The Strange Social Neuroscience of TikTok
This is the second of a two-part series on social neuroscience and the digital world. The first part introduces the concept of Capgras Delusion and its relationship to social media
TikTok’s rise has been nothing short of astronomical. Though it only launched in 2017, TikTok quickly grew by leaps and bounds, and became the 7th downloaded app of the 2010s.
As Facebook and Instagram failed to captivate the up and coming generation of teenage users, TikTok pounced. Aided by teenage boredom during pandemic lockdowns, it quickly became the app of choice for Generation Z. Since its breakout year in 2020, the platform caught fire, went mainstream, and hasn’t looked back.
As of 2023, it has over 1B monthly active users.
Key to this incredible ascent has been their algorithm, which has been described as the most powerful in the world. The specifics of this algorithm are kept private, but in an internal document obtained by The New York Times, and confirmed authentic by TikTok, we gain a glimpse into the inner workings that have made TikTok one of the most visited sites in the world.
TikTok’s stated goal for the user is simple: stay on the app as long as possible. This a goal of all ad-based businesses to a certain extent, but what TikTok quickly figured out, and what separates it from other social media platforms, is that existing social connections are actually counterproductive to this aim.
It turns out that maximal engagement is about one thing and one thing only: personalized pleasure.
How TikTok delivers Personalized Pleasure
As we’ve seen, personalized algorithms are nothing new. From social media, to YouTube, to Amazon, nearly everything we experience in the digital world is a curated selection.
But the TikTok algorithm is another beast.
Consider another personalized platform, Netflix. As a user, you’re not presented with the entire corpus of Netflix media, because that would be an overwhelming amount of choice. What you’re presented with are the selections which you’d be most likely to enjoy. Netflix slowly converges on this by noting which films you watch, which films you start watching but don’t finish, etc.
TikTok undergoes a similar personalization process, but much quicker and much more comprehensive. By the time it takes you finish an episode of Squid Game, and register a single data point for Netflix, TikTok has already shown you 100s of videos and collected thousands of data points. In addition to whether you finished the video or not, it’s also collecting data from likes, comments, follows, geolocation and more.
It’s hyper-personalization on steroids.
As a result, It’s much exquisitely sensitive to your interests, preferences, and pleasures. Every like, comment, and swipe - even the time spent on a video before swiping to the next one, is spun into the algorithm and makes the next video more pleasureful than the last. It leaves nothing to chance. The longer you stay, the more it gets to know you, and the better and more precise the recommendation engine becomes.
This is a powerful approach. Users have even claimed that the algorithm knows them better than they know themselves. A user named Amalie MacGowan, for example, found that TikTok had come to understand the fact that she was bisexual before she herself had realized this.
Key to the power to indivualize the user’s content is removing the interference of their real life social network. No more friends, no more relatives.
The TikTok algorithm effectively asks - in this vast ocean of videos, from all over the world, which one, right now, is going to provoke the strongest, innermost pleasure? If this is the bar, the content naturally emerging from your friends and family has no chance. The maximally pleasureful piece of content? Of all possible content? Baby videos from your cousin wouldn’t even crack the top 100.
By being completely untethered to your social network, the algorithm quickly hones in on one thing and one thing only: you. In this way, TikTok became the first social media network to be fully individualized.
Given this, TikTok may not really count as a social media platform at all. But what it provides is a kind of social experience. You’re watching content created by people, which largely features people. What kind of social experience is this?
TikTok, Social Cognition, and Fuzzy Trace Theory
TikTok became the first social media algorithm that is completely untethered to your existing social connections, and in turn, to the humanity behind the people you’re viewing.
What does then do the sociality of The TikTok experience? Put simply, it mimics the experience of Capgras Delusion. What keeps people on the platform isn’t who they’re watching, it’s what they’re watching them do. Like Capgras Delusion, it’s all features and no warm glow.
And not only do we not know the people we’re viewing, but given that the algorithm is built for efficiency, we seldom get the opportunity to get to know them, either. There’s little opportunity to develop a “warm glow” for the people on the platform.
As inherently social creatures, our brains evolved to develop robust impressions of the people in our environment, and develop meaningful connections that may assist us in our survival. Compared to many other animals, humans don’t do very well on their own. Our sociality, and our capacity for connection with others, is absolutely crucial.
To fully appreciate how bizarre the TikTok experience is, it’s worth stepping back and noting just how much this diverges this is from our evolved social tendencies. Our brain is adept at social cognition: developing complex representations of other people, and these naturally unfold after multiple encounters.
Imagine you get together with some friends, and they bring along a friend of theirs you’ve never met before, Jim. He’s new to the area, and you all have lunch together. After the meal, you’ll have some specific memories of Jim, such as his features: He’s about 6 feet tall, works as a data scientist, and grew up in Columbus, OH. You also remember some specific, verbatim details: he dropped his fork at the lunch and clanged loudly against his plate. His jacket fell off the back of his chair during the middle of lunch. He stumbled on the carpet as everyone left the restaurant.
Now let’s say you get together with Jim several times over the course of the next few months. What happens to your impression of him? Research in social cognition indicates that we forget the verbatim details of their behavior. Instead, we gain a more abstract, general impression of who they are.
