- Daniel Kahneman is an
internationally-renowned psychologist whose work
spans cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, and
the science of well-being. In recognition of his groundbreaking work on human judgment and decision-making, Kahneman received the 2002
Nobel Prize in economics. And as many of you know,
economics is a field that increasingly bases economic models on psychological models
of information processing. With his longtime
collaborator Amos Tversky, Kahneman laid the foundations for the new field of behavioral economics. And I wanna note that, incredibly
poignantly and graciously, in accepting the Nobel,
Kahneman acknowledged that this award really should have been for both himself and Tversky, but as you know, the Nobel
is not awarded posthumously, and it saddens me and
many others here today that Tversky can't be here to join in hearing Kahneman's talk. Kahneman received his BA in '54 from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, majoring in psychology
and minoring in math. He earned his PhD in psychology from the University of
California, Berkeley in 1961, just missing the opening of Tolman Hall, which opened the next year. So he spent his graduate career in the old life sciences building. He returned to Hebrew
University as a professor. He has also been a professor at the University of British Columbia, back here in our own psychology
department from '86 to '94, and since '93, he has been
at Princeton where he is currently the Eugene Higgins
professor of psychology. Also professor of psychology
and public affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Kahneman has received many awards, you can read about them on
the first page on the program. He's a member of the
National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, many
other elective societies. He has received the Distinguished Scientific
Contribution Award from the American
Psychological Association, with Amos Tversky back in 1982, the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists,
also with Tversky, the Hilgard Award for Lifetime Contributions to General Psychology, and many others, too
numerous to mention here. He holds honorary degrees
from many universities, including Harvard, the
University of Pennsylvania, and the Sorbonne. All of us in the psychology department are pleased today to share
Professor Kahneman with you as our former colleague and brought forth by our nomination of him and this selection by
the Hitchcock Committee so he could present to
us and visit with us and hold office hours on
campus for the last few days. The title of today's talk was Happiness: Living and Thinking About It, has been changed recently to Well-Being: Living and Thinking About It. I don't think is a bait and switch. We'll take well-being
as well as happiness. And now I'd like you to please welcome our honored guest,
Professor Daniel Kahneman. - Thank you. Well, well-being and happiness have both become rather
hot topics recently. New books are coming out all the time. Positive psychology is
very much in the news, and the term has come into the language. And the interest is not only
limited to psychologists, but is clearly interdisciplinary, and in particular, of particular
interest to me actually, is the fact that economists
have become interested, and some significant figures in economics have made significant
career bets on the topic. And I'll be describing the work, a collaboration with one of
these figures, Alan Krueger. Now, the interest in economics may be a reflection of
questions that have been raised in behavioral economics about
the assumption of rationality. Because, once that assumption was made, that agents are rational, with that assumption, and not
only through that assumption, economics generally showed
very little interest until recent years in anything that had to do with subjective
measures of anything, and in particular with
measures of well-being, and they had, I think,
two reasons for that. One is that, if people are rational, then measuring their happiness or their enjoyment of
consequences is superfluous, because you know that,
if they're rational, they're choosing what's best for them, and if they're choosing
what's best for them there is very little point
in measuring anything else. That is, you can go, as is
the tradition in economics, by measuring what people want and assume that what they want is what they are most likely to enjoy. The second objection of economics, and that one was formulated,
I think, about 100 years ago, is that measuring subjective
well-being is impossible, well, because it's subjective. And the only things that are
supposed to be measurable are behaviors, things that
anyone can observe objectively. I think both of these objections to the measurement of well-being are ill-placed and have been
questioned by psychologists. I mean, it's pretty clear
that there is a point in measuring and in distinguishing what people want from
what they experience, because, in fact, what people want is not always what they will enjoy. And it is also not the case, or it is also the case,
that we in fact can do a pretty good job of
measuring subjective states. And in recent years, I think, those methodological strictures on the conduct of research
have been dropped very largely. Now, what I'd like to do first is show you some of the major puzzles in the study of well-being. Okay, this is called
the Easterlin Paradox, and what it shows is income and happiness in the United States. This is the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as very happy, as a function of time between
the years 1946 and 1996, and you see two curves there, one curve that seems to be rising that simply is GDP per head, and the other curve is
the percentage of people, the curve that isn't going
anywhere in particular, is the percentage of people who describe themselves as very happy. Now this is really a problem, I think, because people do want to get rich. I mean, there is no question about it. They want to get richer, they want their standard
