雅思阅读 112: Engineered for Attention (为注意力而设计)

改编自 Baylor University / Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking（2025年）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://news.web.baylor.edu/news/story/2025/why-tiktok-keeps-you-scrolling-baylor-research-explains-science-behind-social-media

Reading Passage

A. Few inventions of the past twenty years were meant to be as harmless as a scroll. In 2006, a young interface designer named Aza Raskin created the infinite scroll, a small piece of engineering that simply loads the next page of content underneath the user's thumb instead of making them click a button. The design removed a tiny friction point, and in doing so removed something more important: the natural stopping cue. Pagination had, without anyone noticing, served as a gentle signal that a chapter had ended and the reader might decide to rest. Infinite scroll abolished that decision. Content simply kept arriving, one indistinguishable item after another, until the user looked up and found an hour gone. Raskin would later co-found an organisation dedicated to the harm his own creation had done, estimating that it wastes a large slice of human attention every year. He is far from the only designer whose modest convenience turned out to have teeth. Pull-to-refresh, autoplay, the like button, the red notification badge — each began as a small improvement to a product and ended as a lever that the platform could pull, thousands of times a day, in competition for the user's focus.

B. The infinite scroll is best understood not as an accident but as one instrument in a deliberate design kit. Behavioural researchers, building on decades of work on operant conditioning, long ago established that reward is most addictive when it is unpredictable. A slot machine pays out on a variable schedule: sometimes a small win, sometimes nothing at all, and the uncertainty keeps the lever pulling. Social feeds borrow the same mechanics directly. Pull-to-refresh offers a fresh, unknown batch; an algorithmic feed delivers something delightful now and something dull next, so that the next swipe is never a foregone conclusion. Studies using brain scans find that personalised short videos trigger activity in regions of the brain associated with addiction — the same circuitry that lights up under other compulsive rewards. The platforms are not, in this view, accidentally habit-forming; they are engineered, at every layer of interface and code, to keep the session alive.

C. A 2025 study comparing the design features of three leading short-video platforms — TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts — set out to explain why one of them, in particular, seems to exert the strongest pull. Researchers described the relevant features as "affordances": the built-in capabilities that quietly shape what a user is able, and therefore likely, to do. They found that no single ingredient explained the effect, but a combination did. TikTok made the desired behaviour effortless, with almost no friction between deciding to watch and watching. Its recommendation system was unusually accurate, showing each user content closely matched to taste. And, crucially, the content stayed surprising: just when a viewer thought they had seen the pattern, a new genre appeared. Ease of use plus precision plus surprise, the authors concluded, is a recipe that maximises engagement — and, in a substantial share of users, slides over into addiction.

D. The costs are now being measured rather than merely lamented. Surveys find that more than half of Facebook users report feeling distracted by the platform, and the average ninety minutes a day spent on TikTok by heavy users has been linked to declines in school performance among the young. Autoplay, the feature that queues the next video before the current one ends, was singled out for particular criticism for removing the user's decision about when to stop. Yet the platforms are not entirely defenceless. When one major service introduced a simple toggle that switched autoplay off by default, average session lengths fell by roughly ten percent — a modest gain, but a real one, and a sign that small design choices on the provider's side can change behaviour. Synthetic models suggest that capping the number of refreshes or showing the user how long they have spent scrolling could reduce use further, though not without costing the companies revenue. The industry's resistance to such tweaks is itself instructive: it confirms that the engineers know exactly which features hold attention longest, and which, if softened, would hand the decision back to the user.

E. The question that now divides policymakers, ethicists and the industry itself is where responsibility lies. The platforms reply that users are adults who may switch off, take breaks and delete apps at will; critics answer that a system designed by thousands of engineers to exploit the brain's reward circuitry cannot be fairly opposed by willpower alone, any more than a casino can be opposed by a stern decision at the door. Regulators in the European Union have begun to lean toward the latter view, proposing rules that would ban certain manipulative design choices aimed at children and require transparency about how feeds are chosen. What no one yet knows is whether such rules, or the quiet addition of a well-placed "you have been scrolling for an hour" prompt, can reintroduce the stopping cue that the infinite scroll removed — or whether, having once learned to feed itself without friction, attention will simply flow elsewhere. The deepest disagreement is not really about design details. It is about whether a grown-up person is truly free to stop using a product that has been engineered, at enormous expense, to make stopping feel unpleasant. If the answer is no, then the burden of restraint must lie with the engineer and the regulator; if it is yes, then a century of psychology has been poorly spent. The next few years of experimentation, and of argument, are likely to decide which of those two answers history believes. Until then, the scroll continues, and the hour disappears, one indistinguishable swipe at a time.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. A deliberate toolkit borrowed from the slot machine ii. Why one short-video platform exerts the strongest pull iii. The measured costs — and the small design fixes that help iv. Where the responsibility really lies v. The history of the smartphone camera vi. How brain scans diagnose mental illness vii. Aza Raskin's career as a musician

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. What did the infinite scroll remove, according to the passage? A. The ability to read long articles. B. The natural stopping cue that pagination had provided. C. The user's password. D. All advertisements from the page.

6. Why is the "variable reward" schedule so powerful? A. Because rewards are always large and certain. B. Because unpredictability keeps the user seeking the next reward. C. Because it requires no effort from the user. D. Because it is banned in casinos.

7. According to the 2025 study, what combination makes TikTok so engaging? A. Bright colours and loud music. B. Ease of use, accurate recommendations and surprising content. C. Long videos and frequent adverts. D. Strict parental controls.

8. What happened when one platform turned autoplay off by default? A. Revenue rose sharply. B. Average session lengths fell by about ten percent. C. Users immediately deleted the app. D. There was no measurable effect.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. Aza Raskin later co-founded an organisation critical of his own invention.
10. Brain scans show that personalised short videos activate brain regions linked to addiction.
11. The Baylor study found that Instagram Reels was the most addictive of the three platforms.
12. Regulators in the European Union have proposed rules on manipulative design aimed at children.
13. TikTok was founded by a former employee of Facebook.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The infinite scroll, created in 2006, removed the natural (14) __________ cue that older pagination had provided. Alongside pull-to-refresh and variable rewards, it exploits the same reward circuitry found in (15) __________ machines.

答案与解析

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