Evolutionary mismatch
The term for when traits evolved for one environment become mismatched with a new one, like our social brains meeting social media.
What is Evolutionary Mismatch?
This neurotransmitter is released in anticipation of social rewards, not just upon receiving them, making notification checks neurologically compelling.
What is dopamine?
This UX feature removes stopping points by continuously loading new content, exploiting our inability to self-regulate open-ended tasks.
What is infinite scroll?
This cognitive bias causes users to preferentially engage with content confirming existing beliefs and algorithms learn to feed it back amplified.
What is confirmation bias?
McLuhan's four-part framework for analyzing any medium: what it enhances, obsolesces, retrieves, and reverses into.
What is the Media Tetrad?
The approximate size of the stable social group humans evolved to manage, roughly 50 to 150 people.
What is Dunbar's Number?
This term describes reward schedules where outcomes are unpredictable, the same mechanism used by slot machines and social media likes.
What is a variable reward schedule?
Algorithms prioritize this type of content because it generates 3x more engagement, despite its harmful effects on users and public discourse.
What is outrage (or emotionally provocative content)?
This heuristic causes people to overestimate how common dramatic or extreme events are, because they encounter them so frequently in their feeds.
What is the availability heuristic?
According to the Media Tetrad, social media retrives this ancient social dynamic, reputation tracked publicly, at speed, within a community.
What are tribal reputation dynamics?
According to Haidt and Twenge, this year marks when teen depression rates began a sharp climb, coinciding with smartphone adoption.
The brain system that evolved to track social hierarchies, monitor reputation, and respond to social threat in our ancestral environment.
What is the social brain (or primate social cognition)?
Visible like counts and follower numbers are an example of this, publicly quantifying social standing in real time.
What is social quantification (or public social metrics)?
Our deeply primate tendency to look to others for behavioral cues weaponized by platforms through visible engagement metrics like likes and shares.
What is social proof?
The Media Tetrad says social media obsesses this, realistic, stable, local peer group that humans used for social comparison throughout most of history.
What is the local reference group (or geographic community)?
This researcher coined the term 'Dunbar's Number' and argued our neocortex size limits the complexity of social relationships we can maintain.
Who is Robin Dunbar?
This stress hormone elevates when we experience social threat, and research shows it rises with heavy social media use.
What is cortisol?
The underlying business model that structurally misaligns platform incentives with user wellbeing, because attention equals revenue.
What is the advertising model?
The condition created by algorithmic curation where users are shown a global highlight reel rather than a realistic local reference group, permanently pushing comparison upward.
What is upward social comparison?
When pushed to its extreme, McLuhan's tetrad says social media reverses into the breakdown of shared reality and the isolation of individuals in filtered information bubbles.
What is epistemic fragmentation (or echo chambers)?
Haidt and Twenge found this demographic group shows the strongest correlation between heavy social media use and poor mental health outcomes.
Who are adolescent girls?
Managing social connections beyond roughly 150 people requires this, which our brains are not evolutionarily equipped to handle efficiently at scale.
What is cognitive load?
Teams of engineers and behavioral scientists employed by platforms with the specific goal of maximizing one thing above all others.
What is time-on-platform (or engagement)?
Festinger's 1954 theory, expanded in the context of social media, explaining why viewing others' curated success systematically reduces our own self-esteem.
What is Social Comparison Theory?
This media theorist, foundational to the field of media ecology, argued 'the medium is the message' and developed the Laws of Media.
Who is Marshall McLuhan?