of living to increase. And yet, when everybody's
standard of living is increasing, as we see in this graph, quite steadily over the last 60 years, little if anything happens to well-being. And that is a deep puzzle, I think. And economists in general simply were paying no attention to this. In recent years, this has been
recognized as a difficulty, as something that needs
to be grappled with. Now, here is the emblematic
puzzle of well-being. This result describes, it's from the German socioeconomic panel, people are interviewed every year, one of the questions that they are asked is how satisfied they are with their life, and this is the percentage of people, I think, who describe
themselves as satisfied. No, that can't be it. But it's some score of life satisfaction, I don't remember the details now. And it's as a function of years before and after marriage. And, you know, I think this
sort of speaks for itself. You can get very similar
curves with different things. You know, widowhood actually behaves as pretty much the mirror image of that. Although recovery is a bit slower than recovery from the
happiness of marriage is. Especially for men. But you get similar results
on many other changes of life. You get an anticipation,
a change in anticipation, and then what looks like
fairly rapid adaptation, in many cases pretty close to
baseline, although not always. Okay, we need to understand that. What is actually happening here? And I think there is another puzzle that we want to add to this. And this is that if the curve
for marriage is like this, that is, you know, if we see
for most big changes in life that there is a transient change and then something that
looks like adaptation, why do we find this result surprising? Because the fact is, we
do find it surprising. And it is certainly the case that people, on the day of their, on their wedding day, are not anticipating this curve. There is, so here is something that is absolutely routine in our life and which is deeply counterintuitive. And why it is counterintuitive is, I think, by itself an important puzzle in the study of well-being. We need to understand
why a basic fact of life seems surprising to us
and stays surprising. This just shows how
surprising it is, actually. This is a study that an
undergraduate student did with me at Princeton some time ago. Survey participants who were asked to estimate the percentage of time that various classes of persons spend in good, neutral, or bad mood, so paraplegics, lottery winners, one month or one year after the event, and many other classes of people. And respondents were also asked if they knew a case personally. And what I'm going to
show you as the measure is percentage of good mood minus percentage of time in bad mood. So people assign percentages to these, we look at the difference. And so, if you know a paraplegic, and these people, so some of them knew a paraplegic personally
and others didn't, then they knew that one
month after the event, the situation is much worse than one year after the event. People who reported not
knowing a paraplegic seemed to be unaware or at
least completely insensitive to the difference between one month and one year after the event. Now this is really pretty dramatic, because, if you stop to think about it, it out to be salient that the response, you know, the emotional response to such an event cannot
last all that long, but people spontaneously don't do this. And I can tell you what I
believe is happening here. What is happening is that when people are asked the question how happy or miserable somebody is, lottery winner or a paraplegic, after x time after the event, what they do, instead
of thinking about this, they answer a much easier question. And the question is how miserable is a person
when they become a paraplegic or how happy is a person
when they win the lottery. This is something that we can imagine. We probably imagine it fairly
well, fairly accurately. And if we substitute this judgment for the judgment that is required, how happy will that
person be after a year, you get results like this. Very similar results for lottery winners. People who know a lottery winner know that there is a, you know,
euphoria at the beginning, one year later very little
is left of the euphoria. This is actually below average of people, there's 25 percent. And people who don't know a paraplegic don't seem to anticipate the leveling off or the change that will
occur after a year. So something deeply
counterintuitive is happening. We now have other results using, I'm just going to go
over this very quickly without going into the numbers. We ask about groups, for example, people whose
household income is above 100,000 and people whose household
income is below 20,000. And we know the results, because we have samples of people who
belong to these categories. The difference in mood, the actual difference in mood is small. It's about 12 percent in these units. The predicted difference is 32 percent. People greatly exaggerate
the weight of this event. One of my favorites is what do people believe
about what it's like to be a woman over 40 years of age? Now, you know, you would think that most of the people who answer
this question have mothers. And, you know, they would know that it's not all that bad to be over 40. And there is no difference, actually, in terms of reported mood, between women over 40 and below 40. But people do predict
quite a large difference. And by the way, young males in particular seem to think that being a woman over 40, you know, you might as well be dead. So, now, close supervision at work has a substantial effect
on mood at work in fact, but the effect is greatly overestimated when you try to do this. The effect of fringe benefits
is almost negligible, but substantially overestimated. So there is a phenomenon, and it's a phenomenon that
we'll want to explain, of why do we have the wrong intuitions about what will make us and makes other people happy or miserable? Now, so that's the second
