Why do you make bad decisions?

People have a bad habit of checking emails first thing in the morning. For many people, the morning is the most productive time. Yet email is quite tempting, and they end up using their productive time to answer emails.

Psychologist BF Skinner came up with the idea of random reinforcement, where you give a rat a lever and every time it presses the lever 50 times it gets a piece of food.

However, if the number is a random number between one and 100, it actually ends up being much more exciting for the rat. And the rat keeps on working much, much more, even if you take the reward away all together

I think email and even to a greater degree social networks display the principle of random reinforcement in an excellent way. Usually when we check our email, it is not very exciting. But occasionally it is exciting. And that excitement, that occurs at random intervals is what keeps us coming back to check our email all the time.

If you think about it the world around us including the world and our computers, is all about trying to tempt us to do things right now.

This idea is basically that the world around us tries to tempt us. Second, we listen to the world around us. Third, we don't deal very well with temptations.

Photos- www.pixabay.com