Reward system

• This system promotes us taking actions and learn behaviour that leads to benefits and avoiding detrimental situations, playing an important role in building a cognitive model.
• Evolutionary (primary): These reward functions are naturally selected, such as sex, social stimuli, eating food, etc.
• Learned (secondary): Includes social media, video games, and skills that earn money. These are learned behaviours/skills, but evolutionary functions still acts as a basis for these, e.g. social media simulates social stimuli, video games include social engagement/competition, probabilistic in-game items, and soft materialism. Learning skills to make money because we can pay for necessary things like food, a home and more.
• Punishments or negative rewards examples include loss of money (non-probabilistic way), a cold shoulder, breaking the law leads to punishments with respective severity, and a drop in frequency of getting burned while cooking.
• Feeling good or getting that “kick” comes from a dopamine surge, while negative things lead to a dopamine dip, making you feel blue.
• Regular engagement in rewarding activities leads to decreasing the “kick” and normalising on higher level of reward. Now, just ceasing to engage with the activity can lead to feeling low considering the new norm, while feeling rewarded will require to engage in higher frequency or intensity. This is why people face difficulties reducing social media, gaming time, etc., underlining the importance of intentional boredom to reset “normal” level, maintaining balanced behaviour and avoiding addiction.
• A crucial factor for the behavioural development of children to be able lead a mentally and functionally healthy life, as their cognitive model, building balanced self-esteem and confidence, comes from accurate environmental feedback. Inaccurate feedbacks malforms cognitive lenses, leading to inaccurate information perception, which further leads to malformed cognitive model. This cycle quickly bloats bad models in modern info-dense environment making it extremely difficult to resolve older cognitive models, especially formed in early age.

Perception driven by semantically relevant existing cognitive lenses/beliefs. High quantity of semantically aligned information. Reinforcing existing beliefs and cognitive lenses

Bias bloating

• It’s crucial that positive acknowledgements/complements and negative acknowledgements/penalties are delivered with high accuracy by the environment for respective actions (correct data labelling). Depending on severity and combination type of desynchronisation between behaviour and environmental feedback can lead to a fragmented cognitive model, including malformed emotional response, over/under confidence, polarised personality/moods.
• This remains important throughout adult life to build advanced behaviour and habits shaped by how the social system incentivise its components. People’s behaviour is not just driven by direct feedback but also perceived patterns about what behaviour leads to higher rewards, especially by behaviour of high rank personalities in social hierarchies, where large population observers often fall victim to heuristic pattern learning (shallow copying), e.g. following trends even if economically nonviable.