And even when decisions don’t turn out badly, it is often appropriate and important to experience and acknowledge regret. If you decide to take a job 2,500 miles away from your family, it is appropriate to regret having been put in the position of trading off a good job opportunity against family ties, even if the decision works out well. The mere fact that such trade-offs have to be made is regrettable. And to acknowledge the fact of tragic choices is merely to give the sacrifices entailed in a choice their due.
Still, for people who are so plagued by regret that they can’t let go of decisions in the past and have enormous difficulty making decisions in the present, taking steps to reduce regret could be extremely beneficial to their well-being.
In Chapter 11, we will discuss a general approach to coping with a world of choice, and many of these methods have the direct effect of diminishing our tendency to regret.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Why Decisions Disappoint: The Problem of Adaptation
WHILE REGRET AND OPPORTUNITY COSTS CAN FOCUS OUR ATTENTION on what we’ve passed up, there is also plenty of room for dissatisfaction with the options that we actually choose.
Because of a ubiquitous feature of human psychology, very little in life turns out quite as good as we expect it will be. After much anguish, you might decide to buy a Lexus, and you try to put all the attractions of other makes out of your mind. But once you’re driving your new car, the experience falls just a little bit flat. You’re hit with a double whammy—regret about what you didn’t choose, and disappointment with what you did.
This ubiquitous feature of human psychology is a process known as adaptation. Simply put, we get used to things, and then we start to take them for granted. My first desktop computer had 8K of memory, loaded programs by cassette tape (it took five minutes to load a simple program), and was anything but user-friendly. I loved it and all the things it enabled me to do. Last year I dumped a computer with several thousand times that much speed and capacity because it was too clunky to meet my needs. What I do with my computer hasn’t changed all that much over the years. But what I expect it to do for me has. When I first got cable TV, I was ecstatic about the reception and excited about all the choices it provided (many fewer than today). Now I moan when the cable goes out and I complain about the paucity of attractive programs. When it first became possible to get a wide variety of fruits and vegetables at all times of year, I thought I’d found heaven. Now I take this year-round bounty for granted and get annoyed if the nectarines from Israel or Peru that I can buy in February aren’t sweet and juicy. I got used to—adapted to—each of these sources of pleasure, and they stopped being sources of pleasure.
Because of adaptation, enthusiasm about positive experiences doesn’t sustain itself. And what’s worse, people seem generally unable to anticipate that this process of adaptation will take place. The waning of pleasure or enjoyment over time always seems to come as an unpleasant surprise.
Researchers have known about and studied adaptation for many years, but for the most part they emphasized perceptual adaptation—decreased responsiveness to sights, sounds, odors and the like as people continue to experience them. The idea is that human beings, like virtually all other animals, respond less and less to any given environmental event as the event persists. A small-town resident who visits Manhattan is overwhelmed by all that is going on. A New Yorker, thoroughly adapted to the city’s hyperstimulation, is oblivious to it.
In the same way that we each have our own internal thermometer for registering sensation, we each have a “pleasure thermometer,” that runs from negative (unpleasant), through neutral, to pleasant. When we experience something good, our pleasure “temperature” goes up, and when we experience something bad, it goes down. But then we adapt. In this case it is hedonic adaptation, or adaptation to pleasure. An experience that boosts our “hedonic” or pleasure temperature by say 20 degrees at the first encounter may boost it by only 15 degrees the next time, by 10 degrees the time after that, and eventually it may stop boosting it at all.
Imagine yourself out running errands on a hot, humid summer day. After several hours of sweating in the heat, you return home to your air-conditioned house. The feeling of the cool, dry air enveloping you is spectacular. At first it makes you feel revived, invigorated, almost ecstatic. But as time passes, the intense pleasure wanes, replaced by a feeling of simple comfort. While you don’t feel hot, sticky, and tired, you don’t feel cool and energized either. In fact, you don’t feel much of anything. You’ve gotten so accustomed to the air-conditioning that you don’t even notice it. That is, you don’t notice it until you leave it to go back out into the heat a while later. Now the heat hits you like a blast from an open oven, and you notice the air-conditioning that you no longer have.
In 1973, 13 percent of Americans thought of air-conditioning in their cars as a necessity. Today, 41 percent do. I know the earth is getting warmer, but the climate hasn’t changed that much in thirty years. What has changed is our standard of comfort.
Even though we don’t expect it to happen, such adaptation to pleasure is inevitable, and it may cause more disappointment in a world of many choices than in a world of few.
Changed Response to a Persistent Event and Changed Reference Point
HEDONIC ADAPTATION CAN BE THE SIMPLE “GETTING USED TO” I JUST described, or it can be the result of a change in reference point, owing to a new experience.
