Red pill or blue pill: Who cares? Getting to choose is the best part

Ottawa Citizen:

Life is about making choices, from the mundane (Should I eat a Kit Kat for breakfast?) to the momentous (Should I accept this new job?).

Though we agonize over some decisions, researchers have found that we generally like having choices. And after we choose something, we tend to like it more.

However, a new study examining the experience of choice, suggests that it’s not just about the selections — it’s about the selecting. Simply having the possibility to choose is pleasurable.

Researchers at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, studied individuals who were presented with the opportunity to make choices and found that the mere anticipation of choice activated areas of the brain associated with rewards.

“I’ve been studying how the brain processes reward information for a while now. Throughout these experiments, we always noticed that people get excited when they perceive that the rewards were contingent on their behaviours,” says Mauricio Delgado, assistant professor of psychology and co-author on the study. The findings will be published in the journal Psychological Science. “As you can imagine, if you think you can do something to improve your situation, you’re going to get more motivated.”

So Delgado and Lauren Leotti, a post-doctoral fellow, presented study participants with cues that would lead to one of two scenarios: They could freely choose between two keys which could lead to more money or they were forced to accept a computer-selected key.

The participants were asked to rate how much they liked or disliked each of the trials; also, imaging data on their brains were performed.

“We observed behavioural evidence that choice is desirable, and furthermore, we found that anticipation of choice opportunity was associated with increased activity in a network of brain regions assumed to be involved in reward processing,” Delgado and Leotti wrote.

Read the whole story: Ottawa Citizen