It is 11:47 p.m. You meant to go to bed an hour ago. Instead, you're watching a golden retriever carefully carry a single egg across a kitchen, and now the app has offered you a cat who's alarmed by a cucumber. You feel slightly guilty and also, inexplicably, much better than you did.
It turns out that somebody has studied this. In 2015, Jessica Gall Myrick, then a researcher at Indiana University's Media School, published a study on internet cats in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, drawing on a survey of about 7,000 people.
Her participants reported feeling more energetic and more positive after watching cat videos, and reported fewer negative emotions such as anxiety, annoyance and sadness. People often watched while procrastinating, and they felt guilty about it. But the pleasure they reported tended to outweigh the guilt.
Cuteness does something to your attention
Another line of research looks at what cuteness does to us. In a 2012 study published in PLoS ONE, a team led by Hiroshi Nittono at Hiroshima University found that people who viewed images of baby animals subsequently performed better on tasks demanding careful attention than those who viewed less cute pictures.
The researchers suggested that cute images might encourage a narrower, more careful focus. That's a long way from proving that your scrolling habit will make you more productive, and the effects measured in a lab are modest and short-lived. It's still a delightful excuse.
The guilt is real. So, apparently, is the mood boost.
Why pets beat almost everything else in the feed
Part of the appeal is what pets don't do. An animal on your screen isn't selling you a course or trying to make you angry about something. It also has no idea that it's being recorded. In a feed built around performance, an animal falling off a sofa with complete sincerity feels like relief.
The same goes for the other great pillar of wholesome content: small children saying things with total confidence. A toddler explaining how the moon works has the very quality that the rest of the internet has lost, which is that they really aren't trying to go viral.
Of course, plenty of what's on your phone is engineered with care, and the charts move quickly. You can see how that machinery works in our breakdown of how a dance goes viral, which is a different kind of story about attention.
The one rule of healthy pet scrolling
If you've got a real animal in your home, it would probably like some of that attention. Filming your own pet can be even more fun than watching someone else's, and an interactive toy is a straightforward way to get something worth recording while burning off some of your pet's energy too.
And when it's 11:47 p.m. and the feed offers you just one more? The science doesn't quite tell you to go to sleep. But your dog is already asleep, and it seems to be working out very well for them.