Happiness by Design

by Paul Dolan

  In making decisions now that affect us in the future, we generally care about today far more than we care about tomorrow, and we care about tomorrow more than the day after—but there is very little difference between how we view a year’s time versus a year and a day.22 So we have a strong preference for the present, which explains why some of us (and I include myself in this) are quite impulsive and impatient.

  My own recent research, conducted in collaboration with David Bradford and Matteo Galizzi, confirms that we “warp” time in much the same way we have long been known to warp noise, heat, and light.23 If I doubled the volume of the TV from 50 decibels to 100 decibels, you would think that the sound had increased by less than a factor of two. So differences feel smaller the more extreme they get. Similarly, if I doubled, from today, the duration I asked you to consider from a week to two weeks, it would feel like the time had increased by less than a factor of two. Let’s do the time warp again here:

  Imagine a day exactly a week from now. On the line below, the leftmost end of the line represents “very short,” and the rightmost end of the line represents “very long.” Please place a mark on the line to indicate how long you consider the duration to be between today and a week from now.

  Very short Very long

  Now imagine a day four weeks from now. On the line below, please place a mark to indicate how long you consider the duration to be between today and four weeks from now.

  Very short Very long

  If you are anything like the participants in our studies, then the perceived distance between now and one week from now is about the same as the perceived distance between one week from now and four weeks from now. In other words, as seen from today, the first week feels about as far away as do the three weeks after that, even though the latter is obviously three times as long in real time.

  There is no doubt that how impulsive you are and how you perceive time will greatly affect your behavior. But whatever your preferences, your sentiments of pleasure and purpose are always experienced in the moment. It is the full flow of sentiments that matters to your happiness, and they are what should be used to judge your behavior.

  I accept that you should sometimes be willing to give up a bit of happy time now for more happiness later. An unhappy marriage can be the impetus for divorce, for example, and especially so when one partner is significantly less happy than the other, even in the first year of marriage and especially over time if the gap widens.24 The good news is that divorce, in Britain at least, has been shown to improve the happiness of the divorcees and their adult children (aged eighteen to thirty) after the knot is broken.25 You might be made less happy in the short term by reducing how much you smoke but become happier in the long term when you reap the health and happiness benefits of having done so.26

  So it can be good to be unhappy if you will reap the benefits at a later point, and it’s important to consider this temporal dimension to your happiness. As I write this sentence, my family and I are halfway through an eight-week stint in a rented two-bedroom flat so that our new house can be renovated. We expect that our lower happiness from living in cramped conditions for eight weeks will be more than compensated by living in a renovated house for at least eight years. The only way we can make this judgment is by considering experiences of happiness over time.

  When economists and others talk about delayed gratification, they are implicitly referring to sacrificing pleasure now for pleasure later. When happiness is defined as experiences of both pleasure and purpose, the circumstances under which it is sacrificed for the pursuit of achievement are potentially much more limited. So the less pleasurable things that you do should at least feel purposeful. Serious athletes provide a good example for they give up a lot of the fun in their lives in order to make it to painful early-morning training sessions. This could be seen as delayed gratification, but I believe that these athletes experience purposeful gratification from training. Just as there is pain from the lactic acid in their muscles, they feel sentiments of purpose too. My research and my experiences tell me that life is less about trading off happiness now for happiness later (and vice versa) and more about trading off pleasure and purpose at different rates at different times.

  The PPP for life

  Whether or not anything is worth doing depends on your experiences of pleasure and purpose. This includes good and bad sentiments in anticipation of an event that is yet to happen and the good and bad memories of past experiences. There is nothing that exists outside of the here and now: your anticipations and memories are all part of your current feelings. A focus on pleasure and purpose over time allows us to say whether or not a decision is or was rational in a substantive sense according to its overall consequences for happiness.

  This is important for a wide range of audiences. It matters to individuals deciding whether it is worth staying in all weekend to devour a DVD box set, and it also represents a new way of thinking for policy makers who are deciding whether they should influence people’s decision to devour a KFC bucket. The effects of DVDs and KFCs need to be assessed according to their consequences for happiness, and not on the basis of any other judgments, moral or otherwise, about the “goodness” of these activities.

  As an example, consider staying up late (drinking, perhaps, though I won’t assume so). You will often regret having done so the next morning when you feel tired. And sometimes you will be right, in an experience-of-happiness sense, to say that the pain of the tiredness outweighs the pleasure of the late night. But sometimes you will be wrong—perhaps the night’s pleasure more than makes up for the morning’s pain. Importantly, there might also be the memories of the night before to draw from as future pleasures. When thinking about how to be happier, you must keep in mind that your memories of the past are important experiences of happiness in the present. Happiness includes good memories of good experiences.