puzzle of well-being. And the third puzzle of well-being is the enormous
differences among countries that have been reported. So this has been, there have
been hundreds of studies using similar questions across the globe, and this result is really
a fairly typical result. And you know, you can replicate
it survey after survey. There's a group of,
you have GDP per capita on the x axis and you have, in this case, the mean of the percentage of people report themselves very satisfied and very happy with their lives. Historically Protestant societies are up there on the right. The former communist societies
are down there on the left. And this has not changed
for the last 10 or 15 years, it is really a very stable
result, enormous differences. And you know, that, we
need to understand that. What on earth is happening here? It distinguishes the Danes, who are the world champions in happiness. Why are they so much happier than people, you know, in Lithuania or Latvia? So those are some of the puzzles. And I will try to deal with those puzzles in the remainder of this talk. Now, my own interest in well-being arose during my years in Berkeley. Actually, when I came to Berkeley, I was running an experiment on whether people can predict their future tastes. And we, just to describe the
nature of that experiment, which actually was quite popular
among students at the time, it was an experiment about
the consumption of ice cream, and we advertised it as such and we paid people to
come to the laboratory for, I think, eight
consecutive working days to have an experience, which
was always the same experience. They had a helping of
their favorite ice cream and they listened to a piece of Canadian rock music that I had selected. They rated their experience
after the first day, and they then predicted
what was going to happen eight days later, how they would rate the same experience eight days later. And there was a lot of
variation that we observed. That is, some people get sort
of addicted to the ice cream. You know, they had to come
on the same hour of the day to the same place to get that experience, and so they would get, you know, eager towards the appointed hour. Other people got sort of
sick of the whole thing. But the interesting thing is that people did not predict what was going to happen to them. That is, there was
essentially no correlation between people's individual predictions and their individual outcomes. People were not better at predicting what would happen to them than they were at predicting what would
happen to a stranger. And that was sort of surprising, because if people cannot really predict their tastes in such a very, you know, mundane kind of experience, how their tastes will
evolve with repetition, how can we make rational decisions about outcomes that are far in the future? If we cannot predict our tastes, rationality is indeed very
difficult to conceive of. Subsequent to those studies of prediction, we got into another question that at first seemed,
you know, a bit extreme. How good are people at
remembering past experiences? So people have an experience and then, that's the living, in my title, and then they remember that experience, they store that experience. They have a memory,
they store that memory. How good or how accurate, if you will, are memories of, I'll call
them hedonic experiences, experiences of pleasure or pain. Well it turns out, not
particularly good at all. So here is, in this case, well, that's a study of patients
undergoing a colonoscopy. A colonoscopy, I won't go into detail, but it's a procedure that
involved a tube up the gut. It now is commonly run
under general anesthesia, but at the time this study was run, most people had it without
any anesthesia at all. And it could get quite painful. Now that procedure is highly
variable in terms of duration. In the original sample of patients on which the study was conducted, I think the shortest
was about five minutes and the longest was about an hour. So there is a lot of variability
in how long it lasts. And what we did was very simple. We asked people every 60 seconds to tell us how much pain they
were experiencing right then. So there was somebody and they would ask. And now I'm going to
show you two patients. So this is Patient A
and this is Patient B. You can see here the profile
of the pain that they reported. And the question that I want to ask is how much did these patients suffer? Now I want you to notice that this is, as it were, an objective question. I am asking you to evaluate how much these patients suffered, assuming that they used the scale in roughly comparable ways. Or you know, if you want, you could have those two experiences of the same patient and I could ask you, on which of these occasions
did the patient suffer more? So that question is asked from the perspective of
an objective observer. And what it requires is the evaluation of the temporal profile of an experience. Utility is the term that, well it started in philosophy and it's been adopted in economics, to describe the value
of goods or episodes. So this is an objective utility. And what I mean by objective is we don't ask the patient to
provide a global evaluation. The patient provides a
moment by moment evaluation. We evaluate that. And most of us, I think, will say that Patient B suffered
more than Patient A. It's very easy to justify that. Patient B's colonoscopy
lasted two minutes, Patient A eight minutes, and every level of pain
that Patient A reported, Patient B had that and more. So Patient B suffered more. But we can ask a completely
different question. We can ask, how did the two
patients remember the episode? Which of the two patients
remembered the episode as worse? And let me show you again
what they looked like. This question is now asked from the perspective of
the experiencing subject. And here is a finding,
it's a very robust finding. It's not only about these
