Why Our Brains Prefer Rewards Over Habits

The experiments showed that reward is a decisive factor in determining what we notice and remember to do when we are presented with multiple opportunities.

It is, therefore, imprecise to talk about the digital world stealing or controlling our attention. It is almost the opposite. The technologies often exploit our ability to choose exactly the content that gives us the greatest reward when presented with a wide range of possibilities.

In other words, what tech companies leverage are our subjective values by rewarding our attention shifts and actions.

Normally we think of habits as close to unbreakable, but here too the experiments tell us something important.

They tell us something about our behavior in a situation where we have been trained for a certain action. The participants in our experiments spent a lot of time learning how to connect a single box with a shift of attention to a particular corner of the screen.

Training the attention shifts should make them into habits. But when they were presented with four competing actions that they had a short time to decide on, participants chose the reward over the habitual behavior.

In the experimental situation, the action with the highest subjective value is most likely to be selected, even though other actions have been trained extensively, conclude the study’s authors.

This means that a person’s values compete with ingrained habits—a competition the habit often loses if another action is more important. This insight is also worth bringing into the discussion about attention economy.

The next step for the researchers will be a project in which they will examine how we plan in the long term. The current experiment shows something about what activates our shift in attention in the short term, but what happens when we try to plan actions in the future?

The researchers expect that here too we will focus our attention on the action to which we attach the highest value. But when we are in the real world as opposed to a laboratory, other factors come into play. Previous research has shown, for example, that our surroundings play an important role in how we remember things.