The Psychology of TikTok. What makes scrolling through the “For… | by Dana Goetz, Ph.D. | Medium

TikTok is an extremely popular social media application with about 800 million monthly users world-wide. This makes TikTok the 7th most used social platform in the world, falling just behind Instagram’s one billion monthly users. TikTok’s main feature, the “For You” page, is the home page and the first thing you see when you open TikTok. The page consists of brief videos (also called TikToks) that are one minute or less, that you can scroll through, and that have been recommended to you through an algorithm. How does TikTok maintain such a high number of users? What makes scrolling through the “For You” page so fun and almost addicting? An entire field related to psychology called behavior analysis can answer these questions by describing how we learn from our consequences and the properties that make a consequence more reinforcing. How We Learn from Our Consequences According to the law of effect, behavior is either strengthened (likely to occur more frequently) or weakened (likely to

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