If people err systematically and substantially in making those predictions, it’s likely that they will make some bad decisions—decisions that produce regret, even when events turn out well.
Adaptation and the Choice Problem
THE ABUNDANCE OF CHOICE AVAILABLE TO US EXACERBATES THE problem of adaptation by increasing the costs, in time and effort, of making a decision. Time, effort, opportunity costs, anticipated regret, and the like are fixed costs that we “pay” up front in making a decision, and those costs then get “amortized” over the life of the decision. If the decision provides substantial satisfaction for a long time after it is made, the costs of making it recede into insignificance. But if the decision provides satisfaction for only a short time, those costs loom large. Spending four months deciding what stereo to buy isn’t so bad if you really enjoy that stereo for fifteen years. But if you end up being excited by it for six months and then adapting, you may feel like a fool for having put in all that effort. It just wasn’t worth it.
So the more choices we have, the more effort goes into our decisions, and the more we expect to enjoy the benefits of those decisions. Adaptation, by dramatically truncating the duration of those benefits, puts us into a state of mind where the result just wasn’t worth the effort. The more we invest in a decision, the more we expect to realize from our investment. And adaptation makes agonizing over decisions a bad investment.
It should also be obvious that the phenomenon of adaptation will have more profound effects on people who set out to maximize than it will on people who are aiming for good enough. It is maximizers for whom expanded opportunities really create a time and effort problem. It is maximizers who make a really big investment in each of their decisions, who agonize most about trade-offs. And so it is maximizers who will be most disappointed when they discover the pleasure they derive from their decisions to be short-lived.
Happiness isn’t everything. Subjective experience is not the only reason we have for existing. Careful, well-researched, and labor-intensive decisions may produce better objective results than impulsive decisions. A world with multiple options may make possible better objective choices than a world with few options. But at the same time, happiness doesn’t count for nothing, and subjective experience isn’t trivial. If adaptation saddles people with a subjective experience of their choices that doesn’t justify the effort that went into making those choices, people will begin to see choice not as a liberator but as a burden.
What Is to Be Done?
IF YOU LIVE IN A WORLD IN WHICH YOU EXPERIENCE MISERY MORE often than joy, adaptation is very beneficial. It may be the only thing that gives you the strength and courage to get through the day. But if you live in a world of plenty, in which sources of joy outnumber sources of misery, then adaptation defeats your attempts to enjoy your good fortune. Most modern Americans live in a bountiful world. While we don’t get to do and to have everything we want, no other people on earth have ever had such control over their lives, such material abundance, and such freedom of choice. Whereas adaptation does nothing to negate the objective improvements in our lives that all this freedom and abundance bring, it does much to negate the satisfaction we derive from those improvements.
We could go a long way toward improving the experienced well-being of people in our society if we could find a way to stop the process of adaptation. But adaptation is so fundamental and universal a feature of our responses to events in the world—it is so much a “hardwired” property of our nervous systems—that there is very little we can do to mitigate it directly.
However, simply by being aware of the process we can anticipate its effects, and therefore be less disappointed when it comes. This means that when we are making decisions, we should think about how each of the options will feel not just tomorrow, but months or even years later. Factoring in adaptation to the decision-making process may make differences that seem large at the moment of choice feel much smaller. Factoring in adaptation may help us be satisfied with choices that are good enough rather than “the best,” and this in turn will reduce the time and effort we devote to making those choices. Finally, we can remind ourselves to be grateful for what we have. This may seem trite, the sort of thing one hears from parents or ministers, and then ignores. But individuals who regularly experience and express gratitude are physically healthier, more optimistic about the future, and feel better about their lives than those who do not. Individuals who experience gratitude are more alert, enthusiastic, and energetic than those who do not, and they are more likely to achieve personal goals.
And unlike adaptation, the experience of gratitude is something we can affect directly. Experiencing and expressing gratitude actually get easier with practice. By causing us to focus on how much better our lives are than they could have been, or were before, the disappointment that adaptation brings in its wake can be blunted.
CHAPTER NINE
Why Everything Suffers from Comparison
I THINK IT IS SAFE TO SAY THAT SLAMMING A CAR DOOR ON YOUR hand is unequivocally bad and that reciprocated love is unequivocally good. But most human experiences cannot be evaluated in such absolute terms; they are judged instead against other factors.
When we consider whether we liked a meal, a vacation, or a class, inevitably we are asking ourselves, “Compared to what?” For purposes of making decisions about what to do in the future, the “Was it good or bad?” question is less important than “How good or bad was it?” Very few meals in restaurants are actually “bad”—distasteful enough to induce us to spit out our food and leave. Nonetheless, we describe restaurants to our friends as bad, and they understand us to mean that compared to some standard, this restaurant is on the wrong side of zero. Comparisons are the only meaningful benchmark.
The circumstances of modern life seem to be conspiring to make experiences less satisfying than they could and perhaps should be, in part because of the richness against which we are comparing our own experiences. Again, as we’ll see, an overload of choice contributes to this dissatisfaction.
