Social Hooks
Social hooks is the sixth ingredient in Adam Alter's model of behavioural addiction, from Irresistible in 2017, and on his own neuroscientist source's account it is the most important of them. The mechanism he proposes is that self-worth has no built-in unit, so any platform that hands you a trackable number fills a vacuum that was already there. It is a framework rather than a tested effect, and the evidence for it is interview material and business history rather than research.
What it is
Alter's six ingredients are compelling goals, variable rewards, incremental progress, progressive difficulty, unresolved tension, and social interaction. The sixth is the one his own neuroscientist source, Andy Doan, picks out as by far the most important, above immersion and achievement.
The mechanism claim is the interesting part. People are never really sure of their own self-worth, which cannot be measured the way weight or height can. A platform that supplies a count, of likes, followers, points or rank, is therefore not adding a feature to an existing measure but supplying the first measure there was. Alter's own phrase for the result is that the feed is a source of inconsistent feedback, which is where this ingredient meets variable rewards.
The social-comparison machinery behind the self-worth argument is much older and has its own literature, running from Leon Festinger in 1954. Anyone making the mechanism claim as fact should cite that literature directly rather than the framework.
In effect
The case Alter builds it on is a pair of photo applications that shipped near-identical retro-photo features at around the same time, one of which wrapped a social network of likes, followers and a feed around the core feature and was bought for a billion dollars in April 2012, while the other stalled.
That comparison is not one variable different, and this publication does not treat it as a natural experiment. One was a paid application launched in 2009 and the other a free application launched in 2010, with differences of pricing, platform and timing on top. It illustrates the ingredient; it does not isolate it.
Two further cases carry the same caution. A rating site that attached a number to a photograph reached very large traffic within days of launch and was reportedly sold for around twenty million dollars in 2008, and those figures come from press coverage rather than from research. And the social-media personality who quit at half a million followers and renamed her account to say that social media is not real life is the lived version of the other side, which is a testimony rather than a measurement.
What it does not say
It does not say the six ingredients are the right carve-up. No study tests the model, and it stands as a design vocabulary.
It does not establish the self-worth vacuum as a finding. It is a proposal, and the underlying social-comparison literature is what would have to carry it.
It does not treat the two photo applications as a controlled comparison. Too much else differed.
It does not supply the traffic and sale figures as data. They come from press coverage.
Sources
- Alter, A. Irresistible (2017). Named as the sixth of six ingredients in the opening chapter; ch. 9 at pp. 214 to 230 supplies the photo-application comparison, the self-worth mechanism at p. 217, the feed quotation at p. 218, and the interview material from Andy Doan at p. 230.
- Festinger, L. (1954), for the social-comparison literature behind the self-worth claim. Cite this directly if the mechanism is stated as fact.
- The billion-dollar acquisition of April 2012 and the reported twenty-million-dollar sale in 2008 are public record and press coverage respectively, not research.
- Evidence review, 2026-09-25. Verdict: not-a-research-claim.