Break the Social Media Addiction Using Nudges

Social media – we love it! Worldwide, upwards of 4 billion people (more than half the humans on the planet) use some form of social media. It’s as ubiquitous as air, water and carbohydrates. It connects us with friends, sends us news, provides channels for self-expression and lets us share pictures of our children, our pets and our food.

Social media – we hate it! About two-thirds of Americans (64%) say social media have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the country today, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2020. In a world of COVID disinformation and pandemic rumor proliferation, things didn’t improve over the last two years.

Can Social Media Use Really Become an Addiction?

Addiction occurs when an individual can’t stop engaging in a behavior even though it causes psychological or physical harm. The behavior in question becomes initially appealing because it confers a reward – for example, the feelings of happiness and inclusion we experience from text messages, Facebook likes and Instagram comments.

These feelings, however, are temporary (like the high from a narcotic) and require the individual to continue searching for the next source of gratification. Excessive time and attention spent in that search are the prime indicators of addiction. Anxiety, depression and sleep disturbances are the well-documented consequences of over-attentiveness to social media.

What is a Nudge?

What can an employer do if employees are overusing or misusing social media platforms? Organizational rules and policies can help – and are probably necessary – but they aren’t enough. Face it – you can’t effectively watch over employees’ social media usage moment to moment or topic to topic. Moreover, you can expect that employees will balk at working in a social media police state. Employers may need to take more direct action, albeit with subtlety, to help employees break social media overuse habits.

That’s where nudges come in. The theory of nudges and their use was formalized and popularized by economist Richard Thaler (who received the 2017 Nobel Prize for Economics for his work in the area) and Cass Sunstein in their 2008 book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. A nudge is a simple action or suggestion that gently steers individuals toward or away from a specific decision. To count as a nudge, an intervention must be appealing but easy to avoid. A nudge is not a mandate, Thaler and Sunstein say: “Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.”

Ground Rules for Nudges

Here are some guidelines for designing and implementing nudges:

Don’t try to hide them – Let people be aware of the nudge. After all, if it’s well-conceived, they will see the benefit.
Don’t try to make them too big – A small action like placing healthy food near checkout counters is all it takes to encourage people to improve their nutrition.
Make sure the individual retains the ability to choose – Again, the nudge works only if it’s completely voluntary. Don’t make it too hard for people to opt out.
Appeal to employees’ conscious reasoning – Provide evidence on how social media obsession is harmful – data on stress or sleep disruption, for instance – as the basis for nudging them to cut back on usage.

Some Digital Detox Nudges to Try

Following these principles, you can invent an array of nudges to help people perform a digital detox. Here are some ideas to consider:

Declare an occasional “detox day” and invite people to put their phones aside and not look at them for a whole work day.
Send people an email or text message periodically during the day to suggest they leave their phones untouched for the next two hours. Perhaps include a message like this: “Tapping into social media decreases your concentration and increases your stress. Who needs that? Go phoneless for the next two hours – you’ll feel better.”
Give everyone a “detox box” for their workstations, cubicles or offices. The idea is for them to drop the phone in the box, move it as far away as possible and leave it there untouched for the whole day.
Suggest that people reconfigure their screens to make their phones less visually appealing. Turning down brightness; enabling grayscale; moving apps around to require a search effort rather than reliance on muscle memory – these can all help reduce attention to the device. Maybe call it the ”Change Your Phone, Change Your Life” effort.
In a similar vein, suggest that employees turn off non-essential notifications. Perhaps it’s the “Leave Me Alone, I’m Busy” campaign.

Put your mind to it and you can no doubt come up with other ways to nudge people to cut back on their social media engagement during work hours.