Lunch break. A picture was taken.
Coffee on the table, someone sitting across from me. The kind of image that tells you immediately what you are supposed to think. There is work, there is company, and there is even time to sit down for a coffee. Life appears to be going rather well.
The picture may be entirely genuine. Those twenty minutes happened. But the image cannot tell us what came before or after them, how the rest of the day felt, or whether the moment was particularly enjoyable. It shows what was selected to be seen.
Taking a photograph tells us very little about the motivation behind it. People photograph moments they enjoy, want to remember or intend to share. I am interested in a particular pattern, one in which the prospect of sharing begins to influence the experience before the photograph is even taken.
From a behavioural perspective, posting can become an operant behaviour maintained by its consequences. Attention, comments, visibility and social recognition may reinforce future posting. A response functions as reinforcement when it increases the likelihood of the behaviour that produced it. Its influence can extend beyond the act of publishing.
Research supports important parts of this mechanism. Barasch, Zauberman and Diehl (2018) examined what happens when people take photographs for themselves compared with taking them to share with others. Across field and laboratory studies, participants photographing experiences with the intention of sharing them reported less enjoyment. The anticipated audience increased concerns about self-presentation and could reduce engagement with the experience itself.
The audience had already influenced the experience, although the photograph had not yet been shared.
Research by Lindström and colleagues (2021) provides another part of the explanation. Analysing more than a million social media posts and conducting an online experiment, the researchers found evidence that social rewards influence posting behaviour. Users adjusted the timing of their posts in ways consistent with reward learning. The feedback they received mattered for what they did next.
Social feedback is neither uniform nor entirely predictable. One post may attract little attention while another produces a surprisingly strong response. Repeated experience with these outcomes can influence what someone chooses to publish and how frequently they do so. Once certain kinds of content have repeatedly produced desirable consequences, the anticipation of similar outcomes may begin to influence earlier choices.
This is where the behavioural implications become particularly interesting.
A person may begin selecting activities, settings or moments partly according to their potential for generating a successful post. The photograph becomes something to prepare for. Attention shifts towards the aspects of an event that can be shown, and the anticipated response becomes part of its expected value.
Life can gradually acquire a second organising principle: the search for postable moments.
An event does not even have to be particularly enjoyable to serve this purpose. It may involve waiting, fatigue, awkwardness or disappointment. A single attractive moment can still emerge from it. That moment becomes the material for a post, and the post may receive a positive response irrespective of how the event was experienced.
A picture of coffee with a friend can be completely authentic while presenting only the most attractive fraction of the afternoon. The coffee was there. The friend was there. What the photograph cannot provide is a reliable account of the experience as a whole.
Selection is central to this process. The image highlights what can produce the desired impression and excludes what contributes nothing to it. Sometimes the result is misleading, even when nothing in the photograph itself has been falsified.
In a repeated pattern, the relationship between experience and reward can change. The event still takes place, but its value is increasingly assessed through what can be extracted from it and displayed afterwards. A disappointing afternoon can produce a successful post. The satisfaction associated with that post may then influence the next decision about what is worth doing, recording or sharing.
The possible influence extends to memory. Barasch and colleagues (2017) found that taking photographs changed what participants remembered about an experience. Photographing participants recognised more visual information but less auditory information than participants who had not taken photographs. The act of photographing had altered the distribution of attention.
The photograph can also become a convenient reference for later recollection. It remains available, together with the caption and the responses it received. Repeatedly encountering that record may give the selected moment a prominent place in how the event is recalled. The surrounding details remain part of the experience, although they may receive far less attention afterward.
I would describe the more developed form of this pattern as reinforcement dominance. By this I mean a situation in which the consequences associated with displaying an experience acquire enough influence to shape the activities and decisions that precede the display.
The term identifies a relationship between behaviour and its consequences. People sometimes describe extensive posting as a compulsion, but the frequency of a behaviour alone tells us little about what maintains it. The relevant question is which consequences have become influential enough to organise the person’s choices.
At its most developed, the post becomes the primary output, and the event supplies the raw material. The person may choose the experience because of the image it can produce, even when the experience itself offers relatively little satisfaction.
The event happens in order for the post to exist.
A life lived for posting describes this particular organisation of behaviour. The external audience becomes part of the person’s decision-making long before anyone sees the resulting image. What will later be visible begins to influence what is done, where attention goes and which moments are considered worth having.
References
Barasch, A., Diehl, K., Silverman, J., & Zauberman, G. (2017). Photographic memory: The effects of volitional photo taking on memory for visual and auditory aspects of an experience. Psychological Science, 28(8), 1056–1066. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617694868
Barasch, A., Zauberman, G., & Diehl, K. (2018). How the intention to share can undermine enjoyment: Photo-taking goals and evaluation of experiences. Journal of Consumer Research, 44(6), 1220–1237. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucx112
Lindström, B., Bellander, M., Schultner, D. T., Chang, A., Tobler, P. N., & Amodio, D. M. (2021). A computational reward learning account of social media engagement. Nature Communications, 12, Article 1311. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19607-xudgement, but a descriptive category. It names a mode of functioning in which experience alone is insufficient, and value emerges only afterward. The present moment is no longer the site of experience, but the site of producing future reinforcement. This is not a question of good or bad. This is the mechanism.
