Dr. Carl Erik Fisher

Some people do it to feel good because they have trouble accessing joy or pleasure.

We could apply a similar kind of principle to doom scrolling.

Like everyone...

I think has a sense of what doom scrolling might mean.

It's the person sitting in the corner on the couch, hunched over their phone, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

But for one person that could be more about pursuing reward, right?

That could be more about pursuing novelty.

Maybe that's how they get comedy.

Maybe they want like a little jolt of levity and on their discover feed, there's a lot of standup and they're, they're just searching for the thing that's going to make them chuckle and smile.

But for somebody else, it could be about stress and fatigue and,

just trying to check out.

Those could be two totally different psychological functions.

Yeah, I'll start with the personal because even if

A lot of these factors devolve to the systemic.

I do think there are things that we can do.

Here's a specific example that comes from a different line of research, from video game research.

So people have started to piece apart what are the technological design features that make video games potentially addictive, in the words of these users.

There are a lot of things that are similar to social media.

There are things like the reward schedule and monetization, the social tie-ins to it.

But one really important thing, which is very basic, is access.