  Many economists view you as the perfect judge of your happiness now and projected into the future. From this perspective, you must be better off from staying up late whenever that is what you decided to do, fully aware of all the future consequences of your behavior. They make the same point about everything else, too, since it enables them to look only at what you do. So if you eat lots of cakes and become fat, then that’s what you wanted and so you are better off than if you were prevented, or nudged away, from doing so. But it is naïve to say that your preferences before the event are all that count since you can sometimes have preferences after the event, when you may wish that you had behaved differently. I think we can all agree that we’ve each had times in our lives when we’ve said, “I really wish I had not done that.”

  At the other extreme from the economists are the public policy experts, who argue that regrets after the event should count over all else. But this is also naïve. You can regret lots of things when you experience the adverse consequences of your behavior but that is not to say that you would have wanted to behave any differently before that. There is pleasure in eating cakes. There can be purpose in skydiving even if there is some associated risk of death or serious injury.

  In any case, regrets are far from straightforward. We are more likely to regret not doing something than having done it, especially if we are presented with an opportunity to make a big life change.27 And regrets have been shown to be sensitive to the time frame over which the retrospection takes place. When researchers looked at the regrets of college students in relation to their recent winter breaks and at the regrets of college graduates looking back at the winter breaks they had forty years earlier, the college students regretted not working harder (purposeful activities) while the alumni regretted not partying harder (pleasurable activities) all those years before.28 Instead of worrying about immediate or more distant regrets, better to focus on consuming a good balance of pleasure and purpose now. A good balance of pleasure and purpose is also likely to have the posit
ive by-product of you having fewer regrets.

  So whether staying up late, eating cakes, skydiving, or anything else is good or bad should not be judged according to forward-looking preferences or backward-looking regrets but rather directly on the experiences of happiness over time; over your lifetime, in fact. It’s all the happiness you experience over all of your life that matters to you (even if you will necessarily pay attention to the happiness over much shorter time frames).

  Everything that happens in your life, in principle, can be subject to empirical enquiry into consequences. Your experiences of happiness give you an account by which you can judge whether every single behavior eventually resolves itself as being, on balance, a good or a bad decision. It is difficult in practice to know how different decisions will pan out in the fullness of time but that does not negate the fact that, in principle, the lifetime approach to happiness is the correct analysis. How much more or less pleasure and purpose you feel from one set of experiences compared to another depends on what you might otherwise be feeling instead. Again, you cannot possibly think about the benefits foregone or to be gained from every activity but, by definition, doing one thing means that you lose the happiness from doing something else.

  Some philosophers say that you can only really judge a life from its deathbed, as you reflect upon your successes and failures.29 To quote Bertrand Russell, “I feel as if one would only discover on one’s death-bed what one ought to have lived for.”30 But no moment should be privileged simply because it is that moment, and that includes your deathbed. I’m sure many of us care about how we will look back on our lives on our deathbed, but the value of our lives comes from the experiences of pleasure and purpose over our lifetimes and not from a judgment we might make at an arbitrarily chosen moment in time.

  You don’t have to completely sign up to this exposition of happiness. Much of what I have to say later in this book applies to other definitions of happiness, such as those that rely on evaluations of life satisfaction, although it does influence some specific observations, such as thinking about how you can make better use of your time. My definition of happiness also influences my discussion of the empirical evidence on happiness, since I am most interested in understanding experiences of pleasure and purpose over time. These data on happiness are the focus of the next chapter.

  2

  What do we know about happiness?

  For reasons alluded to in the introduction, and which will become even clearer in the next chapter, I would ideally like to find out what you are paying attention to in a given moment and relate this to how happy you feel. It is difficult to ask you “What are you attending to right now?” and so most attempts to measure happiness over time have done so by asking “What are you doing right now?” The inferences made from such data will assume that your happiness comes from these activities (such as working or watching television), when you might, in fact, be thinking about a whole host of other things as you “listen” to your boss or “watch” The X Factor. On average, though, and across large enough samples, measures of happiness focused on activities will probably provide a reliable approximation of where attention is generally directed.

  I should also add a few words of caution about the interpretation of happiness data. Our understanding of the correlation between happiness and a range of factors has come a very long way over the past couple of decades, but we do not know as much as we would like to about the degree to which those factors truly cause happiness. There are two main obstacles that prevent us from making the leap from correlation to causation: selection effects and reverse causality. Take the effects of volunteering as an example. It’s possible that those choosing to volunteer are those most likely to benefit from it, which means that we may not be able to generalize the happiness effects of volunteering to a wider population. Also, those with greater happiness may be those most likely to volunteer in the first place, and so part of any correlation will be picking up the reverse causality from happiness to volunteering. Telling the chicken from the egg in happiness research is quite a challenge.

