We all do things we know we shouldn’t. Eat that party size bag of M&Ms when we’re stressed. Have just one more drink. Sleep with our ex. Get a tattoo of the KFC Double Down sandwich (this actually happened).
There’s even an entire city is built on the knowledge that we will do stupid things: what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
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Today we’ll talk about three reasons why—even as our conscience or our common sense screams, “Nooooooooo!”—we watch ourselves do things we know we’ll regret.
Reason #1: Two Kinds of Pleasure. From a 2007 paper in the journalPsychopharmacology comes the idea that there are actually two types of pleasure. The first type is how we usually think of pleasure: a state of happy satisfaction. For example, we get this kind of pleasure from a good meal, sex and its afterglow, or from that first sip when we’re really, really thirsty. We’ll call this pleasure “liking.”
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Jeanna Bryner, Editor in Chief, Scientific American
