Are Facebook likes are the first “digital drug” to dominate our culture? The same thing applies to Facebook likes. “It’s hard to exaggerate how much the like button changed the psychology of Facebook use … A post with zero ‘likes’ [isn’t] just privately painful, but also a kind of public condemnation: either you didn’t have enough online friends, or, worse still, your online friends weren’t impressed,” writes Adam Alter for The Guardian, in an extract adapted from his book “Irresistible.” “People are addicted. We experience withdrawals. We are so driven by this drug, getting just one hit elicits truly peculiar reactions. I’m talking about likes. They’ve inconspicuously emerged as the first digital drug to dominate our culture,” says web developer Rameet Chawla.

It’s the same psychological trick at play in video games: “Video games are governed by microscopic rules,” says Bennett Foddy, who teaches game design at New York University’s Game Center. He talks about text that pops up or sound that is emitted when you move the cursor, tools that are used to hook players in. “A game must obey these microscopic rules, because gamers are likely to stop playing a game that doesn’t deliver a steady dose of small rewards that make sense given the game’s rule.” Remember the Candy Crush Saga craze? It was those effects that made people so caught up in the game, and not the rules — and that earned its developer more than USD 2.5 bn so far. “When you form a line in Candy Crush Saga, a reinforcing sound plays, the score associated with that line flashes brightly, and sometimes you hear words of praise intoned by a hidden, deep-voiced narrator” writes Alter. Another trick allows you to recharge to play more — who wants to end on a losing note? “You start playing because you want to have fun, but you continue playing because you want to avoid feeling unhappy.”