Mindless Accumulation

First time commenting on hacker news: Just wanted to say there's a difference between enjoying a treat you've worked for, and saving for retirement. When you have no clue how long you might live and how expensive your taxes, insurance, mortgage, medical bills, etc might cost in the future, it breeds the mindset of 'save as much as possible as quickly as possible so I can feel safe and relaxed about my future.'

I like the quote "both groups were driven by the same thing: not by how much they need, but by how much work they could withstand."

>Nonetheless, the researchers note that productivity rates have risen, which theoretically lets many people be just as comfortable as previous generations while working less. Yet they choose not to.

Oh, ffs.

This is hilarious. Definitely can see what they are talking about. Did they control for how much people like chocolate and sweets?

I find the study's interpretation, as reported, to be somewhat dubious.

Seated for what you know to be a study, with few options, even "pleasant music" is pretty boring. (And other sounds that can be accurately described as "white noise" are sometimes so pleasant that people buy devices to generate it!)

Turning a boring situation into a game helps make it less boring, and the researchers provided only one prominent option for doing so: how many chocolates can I 'score'? Plus, it's a psychological study... which participants know may have twists or deceptions. So possible motivations include:

• "I have all the music I can hear at home; maybe something interesting happens after choosing the 'noise' 10 times!"

• "Maybe they'll change the story after phase 1 and I will be able to take the chocolates away, or trade them for something else!"

• "My friend also signed up for this study, afterwards we can compare how many we each earned."

I'm also reminded of the study from about a year ago that got widely forwarded under headlines like "men prefer painful electric shocks to sitting alone with their thoughts". It was also over-spun to claim more than it showed, but the tendency there would be another way to explain this study's results: people prefer to try doing something novel, even if it's superficially/temporarily unpleasant, over idleness. That's not chiefly 'mindless accumulation', just curiosity and testing the edges of your environment.