"I decided to watch another"

Start with the belief that the overrun was a choice. You wanted to see what was behind the door, so you watched on. That's a decision, and a person is allowed to make it.

Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein, in 2003, published a short paper in Science about defaults. They compared countries where people are organ donors unless they opt out with countries where they're not unless they opt in, and found that the rate of donors was vastly different between them, not because the people differed, but because the default did. Where you had to act to be a donor, most people weren't. Where you had to act not to be, most people were. The paper's title asked whether defaults save lives, and its point was that when people don't actively choose, the default chooses for them, and that this happens even on decisions that matter enormously. I'm describing the paper from what's generally known about it, and the notes say so.

Now look at the countdown. Five, four, three. If you do nothing, the next one plays. Doing nothing is the default, and Johnson and Goldstein's finding is that doing nothing is what most people do. You didn't decide to watch another. You declined to intervene in a process that was going to play it anyway, and declining to intervene at quarter past ten on a sofa isn't a decision about television. It's inertia, and the countdown was designed around inertia, by people who'd read the same research.

A door that closes on its own unless held is a fair comparison for two sentences. Nobody who's walked through one thinks they decided to close it, and yet it's closed, every time.

Consider what the same evening would have looked like ten years ago, before autoplay. The credits rolled. The screen went to a menu. To watch the next episode you had to pick up the remote and choose it. That was the old default, which was stopping, and most people, most nights, stopped, not because they were disciplined but because the default was on their side. Nothing about you has changed since then. What's changed is which way the door swings.

So "I decided to watch another" is true of the first episode and false of the third. The first was a choice. The third was a countdown reaching zero on a sofa with a person on it, and the method in chapter 20 puts the door back the way it was.