two patients, it generalizes. We've done many studies along those lines. Patient A actually keeps a much worse memory of the episode than Patient B. And the reason is straightforward. For Patient A, the episode ended at the moment of intense pain. And it turns out that if you look at how memories of such episodes are formed, well, they're not, they don't
integrate under the curve. This is not what is happening. It is not a sum, rolling sum of the pain that a person experiences,
that's not what happens. What happens is that what gets stored is an average of the pain
that was experienced. And it's a weighted average. And in that weighted average, two moments have particular weight, the peak pain that was
experienced and the end. And if you know the peak
and you know the end, you can predict with a
great deal of accuracy how people will evaluate
the experience as a whole. And there is one detail
you don't need to know, and this is how long
the colonoscopy lasted. Because when people provide
an overall evaluation, it turns out that that detail goes. In the memory representation, the colonoscopy is represented by sort of an average
moment, a moment of pain. And if it ended badly, then the memory is of relatively intense pain. Now it turns out that people not only remember things that way, they also, so that's the correlation of peak and end and those
are correlation values, and the duration of the procedure has essentially no effect on the ratings. It turns out that people make decisions that are based on such odd
memories that they store. So we ran an experiment that was, that was run, actually, at Berkeley. And in that experiment,
well let me describe it. On two trials separated by seven minutes, participants immerse a hand in cold water until instructed to remove it. That's called the cold press task. So you put your hand to
the wrist in cold water. And you can make it as
painful as you want. I mean, you can make
it very painful indeed if the water is very cold. This is kind of tolerable. Seven minutes after the second trial, they are called for third trial and are asked which of the two
trials they want to repeat. So they have one with their left hand, one with their right hand. And one of these trials is short, I'll call it the short trial,
the other is the long trial. The short trial is you spend 60 seconds in water at 14 degrees Celsius. And by the time you are done with that, you are reporting levels of pain that are eight or nine
on a 14-point scale. Quite substantial pain. Not overwhelming, not intolerable,
but people are in pain. The long experience, oh yes, and after 60
seconds, the experimenter tells you take your hand out, and there is a warm towel waiting for you. The long experience, which
you have with the other hand, is the following, you have 60 seconds at 14 degrees
Celsius, exactly the same, but at the end of the 60 seconds, the experimenter doesn't say anything. The experimenter opens a valve which lets in some water
that is slightly warmer, so that over the next 30 seconds the water heats up, if you
will, to 15 degrees Celsius. Still painfully cold, but a little less painful
than it was initially. So now we have a clear prediction
from what I said earlier. Because the average of
peak pain and end pain is now lower for the longer experience. And the question is which of the two experiences
would people choose to repeat? And 65 to 80 percent, depending on conditions and how you count, prefer the long experience
over the short experience. So people expose themselves to pain that they really don't need
to expose themselves to. They don't do it to be brave, they don't do it to impress anyone. It is simply that the memory they stored is worse when the experience
ended at a high level of pain than when the experience
ended more gently. Although the overall amount
of pain that people suffered is higher in the second case. So that creates, you know,
this is telling us something. This is telling us that
there is a difference between living and thinking about it or between living and remembering it. Because if you think about the experience, clearly the longer experience is worse. But if you think of the
memory that people keep, then the longer experience
is actually better. It is not as bad. And notice that the
choices that people make are guided by their memory. They're not guided by the
reality of the experience. They are guided, in this case, by what I would describe
as an inaccurate memory of what actually happened to them. So, there have been many
experiments of that kind, and that's the background, actually, for my interest in the
study of well-being. So I want to distinguish two notions, if you will. I think of it in terms of two selves. There is an experiencing self. That's the one that's doing
the living moment to moment. And then there is a
remembering, evaluating self. So that's the one that answers
question like how was it? You know, how was this experience? How was your vacation? How's your life these days? This is a very different
person that we're asking. They're not necessarily the same. So some, you know, someone is
doing the living at all times, and then occasionally we stop
and think about our life. And memories are all we get
to keep from the living. So the experiencing self, you know, just exists second by second and it's a fleeting
existence and it's gone. So the only self that has permanence is the remembering self. But the remembering self need not be right about what actually happened. The remembering self can have, you know, can have memories
that are quite inaccurate. Now it turned out, when, you know, I was interested by
this, it turned out that research on well-being
is almost exclusively dominated by studies of
the remembering self. So people get asked questions such as how happy are you with
your life these days? Or, here are some examples. How satisfied are you with your
life as a whole these days? Would you say that these days you are very happy, pretty happy, or not so happy? Millions of people have
