Top Quotes: “Stumbling on Happiness” — Daniel Gilbert
Introduction
“When people are asked to report how much they think about the past, present, and future, they claim to think about the future the most. When researchers actually count the items that float along in the average person’s stream of consciousness, they find that about 12 percent of our daily thoughts are about the future. In other words, every eight hours of thinking includes an hour of thinking about things that have yet to happen.”
“Experiencing an earthquake causes people to become temporarily realistic about their risk of dying in a future disaster, but within a couple of weeks even earthquake survivors return to their normal level of unfounded optimism. Indeed, events that challenge our optimistic beliefs can sometimes make us more rather than less optimistic. One study found that cancer patients were more optimistic about their futures than were their healthy counterparts.”
“Anticipating unpleasant events can minimize their impact. For instance, volunteers in one study received a series of twenty electric shocks and were warned three seconds before the onset of each one. Some volunteers (the high-shock group) received twenty high-intensity shocks to their right ankles. Other volunteers (the low-shock group) received three high-intensity shocks and seventeen low-intensity shocks. Although the low-shock group received fewer volts than the high-shock group did, their hearts beat faster, they sweated more profusely, and they rated themselves as more afraid. Why? Because volunteers in the low-shock group received shocks of different intensities at different times, which made it impossible for them to anticipate their futures. Apparently, three big jolts that one cannot foresee are more painful than twenty big jolts that one can.”
“Researchers arranged for student volunteers to pay regular visits to nursing-home residents. Residents in the high-control group were allowed to control the timing and duration of the student’s visit (“Please come visit me next Thursday for an hour”), and residents in low-control group were not (“I’ll come visit you next Thursday for an hour”). After two months, residents in the high-control group were happier, healthier, more active, and taking fewer medications than those in the low-control group. At this point the researchers concluded their study and discontinued the student visits. Several months later they were chagrined to learn that a disproportionate number of residents who had been in the high-control group had died. Only in retrospect did the cause of this tragedy seem clear. The residents who had been given control, and who had benefited measurably from that control while they had it, were inadvertently robbed of control when the study ended. Apparently, gaining control can have a positive impact on one’s health and well-being, but losing control can be worse than never having had any at all.”
The Blind Spot
“Researchers arranged for a researcher to approach pedestrians on a college campus and ask for directions to a particular building. While the pedestrian and the researcher conferred over the researcher’s map, two construction workers, each holding one end of a large door, rudely cut between them, temporarily obstructing the pedestrian’s view of the researcher. As the construction workers passed, the original researcher crouched down behind the door and walked off with the construction workers, while a new researcher, who had been hiding behind the door all along, took his place and picked up the conversation. The original and substitute researchers were of different heights and builds and had noticeably different voices, haircuts, and clothing. You would have no trouble telling them apart if they were standing side by side. So what did the Good Samaritans who had stopped to help a lost tourist make of this switcheroo? Not much. In fact, most of the pedestrians failed to notice — failed to notice that the person to whom they were talking had suddenly been transformed into an entirely new individual.”
“The point of these studies is not that we are hopelessly inept at detecting changes in our experience of the world but rather that unless our minds are keenly focused on a particular aspect of that experience; at the very moment it changes, we will be forced to rely on our memories — forced to compare our current experience to our recollection of our former experience — in order to detect the change.”
“The eyeball cannot register an image at the point at which the optic nerve attaches, and hence that point is known as the blind spot. No one can see an object that appears in the blind spot because there are no visual receptors there. And yet, if you look out into your living room, you do not notice a black hole in the otherwise smooth picture of your brother-in-law sitting on the sofa, devouring cheese dip. Why? Because your brain uses information from the areas around the blind spot to make a reasonable guess about what the blind spot would see if only it weren’t blind, and then your brain fills in the scene with this information. That’s right, it invents things, creates things, makes stuff up! It doesn’t consult you about this, doesn’t seek your approval. It just makes its best guess about the nature of the missing information and proceeds to fill in the scene — and the part of your visual experience of your cheese-dipping brother-in-law that is caused by real light reflecting off of his real face and the part that your brain just made up look exactly alike to you.”
“Just as there are parties and pastas you like and parties and pastas you don’t, there are ways of being rich and ways of being executed that make the former less marvelous and the latter less awful than we might otherwise expect. One reason why you found Fischer’s and Eastman’s reactions so perverse is that you almost certainly misimagined the details of their situations. And yet, without a second thought, you behaved like an unrepentant realist and confidently based your predictions about how you would feel on details that your brain had invented while you weren’t watching. Your mistake was not in imagining things you could not know — that is, after all, what imagination is for. Rather, your mistake was in unthinkingly treating what you imagined as though it were an accurate representation of the facts. You are a very fine person, I’m sure. But you are a very bad wizard.”
“Our inability to think about absences can lead us to make some fairly bizarre judgments. For example, in a study done about three decades ago, Americans were asked which countries were most similar to each other — Ceylon and Nepal or West Germany and East Germany. Most picked the latter pair. But when they were asked which countries were most dissimilar, most Americans picked the latter pair as well. Now, how can one pair of countries be both more similar and more dissimilar than another pair? They can’t, of course. But when people are asked to judge the similarity of two countries, they tend to look for the presence of similarities (of which East and West Germany had many — for example, their names) and ignore the absence of similarities. When they are asked to judge the dissimilarities of two countries, they tend to look for the presence of dissimilarities (of which East and West Germany had many — for example, their governments) and ignore the absence of dissimilarities.”
“The tendency to ignore absences can befuddle more personal decisions as well. For example, imagine that you are preparing to go on a vacation to one of two islands: Moderacia (which has average weather, average beaches, average hotels, and average nightlife) or Extremia (which has beautiful weather and fantastic beaches but crummy hotels and no nightlife). The time has come to make your reservations, so which one would you choose? Most people pick Extremia. But now imagine that you are already holding tentative reservations for both destinations and the time has come to cancel one of them before they charge your credit card. Which would you cancel? Most people choose to cancel their reservation on Extremia. Why would people both select and reject Extremia? Because when we are selecting, we consider the positive attributes of our alternatives, and when we are rejecting, we consider the negative attributes. Extremia has the most positive attributes and the most negative attributes, hence people tend to select it when they are looking for something to select and they reject it when they are looking for something to reject. Of course, the logical way to select a vacation is to consider both the presence and the absence of positive and negative attributes, but that’s not what most of us do.”