Imagine a woman working contentedly at an interesting job for $40,000 a year. A new job opportunity arises that offers her $60,000. She switches jobs, but, alas, after six months, the new company goes under. The old company is happy to take her back, so happy, in fact, that it raises her salary to $45,000. Is she happy with the “raise”? Will it even feel like a raise? The answer is probably no. The $60,000 salary, however briefly it was available, may establish for this person a new baseline or reference point of hedonic neutrality, so that anything less is taken as a loss. Though six months earlier, a raise from $40,000 to $45,000 would have felt wonderful, now it feels like a cut from $60,000 to $45,000.
We often hear people say things like, “I never knew wine could taste this good,” or “I never knew sex could be this exciting,” or “I never expected to make this much money.” Novelty can change someone’s hedonic standards so that what was once good enough, or even better than that, no longer is. And as we’ll see, adaptation can be especially disappointing when we’ve put much time and effort into selecting, from a myriad of possibilities, the items or experiences we end up adapting to.
Hedonic Adaptation and Hedonic Treadmills
IN WHAT IS PERHAPS THE MOST FAMOUS EXAMPLE OF HEDONIC ADAPTATION, respondents were asked to rate their happiness on a 5-point scale. Some of them had won between $50,000 and $1 million in state lotteries within the last year. Others had become paraplegic or quadriplegic as a result of accidents. Not surprisingly, the lottery winners were happier than those who had become paralyzed. What is surprising, though, is that the lottery winners were no happier than people in general. And what is even more surprising is that the accident victims, while somewhat less happy than people in general, still judged themselves to be happy.
There is little doubt that if you had asked lottery winners how happy they were right after their number was drawn, they would have placed themselves somewhere off the charts. And if you had asked accident victims how happy they were right after they suffered their disability, they would have been as low as can be. But as time passes, and the winners and the accident victims get used to their new circumstances, the “hedonic thermometers” in both groups begin to converge, becoming much more like the population at large.
I’m not suggesting here that, as far as subjective experience goes, in the long run there’s no difference between winning a lottery and being paralyzed in an accident. But what I am arguing is that the difference is much smaller than you would expect, and much smaller than it appears to be at the moment at which these life-changing events occur
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As I said, there are two reasons why these dramatic hedonic adaptations occur. First, people just get used to good or bad fortune. Second, the new standard of what’s a good experience (winning the lottery) may make many of the ordinary pleasures of daily life (the smell of freshly brewed coffee, the new blooms and refreshing breezes of a lovely spring day) rather tame by comparison. And indeed when the lottery winners were asked to rate the hedonic quality of various everyday activities, they rated them as less pleasurable than non–lottery winners did. So there is both a changed response to a persistent event and a changed reference level.
In the case of the accident victims, there is probably still more going on. The immediate aftermath of the accident is crushing, because these accident victims have lived their lives as mobile individuals and they possess none of the skills that enable paraplegics to negotiate in the environment. As time passes, they develop some of these skills and discover that they are not as impaired as they first thought. Beyond this, they may start paying attention to things that can be done and appreciated by people of impaired mobility that they never gave much thought to prior to their accidents.
Twenty-five years ago, economist Tibor Scitovsky explored some of the consequences of the phenomenon of adaptation in his book The Joyless Economy. Human beings, Scitovsky said, want to experience pleasure. And when they consume, they do experience pleasure—as long as the things they consume are novel. But as people adapt—as the novelty wears off—pleasure comes to be replaced by comfort. It’s a thrill to drive your new car for the first few weeks; after that, it’s just comfortable. It certainly beats the old car, but it isn’t much of a kick. Comfort is nice enough, but people want pleasure. And comfort isn’t pleasure.
The result of having pleasure turn into comfort is disappointment, and the disappointment will be especially severe when the goods we are consuming are “durable” goods, such as cars, houses, stereo systems, elegant clothes, jewelry, and computers. When the brief period of real enthusiasm and pleasure wanes, people still have these things around them—as a constant reminder that consumption isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, that expectations are not matched by reality. And as a society’s affluence grows, consumption shifts increasingly to expensive, durable goods, with the result that disappointment with consumption increases.
Faced with this inevitable disappointment, what do people do? Some simply give up the chase and stop valuing pleasure derived from things. Most are driven instead to pursue novelty, to seek out new commodities and experiences whose pleasure potential has not been dissipated by repeated exposure. In time, these new commodities also will lose their intensity, but people still get caught up in the chase, a process that psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell labeled the hedonic treadmill. No matter how fast you run on this kind of machine, you still don’t get anywhere. And because of adaptation, no matter how good your choices and how pleasurable the results, you still end up back where you started in terms of subjective experience.