been asked these questions. These are questions to
the remembering self. But now, how would we go about measuring the happiness of the experiencing self? Well it turns out there
are methods for doing that, and in particular a method
invented by Csikszentmihalyi, which is called experience sampling. And the way that experience sampling would be done these days is participants carry a palm-top,
you know, or cell phone, it beeps several times a day
at unpredictable intervals, and then you're supposed to take it out and there is a menu of questions, and the questions basically
ask you where are you, you know, offering a
menu of possibilities, what are you doing, offering
a menu of possibilities, and how do you feel. And there is a list of feelings and you rate the
intensity of your feeling. That is, you know, there
is memory involved, but clearly the memory
demands are very different in experience sampling and
in the life study questions. Basically you're asked,
how do you feel right now? And the assumption is that you are likely to get quite different results. So I'm interested in the
difference, if you will, between the experiencing self
and the remembering self. And this is what I've been studying for the better part of the last 10 years. Now I haven't been studying this alone. I have a whole team. In our studies, there
is a philosophical issue that, I suppose, I have been raising, and I'm not going to answer it. Which of the two matters more? That is, if they diverge, if the experiencing self, you know, has one evaluation of life, if you will, and the remembering self has another, which should we cater to? So those are the extensions. We have contradictory intuitions about what happiness and
well-being is, by the way. Consider an individual that
is always in a good mood, but when you ask him, he
says that his life was wasted because he didn't go to college. Now would we say that this person is high or low in well-being? If we look at the mood, the
mood is almost always good. But when the person thinks about his life, he's not happy with it. Compare that to an individual who rarely smiles but
lives a productive life and says he's achieving his goals. Who of those two, we would
say, has higher well-being? And it really, I think
most people, by the way, on this question, would
say the second individual has higher well-being than the first, but clearly it's debatable. We have linguistic intuitions that are not entirely consistent. A question in which I've been
personally quite interested is are people happier in
California than elsewhere? Now, and you know, it was highly relevant when we went from California to Princeton. There were different opinions in my family about this question. Now, when you ask this question, what do you have in mind? Do we ask whether Californians are more satisfied with their lives or do we ask, are Californians basically more cheerful and in a better mood? And in this case, I think unquestionably, the interpretation of this
question has to do with mood. It has to do with the experiencing self and not with the remembering self. So there is something to be explored. So about six years ago I started work on measuring the happiness
of the experiencing self with a group of collaborators. Alan Krueger is my colleague,
an economist at Princeton. The rest are psychologists. Clause Fischler is a sociologist in Paris with whom we did a
study that I'll describe comparing happiness in France
and in the United States. And the method that we used, we call that the day
reconstruction method, and I won't go into details. But basically we bring people, and so far we've studied only women, we've studied thousands of them but we haven't studied men, although study of men is ongoing now. Participants come to a central place. That's the way that the data
I'll describe is collected. And they're asked to remember yesterday, to think about yesterday in detail and to reconstruct yesterday
as a sequence of episodes. They're asked to think of it as a film and take scenes, label those scenes. And they, in general, people create about 15, 17 episodes for a day. And then, in a subsequent questionnaire, they're asked to describe
each of these episodes. Now it turns out that,
and we have evidence that I won't go over in detail, this procedure is pretty good
to cause actual reliving. That is, people who are led in this way to relive the day do a pretty good job of recovering their actual
emotional experience. There are other data indicating that and we find the same. Now, the day reconstruction method has advantages because it's a lot more practical than experience sampling. You can get data much more easily. And now there are variations of the day reconstruction method. It's being used in telephone surveys and it's being used
internationally in various formats. But that's the general idea and those are the data that we collected. Now, let me tell you where I was when we started this study. I mean, it hasn't happened to me, during my career, I think, this particular topic is the one where I have changed my mind or I have been forced to change my mind or I've been wrong simply, more often thinking about well-being than in thinking about
almost anything else. So I can tell you that when
I was young and foolish, and by that I mean about eight years ago, I thought that really what
matters is the experiencing self, that, you know, who cares
about the remembering self, it's just a story that we're telling. And I thought, we can neglect that. If we really succeed in
studying the experiencing self, then we'll have the real
answer to people's well-being. And now that I am somewhat more mature, I have accepted a different model. And the reason I have had to accept it is because people just don't go along with the idea that the experiencing self is really the end all and be all. It turns out that people have
a narrative of their life, they have a story of their life, they care a great deal about that story, they make decisions for that story, they make choices to keep that