“When we think of events in the distant past or distant future we tend to think abstractly about why they happened or will happen, but when we think of events in the near past or near future we tend to think concretely about how they happened or will happen.”
The Power of Prefeelings
“Seeing in time is like seeing in space. But there is one important difference between spatial and temporal horizons. When we perceive a distant buffalo, our brains are aware of the fact that the buffalo looks smooth, vague, and lacking in detail because it is far away, and they do not mistakenly conclude that the buffalo itself is smooth and vague. But when we remember or imagine a temporally distant event, our brains seem to overlook the fact that details vanish with temporal distance, and they conclude instead that the distant events actually are as smooth and vague as we are imagining and remembering them. For example, have you ever wondered why you often make commitments that you deeply regret when the moment to fulfill them arrives? We all do this, of course. We agree to babysit the nephews and nieces next month, and we look forward to that obligation even as we jot it in our diary. Then, when it actually comes time to buy the Happy Meals, set up the Barbie playset, hide the bong, and ignore the fact that the NBA playoffs are on at one o’clock, we wonder what we were thinking when we said yes. Well, here’s what we were thinking: When we said yes we were thinking about babysitting in terms of why instead of how, in terms of causes and consequences instead of execution, and we failed to consider the fact that the detail-free babysitting we were imagining would not be the detail-laden babysitting we would ultimately experience.”
“Prefeeling often allows us to predict our emotions better than logical thinking does. In one study, researchers offered volunteers a reproduction of an Impressionist painting or a humorous poster of a cartoon cat. Before making their choices, some volunteers were asked to think logically about why they thought they might like or dislike each poster (thinkers), whereas others were encouraged to make their choices quickly and “from the gut” (non-thinkers). Career counselors and financial advisors always tell us that we should think long and hard if we wish to make sound decisions, but when the researchers phoned the volunteers later and asked how much they liked their new objet d’art, the thinkers were the least satisfied. Rather than choosing the poster that had made them feel happy when they imagined hanging it in their homes, thinkers had ignored their prefeelings and had instead chosen posters that possessed the qualities of which a career counselor or financial advisor would approve (“The olive green in the Monet may clash with the drapes, whereas the Garfield poster will signal to visitors that I have a scintillating sense of humor”). Nonthinkers, on the other hand, trusted their prefeelings: They imagined the poster on their wall, noted how they felt when they did so, and assumed that if imagining the poster on their wall made them feel good, then actually seeing it on their wall would probably do the same. And they were right. Prefeeling allowed nonthinkers to predict their future satisfaction more accurately than thinkers did. Indeed, when people are prevented from feeling emotion in the present, they become temporarily unable to predict how they will feel in the future.
But prefeeling has limits. How we feel when we imagine something is not always a good guide to how we will feel when we see, hear, wear, own, drive, eat, or kiss it. For example, why do you close your eyes when you want to visualize an object, or jam your fingers in your ears when you want to remember the melody of a certain song? You do these things because your brain must use its visual and auditory cortices to execute acts of visual and auditory imagination, and if these areas are already busy doing their primary jobs — namely, seeing and hearing things in the real world — then they are not available for acts of imagination. You cannot easily imagine a penguin when you are busy inspecting an ostrich because vision is already using the parts of your brain that imagination needs. Put differently, when we ask our brains to look at a real object and an imaginary object at the same time, our brains typically grant the first request and turn down the second.”
“In a related study, researchers asked people who were working out at a local gym to predict how they would feel if they became lost while hiking and had to spend the night in the woods with neither food nor water. Specifically, they were asked to predict whether their hunger or their thirst would be more unpleasant. Some people made this prediction just after they had worked out on a treadmill (thirsty group), and some made this prediction before they worked out on a treadmill (nonthirsty group). The results showed that 92 percent of the people in the thirsty group predicted that if they were lost in the woods, thirst would be more unpleasant than hunger, but only 61 percent of the people in the nonthirsty group made that prediction. Apparently, the thirsty people tried to answer the researcher’s question by imagining being lost in the woods without food and water and then asking themselves how they felt when they did so. But their brains enforced the Reality First policy and insisted on reacting to the real workout rather than the imaginary hike. Because these people didn’t know their brains were doing this, they confused their feelings and prefeelings.
You’ve probably been in a similar conundrum yourself. You’ve had an awful day — the cat peed on the rug, the dog peed on the cat, the washing machine is busted, World Wrestling has been preempted by Masterpiece Theatre — and you naturally feel out of sorts. If at that moment you try to imagine how much you would enjoy playing cards with your buddies the next evening, you may mistakenly attribute feelings that are due to the misbehavior of real pets and real appliances (“I feel annoyed”), to your imaginary companions (“I don’t think I’ll go because Nick always ticks me off”). Indeed, one of the hallmarks of depression is that when depressed people think about future events, they cannot imagine liking them very much. Vacation? Romance? A night on the town? No thanks, I’ll just sit here in the dark. Their friends get tired of seeing them flail about in a thick blue funk, and they tell them that this too shall pass, that it is always darkest before the dawn, that every dog has its day, and several other important clichés. But from the depressed person’s point of view, all the flailing makes perfectly good sense because when she imagines the future, she finds it difficult to feel happy today and thus difficult to believe that she will feel happy tomorrow.”
