We frequently make mistakes about how much something will make us happy, even when we are convinced that happiness is all there is. We make mistakes about our future happiness when we pay undue attention to (a) the effects of a change; (b) the differences between two options; (c) current feelings; or (d) unrepresentative snapshots of past experiences.
How much happier would you be if you won a load of money? A lot happier, right? Well, only if you spent a great deal of time thinking about how much happier you are with all that cash. When you think about the impact of anything, good or bad, you are basically asking yourself how much it matters when you are paying attention to it, and so you think it matters a lot – and typically a lot more than it will actually matter when you experience it in your life, where your attention will flit around rather than remaining focused on it. This is the focusing effect in action. The fortune cookie maxim here is, “Nothing is quite as important as you think it is while you’re thinking about it.”
Adam Smith, the founding father of economics, recognised the pervasiveness of focusing effects: “The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another.” You think that something will greatly affect your happiness because you are focusing attention on it. It is very hard to predict how much something will matter when you are not paying attention to it. It is not surprising, then, that we are all prone to make mistakes about what will continue to grab our attention and what will not.
Typically in your day-to-day life, you are not just making predictions about how one thing will affect you, but you are making a choice between two or more options. In so doing, you are prone to mistaking the relative impact of those choices. And again the problem lies in where your attention is directed – in this case, what is attention-grabbing in the choice itself as compared to attention-grabbing in the consequences of that choice. Distinction bias is the tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately. So whenever you are making a choice – about which ice cream to buy, say, or which job to take – you tend to look at what is different about the options instead of paying attention to how you will actually experience your final decision.
Consider deciding whether or not you should buy that house you just looked at. This choice involves a joint evaluation of your current house against the new one. The new one is bigger, so you go for it. But its bigness relative to your current house will soon not matter that much once you move in (unless your kids didn’t have their own bedrooms and now do). The size of any house is constant and not especially interesting from an attentional point of view. In your experience of the new house, you are much more likely to be affected by the noise outside at night; a stimulus that will continue to grab your attention on a regular basis. You’ll quickly adapt to the space for the boxes but not to the noise of the foxes.
Buying a house is a nice example of a further element of mistaken projections; namely, our proclivity to allow how we feel now to affect how we imagine feeling in the future. I simply love that house, so how could I not love living there? Projection bias is what behavioural scientists call the scenario when we mistakenly use our current feelings to project how we will feel in the future.
Your future feelings will ebb and flow in ways that your current feelings do not appear to account for. Take the extreme but resonant case of 168 terminally ill cancer patients (who were no longer seeking treatment) voluntarily admitted to the Riverview Health Centre Palliative Care Unit in Winnipeg, Canada, from 1993 to 1995. Their will to live was shown to vary by about sixty points on a hundred-point scale from “complete will to live” to “no will to live” over the course of a month, and by about thirty points over twelve hours. These huge differences can be explained by how the patients felt at the moment that they were asked the question.
In less stark scenarios, think about how your feelings now guide your decisions. Do you always say yes when asked out, and then wonder why you’re so bored on dates? Does an early Sunday brunch with your friends sound like a good idea on Friday night but not from the comfort of your bed come Sunday morning? Did you wind up enjoying going out for an evening bike ride even though it was hard to pull yourself away from the TV? Implicit in many of your decisions is the assumption that your current sentiments of pleasure and purpose, or misery and futility, will carry over.
Not only do we make poor projections into the future, but we are also prone to misremembering the fullness of a past experience. Take a second to recall your last holiday. How much did you enjoy it? Would you go back again? If you are anything like other people, two factors will explain your answers: the peak moment of pleasure or pain and the final moment of pleasure or pain. This is known as the peak-end effect. Further, your overall assessment of an experience doesn’t even pay that much attention to how long it lasted. This is known as duration neglect.
Your memories, even the most recent ones, are etched with extremity and recency at the expense of duration. They are imperfect guides to the flow of past experiences but they do determine how you feel about the past and, crucially, they drive your future behaviour. Think about your favourite films. You’d be hard-pressed to tell me how long each one lasted, but you’ll certainly remember your favourite scene and most likely the final one, too. That’s why screenwriters or playwrights will often spend a great deal of time making the last scene full of sparks and emotion. The whole film might be rubbish, but if the finale is genuinely good and memorable you’ll most likely recall the whole film as having been good. The overall happiness you get from the film is what you experience while watching it and what you draw down as memories of the experience afterward. In other words, overall happiness comes from all the sentiments you experience as a result of it.
The takeaway from this is that the duration of an event might be less important than how the event ended if the ending plays a prominent part in your future recollections of the event. Some of the best nights out may have been short but ended very sweetly, and these may be the ones you recall most later on. So how the event ended might be more important than how long the event lasted if you draw more on your memories of the ending of the event than on your memories of the rest of it – which we often do, of course.
Happiness by Design is available on Amazon UK and Amazon US.