The search for happiness, especially over the long term, may seem unattainable. Partly, this is due to the changes in a person's expectations that make people quickly habituate to new reasons to feel happiness. It also depends on whether people compare what they have with others.
Pursuit of Happiness: Habituation and Comparison
Habituation and comparison lead to a cycle of never-ending desires that can negatively affect a person's mental health and well-being. Understanding the benefits and costs could help experts develop policies and interventions to tackle these mental health biases.
In a recent study published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, titled "The pursuit of happiness: A reinforcement learning perspective on habituation and comparisons." experts used reinforcement learning, a computational framework, to model the effects of varying levels of habituation and comparison-making.
The team found that making comparisons reduces a person's happiness and hastens their learning.
Dr. Nathanial Daw, a Princeton University professor in computational and theoretical neurosciences not involved with the study, tells Medical News Today that simply building a robot to choose between different options isn't as easy as it sounds. Figuring out how to set up the scoring for the robot to make good choices is challenging, with the recent study looking into human happiness from this perspective.
Mental Biases, Happiness, and Learning
Rachit Dubey, the study's lead author and a fifth-year Ph.D. student at Princeton University, explains that reinforcement learning methods focus on training to learn how to map situations and actions. The guiding principle of the method is to train agents using varying rewards for positive desired behavior and negative rewards for undesired ones.
Dubey explains that the method is similar to how we learn from rewards such as money and praise and avoid actions that earn negative rewards like pain and sadness.
For the recent study, the team trained agents by giving rewards each time they exceeded previously stated expectations and the performance of other agents in the study. Then they conducted different experiments in varying environments with the agents.
The results, the team found that agents rewarded for habituation and comparison learned faster than the reward-based agents, although they showed less happiness.
This means habituation and comparison may promote adaptive behavior by serving as a learning signal. Also, experts found that making comparisons sped up agents' learning as it provided an exploration incentive and that proper expectations served as a key aid for comparison, especially in environments with few rewards.
Furthermore, the authors noted that agents were unhappy and sub-optimally performed when comparisons were unchecked and when there were too many similar options for the agents to choose from. This means that when faced with several choices, we should try to make decisions that don't root in comparison.
The team concluded that the results of the study help explain why people are prone to be trapped in endless cycles of wants and desires. They added that the results shed light on psychopathologies like materialism, depression, and overconsumption.
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