“One way to beat habituation is to increase the variety of one’s experiences (“Hey, honey, I have a kinky idea — let’s watch the sun set from the kitchen this time”). Another way to beat habituation is to increase the amount of time that separates repetitions of the experience. Clinking champagne glasses and kissing one’s spouse at the stroke of midnight would be a relatively dull exercise were it to happen every evening, but if one does it on New Year’s Eve and then allows a full year to pass before doing it again, the experience will offer an endless bouquet of delights because a year is plenty long enough for the effects of habituation to disappear. The point here is that time and variety are two ways to avoid habituation, and if you have one, then you don’t need the other. In fact (and this is the really critical point, so please put down your fork and listen), when episodes are sufficiently separated in time, variety is not only unnecessary — it can actually be costly.”
The Limits of Comparison
“One ancient ploy involves asking someone to pay an unrealistically large cost (“Would you come to our Save the Bears meeting next Friday and then join us Saturday for a protest march at the zoo?”) before asking them to pay a smaller cost (“Okay then, could you at least contribute five dollars to our organization?”). Studies show that people are much more likely to agree to pay the small cost after having first contemplated the large one, in part because doing so makes the small cost seems so… er, bearable.”
“We make mistakes when we compare with the past instead of the possible. When we do compare with the possible, we still make mistakes. For example, if you’re like me, your living room is a mini-warehouse of durable goods ranging from chairs and lamps to stereos and television sets. You probably shopped around a bit before buying these items, and you probably compared the one you ultimately bought with a few alternatives — other lamps in the same catalog, other chairs on the showroom floor, other stereos on the same shelf, other televisions at the same mall. Rather than deciding whether to spend money, you were deciding how to spend money, and all the possible ways of spending your money were laid out for you by the nice folks who wanted it. These nice folks helped you overcome your natural tendency to compare with the past (“Is this television really that much better than my old one?”) by making it extremely easy for you to compare with the possible (“When you see them side by side here in the store, the Panasonic has a much sharper picture than the Sony”). Alas, we are all too easily fooled by such side-by-side comparisons, which is why retailers work so hard to ensure that we make them.
For example, people generally don’t like to buy the most expensive item in a category, hence retailers can improve their sales by stocking a few very expensive items that no one actually buys (“Oh my God, the 1982 Château Haut-Brion Pessac-Léognan sells for five hundred dollars a bottle!”) but that make less expensive items seem like a bargain by comparison (“I’ll just stick with the sixty-dollar zinfandel”). Unscrupulous real estate agents bring buyers to dilapidated dumps that are conveniently located between a massage parlor and a crack house before bringing them to the ordinary homes that they actually hope to sell, because the dumps make the ordinary homes seem extraordinary (“Oh, look, honey, no needles on the lawn!”). Our side-by-side comparisons can be influenced by extreme possibilities such as extravagant wines and dilapidated houses, but they can also be influenced by the addition of extra possibilities that are identical to those we are already considering. For example, in one study, physicians read about Medication X and were then asked whether they would prescribe the medication for a patient with osteoarthritis. The physicians clearly considered the medication worthwhile, because only 28 percent chose not to prescribe it. But when another group of physicians was asked whether they would prescribe Medication X or an equally effective Medication Y for a patient with the same disease, 48 percent chose to prescribe nothing. Apparently, adding another equally effective medication to the list of possibilities made it difficult for the physicians to decide between the two medications, thus leading many of them to recommend neither. If you’ve ever caught yourself saying, “I’m having such a hard time deciding between these two movies that I think I’ll just stay home and watch reruns instead,” then you know why physicians made the mistake they did.
One of the most insidious things about side-by-side comparison is that it leads us to pay attention to any attribute that distinguishes the possibilities we are comparing. I’ve probably spent some of the unhappiest hours of my life in stores that I meant to visit for fifteen minutes. I stop at the mall on the way to the picnic, park the car, dash in, and expect to reemerge a few minutes later with a nifty little digital camera in my pocket. But when I get to Wacky Bob’s Giant Mega Super Really Big World of Cameras, I am confronted by a bewildering panoply of nifty little digital cameras that differ on many attributes. Some of these are attributes that I would have considered even if there had been only one camera inthe display case (“This is light enough to fit in my shirt pocket so I can take it anywhere”), and some are attributes I would never have thought about had the differences between cameras not been called to my attention (“The Olympus has flash output compensation, but the Nikon doesn’t. By the way, what is flash output compensation?”). Because side-by-side comparisons cause me to consider all the attributes on which the cameras differ, I end up considering attributes that I don’t really care about but that just so happen to distinguish one camera from another.”
“We compare the small elegant speakers with the huge, boxy speakers, notice the acoustical difference, and buy the hulking leviathans. Alas, the acoustical difference is a difference we never notice again, because when we get the monster speakers home we do not compare their sound to the sound of some speaker we listened to a week earlier at the store, but we do compare their awful boxiness to the rest of our sleek, elegant, and now-spoiled décor. Or we travel to France, meet a couple from our hometown, and instantly become touring buddies because compared with all those French people who hate us when we don’t try to speak their language and hate us more when we do, the hometown couple seems exceptionally warm and interesting. We are delighted to have found these new friends, and we expect to like them just as much in the future as we do today. But when we have them over for dinner a month after returning home, we are surprised to find that our new friends are rather boring and remote compared with our regular friends, and that we actually dislike them enough to qualify for French citizenship. Our mistake was not in touring Paris with a couple of dull homies but in failing to realize that the comparison we were making in the present (“Lisa and Walter are so much nicer than the waiter at Le Grand Colbert”) is not the comparison we would be making in the future (“Lisa and Walter aren’t nearly as nice as Toni and Dan”). The same principle explains why we love new things when we buy them and then stop loving them shortly thereafter. When we start shopping for a new pair of sunglasses, we naturally contrast the hip, stylish ones in the store with the old, outdated ones that are sitting on our noses. So we buy the new ones and stick the old ones in a drawer. But after just a few days of wearing our new sunglasses we stop comparing them with the old pair, and — well, what do you know? The delight that the comparison produced evaporates.”
