Systematic Bias Towards Perceiving Relationships as Beneficial
The human brain is heavily biased. Ask a parent how good it was to have a child and they often say “Having a child was the best thing ever”. There is a circuit in their brain that rewards them in that moment where they reflect.
However, if you have people rate every hour how engaging it is to handle their child, you get a score comparable to household chores.
Probably the brain also is biased to mainly retrieve positive memories when reflection, and make them seem more positive than they actually where.
Nice trick evolution! Somebody who thinks about whether to have another child is much more likely to want another if their perception is skewed in this way.
All the neural machinery involved in relationships, especially romantic ones, is all about reproduction. At least from the perspective of evolution.
People track their romantic relationship as a property of reality. And usually they perceive this property as something positive to be preserved. Optimizing reality to preserve the relationship is probably advantagous evolutionary. Staying close together and talking a lot (which can give optimization relevant information) seems useful for the task of succesfully raising offspring.
Conclusion: It is likely that there is a systematic bias that makes people perceive relationships as more positive upon reflection, than they actually are.
That is not to say that relationships are bad, just that we shouldn’t be suprised if somebody says that they think their realtionship is high value when it’s not.
Systematic Bias Towards Perceiving Relationships as Beneficial
The human brain is heavily biased. Ask a parent how good it was to have a child and they often say “Having a child was the best thing ever”. There is a circuit in their brain that rewards them in that moment where they reflect.
However, if you have people rate every hour how engaging it is to handle their child, you get a score comparable to household chores.
Probably the brain also is biased to mainly retrieve positive memories when reflection, and make them seem more positive than they actually where.
Nice trick evolution! Somebody who thinks about whether to have another child is much more likely to want another if their perception is skewed in this way.
All the neural machinery involved in relationships, especially romantic ones, is all about reproduction. At least from the perspective of evolution.
People track their romantic relationship as a property of reality. And usually they perceive this property as something positive to be preserved. Optimizing reality to preserve the relationship is probably advantagous evolutionary. Staying close together and talking a lot (which can give optimization relevant information) seems useful for the task of succesfully raising offspring.
Conclusion: It is likely that there is a systematic bias that makes people perceive relationships as more positive upon reflection, than they actually are.
That is not to say that relationships are bad, just that we shouldn’t be suprised if somebody says that they think their realtionship is high value when it’s not.