Explained: Why our brains are programmed to keep wanting more even if it leads to unhappiness

New Delhi, India

From new and trendy clothes to shoes, to the latest phones, etc, it appears we humans are never satisfied when it comes to buying. As if there's an in-built tendency to always want more with an unending desire for owning the latest products. 

But have you ever wondered why we want something, even if it doesn't give us any happiness? The latest study, published in the journal PLoS Computational Biology, might have some answers. 

Researchers used some computer models to understand the psychology of why people always want more and more material things, despite the possibility that such products will entertain us momentarily. And with time, we will need something else. 

The new study is led by researchers at Princeton University's Department of Psychology in New Jersey. The findings state that we all run after rewards and we tend to compare ourselves with various standards when we become "habituated". 

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What do the researchers say? 

The researchers said in their paper: "From ancient religious texts to modern literature, human history abounds with tales describing the struggle to achieve ever-lasting happiness." 

"Paradoxically, happiness is one of the most sought-after human emotions, yet achieving it over the long-term remains an elusive goal for many people," it added. 

They further said: "Our results help explain why we are prone to becoming trapped in a cycle of never-ending wants and desires, and may shed light on psychopathologies such as depression, materialism and overconsumption." 

Happiness is influenced by what? 

As mentioned by MailOnline, the experts have highlighted two psychological phenomena that are responsible for our brain's constant desire for material goods. 

The first one is the "relative comparison", which influences human happiness. It basically relates to the source of our concern with what our desires that we want to achieve as compared to what we have. 

The second phenomenon is; that the experts have said that our happiness is influenced by our prior expectations. But it is also said that these expectations can change over time. 

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"Even in favorable circumstances, we often find it hard to remain happy with what we have. One might enjoy a newly bought car for a season, but over time it brings fewer positive feelings and one eventually begins dreaming of the next rewarding thing to pursue" - part of the study read. 

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To conduct the study, the experts experimented by creating computer-simulated agents to represent real human "brains" and how humans think. The teams of researchers have taught them "reinforcement learning". 

"Our paper was inspired by findings about human happiness (particularly our propensity to keep wanting more) and we wanted to provide an explanation for this behaviour," the lead study author, Rachit Dubey, at Princeton told MailOnline. 

"Reinforcement learning methods focus on training an agent (e.g., a robot) so that the agent learns how to map situations to actions (e.g., learning how to play chess)," Dubey added. 

"The guiding principle of these methods is that they train agents using rewards – they provide positive rewards to desired behaviors and/or negative rewards to undesired ones," Dubey said. 

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