  Having said all of this, it is likely that any happiness ratings for an activity will eventually be determined by the attention paid to it, even if the initial impetus for the activity was driven to some degree by initial happiness. You might be in a great or awful mood and decide to do some chores, but eventually tidying the house will affect how you feel. And, in any case, we can still learn a lot from who the happy ones among us are and what they do.

  Experience sampling

  What, then, does the empirical evidence tell us about experiences of pleasure and purpose in our lives? There have been some experience-sampling studies, which typically send reminders to people’s phones at random times during the day to obtain reports of how they are feeling. Such studies are quite intrusive and most people would rather not hear the beep on their mobile phone while in the throes of passion. Also, simply being asked to think about how happy you are feeling in the moment could affect your response.1 Experience-sampling studies can also be pretty expensive and time-consuming. As a result, they are usually conducted on samples that are convenient (such as students and iPhone users) and not very representative of the general population, so the transferability of the results to other samples of people is questionable. Most important, the studies, consistent with most research on happiness, rarely consider purpose.

  German days

  The most serious effort to account for the duration of feelings throughout the day, alongside their type and intensity, involves using the day reconstruction method (DRM), which was designed by Daniel Kahneman and colleagues. It asks people to divide the previous day into a series of episodes (commuting, having lunch, watching TV, and so on) and then to rate how they felt during those episodes (joy, sadness, anxiety, and so on).2

  The DRM is a huge step forward in the measurement of happiness because it is not as invasive as experience sampling and it can capture the amount of time spent engaged in different activities. But it misses out on feelings of purpose. So I conducted my own DRM-type study in 2006 that asked about how worthwhile activities felt in addition to how pleasurable they felt.3 As in the original DRM, pleasure was measured by asking participants to indicate how much they felt each of the following during each episode: happy, nervous/anxious, sad/depressed, content/relaxed, frustrated, impatient for it to end. To assess purpose, three adjectives were added—focused, engaged, competent/able—as well as three statements: “I feel the activities in this episode . . .”: were worthwhile and meaningful; were useful to other people; helped me achieve important goals. The response scale for all questions ranged from 0 (not at all) to 6 (very strongly).

  To get a feel for this kind of empirical research, imagine yourself in a simplified version of this study. Think back to one episode yesterday morning, and use it to answer the questions in the table below, describing what you were doing, who you were with, and how much overall pleasure and purpose that activity brought you on a 0 to 6 scale. Do the same for an activity in the evening.

  Episode

  What were you doing?

  Who were you with?

  Pleasure (0–6)

  Purpose (0–6)

  From yesterday morning

  From yesterday evening

  I worked on this project with Mat White, who was based in Germany at the time, and so the sample was recruited via an Internet panel run from a German university. Of the 625 participants, 61 percent were female, and ages ranged from sixteen to eighty, with an average age of thirty-six. The graphs below show a day in the life of one of our German participants. She is thirty-eight years old; has a husband, a pet, and no children; and her household income is between €80,000 and €100,000. From the first graph showing pleasure alone, sh
e is happiest during her lunch break and when watching TV. From the second graph, which adds purpose into the mix, there is less of a difference between her happiness at work and while watching TV and her lunch break is now not so good because, for her, it is less purposeful than most other activities.

  We then looked at the pleasure and purpose ratings for each of the main activities for all the participants in the study. Each day the participants spent an average of about seven hours sleeping, three and a half hours working (only half the sample worked on their designated diary-writing day), two and a half hours watching TV, two hours with kids, two hours eating, an hour doing housework, a half hour commuting, and ten minutes volunteering (only 5 percent of the sample volunteered). The remaining five hours or so were made up of other activities like praying, having sex, playing sports, and shopping.

  Each activity has its own combination of pleasure and purpose. The graph below summarizes the average ratings. Activities become more pleasurable as we move from the bottom to the top of the graph and activities become more purposeful as we move from left to right. If all activities contained the same amount of pleasure and purpose, they would lie on the diagonal line. So if they are to the left of the diagonal line, they contain more pleasure than purpose, and if they are to the right, more purpose than pleasure. Watching TV, eating, and commuting are therefore more pleasurable than purposeful, and volunteering, working, time with kids, and doing housework are more purposeful than pleasurable. Watching TV is the most pleasurable activity and it is also the least purposeful; and working is the second most purposeful activity (behind volunteering) and it is also the least pleasurable. Watching TV and working occupy a lot of time, so it might be that people are achieving some sort of balance between pleasure and purpose.