Drug addiction involves brain changes that lead to intense craving for something such as alcohol and a loss of control over its use. Fighting addiction is hard or impossible for almost all addicts. Part of the biology usually involves release of a 'pleasure signal' called dopamine. Current research indicates that the brain feels pleasure the same way. A feeling of pleasure can come from a drug or alcohol, a monetary reward, sex, or a good meal. Feeling pleasure involves release dopamine, a neurotransmitter, in the a cluster of nerve cells underneath the cerebral cortex (the nucleus accumbens). Neuroscientists call this the brain’s pleasure center because dopamine release there is usually linked to feelings of pleasure.
A news article on the effects of social media indicate that dopamine release appears to be part of what makes social media addictive for at least some people. Companies that rely on user attention are becoming more sophisticated at getting it: “The techniques these companies use are not always generic: they can be algorithmically tailored to each person. An internal Facebook report leaked this year, for example, revealed that the company can identify when teens feel ‘insecure’, ‘worthless’ and ‘need a confidence boost.’ Such granular information, Harris adds, is ‘a perfect model of what buttons you can push in a particular person.’”
The article comments: “ One morning in April this year, designers, programmers and tech entrepreneurs from across the world gathered at a conference centre on the shore of the San Francisco Bay. They had each paid up to $1,700 to learn how to manipulate people into habitual use of their products, on a course curated by conference organiser Nir Eyal.
Eyal, 39, the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, has spent several years consulting for the tech industry, teaching techniques he developed by closely studying how the Silicon Valley giants operate.
‘The technologies we use have turned into compulsions, if not full-fledged addictions,’ Eyal writes. ‘It’s the impulse to check a message notification. It’s the pull to visit YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter for just a few minutes, only to find yourself still tapping and scrolling an hour later.’ None of this is an accident, he writes. It is all ‘just as their designers intended.’”
In another article, Exploiting the Neuroscience of Internet Addiction, the moral issue is pinpointed: “The leaders of Internet companies face an interesting, if also morally questionable, imperative: either they hijack neuroscience to gain market share and make large profits, or they let competitors do that and run away with the market.
In the Industrial Age, Thomas Edison famously said, ‘I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent’. In the Internet Age, more and more companies live by the mantra ‘create an obsession, then exploit it’. Gaming companies talk openly about creating a ‘compulsion loop’, which works roughly as follows: the player plays the game; the player achieves the goal; the player is awarded new content; which causes the player to want to continue playing with the new content and re-enter the loop.
Many Internet companies are learning what the tobacco industry has long known -- addiction is good for business. There is little doubt that by applying current neuroscience techniques we will be able to create ever-more-compelling obsessions in the virtual world.”
What about politics?: To the extent that players in politics can take advantage of the tricks that social media companies use to play with our minds, there is no reason to think that they are not going full-bore to do the same with partisan politics. It is likely that Russia has deployed this to influence elections in America and other countries. Like other businesses, American politics doesn't generally operate with much or any regard for moral issues, so that is not a significant concern for major players.
But even more fundamentally and aside from social media, can rigid, unshakable belief in a political, economic or religious ideology by itself led to the same or similar biological responses? Is rigid ideology not just blinding and distorting, but also addicting? Maybe.
One study found a correlation between a gene involved in dopamine signalling and certain social circumstances. That study claimed to describe “a specific gene-environment interaction that contributes to ideological self-identification, and it highlights the importance of incorporating both nature and nurture into the study of political preferences.”
Another researcher wrote: “Engagement with electronically mediated information, such as participation with social media, often provides the illusion of democratic freedom. In actuality, social media, as it exists within a neoliberal context, provides what I refer to as dopamine democracy, which entails the appearance of democratic choice that is actually uncritical choice brought about through incentive salience.” Although that links electronic media to politics, it at least elevates dopamine responses to a central role in democratic politics. There is no reason this does not also apply to non-democratic politics to some non-trivial extent.
Another research group writes: “Twin and family studies suggest that political attitudes are partially determined by an individual's genotype. The dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4) exon III repeat region that has been extensively studied in connection with human behaviour, is a plausible candidate to contribute to individual differences in political attitudes.”
Again, that is not proof that ideology alone can be an addiction or compulsion. But, it is more evidence that brain biology is relevant to politics. That probably should not be a surprise since brain biology is, or appears to be, relevant to everything that humans experience. Correlations between dopamine responses and religious beliefs[1] have been described, and it is possible that religious extremism can sometimes be seen as a clinical addiction.[2] Based on a limited search of the scientific literature, it is not clear that political ideology alone has been come to be seen as an addiction or compulsion.
Footnotes:
1. “Second, these results may be relevant for behavioural genetics studies looking at the heritability of religiousness. Individual differences in cognitive flexibility, and specifically the WCST, RAT, and AUT Flexibility, have been linked to dopaminergic systems, and so perhaps future behavioural genetic and epigenetic investigations on the heritability of religiosity should investigate the role of genes implicated in dopamine functioning. In fact, an integrative predictive processing framework for understanding religion has been recently proposed, implicating the dopaminergic system in the maintenance of religious and paranormal beliefs.” (citations omitted)
2. “Today one of the main criteria for a diagnosis of drug addiction/alcoholism is: continuing to consume alcohol or another drug ‘despite unpleasant or adverse consequences’ (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). For the Christian martyrs the same criteria would apply. People of that time and place—Rome, 2nd century A.D.—could also say that this new Christianity was like a drug that endangered lives and that being a Christian had all the adverse financial, social, psychological and physical consequences that we now see in the lives of drug addicts and alcoholics. And yet Christians, of all ages, in spite of the consequences, continued to profess their faith… and continued to be eaten by lions.”
B&B orig: 9/14/18
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