(ethereal music) - At a time when social media is increasingly taking over our lives, Facebook has become an emblem of technology run amok.

It's been pilloried in the press for manipulating users, and has come under investigation for sharing personal data.

Social media's power over consumers didn't happen by chance, but by design.

- A theory pioneered decades ago by the influential psychologist B.F. Skinner lies at the root of today's attention economy, where people are manipulated with the same techniques Skinner developed to teach rats to press levers, cats to play the piano, and pigeons to face off in ping-pong.

But could the research that led to social media's power over us also help us to escape its grip?

(upbeat music) Over the last decade.

- iPhone is like having your life in your pocket.

- [Celeste] Technology has reshaped how we interact with the world.

- [Reporter] 1/3 of humanity uses Facebook at least once a month.

If Facebook were a country, it would be the largest in the world.

- [Celeste] It's also reshaped our own lives.

- More families are texting each other while inside the same house instead of actually talking-- - Even the CEO of Apple thinks he's on his iPhone too much.

- Some people are so addicted to technology and their devices, they're now turning to rehab.

- [Celeste] But to understand how this technology hooks us, we need to look back to a different time.

- [Narrator] Conquest, the search for new knowledge about our universe, our world, and ourselves.

- What is behavior?

What makes a man love, gamble, write a sonnet?

In this laboratory, scientists seek answers to those questions using pigeons.

- [Celeste] It was 1959, and an unassuming scientist was about to tell the nation about a remarkable discovery.

- Dr. Skinner, what are you doing with this pigeon?

- I'm getting ready to demonstrate a fundamental principle of behavior.

This pigeon is hungry, and I can give it food just by pressing this switch, which operates a small food dish in back of the square opening in the wall.

In that way, I can select parts of its behavior and make it do practically anything I like.

- [Celeste] For decades, behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner had been experimenting with pigeons and rats to see what he could make them do.

But rats pressing levers and pigeons pecking discs was just the start.

- If it goes past one pigeon, the other people can eat, and if it goes the other way, the other pigeon eats.

- That's remarkable - [Dr. Skinner] Of course we're not interested in behavior because its amusing or dramatic.

We want to study its causes and find out how to change it.

- [Celeste] One of those techniques he found, that was particularly useful in shaping behavior was the variable reward.

- [Dr. Skinner] The things we do in everyday life don't always pay off and they don't always not pay off.

It isn't simple all or none.

We study that in the case of the pigeon by arranging various schedules or systems of pay off.

- He found, that if you don't know what is gonna come down that shoot in terms of a reward and you don't know when its going to come, you will stay there pressing the button and pulling the lever.

- [Celeste] The key, Skinner discovered, was making the payoff unpredictable.

- That element of uncertainty, that perfect sweet sport that balance of you know predictability yet uncertainty, that is the most addicting reinforcement schedule.

- [Celeste] To help make his case that humans could be controlled in the same way, Skinner pointed to casinos.

- [Dr. Skinner] People gamble because of the schedule of the reinforcement that follows.

- In Skinner's time, people found a lot of what he said for cultural and historical reasons, to be very creepy.

The idea that we could be controlled was coming right on the heels of this image of sort of Communism and that we could all be turned into little drones executing the commands of others.

And so people were repelled by it.

- I come back to the old question the old objection, (speaking in foreign language) Who is going to guard are guardians?

Who is going to modify the people, who are going to modify us.

- In the climate of the 70's, 80's ans even 90's, it would've been a very dubious proposition to call yourself and advertise yourself as a behavior designer.

- [Celeste] But that's not the case today.

- I'd like to share with you a design pattern that companies use to build habit forming products.

Its called the hook.

- I decided to dive deeper into the psychology of what makes products habit forming, hoping that I could build a habit forming product.

- [Celeste] Nir Eyal now works as a Behavior Designer, helping companies figure out what kind of behavioral techniques will attract users and keep them.

- What we find, is that habit forming products have what's called a hook designed into the product.

If we feel lonely we check Facebook, if were uncertain we Google.

All of these things fundamentally cater to an emotional itch and emotional discomfort.

What we want to do is to find the pin points in users lives so that we can solve that problem for them.

- [Celeste] But behavioral design goes beyond simply finding and easing an emotional itch.

The hooks built into these products are also intended to keep users coming back and here Skinner's discoveries are key.

- The connection is to make something interesting it needs to be variable.

There has to be some kind of mystery, some kind of uncertainty.

Instagram is a great example of a product that has a fantastic hook built in, the internal trigger when your seeking connection.

The action is to open the app.

The variable reward is to scroll the feed, over time your changing your habits to use this product.

- There's certain possibilities and there's certain uncertainties, right.

So something like Twitter really has that feel of you never know when a pellet is gonna come down the shoot and the same with Facebook.

You log on and you just keep strolling to see like when am I gonna get a little hit.

I think it is useful to think about them as some kind of digitally enhanced Skinner box.

- [Celeste] Loren Brichter is one reason Twitter is so additive.

He developed the code for the now ubiquitous gesture known as pull to refresh.

- It was literally five lines of code.

I put it in and it was done.

Like, that was pull to refresh, and then people started putting it in everything.

In my mind I did it because it was a more natural gesture, like it was a bit more ergonomic.

Some people likened it to a slot machine.

Which makes a ton of sense in hindsight.

- [Celeste] Today there is growing concern that technology companies have gone to far in their attempt to keep users glued to their screens.

And some of the industries leaders are speaking out.

- This short term dopamine driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works.

- It's not about giving you all this freedom, it's about sucking you in to take your time.

- I mean its exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because your exploiting the vulnerability in human's psychology.

- [Celeste] Skinners daughter, Julie Vargas, says her father believed that behavioral psychology could be a force for good if it was used in the right way.

- My sister's school had Father's Day and what he saw was the teachers giving a lesson and then giving a worksheet.

And some of them were doing it quickly, others were clearly not knowing what to do.

So he came home and he said I'm making a teaching machine.

- [Narrator] One of the practical applications of laboratory work in the field of behavior theory is the teaching machine.

- [Narrator] These machines are now being used to teach everything from telling the time to advanced physics.

Satisfaction from achievement is a powerful human reinforcer.

- He had an ethics.

An ethics of collective human flourishing that depended on making the right choices rather than ones that would deplete us and keep us in the corner of the Skinner box pressing the button.

- [Celeste] Vargas said her father would be appalled by the way his discoveries are being used by some technology companies today.

- He would be horrified at how much control these little devices or the interaction has over, particularly the young people in our society.

- Just because something is potentially addictive, doesn't mean we don't have control.

We're not freebasing Facebook.

We're not injecting Instagram here.

- [Celeste] Eyal says that many behavior designers are actually trying to improve users lives.

- I'll give you example after example.

Duolingo helps us learn languages.

We've got apps that I use everyday when I go to the gym that helps me exercise, apps to help us stop smoking, apps that help us stop using our technology are all using these behavioral design tactics.

- [Celeste] But in the end, the solution to help us overcome our addiction to technology may not come from an app.

Instead it may from understanding one of Skinner's most important realizations, knowing your being controlled by something might be the first step to breaking its grip.

- Science liberates you to the extent that you now understand why things are happening and when they're going to happen.

Knowing what in your environment is controlling your behavior, lets you change that environment and change your own behavior.

- [Celeste] Loren Brichter is among those now thinking more deeply about his environment, and the ones he created.

- On some levels it was like I thought I did good work.

But on other levels like I think that work led to bad things happening.

And they're all part of this big thing that like led to this massive shift in you know human culture.

There's no undo button.

I mean all technology is like Pandora's Box , you can't predict what making any of this stuff is gonna do.