In the process of working on my eventually forthcoming first book, The Lazy Underachiever’s Guide to Success, I’ve been coming across some very interesting research. If you ever really, really want to get to know a subject, write a book about it. The effort to make sure you don’t miss something obvious forces you to put in some serious work. It’s rewarding work, but it is work.
Or as zombies call it, "the tasty bit" (Image via Wikipedia)
My most recent discovery, while working on my chapter “Be Unhappy”, is an article from 2004 in the journal Neuron. The article, authored by Zink, Martin-Skurski, Chappelow, & Berns, was titled Human striatal responses to monetary reward depend on saliency. What did you expect, it’s in the Journal Neuron?
The article provides the biological basis for the Thomas Paine quote, “That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly.” We don’t value the things we didn’t work for. We do value those things we did work for. But why?
In their efforts to show that not all rewards are as rewarding, the experimenters strapped some humans into some brain scanning devices and gave them money, which sounds better than some jobs I’ve had. Sometimes the subjects would be rewarded for actually accomplishing something (active) and sometimes the reward would come from just being present (passive). As you would expect, rewards were more rewarding when they were rewards as opposed to gifts.
The spear fishing issue (Image by pt via Flickr)
From a biological perspective, this is reasonable. If I’m walking along and an eagle accidentally drops a fish in front of me when I’m hungry, it does not help me to be rewarded psychologically. What behavior does this reinforce? What does it teach me about how to get fish in the future, to go for a walk? On the other hand, if I go down to a stream and catch one with a spear I personally fashioned with my MacGyver-like skills, a psychological reward makes me more likely to learn that method is good for future fish gathering efforts.
We can generalize this to winning the lottery as well. What behavior does winning the lottery reinforce? Best case scenario, nothing. Worst case scenario it reinforces gambling behavior. On the other hand, building a business that gets you rich rewards that behavior. Obviously one is better than the other.
If we generalize this even further out, well past where the authors would be comfortable, I think this can help explain why winning the lottery doesn’t make people happy in the long term. (If that’s news to you, go ahead and google unhappy lottery winner.)
While the reward of winning the lottery is huge, there is no personal connection, no salience that activates those parts of the brain to feel rewarded. It is a gift rather than a reward. All of the other parts of the person’s life, the parts that really make you happy or unhappy, don’t change much. Your social support, your need to feel productive, and your desire to have meaning, are still all the same. They can even be eroded by the stress of the drastic economic change you’ve just gone through.
So the lesson is clear. As the great philosopher Donna Summer would put it, “work hard for the money, so hard for it honey.” It’ll be far more rewarding. Oh, and if you win the lottery you can share with me. It’ll make you happier.
Did you know commenting on my blog posts make you more likely to win the lottery? I’m sure I read that somewhere.
Related articles
- How to Win the Lottery … Almost (abcnews.go.com)
- Varies of reward in the brain. (mindblog.dericbownds.net)
- How Could I Be Related to These People? (psychologytoday.com)
