Between Pleasure and Contentment: Evolutionary Dynamics of Some Possible Parameters of Happiness

Abstract

We offer and test a simple operationalization of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being (“happiness”) as mediating variables that link outcomes to motivation. In six evolutionary agent-based simulation experiments, we compared the relative performance of agents endowed with different combinations of happiness-related traits (parameter values), under four types of environmental conditions. We found (i) that the effects of attaching more weight to longer-term than to momentary happiness and of extending the memory for past happiness are both stronger in an environment where food is scarce; (ii) that in such an environment “relative consumption,” in which the agent’s well-being is negatively affected by that of its neighbors, is more detrimental to survival when food is scarce; and (iii) that having a positive outlook, under which agents’ longer-term happiness is increased by positive events more than it is decreased by negative ones, is generally advantageous.

Happiness as an intrinsic motivator in reinforcement learning

“…Possible directions for future work include extending our model to multi-agent settings and embedding it in a multi-generational evolutionary context (see Gao and Edelman (2016), experiment 3). In particular, it would be interesting to examine the social and evolutionary dynamics of learning by IMRL agents that are motivated by hedonic and eudaimonic factors.…”

“…(Henderson & Knight, 2012;Rutledge, Skandali, Dayan, & Dolan, 2014). In earlier work (Gao & Edelman, 2016), we investigated several possible formulations for happiness that involve these two aspects of well-being, as well as their role in evolutionary success of agents in a variety of simulated environments. We found that (i) the effects of attaching more weight to eudaimonic (longer-term) than to momentary (hedonic) happiness and of extending the memory for past happiness are both stronger in an environment where food is scarce; (ii) ''relative consumption'', in which the agent's well-being is diminished by that of its neighbors, is more detrimental to survival when food is scarce; and (iii) agents with a positive outlook, whose longer-term happiness gets increased more from positive events than decreased from negative ones, is generally advantageous.…”

“…where n t represents the affectively important outcomes obtained from the agent-environment interaction at time t. In our experiments that involve foraging, we used n t to represent the agent's encounters with food or poison. The agent's eudaimonic well-being E is then computed from its present value of H, its memory of past values of H extending over a number of cycles, and the rates of rise and fall of H. The present formulation of eudaimonic well-being is based on our previous work (Gao & Edelman, 2016). Specifically…”

“…For a tutorial discussion of IMRL, the reader is referred to the chapter by Barto (2013), as well as the entire volume in which it appears (Baldassarre & Mirolli, 2013). The possible role of happiness as a variable that mediates between outcomes and motivation in evolutionary agent-based simulations of foraging behavior has been explored by Gao and Edelman (2016).…”

“…In this paper, we address the problem of choosing a good reward function, on which the success of RL is predicated. Specifically, we formulate and evaluate several reward functions that involve happiness, operationalized as dynamic evaluation of behaviorally significant outcomes (Gao & Edelman, 2016). We begin by offering some motivation for this research program.…”