← The Hacking of the American Mind The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains
The Hacking of the American Mind Chapter 14. Are You “Lovin’ It”? Or “Liking It”?
Author: Robert H. Lustig Publisher: New York, NY: Penguin Random House. Publish Date: 2017 Review Date: 2023-6-5 Status:⌛️
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Although corporations are now people, they are not faceless behemoth monsters. They are comprised of fine and upstanding individuals, each with principles, morals, and high aspirations. But they work for a corporation, whose only job, in the words of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, is to make money.
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They are very good at what they do. In the process they have honed the ability to exploit human emotion. It is called marketing. By conflating the notions of pleasure and happiness, they know how to get a rise out of your dopamine and cortisol.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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(1) The trigger; that is, something that commands your attention even when you don’t want it to, like an itch.
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(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.
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(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.
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(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.
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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.
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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.”
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We are distracted because we want to be. Because it’s fun and obfuscates real life. Why else would they sell so many smartphones?
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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).
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The smartphone brilliantly exploits two types of attention: “top down” (what we want to focus on) and “bottom up” (what takes us by surprise).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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?
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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.
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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
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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 serotonin receptors are already diminished—but the “Like” button takes teenage angst and misery to new heights (or depths).
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Cell phones and the internet may encourage networking and creativity, but it comes with a cost.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“Like”-wise, the Liker can get into trouble. A recent study created a fictitious social media group, in which all the participants were actually the research subjects, and the scientists were in charge of what each subject viewed on Facebook.19 Each subject underwent MRI scanning while being shown a fake item for a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. The nucleus accumbens (NA) lit up only when the subjects Liked something that they thought that others Liked as well—in other words, they exhibited the herd mentality. If they Liked something that wasn’t popular, no dopamine rush was noted.
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This could easily be a trap for both participants on the end of a social network. Maybe we should call it antisocial media. And Facebook, Snapchat, etc., are for-profit entities. They are there to make money through ad sales. They need to be relevant to do so.
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If you think your smartphone provides a pretty good rush, try the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. John Coates is a Wall Street trader turned University of Cambridge neuroscientist who studies traders on the floor of the stock exchange to determine when, how, and why they engage in risk-taking behavior.20
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He chronicles both the testosterone and the dopamine surges of the traders in the midst of a bull market versus the cortisol rises during the bare-knuckled fall to the bottom of a bear market. The result of this double hit is an overworked and overtired reward system, unable to muster up a taste of victory.
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Perhaps then we should not be too surprised to hear that David Nutt, the UK drug czar, opined in 2013 that many of the traders who precipitated the Great Recession were so morally bankrupt, so depleted of dopamine and their receptors, that they had to resort to cocaine to feel anything.21
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No doubt, conflating happiness with the maximization of pleasure and reduction of pain (see Chapter 1) has influenced the inherent structure and function of our financial markets. In part due to the Great Depression, the Keynesian economic school of thought ruled the markets from 1936 until 1970. Keynesian economics states that the private sector makes the decisions, but always under the watchful eye of government, which alters policy as necessary (i.e., establishes regulations). Such an oversight posture invariably limits growth and therefore the production of money. Rather, Milton Friedman22 and his University of Chicago economic colleagues conflated money with happiness, and his legacy is that more happiness, i.e., more money, is always better than less. After all, consumers want more bang for less buck, and more buck for less bang. Indeed, the genius of the Chicago school was to apply this psychology known as “price theory” to all walks of life—that the only method of rational behavior was that which created the most happiness … er, money.
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Enter Lewis Powell. By 1980 the sands had shifted to favor corporations over people. The Chicago school began to dominate in 1980 under Reagan. Banks started borrowing at low rates to buy other companies to liquidate them, known as risk arbitrage. The Chicago school achieved its sentinel victory with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, which completely deregulated the banks and markets—and we all know what came next.
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Yet for all their unpredictability and volatility, markets still do work, and we usually let them. Except when it comes to addictive substances. Witness the phenomenon of price elasticity for foods.23 This is an index, applied to products, that indicates how badly the consumer wants the product using the metric of how much they would be willing to pay, and it is driven by dopamine and its receptor.24
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The price elasticity index is measured as: if the price were to increase 1 percent, how much continued sales would remain? A low index means that people stop buying the product, and the product is “price elastic.” A high index means that people will continue to buy the product even though the price has increased, thus the product is “price inelastic.”
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The most price elastic food item is eggs, at 0.32. This means if the price of eggs goes up 1 percent, consumption goes down 0.68 percent. Eggs are the highest-quality protein there is. Eggs have all the nutrients you need. They are literally the world’s most perfect food. And people won’t buy them if the price increases. Why? Because there’s nothing in an egg that has hedonic properties. Tryptophan (the precursor of serotonin) sure, but can it drive dopamine?
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Conversely, the most price inelastic consumable is fast food, at 0.81. This means if the price of fast food goes up 1 percent, consumption only goes down 0.19 percent. And the second most? Soft drinks, at 0.79. These two food items exert the most hedonic effects (due to sugar and caffeine) and happen to be the ones that people will consume no matter what. And of course they are the most addictive.