Hopes, Expectations, Past Experience, and the Experience of Others
WHEN PEOPLE EVALUATE AN EXPERIENCE, THEY ARE PERFORMING one or more of the following comparisons:
Comparing the experience to what they hoped it would be
Comparing the experience to what they expected it to be
Comparing the experience to other experiences they have had in the recent past
Comparing the experience to experiences that others have had
Each of these comparisons makes the evaluation of an experience relative, and this may diminish the experience or enhance it. If someone is out for a great dinner, and she’s just read glowing reviews of the restaurant, her hopes and expectations will be high. If she’s recently had a great meal in another restaurant, her standard of comparison with her past experience will be high. And if just before dinner she listened to one of her dining companions describe in ecstatic detail a meal he recently had, her social standard of comparison will be high. Given all this, the chef in this restaurant is going to be challenged to produce a meal that will move this person’s hedonic thermometer any higher. If, in contrast, someone stumbles into the first restaurant she sees because she’s very hungry, and if the place looks modest and its menu is simple, and if she had an awful dinner out the day before, and if her friend told her about a recent culinary disaster, chances are she won’t be too hard to please. The same meal, in the same restaurant, can be judged negatively on the basis of the first set of comparisons and positively on the basis of the second. And by and large, we are unlikely to realize that our evaluations are as much a commentary on what we bring to the meal as they are on the meal itself.
In the same way, getting a B+ on a difficult exam can fall to either side of the hedonic neutral point. Were you hoping for a B or were you hoping for an A? Were you expecting a B or expecting an A? Do you normally get Bs or do you normally get As? And what grades did your classmates get?
> Social scientist Alex Michalos, in his discussion of the perceived quality of experience, argued that people establish standards of satisfaction based on the assessment of three gaps: “the gap between what one has and wants, the gap between what one has and thinks others like oneself have, and the gap between what one has and the best one has had in the past.” Michalos found that much of the individual variation in life satisfaction could be explained in terms not of differences in objective experience, but in terms of differences in these three perceived gaps. To these three comparisons I have added a fourth: the gap between what one has and what one expects.
As our material and social circumstances improve, our standards of comparison go up. As we have contact with items of high quality, we begin to suffer from “the curse of discernment.” The lower quality items that used to be perfectly acceptable are no longer good enough. The hedonic zero point keeps rising, and expectations and aspirations rise with it.
In some respects, rising standards of acceptability are an indication of progress. It is only when people demand more that the market provides more. In part because the members of a society develop higher and higher standards for what is good, people live much better material lives today than they ever did before, objectively speaking.
But not subjectively speaking. If your hedonic assessment derives from the relation between the objective quality of an experience and your expectations, then the rising quality of experience is met with rising expectations, and you’re just running in place. The “hedonic treadmill” and the “satisfaction treadmill” that I discussed in the last chapter explain to a significant degree how real income can increase by a factor of two (in the U.S.) or five (in Japan) without having a measurable effect on the subjective well-being of the members of society. As long as expectations keep pace with realizations, people may live better, but they won’t feel better about how they live.
Prospects, Frames, and Evaluation
IN CHAPTER 3, I DISCUSSED A VERY IMPORTANT FRAMEWORK FOR understanding how we assess subjective experience. It is called prospect theory, and it was developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. What the theory claims is that evaluations are relative to a baseline. A given experience will feel positive if it’s an improvement on what came before and negative if it’s worse than what came before. To understand how we will judge an experience, it is necessary first to find out where we set our hedonic zero point.
In Chapter 3, I emphasized how language can affect the framing of an experience and thus, the setting of the zero point. A sign at a gas station that says “Discount for Paying Cash” sets the zero point at the credit card price. A sign that says “Surcharge for Using Credit” sets the zero point at the cash price. Though the difference between cash and credit may be the same at both gas stations, people will be annoyed at having to pay a surcharge and delighted at getting a discount.
But the language of description is not the only factor that affects the setting of the zero point. Expectations do as well. “How good did I expect this meal (exam grade, wine, vacation, job, romantic relationship) to be?” people ask themselves. Then they ask themselves, “How good was it?” If the experience was as good as expected, people may be satisfied, but they won’t be ecstatic. Real hedonic charge comes when an experience exceeds expectations. And hedonic distress comes when experience fails to live up to expectations. Past experience also affects the setting of the zero point, which is, in part, what adaptation is about. “Was it as good as last time?” we ask. If so, we may again be satisfied, but we will not be enthused.
The Curse of High Expectations
IN THE FALL OF 1999, THE NEW YORK TIMES AND CBS NEWS ASKED teenagers to compare their experience with what their parents had experienced growing up. Overall, 43 percent of the respondents said they were having a harder time than their parents did, but 50 percent of children from affluent households said their lives were harder. When probed, the teenagers from affluent households talked about high expectations, both their own and their parents’. They talked about “too-muchness”: too many activities, too many consumer choices, too much to learn. Whereas teens from low-income households talked about how much easier it was to get schoolwork done thanks to computers and the Internet, teens from high-income homes talked about how much had to be sifted through because of computers and the Internet. As one commentator put it, “Children feel the pressure…to be sure they don’t slide back. Everything’s about going forward…. Falling back is the American nightmare.” So if your perch is high, you have much further to fall than if your perch is low. “Fear of falling,” as Barbara Ehrenreich put it, is the curse of high expectations.