“For at least a century, psychologists have assumed that terrible events — such as having a loved one die or becoming the victim of a violent crime — must have a powerful, devastating, and enduring impact on those who experience them. This assumption has been so deeply embedded in our conventional wisdom that people who don’t have dire reactions to events such as these are sometimes diagnosed as having a pathological condition known as”absent grief.” But recent research suggests that the conventional wisdom is wrong, that the absence of grief is quite normal, and that rather than being the fragile flowers that a century of psychologists have made us out to be, most people are surprisingly resilient in the face of trauma. The loss of a parent or spouse is usually sad and often tragic, and it would be perverse to suggest otherwise. But the fact is that while most bereaved people are quite sad for a while, very few become chronically depressed and most experience relatively low levels of relatively short-lived distress. Although more than half the people in the United States will experience a trauma such as rape, physical assault, or natural disaster in their lifetimes, only a small fraction will ever develop any post-traumatic pathology or require any professional assistance. As one group of researchers noted, “Resilience is often the most commonly observed outcome trajectory, following exposure to a potentially traumatic event.” Indeed, studies of those who survive major traumas suggest that the vast majority do quite well, and that a significant portion claim that their lives were enhanced by the experience. I know, I know. It sounds suspiciously like the title of a country song, but the fact is that most folks do pretty darn good when things go pretty darn bad.”
“Negative events affect us, but they generally don’t affect us for as much or as long as we expect them to. When people are asked to predict how they feel if they lose a job or romantic partner, if they flunk an interview or their candidate loses an election, they consistently overestimate how awful they’ll feel and how long they’ll feel awful.”
“Because this drawing has two equally meaningful interpretations, your brain merrily switches back and forth between them, keeping you mildly entertained until you eventually get dizzy and fall down. But what if one of these meanings were better than the other? That is, what if you preferred one of the interpretations of this object? Experiments show that when subjects are rewarded for seeing the box across from them or below them, the orientation for which they were rewarded starts “popping out” more often and their brains “hold on” to that interpretation without switching. In other words, when your brain is at liberty to interpret a stimulus in more than one way, it tends to interpret it the way it wants to, which is to say that your preferences influence your interpretations of stimuli in just the same way that context, frequency, and recency do.”
“Researchers asked some volunteers (definers) to write down their definition of talented and then to estimate their talent using that definition as a guide. Next, some other volunteers (nondefiners) were given the definitions that the first group had written down and were asked to estimate their own talent using those definitions as a guide. Interestingly, the definers rated themselves as more talented than the nondefiners did. Because definers were given the liberty to define the word talented any way they wished, they defined it exactly the way they wished — namely; in terms of some activity at which they just so happened to excel (“I think talent usually refers to exceptional artistic achievement like, for example, this painting I just finished,” or “Talent means an ability you’re born with, such as being much stronger than other people. Shall I put you down now?”). Definers were able to set the standards for talent, and not coincidentally, they were more likely to meet the standards they set. One of the reasons why most of us think of ourselves as talented, friendly, wise, and fair-minded is that these words are the lexical equivalents of a Necker cube, and the human mind naturally exploits each word’s ambiguity for its own gratification.”
“For some odd reason, ice cream eaters were thinking about food in terms of its taste — and unlike kale and Spam, ice cream tastes delicious. On the other hand, kale eaters thought that Spam was more like ice cream than it was like kale. Why? Because for some odd reason, kale eaters were thinking about food in terms of its healthfulness — and unlike kale, ice cream and Spam are unhealthful. The odd reason isn’t really so odd. Just as a Necker cube is both across from you and below you, ice cream is both fattening and tasty, and kale is both healthful and bitter. Your brain and my brain easily jump back and forth between these different ways of thinking about the foods because we are merely reading about them. But if we were preparing to eat one of them, our brains would automatically exploit the ambiguity of that food’s identity and allow us to think of it in a way that pleased us (delicious dessert or nutritious veggie) rather than a way that did not (fattening dessert or bitter veggie). As soon as our potential experience becomes our actual experience — as soon as we have a stake in its goodness — our brains get busy looking for ways to think about the experience that will allow us to appreciate it.
Because experiences are inherently ambiguous, finding a “positive view” of an experience is often as simple as finding the “below-you view” of a Necker cube, and research shows that most people do this well and often. Consumers evaluate kitchen appliances more positively after they buy them, job seekers evaluate jobs more positively after they accept them, and high school students evaluate colleges more positively after they get into them. Racetrack gamblers evaluate their horses more positively when they are leaving the betting window than when they are approaching it, and voters evaluate their candidates more positively when they are exiting the voting booth than when they are entering it. A toaster, a firm, a university, a horse, and a senator are all just fine and dandy, but when they become our toaster, firm, university, horse, and senator they are instantly finer and dandier. Studies such as these suggest that people are quite adept at finding a positive way to view things once those things become their own.”
“Rather than thinking of people as hopelessly Panglossian, then, we might think of them as having a psychological immune system that defends the mind against unhappiness in much the same way that the physical immune system defends the body against illness. This metaphor is unusually appropriate. For example, the physical immune system must strike a balance between two competing needs: the need to recognize and destroy foreign in vaders such as viruses and bacteria, and the need to recognize and respect the body’s own cells. If the physical immune system is hypoactive, it fails to defend the body against micropredators and we are stricken with infections; but if the physical immune system is hyperactive, it mistakenly defends the body against itself and we are stricken with autoimmune disease. A healthy physical immune system must balance its competing needs and find a way to defend us well — but not too well.”
“This tendency to seek information about those who have done more poorly than we have is especially pronounced when the stakes are high. People with life-threatening illnesses such as cancer are particularly likely to compare themselves with those who are in worse shape, which explains why 96 percent of the cancer patients in one study claimed to be in better health than the average cancer patient. And if we can’t find people who are doing more poorly than we are, we may go out and create them. Volunteers in one study took a test and were then given the opportunity to provide hints that would either help or hinder a friend’s performance on the same test. Although volunteers helped their friends when the test was described as a game, they actively hindered their friends when the test was described as an important measure of intellectual ability. Apparently, when our friends do not have the good taste to come in last so that we can enjoy the good taste of coming in first, we give them a friendly push in the appropriate direction. Once we’ve successfully sabotaged their performances and ensured their failure, they become the perfect standard for comparison. The bottom line is this: the brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.”
