Digital Decision-Making: Choosing what we want from a flood of content.

    In our digital age, we have access to an immense amount of content at the tip of our fingertips. Whether it is the new Netflix original, digital news articles, Instagram posts, and so much more, every day we have to decide on what we want to spend our time enjoying. Online content providers know this and therefore invest money and time into their algorithms, letting their artificial intelligence systems process our previously visited sites and apps to predict what we might want to watch next. These predictions serve to keep us hooked on content, generating more revenue for the company, while at the same time increasing our satisfaction with the content we use our time to enjoy. The majority of our life is about maximizing what we can do with our time. We make tradeoffs to be efficient, sometimes giving up one thing for another, which is all determined by our personal goals.

However, this phenomenon of maximizing benefit is not just seen in humans. In the study “Mice learn to avoid regret” by Sweis et al. (2018), researchers at the University of Minnesota explored how mice would alter their foraging strategies to maximize food procured when limited by time. They had discovered that as mice, in an increasingly reward-scarce environment, would adapt their economic decision-making to maximize the amount of food earned. As each mouse had to spend an increasingly longer amount of time waiting to earn a food pellet, mice learned to be able to differentiate between a “bad” and a “good” offer and would even pass by their favorite pellets if they were not satisfied with the waiting time. They had one hour each day to get all of the pellets they were allowed to eat. However, they were also seen to be more flexible in taking longer offers when it came to getting a pellet that was their “favorite” flavor.

Maximizing marginal benefit is a daily occurrence in our lives. Think of the last time you decided to skip eating at a specific restaurant because the line was too long, or the last time you tabbed off of a video because it took too long to load. You may not realize it, but with everything we dedicate time to, we analyze it to decide if it is even worth it. In the article “Can Tech Break Us Out of Our Bubbles”, Shira Ovide describes a common issue – deciding what to watch online. As I mentioned before, digital content platforms have invested a lot of money and time developing computer programs that will recommend things that they think we will like, and the majority of the time, they are right. We are much more likely to watch a YouTube video or listen to music we believe we will enjoy because we are looking to get the most out of our time. Therefore, these algorithms will continue to recommend similar content or even old, already watched videos, music, or books because they know we might watch them. As a result, we rarely risk stepping out of our digital comfort zones for the same reason that a mouse in a maze will skip out on a food pellet it might not like - we have a limited amount of time each day to entertain ourselves, and we make sure that we get as much out of it as we can. To us, exploring new content is a risk, because if we are unsatisfied in the end, we know that we had just wasted precious time that could have been used for something we are more likely to enjoy. The fact that almost everything on the internet is automatically curated to our tastes makes this a difficult habit to break. As Ovide mentions in her article, the best way to do so is to skip the automatically generated recommendations and spend time exploring what is out there. You’ll never know what you’ll find, and I recommend you do so because you never know when you’ll find a new obsession.

References:

Sweis BM, Thomas MJ, Redish AD (2018) Mice learn to avoid regret. PLoS Biol 16(6): e2005853. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2005853

Ovide, S. (2021, February 26). Can tech break us out of our bubbles?
Retrieved March 02, 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/technology/can-tech-break-us-out-of-our-bubbles.html