Unpredictable rewards, on the other hand, are not. If we know we’ll receive a reward but aren’t sure when, we get sucked in. We experience a sort of exciting, suspenseful anxiety as we wait to see whether this occasion will deliver the good stuff. Our brains hone in on unpredictability. They naturally suppress systems that take in other information, and we fixate on whatever is unpredictable. One study found that unpredictable rewards “tap into fundamental aspects of human cognition and emotion.”
