The Scarcity Loop: The Behaviour Used by Companies to Keep us Engaged

In the technology industry, the concept has become particularly relevant to discussions about app design, online engagement and the potential consequences of spending too much time connected to digital platforms. But behind some of these digital experiences lies a behavioural pattern known as the 'Scarcity Loop', a concept that helps explain why people can find it difficult to put their phones down.

What Is the Scarcity Loop?

The scarcity loop is a behavioural cycle that encourages people to keep repeating an action in the hope of receiving a desirable reward. Popularised by author Michael Easter in his book 'Scarcity Brain', the concept identifies three key parts.

1. Opportunity
2. Unpredictable Rewards
3. Quick Repeatability

Unlike activities that provide a predictable outcome, the scarcity loop relies on the opportunity of being able to quickly and easily complete an action with the uncertainty of the outcome or reward. An individual may receive something interesting or valuable on one attempt, where the next attempt might deliver nothing of significance, with the uncertainty encouraging people to try again.

Used to influence behaviour from retail to gambling, in digital technology the pattern can be seen in activities such as refreshing a social media feed, checking notifications, swiping through dating profiles or opening a mobile game to see what happens next. Breaking down the use of the scarcity loop within technology, it is used as follows:

1. The Opportunity: There is a chance to obtain something desirable, such as an interesting video, a message, a social media notification or a rare item from a game.
2. The Unpredictable Rewards: The outcome is uncertain as a user does not know when the next interesting post, rewarding interaction or valuable item will appear.
3. Quick Repeatability: The action can be repeated almost immediately with little effort from simply scrolling, refreshing, swiping or tapping a button.

When these elements occur together, users will continue to engage with a website, service, application or game for longer than they originally intended.

Digital services can make these behavioural patterns particularly easy to repeat where unlike many activities in the physical world, online interactions are available around the clock, with the next opportunity only being a tap or swipe away.

Social Media

Social media platforms provide a constant stream of potential rewards, including entertaining videos, breaking news, comments, likes and messages but the content is unpredictable. A user might scroll through several uninteresting posts before encountering something particularly entertaining or relevant, which encourages further scrolling.

Features such as continuously loading feeds and personalised recommendations can remove natural stopping points, making it easier to continue browsing without consciously deciding to do so.

Notifications & Messages

Notifications create another potential scarcity loop when a phone vibrates or displays an alert, with the user wondering whether it contains an important message, a reply from a friend or something else worth checking.

Because the content varies, checking a notification can become a repeated habit, even when many alerts prove unimportant. However, the possibility of receiving a valuable message encourages people to keep checking, each time a user receives and alert or notification.

Not every notification is designed to exploit this behaviour, they also provide useful reminders and genuinely important information.

Online Gaming

Video games can use unpredictable rewards to encourage continued play, with players repeatedly completing challenges, opening virtual rewards or attempting to obtain a rare character, item or achievement.

Some games also introduce daily rewards, timed events and limited time challenges, encouraging players to return regularly. These features can make games engaging but they may also encourage excessive play or spending, particularly when rewards are uncertain and opportunities can only be achieved in a specific time frame.

Dating Apps

Dating applications can also contain elements of the scarcity loop, where each swipe offers the possibility of discovering a compatible person, receiving a match or starting a conversation. The outcome is uncertain, and users can often repeat the action almost immediately with this combination encouraging prolonged use, as people continue searching for a rewarding interaction.

Online Shopping & Digital Offers

Online shopping and e-commerce websites and apps may use limited promotions, stock alerts and personalised recommendations to encourage purchases. When this is combined with genuine scarcity, these features can help customers understand product availability but misleading countdown timers or exaggerated claims about limited stock, can create artificial urgency and pressure people into making decisions before they have properly considered a purchase.

The important distinction is whether the information reflects a genuine limitation, or whether it is being used to manufacture a sense of urgency.

The Relevance to Technology Companies?

For many digital businesses and technology companies, it is commercially valuable for users to remain on their platforms for longer periods of time. This results in more opportunities to display advertisements, promote subscriptions, encourage purchases or gather information about how users interact with a service.

This creates an incentive to develop products that people want to revisit frequently. The use of personalised algorithms, recommendations, notifications and frictionless interfaces can make digital services more convenient and engaging. However, when these features combine with unpredictable rewards and easy repetition, they can also encourage habitual use.

This does not mean every technology company deliberately sets out to make its products addictive and doesn't prove that the presence of a scarcity loop causes addiction.

The concept instead offers a useful framework, for understanding how certain design choices can influence user behaviour and why 'engaging', features deserve scrutiny.

The Impact on Users

The scarcity loop becomes a concern when repeated engagement starts to interfere with everyday life, which could include someone simply checking a message for a minute to find themselves scrolling for much longer. Frequent checking can interrupt work, studying, sleep or conversations with other people and for some users, unpredictable rewards can also contribute to feelings of frustration, anxiety or a fear of missing out.

The impact varies between individuals and depends on factors such as the type of service, how it is used and a person's circumstances. Heavy technology use is not automatically harmful and many online activities provide genuine educational, social and recreational benefits. Nevertheless, recognising repeated behavioural patterns can help users make more deliberate decisions about their time online.

Can the Scarcity Loop Be Broken?

Understanding the three elements of the scarcity loop provides a starting point for reducing bad or unwanted habits, where users can introduce small changes that make repetitive behaviour less automatic.

• Disable Notifications: This reduces the number of interruptions and the temptation to check a device.
• Set Limits: Settings and screen time tools can be modified and used to help identify patterns and establish boundaries when using devices.
• Stopping Points: Choose a specific number of videos, set an amount of time or a clear task before opening an app.
• Screen Access: Removing apps from the home screen or from any quick access menus on your device can make any automatic use less likely.
• Routine: Establishing a consistent routine can reduce opportunities for prolonged browsing.
• Question Urgency: Before responding to a countdown timer or limited time offer, consider whether the purchase or the feature within the game or app is genuinely necessary.

Technology companies can also make a difference by designing services that respect the time for users. This could be achieved by offering meaningful controls over notifications and recommendations, while avoiding any misleading urgency or unnecessarily compulsive engagement patterns.

Designing Technology Around Users

The scarcity loop highlights an important question for the technology industry. Should digital products be designed primarily to maximise engagement, or should success also be measured by how well they serve users?

Keeping people engaged is not inherently harmful with educational platforms, exercise applications and productivity tools being good examples where rewards and repeated interactions are used to encourage beneficial habits.

The challenge is ensuring that these mechanisms support the interest of users, rather than simply encouraging them to spend more time or money on a service.

As digital platforms become increasingly integrated into everyday life, understanding the psychology behind their design is an important part of digital literacy.

Conclusion

The scarcity loop helps explain why people can find themselves repeatedly checking social media, playing games or browsing apps long after they intended to stop.

By combining opportunity, unpredictable rewards and quick repeatability, certain digital experiences can encourage users to keep trying in the hope that the next interaction will be more rewarding.

Recognising this pattern does not mean abandoning technology. Instead, it provides a way to understand how digital products influence behaviour and make more informed choices about how they are designed and used.

Ultimately, the goal should be to build and use technology that delivers genuine value, rather than measuring success solely by how effectively it keeps people coming back.