This one is not a viral claim to debunk, it is a genuinely interesting new study that quietly overturns a common explanation for why we make the choices we do.
The study
Published in 2025 in Communications Psychology, a Nature journal, researchers at TU Dresden and the University of Tuebingen ran nine new decision-making experiments on 351 people and reanalyzed six previously published studies covering another 350 participants. Across all of it, the pattern held with strong statistical support.
What they found
People tend to prefer options they have chosen more often before, even when comparing options with equal actual value, and even in a completely new context where the old choice history should not matter. Simply repeating a choice biases you toward picking it again later, separate from whether it was ever the objectively better option.
Why this matters
For years, this kind of choice bias was explained by "value normalization," the idea that your brain does sophisticated background math, comparing and rescaling the value of options relative to everything else in a given context. This study proposes something much simpler: you are not doing complex value math, you are building a repetition habit. Each time you pick something, that specific action gets a small boost in your internal preference, independent of the reward it gave you. Across nine tasks and six independent datasets, this simple repetition model explained people's choices better than the more complicated value-comparison models.
A careful bridge, not a claim
The study itself did not test autistic people, ADHD brains, or any clinical group, it used a general adult sample. But the mechanism it describes, choosing something because you have chosen it before, independent of its actual value, echoes lived experiences that autistic people and people with ADHD often describe: a strong pull toward routine and sameness, or getting stuck repeating a choice pattern that no longer serves you well. This is a plausible, honest connection worth knowing about, not something this specific paper proved about neurodivergent brains.
Bottom line
A real, well-powered study offers a simpler, more elegant explanation for how habits quietly steer our choices, separate from value. If routine and repetition feel like a strong force in your own decision-making, this research offers a genuine, well-tested piece of the puzzle for why.
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Source: Wagner, B.J., Wolf, H.B. and Kiebel, S.J., "Action repetition biases choice in context-dependent decision-making," Communications Psychology (2025). Educational summary, not a diagnosis or medical advice.