Our love-hate relationship with social media
Scientific American · Jeanna Bryner ·
Regardless of whether social media addiction is real, these platforms hack the human brain, often to our detriment
Two opposing ideas can be true at once. Something can be helpful and harmful, good and bad, annoying and endearing. That’s the premise of dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), and it’s also, I think, partly why we are having such a tough time navigating social media. We genuinely benefit from the “infinite scroll of doom.” We are social beings, and our very survival has always depended on connections. A lone human ancestor would have been easy pickings for a hyena on the African savanna, and without cooperative hunting or food gathering, our forebears simply wouldn’t have made it. Even today human infants are helpless without at least one connection. We’re built for bonding, so much so that the brain rewards us for it, releasing bonding chemicals such as oxytocin when we connect. Maybe, then, it’s no wonder we are drawn to social media platforms, where connections can be forged in minutes.
Here’s where things get complicated. As associate editor Allison Parshall points out in our cover story, social media isn’t quite the same as real-world meetups or handwritten letters (I’m now reading Virginia Evans’s 2025 debut novel, The Correspondent, whose theme touches on the lost art of letter writing). Platforms such as X, Facebook and Instagram run on algorithms that hack the brain’s mesolimbic pathway, whose neurons rely on dopamine, a type of “feel-good” chemical that can drive motivation and reward. “I’ve come to almost understand algorithms as being heat-seeking missiles that identify psychological vulnerability,” one psychologist told Allison.
That quote really hit home. After talking with Allison in the initial stages of her reporting, I realized I’m apparently vulnerable to sad medical stories, and my Instagram algorithm picked that up right away. How could I not read a post describing a recent disease diagnosis or the loss of a child that my feed was serving up?
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