“When we want to believe that someone is smart, then a single letter of recommendation may suffice; but when we don’t want to believe that person is smart, we may demand a thick manila folder full of transcripts, tests, and testimony.”
“In July 2004, the City Council of Monza, Italy, took the unusual step of banning goldfish bowls. They reasoned that goldfish should be kept in rectangular aquariums and not in round bowls because “a fish kept in a bowl has a distorted view of reality and suffers because of this.” No mention was made of the bland diet, the noisy pump, or the silly plastic castles.”
“People expect to feel more regret when they foolishly switch stocks than when they foolishly fail to switch stocks, because most people think they will regret foolish actions more than foolish inactions. But studies also show that nine out of ten people are wrong. Indeed, in the long run, people of every age and in every walk of life seem to regret not having done things much more than they regret things they did, which is why the most popular regrets include not going to college, not grasping profitable business opportunities, and not spending enough time with family and friends.
But why do people regret inactions more than actions? One reason is that the psychological immune system has a more difficult time manufacturing positive and credible views of inactions than of actions. When our action causes us to accept a marriage proposal from someone who later becomes an axe murderer, we can console ourselves by thinking of all the things we learned from the experience (“Collecting hatchets is not a healthy hobby”). But when our inaction causes us to reject a marriage proposal from someone who later becomes a movie star, we can’t console ourselves by thinking of all the things we learned from the experience because … well, there wasn’t one. The irony is all too clear: Because we do not realize that our psychological immune systems can rationalize an excess of courage more easily than an excess of cowardice, we hedge our bets when we should blunder forward.”
“When experiences make us feel sufficiently unhappy, the psychological immune system cooks facts and shifts blame in order to offer us a more positive view. But it doesn’t do this every time we feel the slightest tingle of sadness, jealousy, anger, or frustration. Failed marriages and lost jobs are the kinds of large-scale assaults on our happiness that trigger our psychological defenses, but these defenses are not triggered by broken pencils, stubbed toes, or slow elevators. Broken pencils may be annoying, but they do not pose a grave threat to our psychological well-being and hence do not trigger our psychological defenses. The paradoxical consequence of this fact is that it is sometimes more difficult to achieve a positive view of a bad experience than of a very bad experience.
For example, volunteers in one study were students who were invited to join an extracurricular club whose initiation ritual required that they receive three electric shocks. Some of the volunteers had a truly dreadful experience because the shocks they received were quite severe (severe-initiation group), and others had a slightly unpleasant experience because the shocks they received were relatively mild (mild-initiation group). Although you might expect people to dislike anything associated with physical pain, the volunteers in the severe-initiation group actually liked the club more. Because these volunteers suffered greatly, the intensity of their suffering triggered their defensive systems, which immediately began working to help them achieve a credible and positive view of their experience. It isn’t easy to find such a view, but it can be done. For example, physical suffering is bad (“Oh my God, that really hurt!”), but it isn’t entirely bad if the thing one suffers for is extremely valuable (“But I’m joining a very elite group of very special people”). Indeed, research shows that when people are given electric shocks, they actually feel less pain when they believe they are suffering for something of great value. The intense shocks were unpleasant enough to trigger the volunteers’ psychological defenses, but the mild shocks were not, hence the volunteers valued the club most when its initiation was most painful. If you’ve managed to forgive your spouse for some egregious transgression but still find yourself miffed about the dent in the garage door or the trail of dirty socks on the staircase, then you have experienced this paradox.
Intense suffering triggers the very processes that eradicate it, while mild suffering does not, and this counterintuitive fact can make it difficult for us to predict our emotional futures. For example, would it be worse if your best friend insulted you or insulted your cousin? As much as you may like your cousin, it’s a pretty good bet that you like yourself more, hence you probably think that it would be worse if the epithet were hurled your way. And you’re right. It would be worse. At first. But if intense suffering triggers the psychological immune system and mild suffering does not, then over time you should be more likely to generate a positive view of an insult that was directed at you (“Felicia called me a pea-brain . . . boy, she can really crack me up sometimes”) than one that was directed at your cousin (“Felicia called Cousin Dwayne a pea-brain .. . I mean, she’s right, of course, but it wasn’t very nice of her to say”). The irony is that you may ultimately feel better when you are the victim of an insult than when you are a bystander to it.
This possibility was tested in a study in which two volunteers took a personality test and then one of them received feedback from a psychologist. The feedback was professional, detailed, and unrelentingly negative. For example, it contained statements such as “You have few qualities that distinguish you from others” and “People like you primarily because you don’t threaten their competence.” Both of the volunteers read the feedback and then reported how much they liked the psychologist who had written it. Ironically, the volunteer who was the victim of the negative feedback liked the psychologist more than did the volunteer who was merely a bystander to it. Why? Because bystanders were miffed (“Man, that was a really crummy thing to do to the other volunteer”), but they were not devastated, hence their psychological immune systems did nothing to ameliorate their mildly negative feelings. But victims were devastated (“Yikes, I’m a certified loser!”), hence their brains quickly went shopping for a positive view of the experience (“But now that I think of it, that test could only provide a small glimpse into my very complex personality, so I rather doubt it means much”). Now here’s the important finding: When a new group of volunteers was asked to predict how much they would like the psychologist, they predicted that they would like the psychologist less if they were victims than if they were bystanders. Apparently, people are not aware of the fact that their defenses are more likely to be triggered by intense than mild suffering, thus they mispredict their own emotional reactions to misfortunes of different sizes.”
