or notifications your friend is receiving are not urgent. (Most of her emails are probably advertisements from online retailers!) But she can’t stop checking in hopes of getting a personal email from someone she cares about—or exciting news of any kind.
A 2015 study found that Americans check their phones a total of 8 billion times a day. As mentioned in the prologue, a study shows that an average adult with a mobile phone connected to the Internet checked his or her phone more than two hundred times a day. That’s about every five minutes. In the evening it escalates. When most people are home from work, on average they begin checking their mobile phones once every six minutes. (How many times have you caught yourself picking up your phone mindlessly and checking your email queue again, then realized you just looked at it two minutes before?) Studies differ, but the overall results are similar: Average phone checking per day is surprisingly high.
Given the dependence on mobile phones, it was only a matter of time before they were repackaged as wearables and strapped to the wrist—but wouldn’t this only escalate the distractibility?
In terms of controlling compulsive behavior, there are a slew of tests to take online to scale your own “smartphone addiction.” And while these questionnaires are not really scientific, it’s worth paying attention if you find yourself starting to feel a little uncomfortable or, worse, no
dding in agreement:
• Do you find someone to call as soon as you leave the office or land in a plane? (More important, do you sneak your phone out as soon as the plane has landed and turn it on before the pilot says it’s okay? How many can resist that urge?)
• Have you ever been teased because you had your cellphone while working out or doing some other activity?
• Are you unable to resist special offers on the latest cellphone models?
• Do you sometimes believe your phone is ringing, but when you answer it or listen longer, you find it wasn’t ringing at all (known as “phantom ringing”)?
If you recognize yourself in some of the above compulsive behavior, it might help to understand what makes mobile phones so irresistible. To begin with, they are sleek, well-designed little devils that are portable, they are easy to slip into our handbags and pockets, and they travel with us almost anywhere. (I’ve heard of swimmers getting waterproof cases for them.) And the mobile phone, like the lottery scratch card, offers an intermittent reward. The surprise of hearing or reading news on our devices gives us a buzz of pleasure, which sets in motion a complex set of reinforcing behaviors: You check your phone to (intermittently) get good or surprising news, which is enough to keep you checking.
Now let’s add in what a psychologist would call the related stimuli of these digital devices, or the flashing lights and other alerts and notifications that come with each new email or text or Facebook “like,” depending on how you’ve customized your settings. Related stimuli are cues or situations that an addict associates with their addiction. One famous addiction study found that related stimuli associated with drinking alcohol or taking drugs could induce craving, explaining how the sight of a liquor bottle can cause a person to feel the urge to drink. This is the result of classic conditioning, like the lab experiment with the men who became aroused by the slide showing a pair of shoes. In the past, antidrug campaigns often used drug paraphernalia in their posters—syringes, needles, spoons, and piles of white powder, all designed to shock the world into total abstinence. But paradoxically the visual stimuli actually drove some addicts to relapse and led to a fundamental redesign of antidrug campaigns.