Science The pursuit of happiness How do you quantify what makes someone happy? A recent paper suggests that the process of learning is more rewarding than a reward itself. Liam Kay reports C an money make you happy? For some, the answer is an obvious no, while others, perhaps, put more emphasis on material rewards. The research team behind a recent smartphone app, The Happiness Project, set out to explore the circumstances in which humans are happy or unhappy. Bastien Blain, research associate at University College Londons Queen Square Institute of Neurology, who worked on the project, says that the recent focus has been on the impact of learning and reward on happiness. An initial lab experiment carried out by Blain and his colleagues saw volunteers play a game in which they decided which of two cars would win in a race. In the stable condition, one of the cars always had an 80% chance of winning. In the so-called volatile condition, one car had an 80% chance of winning for the first 20 trials, switching to the other car for the next 20. The volunteers were not told these probabilities before the experiment began, but had to work them out by playing the game. Before the race started, the participants were shown the potential reward they would receive for their car winning. The size of the reward fluctuated at random between trials and was unrelated to the chances of a car actually finishing the race victorious. In between trials, volunteers were asked to rate their current level of happiness. The results showed that participants, particularly those who exhibited symptoms of depression, were happier in the stable condition and after they had won. The key finding, though, was that the size of the reward had no bearing on happiness instead, it was how surprised the person was to claim victory. The idea was that learning and trying to work out when a reward would appear was more fulfilling for an individual than the reward in and of itself. Participants were happier when they were able to 60 Impact ISSUE 33 2021_pp60-61 Science.indd 60 26/03/2021 10:18