“We are more likely to look for and find a positive view of the things we’re stuck with than of the things we’re not. Friends come and go, and changing candidates is as easy as changing socks. But siblings and presidents are ours, for better or for worse, and there’s not much we can do about it once they’ve been born or elected. When the experience we are having is not the experience we want to be having, our first reaction is to go out and have a different one, which is why we return unsatisfactory rental cars, check out of bad hotels, and stop hanging around with people who pick their noses in public. It is only when we cannot change the experience that we look for ways to change our view of the experience, which is why we love the clunker in the driveway.”
“Inescapable, inevitable, and irrevocable circumstances trigger the psychological immune system, but, as with the intensity of suffering, people do not always recognize that this will happen. For example, college students in one study signed up for a course in black-and-white photography. Each student took a dozen photographs of people and places that were personally meaningful, then reported for a private lesson. In these lessons, the teacher spent an hour or two showing students how to print their two best photographs. When the prints were dry and ready, the teacher said that the student could keep one of the photographs but that the other would be kept on file as an example of student work. Some students (inescapable group) were told that once they had chosen a photograph to take home, they would not be allowed to change their minds. Other students (escapable group) were told that once they had chosen a photograph to take home, they would have several days to change their mind — and if they did, the teacher would gladly swap the photograph they’d taken home for the one they’d left behind. Students made their choices and took one of their photographs home. Several days later, the students responded to a survey asking them (among other things) how much they liked their photographs. The results showed that students in the escapable group liked their photograph less than did students in the inescapable group. Interestingly, when a new group of students was asked to predict how much they would like their photographs if they were or were not given the opportunity to change their minds, these students predicted that escapability would have no influence whatsoever on their satisfaction with the photograph. Apparently, inescapable circumstances trigger the psychological defenses that enable us to achieve positive views of those circumstances, but we do not anticipate that this will happen.
Our failure to anticipate that inescapability will trigger our psychological immune systems (hence promote our happiness and satisfaction) can cause us to make some painful mistakes. For example, when a new group of photography students was asked whether they would prefer to have or not to have the opportunity to change their minds about which photograph to keep, the vast majority preferred to have that opportunity — that is, the vast majority of students preferred to enroll in a photography course in which they would ultimately be dissatisfied with the photograph they produced. Why would anyone prefer less satisfaction to more? No one does, of course, but most people do seem to prefer more freedom to less. Indeed, when our freedom to make up our minds — or to change our minds once we’ve made them up — is threatened, we experience a strong impulse to reassert it, which is why retailers sometimes threaten your freedom to own their products with claims such as “Limited stock” or “You must order by midnight tonight.” Our fetish for freedom leads us to patronize expensive department stores that allow us to return merchandise rather than attend auctions that don’t, to lease cars at a dramatic markup rather than buying them at a bargain, and so on.
Most of us will pay a premium today for the opportunity to change our minds tomorrow, and sometimes it makes sense to do so. A few days spent test-driving a little red roadster tells us a lot about what it might be like to own one, thus it is sometimes wise to pay a modest premium for a contract that includes a short refund period. But if keeping our options open has benefits, it also has costs. Little red roadsters are naturally cramped, and while the committed owner will find positive ways to view that fact (“Wow! It feels like a fighter jet!”), the buyer whose contract includes an escape clause may not (“This car is so tiny. Maybe I should return it”). Committed owners attend to a car’s virtues and overlook its flaws, thus cooking the facts to produce a banquet of satisfaction, but the buyer for whom escape is still possible (and whose defenses have not yet been triggered) is likely to evaluate the new car more critically, paying special attention to its imperfections as she tries to decide whether to keep it. The costs and benefits of freedom are clear — but alas, they are not equally clear: We have no trouble anticipating the advantages that freedom may provide, but we seem blind to the joys it can undermine.“
“Fruit flies associate their best and worst experiences with the circumstances that accompanied and preceded them, which allows them to seek or avoid those circumstances in the future. Expose a fruit fly to the odor of tennis shoes, give it a very tiny electric shock, and for the rest of its very tiny life it will avoid places that smell tennis-shoey. The ability to associate pleasure or pain with its circumstances is so vitally important that nature has installed that ability in every one of her creatures.”
Why You Shouldn’t Explain Things
“Studies show that the mere act of explaining an unpleasant event can help to defang it. For example, simply writing about a trauma-such as the death of a loved one or a physical assault — can lead to surprising improvements in both subjective well-being and physical health (e.g., fewer visits to the physician and improved production of viral antibodies). What’s more, the people who experience the greatest benefit from these writing exercises are those whose writing contains an explanation of the trauma.
But just as explanations ameliorate the impact of unpleasant events, so too do they ameliorate the impact of pleasant events. For example, college students volunteered for a study in which they believed they were interacting in an online chat room with students from other universities. In fact, they were actually interacting with a sophisticated computer program that simulated the presence of other students. After the simulated students had provided the real student with information about themselves (“Hi, I’m Eva, and I like to do volunteer work”), the researcher pretended to ask the simulated students to decide which of the people in the chat room they liked most, to write a paragraph explaining why, and then to send it to that person. In just a few minutes, something remarkable happened: The real student received e-mail messages from every one of the simulated students indicating that they liked the real student best! For example, one simulated message read: “I just felt that something clicked between us when I read your answers. It’s too bad we’re not at the same school!” Another read: “You stood out as the one I would like the most. I was especially interested in the way you described your interests and values.” A third read: “I wish I could talk with you directly because…I’d ask you if you like being around water (I love water-skiing) and if you like Italian food (it’s my favorite).”
Now, here’s the catch: Some real students (informed group) received e-mail that allowed them to know which simulated student wrote each of the messages, and other real students (uninformed group) received e-mail messages that had been stripped of that identifying information. In other words, every real student received exactly the same e-mail messages indicating that they had won the hearts and minds of all the simulated people in the chat room, but only real students in the informed group knew which simulated individual had written each of the messages. Hence, real students in the informed group were able to generate explanations for their good fortune (Eva appreciates my values because we’re both involved with Habitat for Humanity, and it makes sense that Catarina would mention Italian food”), whereas real students in the uninformed group were not (“Someone appreciates my values…I wonder who? And why would anyone mention Italian food?”). The researchers measured how happy the real students were immediately after receiving these messages and then again fifteen minutes later. Although real students in both groups were initially delighted to have been chosen as everyone’s best friend, only the real students in the uninformed group remained delighted fifteen minutes later. If you’ve ever had a secret admirer, then you understand why real students in the uninformed group remained on cloud nine while real students in the informed group quickly descended to clouds two through five.
