by Paul Dolan
Here’s the best bit. We then offered our participants a buffet lunch of sandwiches and snacks, again on an individual basis. Unbeknownst to them, we watched what they ate. More precisely, after each student left, Matteo rummaged around in the bins (in his sharp Italian suit) to look at the waste sandwich boxes and chocolate wrappers and potato chip bags. Those who thought they had done well on the exercise task (thus, those in the ten-pence and encouragement groups) ate, on average, about 320 calories compared to the 240 calories eaten by those who did not think they had done so well (those in the two-pence and control groups).29
So the conclusion we can draw here is that the more satisfied we are with our effort in a “calories-out” exercise task, the more we feel that we can reward ourselves with a “calories-in” lunch. Doing a little bit of exercise in order to lose weight will lead to weight gain if you put more calories past your lips than you burn off your hips. This is precisely what happens for many people, and it is the main reason why weight-loss programs predicated on exercise alone don’t work very well.
Indeed, it has been shown that more exercise at one time leads to more rest at another. In a study of two hundred children from three schools, participants wore accelerometers to test whether the schools’ different fitness programs had an effect on how active the children were. It turned out that children who were more active at school rested when they were at home, and vice versa.30 Similar results were found in another study looking at the effect of walking versus driving to school.31 Because food is now more plentiful than it was for our ancestors, these behaviors are a carryover from a time when we needed to conserve energy.
Moral licensing and cleansing
Results like those from our study are strongly supportive of a permitting spillover. They’re also consistent with a concept in psychology called moral licensing. Think of yourself as being in possession of a moral bank account. When you have a positive balance, you will license yourself to use up some of the credits. Moral licensing was originally documented in the context of discriminatory behavior. Participants who, in an easy hypothetical hiring situation, chose to appoint a manifestly better black candidate for a job, thus had the chance to establish they were not racist and were then more likely to make prejudiced choices in a subsequent harder hiring decision.32 Similarly, participants who said they were endorsing Barack Obama instead of John McCain in the 2008 US presidential election were then more likely to make a prejudiced choice in a subsequent hiring task, or to allocate more money to a charity fighting poverty in a white rather than in an African American neighborhood.33
Conversely, when you’re in deficit in your moral bank account, you’ll need to stock up on credits through moral cleansing. The evidence supports this. In a neat experiment, participants were asked to recall in detail either an ethical or an unethical deed from their past and describe their feelings. They were all then asked to rate the desirability of various products, including neutral items, such as juices and chocolate bars, and cleansing products, such as shower soap and disinfectant. Those who had recalled the unethical deed were much more likely to choose a cleansing product.34 The recollection of doing a bad thing prompts the need literally to cleanse oneself—and again in largely unconscious ways.
The shifting sands of attention
The foregoing discussion highlights the temporal nature of your behavior and, consequently, your happiness. There is also a dynamic nature to the impact of many changes in life. Let us now consider the importance of attention in explaining how we adjust the impact of changes in our lives.
Getting over it
One of the main lessons from happiness research is that the impacts of many life changes fade quite quickly. There is lots of adaptation—lots of getting used to change. Adaptation is explained by the withdrawal of attention to inputs as their impact on happiness diminishes.35 The novelty of a new stimulus attracts your attention, but when you get used to it you stop focusing so much attention on it. When this happens, your attention is freed up to find something new to attract it. A new king of attention soon replaces an old one. The King is dead. Long live the King.
Many events are unpredictable and their impacts on happiness are hard to figure out because we cannot always plan and measure happiness before the event happens, but sometimes we get lucky and the data are already there. The September 11 attacks are among the most prominent recent example of an event whose timing was unpredictable, but they also happened to take place in the same month as most of the interviews in the large UK longitudinal study discussed in chapter 2. This study surveys about ten thousand people every year and in addition to life satisfaction (which unfortunately was missing as a variable in 2001) it also asks about mental health, using a standard assessment measure. Some people had been asked about their mental health before the September 11 attacks happened and some asked afterward, so it allowed us to see what difference the event made by looking at the mental health of different people at different times from the event. In this way, we could see whether the negative impact of the September 11 attacks on mental health in the UK wore off over time.36
It turns out that there was a significant effect in 2001 during September, which then fell over the next couple of months to completely disappear by December. An initially attention-grabbing phenomenon ceases to remain so over time. Note that we were not looking at the effects of 9/11 by asking people to think about those effects, for if we had done that, we would have got very different results: the attacks will always feel very important to those who are being asked to think about them directly. The term “focusing effect” has been used for occasions where something matters because it is being attended to.37 The way to avoid focusing effects is to ask people how happy they are first and then find out other relevant things about them (such as when they were interviewed, in this case). I’ll discuss how focusing effects influence your happiness and behavior in greater detail in the next chapter.