story good or to improve it. In short, people care a great deal and take actions that are based on anticipated memories
and on evaluations. So you can't just look
at ongoing experience. But I would argue that it would also be a mistake to ignore ongoing experience. So I've sort of ended up with a hybrid model that nobody likes, where I keep both elements. Experienced happiness is, you know, what happens to the experiencing self, and life satisfaction, which is the reports of the
remembering, evaluating self. And those two are clearly
distinct, that we're finding. And I do not answer the
philosophical questions of which of them matters more. I'm currently interested
in the descriptive task of figuring out what produces
experienced happiness and what produces reported
life satisfaction. And how it varies. Now, there are some important differences depending on whether you focus on experienced happiness or
on reported life satisfaction, and perhaps the most
significant is the role of time. Because, if life is a story,
if life is a narrative, and we're evaluating the
narrative of our life, time is relatively
insignificant in narratives. Narratives and stories
go from event to event, from change to change. Duration really doesn't matter very much. But if you focus on experience, then the duration of experiences is, in fact, quite critical. So, from my point of view, a day in which somebody, you know, just about everyone prefers
socializing over commuting, and I would say that a day on which you socialized more and
commuted less is a better day, regardless of how you think about that day at the end of the day. That is, in terms of
the experiencing self, just changing the duration,
changing the allocation of time makes a great deal of difference. And we have gone into, we've proposed a measure for this. And let me introduce that measure. We call this the U Index,
U for unpleasantness. And the U Index is simply
the proportion of time that an individual or a group spend in an unpleasant emotional state. The way that we do this is
actually quite straightforward. So in the DRM, the day
reconstruction method, people describe one episode after another, they rate all sorts of feelings, some of them positive,
some of them negative, and we count the amount
of time during the day in which the most intense
emotion is negative. It could be anger, it could be depression, it could be sadness, I
think we have several. Or tension. And if it is strictly more intense than any positive emotion, we call that a negative moment. And we look at that index, it's an index that has some
interesting properties, because you can compare individuals, you can compare groups, so that you can ask about a population. What percentage of time
did that population spend in a negative emotional state? It's a meaningful question. So let me give you a few miscellaneous facts about the U Index. Among the American women
that we have studied, the average is 18 percent. It's 21 percent on weekdays,
it's 14 percent on weekends. People do more things they like doing on weekends and on weekdays. And that's a very striking result. The distribution of misery, if you will, is extraordinarily unequal. That is, when you look at
who does the suffering, you know, in a large group of people, it's a relatively small number of people who do the bulk of the suffering. That is, the top 10 percent of people account for about 40 percent or over of the total amount, the total time spent by a group in a
negative emotional state. That, by the way, is a result that has, in my view, immediately
policy implications, when we encountered that. And the policy implications are that, probably, there should be
a focus on mental illness, and there should be a focus on misery. That is, what are the
sources of intense misery? This is something that you get to because that U Index is
actually an interesting measure, that is has some metric properties, that it makes sense to say that we have reduced the time that
people spend suffering by five percent or 10 percent. If we achieved that change, we have achieved something
for the population. That is, I think, quite meaningful. Okay. Another difference between, another thing we need to think about when we think about the experiencing self and the remembering self
and their well-being is the role of attention. What do we focus on when
we think about our life? That is, as I've said occasionally, you think about your
life and you evaluate it. What are you thinking about then? And compare that to what
controls the quality of your emotional experience ongoing, when you're not asking
yourself general questions, you're just living. So what does the remembering
self focus on or attend to? What does the experiencing self attend to? Do those match? And it turns out they don't. Norbert Schwarz, one of my
colleagues in this group, has a lovely experiment in which he asks people a very simple question, how much pleasure do
you get from your car? And, you know, it's a question
that people can answer. And then he asks them a lot
of details about their car so that he can look up the Blue Book value of the individual's car. And then he can correlate the amount of pleasure that people get from their car with the Blue Book value. And there is a correlation. It's not very high, but it's like .35, it's a very respectable correlation. Now there's something else you can do. You can ask people, think of your commute this morning, how much did you enjoy
your commute this morning? And you can correlate that with the Blue Book value of the car. And the correlation is zero. And if you stop to think about it, when do you get pleasure from your car? Well the answer is, when
you're thinking about your car. And by and large, we don't spend much time thinking about our car. Now, the same question, I think, explains what happens about California. It turns out that people both
in California and elsewhere think that people are