Perhaps even more insidious than the hedonic treadmill is something that Daniel Kahneman calls the satisfaction treadmill. Suppose that in addition to adapting to particular objects or experiences, you also adapt to particular levels of satisfaction. In other words, suppose that with great ingenuity and effort in making decisions, you manage to keep your “hedonic temperature” at +20 degrees, so that you feel pretty good about life almost all of the time. Is +20 degrees good enough? Well, it might be good enough at the beginning, but if you adapt to this particular level of happiness, then +20 won’t feel so good after a while. Now you’ll be striving to get and do things that push you to +30. So even if you manage to defeat or outsmart the inexorable adaptation to commodities and experiences, you still have to defeat adaptation to subjective feelings about these commodities and experiences. It’s a difficult task.
Mispredicting Satisfaction
ADAPTATION TO POSITIVE EXPERIENCES WOULD BE DIFFICULT enough if we knew it was coming and prepared ourselves for it. But oddly enough, the evidence indicates that we tend to be surprised by it. In general, human beings are remarkably bad at predicting how various experiences will make them feel. Chances are that if lottery winners knew in advance just how little winning the lottery would improve their subjective well-being, they wouldn’t be buying lottery tickets.
Much of the research that has been done to assess the accuracy of people’s predictions about their future feelings has taken this form: One group of participants is asked to imagine some event—good or bad—and then to answer questions about how that event would make them feel. A second group consisting of those who have actually experienced the event is asked how that event has actually made them feel. Then the predictions of the first group are compared to the experiences of the second group.
In one study of this type, college students in the Midwest were asked how it would feel to live in California. They judged that students who lived in California were happier with the climate and more satisfied with life as a whole than Midwesterners. They were right about the first point, but not about the second. California college students did like the climate, but they were not happier than Midwest college students. Probably what led the Midwestern students astray is that they focused almost entirely on weather. Just because it’s sunny and warm in California most of the time doesn’t mean that students who live in California don’t have problems—boring classes, too much work, not enough money, hassles with family and friends, romantic disappointments, and so on. It may be marginally more pleasant to be stressed and hassled on a warm, sunny day than on a freezing, snowy one, but not enough to make much of a difference in your outlook on life.
In another study, respondents were asked to predict how various personal and environmental changes would affect their well-being over the next decade. Individuals were asked about changes in air pollution, rain-forest destruction, increased numbers of coffee shops and TV channels, decreased risk of nuclear war, increased risk of AIDS, development of chronic health conditions, changes in income, and increases in body weight. Others were asked not to predict how these changes would make them feel, but to describe how these changes had made them feel over the last decade (to the extent that they applied in each individual case). The pattern of results was clear: those predicting expected each of the hypothetical changes—both good and bad—to have a bigger effect than was reported by those reflecting back on actual experience.
In still another study, young college professors were asked to think about how they would feel after they were either awarded or denied tenure. They were asked to anticipate their feelings immediately after the decision, and their feelings five and ten years later. The participants in the study were somewhat mindful of adaptation effects, and, accordingly, they expected to be extremely happy (or sad) when the decision was made, but that this joy or sadness would dissipate somewhat over time. Nonetheless, they got it wrong. The predictions of these professors were compared to the experiences of faculty who had actually experienced positive or negative tenure decisions either very recently, five years before, or ten years before. Amazingly, with the passage of time, there was no difference in reported well-being between professors who had been awarded tenure and those who had been passed over for the lifetime appointment. Even with adaptation in mind, the predictors substantially overestimated how good a positive decision would make them feel and how bad a negative decision would make them feel in the long run.
Admittedly, there is more to the mismatch between prediction and experience than just the failure to anticipate adaptation. We are ingenious at doing psychological repair work and finding silver linings after things go badly. “My colleagues were a bore.” “The students were losers.” “The job was killing me; I worked all the time and had no life.” “It liberated me; I became a consultant and worked decent hours for twice the salary.” But failure to anticipate adaptation is surely a part of this mismatch.
People also overestimate how devastated they will be by ba
d health news, such as a positive HIV test. And they underestimate how they will adjust to severe illness. Elderly patients suffering from a variety of the most common debilitating illnesses of advanced age reliably judge the quality of their lives more positively than do the physicians who are treating them.
It’s easy to see how results like these would follow directly from the fact that we adapt to almost everything, but ignore or underestimate adaptation effects in predicting the future. When asked to imagine being, say, $25,000 per year richer, it’s easy to conjure up what it will feel like at the moment you get the raise. The mistake is to assume that the way it feels at that moment is the way it will feel forever.
Almost every decision we make involves a prediction about future emotional responses. When people marry, they are making predictions about how they will feel about their spouse. When they have children, they are making predictions about their enduring feelings about family life. When they embark on a long course of graduate or professional training, they are making predictions about how they’ll feel about school and how they’ll feel about work. When people move from the city to a suburb, they’re making predictions about how it will feel to cut the grass and be tied to their cars. And when they buy a car or a stereo or anything else, they are predicting how it will feel to own and use that product in the months and years ahead.
The Paradox of Choice Page 15