Thankfully, most other changes in life are less dramatic than terrorist attacks. Together with David Bradford, I have also looked at the existing life satisfaction data to see what happens to people as they gain weight. They get less happy, right? Well, no, not really. Life satisfaction is hardly affected by weight gain. The theoretical model we developed posits that you can do one of two things to stay happy when you gain weight: the first is to expend effort in losing weight, and the second is to expend effort in playing down the importance of weight gain in your life. Our data analyses support the second explanation. As people put on weight, they shift the focus of their attention away from parts of their lives that are associated with weight, like health, toward aspects where their weight is less important, like work.38
This shift in attention explains some of the behaviors we observe; many of us gain weight but do not lose it. The effort needed to lose weight may be greater than the effort required to shift the attention you give to your health and weight.
There’s some evidence that obesity can have a small but significant effect on life satisfaction but it does not have anywhere near as much of an effect as other problems in life. Notwithstanding some issues in how best to analyze the data, based on ratings of life satisfaction in the UK, we can tentatively suggest that your body mass index (BMI) would have to increase by at least 30 BMI points (which would be very extreme, since obesity is defined as a BMI of 30) to have about the same negative effect upon your satisfaction levels as a marital breakdown.39 The longer-term consequences of obesity, such as diabetes, would have a big impact on happiness, of course, but the more immediate impact of a breakup explains why many people care more about their relationships with other people than the one they have with food. Of course, obesity does not occur overnight, and so there is a gradual adaptation to weighing more.
There is also now some genetic evidence to show that gaining weight may not necessarily make you any less happy. The same gene that is associated with a predisposition to obesity, the FTO gene, is actu
ally associated with a reduced risk of major depressive disorders.40 The impact may also depend on cultural norms and socioeconomic factors.41 In some countries, such as Russia, getting fatter is actually good for life satisfaction because it acts as a signal of affluence. In the United States, those in high-status jobs are most adversely affected by being overweight, probably because of the stigma attached to it in those cohorts.42
While we each may initially react quite differently to an event, we all have a built-in ability to detect and neutralize challenges to our happiness. This has been called our psychological immune system.43 Just as your body adjusts to getting into hot water, so your mind adjusts to change: the psychological reaction to changes in stimuli is analogous to the physiological reaction to changes in temperature. And your psychological immune system works a little like your physical immune system, which kicks in when faced with a threat, such as when someone nearby coughs or sneezes.44 This highlights the fact that many adaptation processes take place automatically and unconsciously; we simply get used to some changes without thinking about whether or not we really want to.
In one of the most interesting studies in this area, students were asked to predict how much worse their mood would be if they were rejected for a job: their average estimate was two points lower than their current mood on a ten-point scale. In sharp contrast, the actual effect of being rejected was only 0.4 points on the same ten-point scale. Even that effect was fleeting: ten minutes after the rejection, their happiness levels had returned to normal. By the way, there was no real job offer—such is the fun that psychologists often have at their students’ expense.
If your partner dumps you, give it a few months and you’ll generally look back on your partner as having been unsuitable. Chances are that you will then meet someone who makes you happier than that loser did. This is not to say that the pain of the breakup is any less real, just that you can take some comfort from it not lasting. You can also take comfort from the fact that you will make sense of the relationship and the breakup in ways that enable you to move on to bigger and better things. You are good at making sense of most life events in ways that enable you to move on. It is better to have loved and lost than to have spent your life with a psychopath, as one of my (single) colleagues says. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger—and often happier, too, eventually.
On the flip side, your psychological immune system seems to neutralize the impact of many good things, too, and so the positive happiness effects of a pay raise, a marriage, or a new job won’t last for very long for most people, either.45 As we shall see more clearly in part 2, this is where the allocation and reallocation of your attention is crucial: we shall consider ways in which you can prolong pleasure and purpose and nip pain and pointlessness in the bud.
Not getting over it
We will obviously adapt to some changes more quickly than to others, to a pay raise faster than to marriage, for example. Further, the impact of some inputs on the production of happiness does not appear to wane over time. Unemployment, as I mentioned, has lasting negative effects (even if we allow for the fact that less happy people are more likely to lose their jobs in the first place). This is not so surprising, is it? One of the first questions someone new asks you is “What do you do for a living?”