happier in California. To the best of, you know, the best evidence available
doesn't support this. But what happens is that when you think about living in California, you are going to think about what distinguishes life in
California from elsewhere. For many people who are not in California, it's the climate. And clearly, you know,
the climate is better here than it is, you know, in Cleveland. And people in Cleveland
really despise their climate. I mean, it is not that, you
know, the have adapted to it. They haven't adapted to it, they hate it. But the point is, most of the time this is not what they focus on. They're thinking about other things. So the amount of time, being a Californian is
a part-time situation. We rarely think about the advantages of living in California. Now we do a fair amount of commuting. We have a house here. So we do actually think about California when we live that experience. But by and large, for
people who live here, that's not a very salient
part of their life. And the climate is not a very
salient part of their life. So asking the issue about
what people focus on, what people think about when they live and when
they think about their life is sort of interesting. And it has implications for consumption. Because you can think of different types of consumption goods. For example, you know,
a large refrigerator, a large car, a large house, et cetera. Those are goods that people think are going to make a very large
difference in their life. We call that a focusing illusion. People exaggerate the importance that this is going to have in their life. Now what's happening
here is the following. There are different kinds
of consumption goods. There are consumption goods
such as a refrigerator that you're completely unaware of unless, you know, something happens to
it and it stops functioning. There are other goods, like
interactions with friends, like family feasts, that, when
you are consuming that good, you are consuming it consciously. You're aware of it. So the amount of discrepancy between the expectation or the amount of pleasure that we get from our house
when we think about our house and the amount of
pleasure we actually get, that may not be the same for
different kinds of goods. We call that the focusing illusion, and I have, that's the only Chinese cookie kind of thing that I've ever
composed, so I'm proud of it. But it says that nothing in life matters quite as much as you think it does while you are thinking about it. You can parse this. The idea is that merely
thinking about something causes you to exaggerate its importance. And we have massive evidence
that this is the case. So notice, by the way,
that what this means is that when people are
making life decisions, they are very likely
basing their decisions on a mistake about the
relative importance, a mistaken view of the importance of what they are deciding
on to their actual welfare. Everything that we decide on because of the focusing illusion tends to be, to have
exaggerated importance. Okay. Now, I have a more provocative
statement about this, and that's to do with the
issue of meaning in life. Clearly a meaningful life is something that people care about very much. And you know, when you ask people whether they would rather
have a meaningful life, you know, or pleasure from food, they will, you know, without hesitation tell you that a meaningful
life is more important. What is sort of interesting is that we don't find very much meaning in our studies of actual experience. Meaning is something that happens when people think about
their life, mostly. And it, by the way, you also need to encourage them to think
about a meaningful life. There are focusing illusions
that are quite significant and that we need to think about. And the possibility that
meaning is one of them is an interesting one. Okay. Now let me just show you what are the implications of this, then I'll go very quickly
through some data. The distinction between experiencing self and remembering self can lead
us to ask questions about what is the interpretation of this marriage graph that we saw earlier? And the question I'm asking is, if we measure the experiencing self, would the experiencing self adapt along the red curve
or along the blue curve? Would the experiencing self
adapt faster or more slowly than the remembering self who
is evaluating satisfaction? And I can tell you, I used to think that it's the red curve when
we started six years ago. It isn't, it's very likely
to be the blue curve, that experience actually
adapts even faster in many cases, and possibly, I'll give you some evidence
about this if I can do it. Okay. We can also ask the same question about national differences. Are they only in evaluation or are they in the experience as well? Okay. We did a study in two cities, Columbus, Ohio and Rennes in
France, a city in Brittany. 800 women in each city
described one day in their life. This is how they spend their time. Engaged leisure, I mean, those categories are pretty self-explanatory. By and large, quite similar, the way they spend their
time, except for eating. And by the way, it is not, what we do here is we ask people when they check multiple activities to indicate what is the focal activity. And what happens is American women spend almost as much time
eating as French women, but they don't think about it. That is, they check something
else as more important, like driving or speaking on the phone. The French women, by and large, when they eat, that's what they're doing. Which is probably a good thing for them. But aside from that,
it's not very surprising. Here is, you know, the
ranking of activities. And there are some things
that are worth pointing out. Not very surprising, but you know, making love is much more
pleasant than commuting, which is down there. Play is very good. By and large, the ranking of activities in the two cities is very similar, with one very interesting exception. That's child care. French women enjoy their children way more than American women do. American mothers spend more time with their children and enjoy it less. And, you know, what the reasons are and what the mechanics are, I don't know, but it's very clear, and we
