Playing On Fear

Nir Eyal

Around the election, in a desperate search for answers about our nation’s future, I found myself scrolling, reading, and watching everything I could. I was trapped in an endless pull-to-refresh cycle of consuming more news, tweets, posts, and videos than was good for me. I told myself that I was staying informed, that this was part of my civic duty—and that not staying up-to-date 24-7 would leave me politically ignorant and impotent.

I’ve since changed my mind. In fact, I’ve decided to give up consuming news online, and I think you should consider doing the same. Here’s why:

Competing Incentives

Much has been written about the incentives driving the news media. One of their missions is to inform. But media companies are also businesses, which means they must sustain themselves.

By and large, media companies that deliver news online monetize attention through display advertising. They want to keep us clicking and scrolling as much as possible. If a story drives clicks, views, or reads, they have an incentive to publish it—sometimes to sensationalize it. Companies delivering news online have no incentive to encourage moderation of the time we spend on their sites.

Furthermore, the purveyors of online news profit most when we feel at our worst. It wasn’t until I’d wasted a few days scrolling through election news that I started to reflect on what was really driving me. I realized I wasn’t reading online news for the reason I told myself—to be informed. Rather, I was spending an inordinate amount of time online because I was scared. I feared what might happen to the country regardless of who won the election.

As I wrote in my book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, fear is an “internal trigger.” An internal trigger is a negative emotion that prompts the habitual use of a product or a service. Companies attach their products to internal triggers to prompt us to perform a behavior with little or no conscious thought.

It’s important to note that companies don’t necessarily create internal triggers—rather, they satiate existing pain points. When the election heightened people’s fears and uncertainties, media organizations leveraged this to their benefit. When we’re in pain, we look for relief. But in my case, I realized that relying on the news to alleviate my fear wasn’t making the matter better—in some ways, it was making things worse. I had lost control of how I was choosing to spend my waking hours.