Unexplained events have two qualities that amplify and extend their emotional impact. First, they strike us as rare and unusual. If I told you that my brother, my sister, and I were all born on the same day, you’d probably consider that a rare and unusual occurrence. Once I explained that we were triplets, you’d find it considerably less so. In fact, just about any explanation I offered (“By same day I meant we were all born on a Thursday” or “We were all delivered by cesarean section, so Mom and Dad timed our births for maximum tax benefits”) would tend to reduce the amazingness of the coincidence and make the event seem more probable. Explanations allow us to understand how and why an event happened, which immediately allows us to see how and why it might happen again. Indeed, whenever we say that something can’t happen — for example, mind reading or levitation or a law that limits the power of incumbents — we usually just mean that we’d have no way to explain it if it did. Unexplained events seem rare, and rare events naturally have a greater emotional impact than common events do. Weare awed by a solar eclipse but merely impressed by a sunset despite the fact that the latter is by far the more spectacular visual treat.
The second reason why unexplained events have a disproportionate emotional impact is that we are especially likely to keep thinking about them. People spontaneously try to explain events, and studies show that when people do not complete the things they set out to do, they are especially likely to think about and remember their unfinished business. Once we explain an event, we can fold it up like freshly washed laundry, put it away in memory’s drawer, and move on to the next one; but if an event defies explanation, it becomes a mystery or a conundrum — and if there’s one thing we all know about mysterious conundrums, it is that they generally refuse to stay in the back of our minds. Filmmakers and novelists often capitalize on this fact by fitting their narratives with mysterious endings, and research shows that people are, in fact, more likely to keep thinking about a movie when they can’t explain what happened to the main character. And if they liked the movie, this morsel of mystery causes them to remain happy longer.
Explanation robs events of their emotional impact because it makes them seem likely and allows us to stop thinking about them. Oddly enough, an explanation doesn’t actually have to explain anything to have these effects — it merely needs to seem as though it does. For instance, in one study, a researcher approached college students in the university library, handed them one of two cards with a dollar coin attached, then walked away. You’d probably agree that this is a curious event that begs for explanation. As figure 20 shows, both cards stated that the researcher was a member of the “Smile Society, which was devoted to “random acts of kindness.” But one card also contained two extra phrases- “Who are we?” and “Why do we do this?” These empty phrases didn’t really provide any new information, of course, but they made students feel as though the curious event had been explained (“Aha, now I understand why they gave me a dollar!”). About five minutes later, a different researcher approached the student and claimed to be doing a class project on “community thoughts and feelings.” The researcher asked the student to complete some survey questions, one of which was “How positive or negative are you feeling right now?” The results showed that those students who had received a card with the pseudo-explanatory phrases felt less happy than those who had received a card without them. Apparently, even a fake explanation can cause us to tuck an event away and move along to the next one.”
“Because we do not realize that we have generated a positive view of our current experience, we do not realize that we will do so again in the future. Not only does our naïveté cause us to overestimate the intensity and duration of our distress in the face of future adversity, but it also leads us to take actions that may undermine the conspiracy. We are more
likely to generate a positive and credible view of an action than an inaction, of a painful experience than of an annoying experience, of an unpleasant situation that we cannot escape than of one we can. And yet, we rarely choose action over inaction, pain over annoyance, and commitment over freedom. The processes by which we generate positive views are many: We pay more attention to favorable information, we surround ourselves with those who provide it, and we accept it uncritically. These tendencies make it easy for us to explain unpleasant experiences in ways that exonerate us and make us feel better. The price we pay for our irrepressible explanatory urge is that we often spoil our most pleasant experiences by making good sense of them.”
Memory
“Because standing in a line that is moving at a rapid pace, or even an average pace, is such a mind-numbingly ordinary experience that we don’t notice or remember it. Instead we just stand there bored, glancing at the tabloids, contemplating the Clark bars, and wondering what idiot decided that batteries of different sizes should be labeled with different numbers of A’s rather than with words we can actually remember such as large, medium, and small. As we do this, we rarely turn to our partners and say, “Have you noticed how normally this line is moving? I mean, it’s just so darned average that I’m feeling compelled to make notes so that I can charm others with the tale at a later date.” No, the line-moving experiences we remember are those in which the guy in the bright red hat who was originally standing behind us before he switched to the other line has made it out of the store and into his car before we’ve even made it to the cash register because the bovine grandmother ahead of us is waving her coupons at the clerk and debating the true meaning of the phrase expiration date. This doesn’t really happen that often, but because it is so memorable, we tend to think it does.”
“Because we don’t recognize the real reasons why these memories come quickly to mind, we mistakenly conclude that they are more common than they actually are. Similarly, awful train-missing incidents come quickly to mind not because they are common but because they are uncommon. But because we don’t recognize the real reasons why these awful episodes come quickly to mind, we mistakenly conclude that they are more common than they actually are. And indeed, when commuters were asked to make predictions about how they would feel if they missed their train that day, they mistakenly expected the experience to be much more inconvenient and frustrating than it likely would have been.
This tendency to recall and rely on unusual instances is one of the reasons why we so often repeat mistakes. When we think about last year’s family vacation we do not recruit a fair and representative sample of instances from our two-week tour of Idaho.”
“Because we tend to remember the best of times and the worst of times instead of the most likely of times, the wealth of experience that young people admire does not always pay clear dividends.”
