Your brain can't tell the difference between a slot machine and your phone
Michael Easter, in his book 'Scarcity Brain,' explains that the addictive nature of today's apps and games, be it endless scrolling or gacha elements in games, is not simply due to people having weak willpower but rather because it is the result of deliberate design. To support this argument, he refers to the "scarcity loop," which, according to him, is an old survival mechanism consisting of three constituent parts: a desirable opportunity, an uncertain reward, and the possibility of quickly repeating the action. He believes that this loop, which once helped humans to locate food in the primitive times more efficiently, has been put to new use in the present age, either intentionally or not, by modern technology in order to keep people engaged.
A study published in the journal PLOS ONE has directly examined this particular mechanism of 'scarcity loop,' except that it was done not in an app, but in the best version of the loop that we have in reality: gambling.
Study Overview:
Zendle and Cairns (2018) carried out a survey of 7,422 gamers regarding the amount they spent on loot boxes, these being undisclosed and randomized, real-money purchases in video games where players do not know what they are getting until after they have paid and bought it. The researchers recorded how much money each person spent on loot boxes and then compared this data with a standard clinical measure of problem gambling symptoms.
Results:
The greater the amount of money a person spent on loot boxes, the more severe their problem-gambling symptoms tended to be.
The relationship was found to be particularly stronger in the case of loot box purchases than it was with other ordinary in-game purchases like in-game currency, since in the latter the customer knows precisely what they are paying for.
The factor that differed between the two was the element of randomness and not the amount of money spent, beacuse other than the element of an undisclosed or an unpredicatble item of purchase, all other mechanisms were more or less the same. Purchases that were predictable were linked much less to problem gambling than were those that were unpredictable.
The most important point in relation to the author's case is that the study identified unpredictability as the active mechanism among the scarcity loop's three components. In the experiment there were two purchases, the same game, the same amount of money, and the same player, the only variation being whether the reward was known beforehand or remained a matter of chance. It was this single difference that correlated with gambling-level compulsive behaviour.
How this supports the book's claim:
The author claims that this kind of loop is not just a feature of casinos but has in fact been subtly integrated into everyday technology, such as social media feeds and in-game loot boxes, since unpredictability is the factor that keeps the brain engaged long after even when the activity itself has stopped being enjoyable, because there remains the allusion of something better just around the corner or after a scroll. The study more or less makes it concrete, which is the evidence that this is not just a metaphor. The same psychological principle that underlies slot machines, the element of reward uncertainty, which thereby acts as the motivation to keep going, is clearly present in video games, which most people would not regard as gambling (unless it is explicitly marketed as one), and it causes symptoms similar to those seen in gambling among the people who are most exposed to it. It is precisely this point that makes the author's notion of "scarcity loop" more than an analogy and into a verifiable mechanism falsifiable by a simple test: whenever the element of unpredictability of the reward is found, a tendency towards compulsive behaviour tends to appear.
You can read the research for yourself (Source): Zendle, D., & Cairns, P. (2018). "Video game loot boxes are linked to problem gambling: Results of a large-scale survey." PLOS ONE, 13(11), e0206767.