The Psychology of Your Scrolling Addiction

In the first part of the research, participants view either five different music videos or just one music video, and then we asked them if they’d rather watch another video or complete a work-related task.

In theory, one might expect that people would get tired of watching music videos after watching five in a row, reducing their desire to watch more of them. But in fact, we found that the opposite was true: Watching five videos made people 10% more likely to choose to watch an additional music video than if they only watched one video.

Participants were shown the same two videos, but for half of the participants, we explicitly labelled the videos with the same category label (“educational videos”), while for the other half of the participants, we didn’t include a category label. We found that simply framing the videos as more similar via the category label made people 21% more likely to choose to watch another related video.

One group of participants complete two work tasks and then watch two similar videos, while the other group completed the same four tasks, but alternated between them (i.e., work, video, work, video).

Despite having done exactly the same activities, the order made a big difference: The participants whose video consumption was uninterrupted were 22% more likely to choose to watch another video than those who alternated between work tasks and videos

• Make an effort to just watch one video; if you really want to watch multiple in a row, choose videos that seem unrelated; or find ways to intentionally interrupt your viewing experience.
• You can use a social media timer that prompts you to take a break after a certain amount of time, or even just consciously remind yourself to consume different kinds of content.
• Find ways to reduce the similarity, repetitiveness, and relatedness of the content you’re consuming.