Social psychologists call this Fuzzy trace theory: You can’t remember every time Jim dropped a piece of silverware, but you’ve come to form a general impression of them: he’s a good guy, but he’s a clutz.
And so when he offers to help you with your bag at the next dinner, you may politely decline without fully realizing it. Inside, you’ve internalized this impression of Jim as a clumsy guy. Positive or negative, clumsiness is a general feature of who Jim is. It’s part of the warm glow that you automatically feel every time you’re in their presence.
Capgras Delusion and Forever First Impressions
Every time you spend time with someone - whether online, or in real life, the brain naturally adds to their personal file. The more you get to know someone, the more dense this becomes. Ultimately, each person you know becomes not just a set of facts, but a robust, emotional concept. In your head, it becomes less about the specifics of what they do, and more about the general feel of who they are.
This social tendency is the exact opposite of what takes place on TikTok. Here, it’s all first impressions and specific behaviors. Each video presents us with a new person, who does something we’ve probably never seen before, for our personal entertainment. A funny dance; a creative skit; a growth hack. You never get to the point of having a robust model of this person with both features and emotionality.
So not only do we not know any of the content creators to begin with, but the breakneck speed of content delivery means that we don’t have the opportunity to form these deeper impressions, either.
The end result? A world of permanent strangers.
Recall that Capgras Delusion results from a disconnect between the details of a person and the emotional feel that they evoke. On TikTok, you’re forever stuck at the first impression stage. You know what they do, but you don’t get this general feel for them.
Recall that Capgras Delusion is when this disconnect between features and humanity happens for people you already know, such as your mother. The conclusion your brain draws is that they must be imposters, pretending to be your mother. Why else would they have mother-like features, but not elicit their warm glow?
Something eerily similar is happening with the social experience on TikTok. Instead of losing the warm glow of someone we already know, we never gain it in the first place.
Perhaps then, it’s not just a world of strangers, but one of imposters.
Final Thoughts on The Social Neuroscience TikTok
There’s a lot to say about the negative impact of TikTok, especially for young people. Concerns have been raised from the perspective of data privacy, geopolitics, immediate gratification, echo chambers, and much more.
In fact, heavy social media use, especially on TikTok, has been put forward as one the primary causes for the large rise of loneliness among young people. In this way, social media is seen as the fast food of sociality; the quick calories. And more and more, it displaces, the nourishing human connection that we get from deeper real-life relationships.
These are all valid concerns.
But beyond the social experiences that social media takes away, we should also be concerned with the social neuroscience that TikTok inculcates, and the environment is has created - one where the humans we see are performative, instrumental, and fundamentally devoid of a deeper humanity. A social experience that mimics Capgras Delusion: All features and no warm glow.
What are the consequences of spending an extended amount of time with people who don’t seem like people? The social world may start to look like a collection of imposters.
Through the lens of TikTok, Capgras Delusion might not seem so bizarre after all.
Photo by Evgeniy Alyoshin on Unsplash
About the author
Matt Johnson, PhD is a researcher, writer, and consumer neuroscientist focusing on the application of psychology to branding. He is the author of the best-selling consumer psychology book Blindsight, and Branding That Means Business (Economist Books, Fall 2022). Contact Matt for speaking engagements, opportunities to collaborate, or just to say hello
References for The Neuroscience of Capgras Delusion and Social Media
Brainerd, C.J.; Reyna, V.F. (2004). "Fuzzy trace theory and memory development". Developmental Review. 24 (4): 396–439. doi:10.1016/j.dr.2004.08.005.
Chhaya T. (2017) She's Not My Mother: A 24-Year-Old Man With Capgras Delusion. Fed Pract. 2017 Dec;34(12):38-41. PMID: 30766249; PMCID: PMC6370465.
Hackel, L., and Mende-Siedlecki, P. (under review), Two modes of social impressions and their effects on choice, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
Hirstein, W (2010). "The misidentification syndromes as mindreading disorders". Cognitive Neuropsychiatry. 15 (1): 233–60
Klug, D., Qin, Y., Evans, M., & Kaufman, G. (2021, June). Trick and please. A mixed-method study on user assumptions about the TikTok algorithm. In 13th ACM Web Science Conference 2021 (pp. 84-92).
Mihailidis, P., & Foster, B. (2021). The cost of disbelief: Fracturing news ecosystems in an age of rampant media cynicism. American Behavioral Scientist, 65(4), 616-631.
Ramachandran, V. S. (1998). Consciousness and body image: Lessons from phantom limbs, Capgras syndrome and pain asymbolia. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 353 (1377): 1851–1859
Ramachandran, V. S. (1996) Illusions of the body image: what they reveal about human nature. In The mind brain continuum: sensory processes (ed. R. Llinas & P. S. Churchland). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Schmuck, D., Hirsch, M., Stevic, A., & Matthes, J. (2022). Politics–simply explained? How influencers affect youth’s perceived simplification of politics, political cynicism, and political interest. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 27(3), 738-762.
Sinkman A (2008). "The syndrome of capgras". Psychiatry. 71 (4): 371–378. doi:10.1521/psyc.2008.71.4.371. PMID 19152286. S2CID 9413706. ProQuest 57274935.
Smith, B (2020) How TikTok Reads Your Mind, The New York Times
