Can you explain the basic idea of how social awards like likes may reinforce posting in different individuals or help us understand what is the psychology lens you're bringing to the social media space?

So reinforcement learning is this very powerful computational framework that explains how humans and animals learn from feedback.

So the basic idea is that obtaining a reward, so something kind of good that happens to you, will reinforce the behavior that led to that reward.

Think of maybe most basic level, you know, a mouse in a box that kind of wanders around, stumbles across a lever, presses the lever and gets a food pellet, right? What that food pellet will do is reinforce the behavior that led to it.

So really the mouse will be more likely to kind of go straight to the lever and press it next time.

So similarly, you can think of posting on social media as kind of pressing a lever.

Only instead of food, you get these digital social rewards like likes, comments, or followers, and that are really designed to mimic things like social approval or praise, right? And because social approval feels good and motivates our behavior, then there is theoretically and there's also evidence that there is this reinforcement learning happening.

These are things we can't answer, but could you lay out some maybe causal possibilities and what type of study you would want to do in the future to explore those?

Can you explain the basic idea of how social awards like likes may reinforce posting i- in different individuals? Or help us understand what is the psychology lens you're bringing to the social media space.

So reinforcement learning is this very powerful computational framework that explains how humans and animals learn from feedback.

So the basic idea is that obtaining a reward, so something kind of good that happens to you, will reinforce the behavior that led to that reward.

Think of maybe most basic level, you know, a mouse in a box that kind of wanders around, stumbles a- across a lever, presses the lever, and gets a food pellet, right? What that food pellet will do is reinforce the behavior that led to it, so really the mouse will be more likely to kind of go straight to the lever and press it next time.

So similarly, you can think of posting on social media as kind of pressing a lever, only instead of food, you get these digital social rewards like likes, comments, or followers, and that are really designed to mimic things like social approval or praise, right? And because social approval feels good and motivates our behavior, then there is theoretically and there is also evidence that there is this reinforcement learning going on.

And there's at least two types of reinforcement learning happening.

So one, you can think of people learning what kind of content to post in order to get the most rewards.

But could you lay out some maybe causal possibilities and what type of study you would want to do in the future to explore those?