New research from University College London suggests that how we learn about the world around us can be more important for how we feel than rewards we receive directly.
Rewards are often uncertain and infrequent, but learning may nevertheless have the potential to boost happiness. Image credit: Pexels.
Many people believe they would be happier if only they had more money. And events such as winning the lottery or receiving a large pay rise do make people happy, at least temporarily.
But recent studies suggest that the main factor driving happiness on such occasions is not the size of the reward received. Instead, it is how well that reward matches up with expectations.
Receiving a 10% pay rise when you were expecting 1% will make you feel happier than receiving 10% when you had been expecting 20%. This difference between an expected and an actual reward is referred to as a reward prediction error.
Reward prediction errors have a key role in learning. They motivate people to repeat behaviors that led to unexpectedly large rewards. But they also enable people to update their beliefs about the world, which is rewarding in itself.
Could it be that reward prediction errors are associated with happiness mainly because they help us understand the world a little better than before?
To test this idea, University College London researchers Robb Rutledge and Bastien Blain designed a task in which the likelihood of receiving a reward was unrelated to the size of the reward.
“Many people think they would be happier if they had more money,” Dr. Rutledge said.
“However, we previously developed an equation for happiness showing that happiness depends not on how much reward you get, but whether you are doing better than expected.”
In the study, the scientists conducted two experiments with human volunteers, where they had to pick which car would win a race. If their chosen car won, they got a reward.
They knew what the potential prize was before they decided which car to bet on, but they could only learn from experience which car was more likely to win the race.
In one scenario, one of the cars was consistently more likely to win, so the participants could learn after a few ‘races’ that they should pick that car to win, and increase their chance of winning. They should only bet on the slower car when the prize was really large.
The other scenario was more volatile, as which car was best would change up unexpectedly every so often.
The authors found that reward size did not impact happiness; rather, participants were happier when they were able to learn which car was better, even when the reward size was low.
Being in an environment that changes a lot reduced their overall happiness, particularly among people with depressive symptoms.
“We found that happiness depends on learning, but surprisingly, it doesn’t depend on reward,” Dr. Blain said.
“Whether study participants got small or large rewards didn’t matter for their happiness.”
The team’s results were published online in the journal eLife.
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Bastien Blain & Robb B. Rutledge. 2020. Momentary subjective well-being depends on learning and not reward. eLife 9: e57977; doi: 10.7554/eLife.57977
