The Indicator from Planet Money - How your phone keeps you scrolling ... even when you want to stop

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

You pick up your phone to do one quick task, and suddenly 20 minutes have flown by without you even noticing. How do apps do that to you? Today on the show, we bring you an episode of Short Wave that explains how your phone is designed specifically to hold your attention.Fact checking by Tyler Jones.Connect with The Indicator — Sign up for The Indicator’s brand new newsletter— Buy the Planet Money book— Find our socials, YouTube and more!— For sponsor-free episodes, subscribe to NPR+ See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

NPR. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrian Ma. Two landmark trials this year found tech companies guilty of harming children through their apps. And although meta and Google are in the process of appealing those decisions, there is a growing awareness that social media apps can be addictive. On that score, we're bringing you an episode from our friends at NPR's Daily Science podcast, Shortwave.

It's hosted by Emily Kwong, and in a recent episode, she spoke with Michaeline Dukleff. She's the author of a new book called Dopamine Kids about the psychology of being glued to a screen. They'll pick up the story from here after the break. Okay, Michaeline, so this story begins in the casinos of Las Vegas. Take us back in time and explain what was happening there. Yeah, so we're going to rewind 40 years ago, way back in the 1980s, when the casino industry underwent a massive transformation and created what many scientists think is the most addictive form of gambling ever. Oh, how did they do that? So they went around and ripped up nearly all the mechanical

slot machines and all those green felt poker tables and replaced them all with digital versions of these games. So video-based slot machines, video-based poker machines. Oh, no. They did this because these machines were way cheaper to maintain, but also they allowed the casino industry to add in all these extra features to them. It's like they were apps before they were apps. The gambling games just played on screens. That's right. So over the course of about 20 years, the industry gradually and purposely increased the

addictiveness of these games by tweaking their features based on user feedback. Wait, who gave the user feedback? The gamblers. The casinos essentially ran these large-scale experiments on all the millions of people gambling each year in Vegas. They tweaked the device a bit and then see if those changes increase the time people spend gambling. Then they just repeated the process for decades. The result was truly extraordinary.

The industry created devices that some people stay on for remarkable periods of time, 24 hours, 48 hours, uninterrupted. Like they don't even stop to use the bathroom? Sometimes not. Anthropologist Natasha Dalshaw found that some people wear adult diapers to the casino so they don't have to stop gambling. One casino worker told her that each night a bunch of the machines sit out in an alley for cleaning because people have peed in them. That is awful. That makes me so sad to hear because it just shows the power these devices have on people's attention. Yeah.

And the power they have on people's time and money as well. In her 15 years of researching, Natasha found four features that when combined together can trigger a trance-like state in people. You lose track of time, where you are, what you're doing. Scientists call this the machine zone. or dark flow. And some people have a really hard time stepping away from a device when they're in this state. And Natasha realized that apps on phones can sometimes trigger this same machine zone state. I think gambling offers a case study of what big tech does in a more general way. Michael, let's blow the cover off of this. What are the four ingredients in social media super low?

The first ingredient is solitude. This is important because it removes social cues for stopping. When we use an app by ourselves, we have trouble noticing if we're actually enjoying what we're doing. Studies have found that when kids use screens all alone in their bedroom, they're more likely to stay on the app even when it prevents them from going to sleep or interferes with their homework or friendships. I've experienced this as an adult. Okay, what is the second ingredient to social media superglum? It's what I call bottomlessness. There's just seemingly endless photos, endless videos, endless comments to read, endless lines. levels to reach on games. And as Natasha points out, all this content appears automatically.

There is no natural stopping point. So as you're scrolling, you may have a little thought in your head like, hmm, maybe I should go to sleep, right? But then another outrageous video pops up in your feed. I genuinely feel like I'm being baited, like a fish. Exactly. And that feeling grows even stronger when you add in the third ingredient. Which is speed. Ah, right. The gambling industry found that when people could place bets faster and faster, they gambled longer and longer. Today on slot machines, you can play like 1,200 games per hour or like one game every three seconds. It's bonkers. Wait, what?

And the speed thing, you're saying this has been happening for a long time with casino games, and it's definitely happening on social media. Oh, yeah, for sure. The faster we can scroll, the longer we stay on these apps. When social media companies added Infinite Scroll in the 2010s, there was a huge jump in use. know why that's the case, that moving faster would make us stay on the app longer? Yeah, you know, scientists don't know yet, but Natasha suspects... The speed can cause this sense where you feel like you're kind of don't have a sense of

where you begin and the machine ends and it really just pulls you into this flow. I don't like that. I don't want to be hooked up to a machine. Me neither. The fourth ingredient is a personalized algorithm. Neuroscientist Jonathan Morrow studies addiction at the University of Michigan. He thinks thinks this ingredient is probably the most important. And he explained how it works. First, the app uses AI to determine what you want to see. They know what you want.

They're very good at figuring that out. But then this is key. They don't give it to you. They give you something close to that. So they sort of tease you in a way. Yeah, they're not trying to satisfy you. The app makes you feel like you're making progress or getting closer to your goal. Mateo Shkola is a neuroscientist at UCC and Diego.

He says when people feel like they're making progress, they double down their effort and try harder. When you see improvement, progress and so on, then you have a huge spike of dopamine telling you, oh, do it again and you will get it, yeah? Because in the real life, when we try again, this dopamine really motivates us to get closer, closer, closer, and hit it. So he's saying just a sense of progress,

even if it's not true progress, motivates us to keep trying and to stick with the app because it's just enough. Yeah, there's always this possibility. ability, right, of getting what you want. So the social media super glue recipe is as follows. Solitude, bottomlessness, speed, and teasing. Yep.

When all those things combined together, you're likely to enter that trans-like state called the machine zone or dark flow. And for many people, like me, it's hard to pull out of that state. I mean, it seems to me like the tech companies and the gambling industry is hacking human minds. You know, everyone is susceptible to this. But question, Mike Lean, I thought being in a flow state was good. Isn't that where you're so immersed in a task and you're enjoying it so much that you almost forget where you are and you play the piano for hours? Yeah.

So that's the classic flow state, you know, the one that the psychologist, Miha, Chick-Sit-Mehi described back in the 80s. People go into these good flow states when they're doing complex and challenging tasks like playing the piano or knitting a sweater, biking over tough terrain, right? Afterwards, this type of flow leaves you feeling really good and optimistic and relaxed. Yeah, you get a little mood bump. Yeah, but these apps create dark flow. And that's where you're concentrating on an easy kind of mindless task. And you still feel deeply immersed in it, right? But afterwards, you often feel bad, right?

Lethargic and maybe even gloomy. Final question, can we use this super glue recipe to fight back and pull ourselves away from these apps? Absolutely. So, for example, our family was wasting way too much time on, streaming apps, right? Streaming videos. So we put a bottom on the app and slowed it way down. How'd you do that? We canceled all of our subscriptions and now have to buy each video a la carte. I thought we'd end up spending way more money, but actually we saved so much money because we're really careful about what we watch. Before we press play, we really think to ourselves,

hmm, do I really want to spend $5.99 on this video? Wow. Yeah. These are great. Any other tips? Yeah, so I have a bunch of tips in my book, but here's one that changed my life. When you come home, put your phone in a drawer near the door and leave it there. If you want to use it, go to the drawer, use it and put it back. I guarantee you it'll change your life. Michael Dean Ducleff, thank you so much for sharing these fascinating insights into our phones and how we can, I don't know, get a bit of distance from them. Oh, thank you so much, Emily.

This episode was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts and Jimmy Keely was the audio engineer. And Shortwave and The Indicator are productions of NPR.