We can get our own feedback, but we can also look to the experiences of others. Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, says that one of the lessons happiness research teaches us is that the experiences of other people like you are a useful guide to the impact of an event on you, and often a much more useful guide than your own predictions about the impact of that event. I agree with him.
Imagine you are about to go on a date. What would you rather know about your date ahead of time — physical features, age, height, hometown, and favourite sport, or how a stranger felt when they met your date on a previous occasion? I’m guessing you would want the personal information, and most other people do, too. But women who were given personal information made worse forecasts about how they would feel when they met a man than when they were given reports of how another woman felt when she met him — even though they did not personally know the other woman who was providing the report.
The key challenge is to know when your experiences will mirror those of other people and when yours will be different because you have a different set of preferences. I know that you think you are special — and you are, of course — but, at least in how you react to events, just not as special as you think. Many of the experiences you have will be quite similar to the experiences of others, and probably more similar, more often, than you would imagine.
You could also solicit the advice of other people about your happiness, particularly since the evidence suggests that your reports of your own happiness tend to correlate quite well with other people’s reports of your happiness. In Estonia, a selection of visitors to GPs and hospitals nominated someone who knew them well (mostly spouses but also friends and other family members) to predict their overall happiness on a 0 to 10 scale. The correlation between the self-reported scores and the predictions made by others was 0.75. Similar results have been found in other studies using different measures of happiness.
When your own mistaken desires for outcomes other than happiness conflict with your experiences of pleasure and purpose, other people can help you to refocus on what really matters. They might quite like the idea of you being the next Lady Gaga but also see, more clearly than you can, just how miserable the process of getting there is making you on a day-to-day basis.
Other people may also be well placed to help you overcome mistaken projections. Partly, this is because they will generally be less committed to your present self than you are; they will instead pay more attention to the consequences for you in the longer term. You will focus mostly on what becoming married, rich, or disabled will be like when you will be a newlywed, newly rich, or newly disabled for only a short time. Those close to you will be more inclined to consider what being married, rich, or disabled will be like, which lasts much longer and therefore more greatly affects your sentiments of pleasure and purpose.
When making a decision, you can use your friends to help you avoid focusing effects and the pitfalls of distinction bias, by asking them to imagine the consequences of your decision and not to pay attention to the decision itself. Say you have just been offered an attractive new job with the only anticipated downside being a longer commute. What will you think about as you decide whether or not to take the new job? Most likely you’ll mistakenly consider the first couple of days or so when you are as excited as you ever will be about going into work, and when you are still making a direct comparison between your new job and the old one. So you could get those close to you to consider the next couple of months, when the pain of changing trains or being stuck in a traffic jam kicks in.
It is vital that you ask the right questions in order to more accurately get at the likely effects of your decision on your happiness. So don’t ask your friends, “What do you think about me taking the new job?” where the focus of attention will be on differences between the jobs that may not show up in the experiences of your decision. Instead ask, “How do you think my day-to-day life will be in a couple of months if I take the new job?”
Overall, it is entirely possible that other people might not be quite as susceptible to projection bias on your behalf as you are for yourself. In particular, your family and friends will be much more detached from your own current feelings about a decision. You might have fallen in love with a man, a car, or a house, and you would let this cloud your decision about whether to jump in, but your friends can adopt — or at least be explicitly asked to adopt — a “cooler” perspective on the likely consequences of your decision.
Recall also from our discussion of mistaken beliefs that you are likely to bring your attitudes in line with your behaviour rather than vice versa. If you’re thinking about getting married, you probably have a favourable attitude toward the person you are considering tying the knot with. You bring your attitude toward making a long-term commitment to that person in line with your behaviour of already being in a committed relationship with that person. Ask your friend how being married might turn out and they could remind you how your prospective partner spends all their time at the office and that you will hardly see them (which might be a good thing, of course). To reiterate, the way you frame the question really matters. Don’t ask “Should I get married?” but rather “What will being married be like?”
Far from being a weakness, it is a sign of strength to ask others for opinions about your behaviour and your happiness. Just think how clearly you can see the mistakes others are making: they can see your mistakes just as clearly. Moreover, the conversations you have with other people about your and their happiness can be pleasurable and purposeful in themselves.
People in a boat similar to yours, or who know people that are, are ideally suited to help you answer these questions. You probably wouldn’t ask your dentist for advice about buying a car. So you won’t want to ask someone who lives in Miami if you’d be happy in Alaska. Just as you need to ask someone who has recently purchased a car for advice before doing so yourself, you need to ask someone who has lived in Alaska, or knows someone who has, if you’d like it there. The more similar this person is to you in terms of values, beliefs, and experiences, the better the person will be able to advise you about your happiness. People like you affect what you do and they might also be a good guide to how you will feel.
Overall, other people are an excellent guide to how far you are away from allocating your attention in ways that bring you the most pleasure and purpose. They can help you pay closer attention to your experiences in life. Other people are likely to arrive more quickly at the conclusion that perhaps you should stop doing something that is making you miserable, while you cling to the often mistaken belief that one day it will get better.
Happiness by Design is available on Amazon UK and Amazon US.