“Most of us believe that men are less emotional than women (“She cried, he didn’t”), that men and women have different emotional reactions to similar events (“He was angry, she was sad”), and that women are particularly prone to negative emotions at particular points in their menstrual cycles (“She’s a bit irritable today, if you know what I mean”). As it turns out, there is little evidence for any of these beliefs — but that’s not the point. The point is that these beliefs are theories that can influence how we remember our own emotions. Consider:
- In one study, volunteers were asked to remember how they had felt a few months earlier, and the male and female volunteers remembered feeling equally intense emotions. Another group of volunteers was asked to remember how they had felt a month earlier, but before doing so, they were asked to think a bit about gender. When volunteers were prompted to think about gender, female volunteers remembered feeling more intense emotion and male volunteers remembered feeling less intense emotion.
- In one study, male and female volunteers became members of teams and played a game against an opposing team. Some volunteers immediately reported the emotions they had felt while playing the game, and others recalled their emotions a week later. Male and female volunteers did not differ in the kinds of emotions they reported. But a week later female volunteers recalled feeling more stereotypically feminine emotions (e.g., sympathy and guilt) and male volunteers recalled feeling more stereotypically masculine emotions (e.g., anger and pride).
- In one study, female volunteers kept diaries and made daily ratings of their feelings for four to six weeks. These ratings revealed that women’s emotions did not vary with the phase of their menstrual cycles. However, when the women were later asked to reread the diary entry for a particular day and remember how they had been feeling, they remembered feeling more negative emotion on the days on which they were menstruating.
It seems that our theories about how people of our gender usually feel can influence our memory of how we actually felt.”
“The theories that lead us to predict that an event will make us happy (“If Bush wins, I’ll be elated”) also lead us to remember that it did (“When Bush won, I was elated”), thereby eliminating evidence of their own inaccuracy. This makes it unusually difficult for us to discover that our predictions were wrong. We overestimate how happy we will be on our birthdays, we underestimate how happy we will be on Monday mornings, and we make these mundane but erroneous predictions again and again, despite their regular disconfirmation. Our inability to recall how we really felt is one of the reasons why our wealth of experience so often turns out to be a poverty of riches.”
Wealth and Family
“The production of wealth does not necessarily make individuals happy, but it does serve the needs of an economy, which serves the needs of a stable society, which serves as a network for the propagation of delusional beliefs about happiness and wealth. Economies thrive when individuals strive, but because individuals will only strive for their own happiness, it is essential that they mistakenly believe that producing and consuming are routes to personal well-being. Although words such as delusional may seem to suggest some sort of shadowy conspiracy orchestrated by a small group of men in dark suits, the belief-transmission game teaches us that the propagation of false beliefs does not require that anyone be trying to perpetrate a magnificent fraud on an innocent populace. There is no cabal at the top, no star chamber, no master manipulator whose clever program of indoctrination and propaganda has duped us all into believing that money can buy us love. Rather, this particular false belief is a super-replicator because holding it causes us to engage in the very activities that perpetuate it.”
“If we measure the actual satisfaction of people who have children, a very different story emerges. Couples generally start out quite happy in their marriages and then become progressively less satisfied over the course of their lives together, getting close to their original levels of satisfaction only when their children leave home. Despite what we read in the popular press, the only known symptom of “empty nest syndrome” is increased smiling. Interestingly, this pattern of satisfaction over the life cycle describes women (who are usually the primary caretakers of children) better than men. Careful studies of how women feel as they go about their daily activities show that they are less happy when taking care of their children than when eating, exercising, shopping, napping, or watching television. Indeed, looking after the kids appears to be only slightly more pleasant than doing housework.”
“If parenting is such difficult business, then why do we have such a rosy view of it? One reason is that we have been talking on the phone all day with society’s stockholders — our moms and uncles and personal trainers — who have been transmitting to us an idea that they believe to be true but whose accuracy is not the cause of its successful transmission. “Children bring happiness” is a super-replicator. The belief-transmission network of which we are a part cannot operate without a continuously replenished supply of people to do the transmitting, thus the belief that children are a source of happiness becomes a part of our cultural wisdom simply because the opposite belief unravels the fabric of any society that holds it. Indeed, people who believed that children
bring misery and despair–and who thus stopped having them — would put their belief-transmission network out of business in around fifty years, hence terminating the belief that terminated them. The Shakers were a utopian farming community that arose in the 1800s and at one time numbered about six thousand. They approved of children, but they did not approve of the natural act that creates them. Over the years, their strict belief in the importance of celibacy caused their network to contract, and today there are just a few elderly Shakers left, transmitting their doomsday belief to no one but themselves.
The belief-transmission game is rigged so that we must believe that children and money bring happiness, regardless of whether such beliefs are true. This doesn’t mean that we should all now quit our jobs and abandon our families. Rather, it means that while we believe we are raising children and earning paychecks to increase our share of happiness, we are actually doing these things for reasons beyond our ken. We are nodes in a social network that arises and falls by a logic of its own, which is why we continue to toil, continue to mate, and continue to be surprised when we do not experience all the joy we so gullibly anticipated.”
Conclusion
“If you believe (as I do) that people can generally say how they are feeling at the moment they are asked, then one way to make predictions about our own emotional futures is to find someone who is having the experience we are contemplating and ask them how they feel. Instead of remembering our past experience in order to simulate our future experience, perhaps we should simply ask other people to introspect on their inner states. Perhaps we should give up on remembering and imagining entirely and use other people as surrogates for our future selves.”
“This tendency to think of ourselves as better than others is not necessarily a manifestation of our unfettered narcissism but may instead be an instance of a more general tendency to think of ourselves as different from others — often for better but sometimes for worse. When people are asked about generosity, they claim to perform a greater number of generous acts than others do; but when they are asked about selfishness, they claim to perform a greater number of selfish acts than others do. When people are asked about their ability to perform an easy task, such as driving a car or riding a bike, they rate themselves as better than others; but when they are asked about their ability to perform a difficult task, such as juggling or playing chess, they rate themselves as worse than others. We don’t always see ourselves as superior, but we almost always see ourselves as unique. Even when we do precisely what others do, we tend to think that we’re doing it for unique reasons.”