One part of life where the curse of high expectations is apparentis health and health care. No matter how frustrating it is for people to get prompt and decent health care in the age of managed care, there is no question that the state of American health is better than it’s ever been. Not only do people live longer, but they have a better quality of life while they are alive. Nonetheless, as medical historian Roy Porter points out, in this age of unparalleled longevity and control over disease, there is also unparalleled anxiety about health. Americans expect to live even longer yet, and to do so without any diminution of capacity. So though modern health practices help extend our lives, they don’t seem to provide an appropriate degree of satisfaction.
What contributes to high expectations, above and beyond the quality of past experience, is, I think, the amount of choice and control we now have over most aspects of our lives. When I was away on vacation a few years ago in a tiny seaside town on the Oregon coast, I went into the small local grocery store to buy some ingredients for dinner. When it came to buying wine, they had about a dozen options. What I got wasn’t very good, but I didn’t expect to be able to get something very good, and so I was satisfied with what I got. If instead I’d been shopping in a store that offered hundreds—even thousands—of options, my expectations would have been a good deal higher. Had I ended up choosing a bottle of wine of the same quality as the one that satisfied me in Oregon, I’d have been sorely disappointed.
And to return to the example with which I began the book, back when jeans came in only one variety, I would be satisfied with the fit, whatever it was. But now, confronted with relaxed fit, easy fit, slim fit, tapered leg, boot cut, and who knows what else, my standards have gone up. With all these options available, I now expect my jeans to fit as though they were custom-made. The proliferation of options seems to lead, inexorably, to the raising of expectations.
Which plays into the tendency to be a maximizer. Almost by definition, to be a maximizer is to have high standards, high expectations. Because of this, and because of the role played by expectations in hedonic evaluations, an experience that is on the positive side of the hedonic thermometer for a satisficer may be on the negative side for a maximizer.
The lesson here is that high expectations can be counterproductive. We probably can do more to affect the quality of our lives by controlling our expectations than we can by doing virtually anything else. The blessing of modest expectations is that they leave room for many experiences to be a pleasant surprise, a hedonic plus. The challenge is to find a way to keep expectations modest, even as actual experiences keep getting better.
One way of achieving this goal is by keeping wonderful experiences rare. No matter what you can afford, save great wine for special occasions. No matter what you can afford, make that perfectly cut, elegantly styled, silk blouse a special treat. This may seem like an exercise in self-denial, but I don’t think it is. On the contrary, it’s a way to make sure that you can continue to experience pleasure. What’s the point of great meals, great wines, and great blouses if they don’t make you feel great?
The Curse of Social Comparison
OF ALL THE SOURCES WE RELY ON WHEN WE EVALUATE EXPERIENCES, perhaps nothing is more important than comparisons to other people. Our answer to the “How am I doing?” question depends on our own past experiences, aspiratio
ns, and expectations, but the question is virtually never asked or answered in a social vacuum. “How am I doing?” almost always carries “compared to others” in parentheses.
Social comparison provides information that helps people evaluate experiences. Many experiences are ambiguous enough that we aren’t completely sure what to make of them. Is a B+ a good grade on an exam? Is your marriage going well? Is there reason to worry because your teenage son is into head-banging music? Are you sufficiently valued at work? Although it is possible to derive approximate answers to questions like these without looking around at others, approximate answers aren’t good enough. Looking at others permits the fine-tuning of assessments. This fine-tuning, in turn, helps people decide whether some sort of action is called for.
Just as we saw in Chapter 7 that the counterfactuals we construct can be tilted upward (imagining a better result) or downward (imagining a worse one), so too with social comparisons. People can compare themselves with others who have done better (upward social comparison) or worse (downward social comparison). Usually, downward social comparisons nudge people up the hedonic thermometer, and upward social comparisons nudge them down. Indeed, social psychologists have found that upward comparisons produce jealousy, hostility, negative mood, frustration, lowered self-esteem, decreased happiness, and symptoms of stress. By the same token, downward comparisons have been found to boost self-esteem, increase positive mood, and reduce anxiety.
But it needn’t be this way. At times, people engaging in social comparison respond positively to upward comparisons and negatively to downward comparisons. Learning that others are worse off can lead you to consider that you yourself can become worse off. When you compare yourself with others who are worse off, you may take pleasure in your superiority, but you may also experience guilt, embarrassment, the need to cope with other people’s envy or resentment, and the fear that their fate could happen to you. And when you compare yourself with others who are better off, you may feel envy or resentment, but you may also be motivated or inspired. For example, in one study, encountering information about other cancer patients who were in better shape improved the mood of cancer patients, probably because it gave them hope that their condition also could improve.
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