Digital behaviourism: A functional approach to behaviour in digital environments

Digital technologies now shape how people connect, work, relax, and avoid, yet psychological research lacks a unified way to explain what sustains these actions over time. Research often relies on broad categories of use, such as screen time, or on isolated platform features, leaving the functions of behaviour underspecified. Here we introduce Digital Behaviourism, a functional approach grounded in operant conditioning that explains digital behaviour through the contingencies linking antecedents, behaviours, and consequences. Rather than classifying behaviour by its form (e.g., scrolling, posting), Digital Behaviourism identifies four functions: exploration, social esteem, entertainment, and escape, that describe the reinforcement processes maintaining behaviour in context. By shifting attention from the form of behaviour to its function, Digital Behaviourism can enable more precise analysis, generate testable hypotheses, and inform effective, contextually sensitive intervention. We argue that behaviourist tradition already possesses the conceptual tools to understand digital life and offer an approach for applying them to the engineered environments where behaviour increasingly unfolds.