You put the laundry in the wash and pause at the puzzle on your table just to get a piece in...
...several hours later, you are still leaning over the puzzle table, just going to get one more piece in....
The clothes are wet and you don’t have socks for tomorrow. Your family is not surprised.
What makes activities like puzzling so enchanting?
It's the variable rewards. The concept shows up in classes on product design and behaviorial research, but the underlying mechanism is simple and old: when you can't fully predict whether the next action will pay off, but you get rewarded fairly often, your brain stays quietly, pleasantly in the game.
One hypothesis as to why we are this way because it's made your ancient ancestors better picking berries (and well, foraging in general), so evolution evolved-in our fondness for activities with random rewards.
And it's not just a human thing, it seems to be a truism across much of the animal world! B. F. Skinner's 1930's experiments showed pigeons pecked more at a food dispenser if the rewards were intermittent. In fact, giving rewards randomly is key to dog-training.
You might think we'd be better off preferring nice, consistent rewards! One neat thing though is our love of variable rewards gives us grit: even if we didn't catch a fish today, we'll go back and try again tomorrow. And in Nature, the best rewards are the intermittent ones - if yummy ripe berries were consistently on the bush, someone else would eat them first.
Just imagine two tribes, one that loves variable rewards, and one that doesn't. Which tribe survives better?
Puzzling has excellent variable rewards - it has a nice randomness but you still feel in control: that piece you want must be here somewhere... oh but look there's that other piece you've been looking for!
That light unpredictability is what makes puzzling so fun.
Researchers loosely group variable rewards into three flavors:
- social rewards (connection, validation, teamwork),
- discovery rewards (finding new information), and
- self rewards (the quiet satisfaction of progress and mastery).
Puzzling earns all three.
The self rewards are obvious, an image is emergent, tessellating in rows of wolves or swirling in cosmic spirals. But puzzles are also quietly social. People puzzle after church, over holidays, in loose gatherings where anyone can drift over, claim a corner, and feel genuine ownership over a collective effort. And the discovery rewards are built into every piece: reading the image, using context clues, figuring out the pieces surrounding the whimsy.
Most of our digital environments are also built on variable rewards: surfing the internet and social media both have that "I might find something good any moment now" feel.
But they tend to be noisier and sneakier about it: there's no such thing as clickbait in puzzling.
A puzzle's rewards are gentler. The loop is effort, feedback, progress. Not every piece fits. But enough of them do, and your brain likes the uneven rhythm.
Oh hey - is it time to put that laundry in the dryer?
To learn more, see also "operant conditioning" "intermittent reinforcement", and