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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ArunaTelshan" data-source="post: 25790700" data-attributes="member: 495249">There may be some reasons why an animal’s brain wants to keep track of upward or downward trends. Daw notes that it can be an important adaptation for foraging animals that need to keep track of whether a food source is getting more or less available. If an animal can make a quick decision about whether to continue looking for food in one place, or whether to change course because their options are dwindling, it could find food more efficiently.When it comes to the way people respond to scarce resources, we might even try to game our own neurobiology. As far back as 1993, the behavioral economists George Loewenstein and Drazen Prelec published a <a href="https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/afc4/28d62648b7420d09dc98bab0c2ae164f6e6e.pdf" target="_blank">paper</a> in Psychological Review suggesting that people prefer an improving trend or sequence of experiences, rather than a decreasing trend, because they like reveling in the anticipation of a positive event. “Individuals are not helpless in the face of their urges,” Loewentstein and Prelec wrote. They pointed to real-life examples like participating in dieting clubs or the Social Security system, activities in which people put off the enjoyment of something now so that they can indulge in it later, whether it be dessert or the comfort of a healthy retirement savings.Or, there are shorter-term scenarios in which someone might intentionally defer the happy ending effect; for example, if you’re at a birthday party and really looking forward to the cake, you may wait until the end of the party to eat it. “You want to delay and save a big reward for later so that you can have a lot of time to look forward to the happy ending,” says Kiyohito Iigaya, a postdoctoral neuroscience researcher at Caltech who was not involved in the new study.Iigaya points out that what’s considered rational or irrational behavior is often subjective. He refers to <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2232929?seq=1" target="_blank">another paper by Loewenstein</a> that found that people will often put off meeting a celebrity so they can enjoy looking forward to the event. This may be irrational in some ways, but, Iiagaya says, from the point of view of maximizing the fun of anticipation, it does have a rationale.The happy ending effect could also be used to steer people in positive ways. Kahneman’s study showed that people base their memories of colonoscopies on those final painful minutes—but what if doctors were able to improve them? Daw suggests that making the end of the exam more comfortable might mean people wouldn’t have as many negative memories—even if those changes make the procedure longer overall. “This would make people hate it less and more likely to return for their next one,” he wrote.Vestergaard agrees that our preference for happy endings can be an evolutionary boon, but he points out that it can also lead us astray. It may make it easier to make decisions quickly, because it gives us an “intuitive” or “gut” feeling about which option is best. But that can be problematic, because our gut can be wrong or be easily misled. This is essentially what his study did, however harmlessly. Using different sequences of coins, the researchers were able to trick people into choosing the wrong pot—one that “felt” like it had more value, simply because the coins falling into it had gotten larger right before the sequence ended.Similarly, Vestergaard gives the example of a political campaign. “Politicians always try to appear strong and successful prior to the end of their tenure,” he says. If a voter only considered that politician’s most recent actions, instead of the entirety of their time in office, they might end up voting counter to their own interests.Vestergaard stresses that just because our brains process information about upward and downward trends doesn’t mean we have to privilege that information. “You can still stop and think,” he says. When it comes time to make a big decision, he suggests taking a step back, writing a pros and cons list, and analytically evaluating the options out there: “Just think one more time: Is that really in my best interest?”<a href="https://www.wired.com/story/your-brain-prefers-happy-endings-thats-not-always-smart/" target="_blank">Your Brain Prefers Happy Endings. That’s Not Always Smart</a></blockquote>

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