A new lens for understanding how digital technologies facilitate human behaviour

Digital technologies now shape how people connect, work, relax, and avoid. Yet the psychological sciences lack a unified approach for explaining what sustains these behaviours over time. Existing frameworks are either too broad (e.g., “screen time”) or too narrow (e.g., app features) to capture the functions digital behaviours serve. Here we introduce technological behaviourism, a general theoretical approach grounded in operant conditioning that explains digital engagement through observable antecedents and consequences. Rather than focusing on what people do (e.g., scrolling), this approach is focused on why they do it, in terms of four functions: exploration, esteem, entertainment, and escape. By shifting the lens from form to function, technological behaviourism enables precise, testable analysis of digital engagement and guides the design of context-aware, functionally aligned interventions. It bridges behavioural science with digital environments, offering a scalable, mechanistically grounded approach to understanding and shaping digital behaviour.