What You Have in Common With a Pigeon and Why It’s Causing Problems for You

By Michaeleen Doucleff

Ms. Doucleff is the author of the forthcoming book “Dopamine Kids: A Science-Based Plan to Rewire Your Child’s Brain and Take Back Your Family in the Age of Screens and Ultraprocessed Foods.”

More than 50 years ago, psychologists began documenting a strange phenomenon among animals, including pigeons, raccoons and rats. Although they didn’t realize it at the time, this behavior would help to explain why our society has developed such an intense and often uncontrollable need for our phones. And how devices and their apps don’t give us instant gratification, as we often believe, but instead trigger the opposite: constant wanting and desire.

In the 1970s, scientists put hungry pigeons into a long box and taught the birds that a flashing light at one end of the box signified the appearance of food at the other end of the box. The light became a signal for a reward.

At first, the pigeons largely ignored the light and spent time at the side of the box near the food. They wanted and needed the food. But over time, the light drew the pigeons to it like a magnet. “It was amazing to watch,” says the psychologist Robert Boakes at the University of Sydney, who was among the first scientists to document this phenomenon. “The birds would spend so much time pecking at the light that they had no time to get the food.” Mr. Boakes called this behavior “sign tracking” because the animals chased after the sign of the reward. Peck, peck, peck.

In one experiment, a pigeon pecked the light thousands of times an hour. The light distracted the birds so much that they went hungry.

How silly of these birds!

Today nearly everyone in America has become just as silly. People are “exactly like the pigeons,” says Peter Balsam, a professor of psychology at Columbia University. Because, he says, we carry around a device that elicits this bizarre behavior: our phones. Swipe, swipe, swipe. Scroll, scroll, scroll. Tap, tap, tap.

Smartphones — as well as their social media platforms, texting apps and video games — can trick us into no longer seeking out what we need in our lives. We start to value, desire and even become obsessed with signals on our devices that we associate with our fundamental needs, like belonging. “As social creatures, people are driven to find social interaction just as compelling as food, water, sex and salt,” says the neuroscientist Read Montague at Virginia Tech.

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