In a finding that may not surprise anyone who endures reading this blog, a recent study found that “Humans will trade pain for useless information”.
The useless information in question was the implications of the results of a coin-flip. Participants would get a reward based on the result of a series of coin-flips. But by default they weren’t told what exactly the prizes associated with heads or tails were until after the fact. Importantly, it was set up to ensure that the participants knew that they would receive the exact same reward irrespective of whether or not they knew the values of each side in beforehand.
Participants were then offered the chance to know what the reward associated with each side of the coin was in advance, but at the cost of having pain inflicted on them - a “flash of heat” applied to their arm. When the pain was set to low, about 3/4 of participants requested to receive the pain and learn in advance about the rewards, information which has no obvious utility given the setup. Even when the pain was set to maximum participants would choose to undergo it nearly half the time.
One theory the researchers have as to why this occurs is that as humans we’re just generally deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty.
This willingness to endure pain in exchange for noninstrumental information may stem from a deep-seated aversion to uncertainty, Bode says—to the point that some people are willing to go through physical discomfort for a few scraps of solid information. “Not knowing is really painful,” he says.
As noted in the original article, pain isn’t the only adversity we’re willing to go through in order to learn about something we know can have no effect on or bearing to what happens to us. Previous studies have shown that people are prepared to pay money or put in unnecessary physical effort in order to learn in advance how a lottery would pay out in a way that could not possibly affect how much they’d win.