have other evidence for that, that the costs of being
a mother are higher in the United States
than they are in France. Okay. That just repeats or shows you, you know, the U Index
for different activities. And engaged leisure is very good. And work and commute are pretty bad. So no surprises here. Now, we're happier on
weekends, I told you earlier. And that's straightforward. We're happier on weekends
because we use time differently. We shift time from
activities we don't like to activities we like better. There's just no particular mystery here. We can compare who is happier, women in France or women
in the United States, and the answer is women in
France, slightly happier. Not by a lot, but you know, the difference between 18 percent U Index and 16 percent U Index, don't knock it, that's a substantial difference in terms of the overall
amount that people suffer. In Denmark it seems to
be about 13 percent, for 800 women in Denmark. Now I want to go back
to the marriage issue. I promised you a solution to
the question of adaptation, or a tentative solution. So here is my attempt. We compared time use of married women and unmarried women in our sample. Now, his could be done
better statistically, but it's good enough as we have it. So we look at has a mate
or don't have a mate, so it's not actual marriage,
but lives with someone. Now obviously, people who have a mate spend much less time alone,
and that's a good thing, because, you know,
being alone is not good. They spend more time with
immediate nuclear family. That's okay. Not great, but okay. They spend a lot less time with friends. That goes from 16
percent to three percent. They spend significantly more time doing things they don't like doing. And they spend significantly less time on discretionary
activities, on just leisure. Now when you look at the balance of good and bad in those
descriptions of time use, it pretty much is a wash. There is no mystery why married women are not all that happier than
single women in steady state. They live different lives and there are costs and
benefits to being married in terms of the kinds
of things that they do, and I'm talking strictly about
the experiencing self here. Being married is quite good. Having a mate is quite
good for life satisfaction. But in terms of experience,
it's much more complicated. So I don't think it's a mystery, what happens a few years before marriage and a few years after marriage, that those levels are pretty similar. I think that what is interesting
and what is a mystery is, you know, why are people
so excited about marriage? If, you know, if this is
what's going to happen to them. And I think there is, of
course, a pretty good answer. Most of the time in the
way that we live normally, what determines how happy we
are in terms of experience is primarily our personality. There is no question about it, some people are born to
be happier than others. It's largely genetic. But beyond personality, there is an enormous effect of context. So people are happier, as we see, socializing than working, socializing than commuting, and so on. But there are periods in life during which it is not the context that determines your happiness. So in a period when, you know, somebody's gloriously in love, they can be very happy
while stuck in traffic. That's completely possible. And people who are depressed are going to be miserable
in a family feast. So there are periods and there are persons whose happiness, experienced happiness, is not determined by the context, it's determined endogenously by things that are
happening in their head. And what happens around marriage is probably in large
part an effect like that. It's an effect of attention. People are spending much more time attending to things that make them happy and relatively less time attending to their immediate context. So they are happier while they drive and they are happier in general, because their attention
is temporarily diverted. So the role of attention in experience is absolutely critical in understanding what is happening in this context and in explaining this mystery. Okay, I think I have kept my promise, almost kept my promise. I'll tell you just in a word about international differences. Turns out I was wrong there again. I thought that I knew that there are those large international differences in the evaluative self,
the remembered self. You know, life satisfaction. I was not expecting to find very large differences in actual emotion. But I'm now looking at the data set collected by Gallup,
they have a world poll in which they have asked, you know, national samples in
well over 100 countries a question such as think about yesterday, did you spend a lot of time yesterday feeling, say, depression,
or feeling enjoyment? Now let me tell you some of the results, and I find them stunning and I don't understand
where they come from. The Danes, the Swiss, the Dutch report being depressed
about three or four percent, three or four percent of people report that they were
depressed the day before. The Americans, the Greeks, the Indians report about 14 percent. The Palestinians report 30 percent. The Armenians report close to 50 percent. There are enormous differences. There are similar
differences in the number of people who report
that they smiled a lot. Well they're somewhat smaller,
but in the same direction. About 80 percent of the Danes, and in this case also the Americans, report that they smiled a lot yesterday. 50 percent of Palestinians say
they smiled a lot yesterday. So national circumstances
have a big effect not only on people's evaluation, they have a big effect on emotional life. And this is a topic that
deserves to be studied and it's going to be studied, but I think we don't understand it yet. I've gone a bit too long, I apologize. Thank you.