To underline the importance of attention, even in the context of a generally attention-grabbing event like unemployment, we have compared the impact on life satisfaction of unemployment on those who mentioned unemployment as a major life event with the impact on those who did not mention it as an important event when completing the survey. Unemployment hurts a lot, whether or not it is mentioned as a major life event, but it hurts twice as much for those who report the loss of a job as having been a major life event in the last year compared to those who have lost their job but did not mention it as being a major life event.46
You may also become increasingly sensitized to some changes. That is, you pay more, not less, attention to some stimuli as time passes. Sadly, these are usually bad things, like noise, especially when the noise is unpredictable in its timing. The evidence shows that we don’t generally withdraw attention from traffic noise because cars do not go by at regular intervals.47 As disheartening evidence of this, children in urban areas who live in noisy, lower floors of apartment buildings have lower reading scores than those on quieter, higher floors where traffic noise doesn’t reach to the same extent.48 This result persists after the authors account for the educational level of the parents and also note that the apartments on each floor cost about the same, so it is not as if the poorer kids are living on lower floors.
Losing your sense of smell, which might even be considered to have its upsides in some instances, has a significant downside: you lose your sense of taste, too. This can lead you into a poor diet and reduce the functioning of your physical immune system.49 There is hardly any adaptation to not being able to smell and yet I suspect that many of us would think that we would get used to it quite quickly. We make a lot of mistakes about what will grab our attention and for how long, as we shall see in the next chapter.
Resolving uncertainty
There is an intuitively appealing model of adaptation called the AREA model. Events in life are attention-grabbing to begin with. You then react and, if you can explain the event, you will withdraw attention and adapt to it.50 Much of this process will occur automatically without conscious effort. Most of the time you can explain things and you will adapt as the impact of the stimulus wears off. A pay raise is generally quickly explained—you’re a good and loyal worker, right? And so you stop paying attention to it. Indeed, you are such a good worker that your pay raise should perhaps have been larger, right?
Sometimes, though, you will keep reacting if you are lacking that all-important explanation. As I mentioned before, if physical pain has an explanation, such as when the ache in your leg is due to a sports injury, then you will withdraw attention from the pain and adapt to it, but if it remains unexplained, it continues to draw attention to itself. Recall from the introduction that a stammer is difficult to explain, and so it draws attention to itself over and above any effect it might have on specific speaking situations.
If you are able to resolve the uncertainty surrounding a situation, you will be better able to explain the consequences that ensue. This sounds obvious, but the implications aren’t: we have data that show that cancer patients report lower life satisfaction rates when they are in remission.51 My interpretation is that the “certainty” of death allows a person to put his or her house into order, and remission casts uncertainty on that purpose.
A similar story can be told for genetic testing. In a study looking at testing for Huntington’s disease—an inherited genetic disorder that affects muscle coordination and generally leads to psychiatric problems and early death—those who were told that they had a decreased risk of the disease reported better mental health over the year of the study following testing than those who were told their risk was unchanged.52 So far, so obvious. But those who were told that they had an increased risk also reported better mental health than the group whose risk was unchanged. The unchanged-risk group arguably still faced the same uncertainty as before, whereas the other two groups benefited from the uncertainty being reduced, even if it was in a “bad” way.
These examples show how the resolution of uncertainty about bad life events is potentially good for your happiness. Your attention is diverted away from worrying about what might or might not happen (and all the possible stresses and strains that those scenarios might involve) toward dealing with a future that can be better planned and managed. This goes a long way toward explaining why people’s life satisfaction takes a massive drop close to the time of separation but then bounces back upon divorce.53 Divorce provides closure by resolving the uncertainty of whether you will get back together again—and it also sorts out the finances, too. Resolving the uncertainty surrounding a situation like divorce forces
an explanation, and thus its impact as an input into the production process of happiness wanes.
What applies to pain might not apply to pleasure, however. Perhaps you have stored a bottle of wine for years or stretched out the time you spent planning your holiday in order to enjoy the pleasure of anticipation as well as consumption.54 If you could have a kiss from your favorite movie star, you might prefer to wait a few days rather than to receive it immediately.55 Or, if you’re like English soccer fans, perhaps you’re more inclined to watch a game when you’re unsure about who will win the match.56 We often seek out uncertainty for pleasure.
Changing purpose
Unfortunately, we don’t know very much about the effects of change on experiences of purpose, so please allow me to use a selective sample and example: me and my weight training. I first walked into a gym about thirteen years ago, weighing 145 pounds and with a twenty-nine-inch waist. I now weigh 215 pounds and have a thirty-two-inch waist. From the first time I lifted a dumbbell, weight training has been a pleasurable activity for me. Over time, it has additionally become a purposeful one, as I began to treat my diet and exercise program as a project. I find it interesting to see what happens to my size and strength as I vary my workouts and eat different combinations of carbs, fats, and proteins. I am proud of the gains I have made, particularly as I am naturally very skinny and I find it incredibly hard to gain weight (I am an exemplar ectomorph). You might have comparable projects in your life, such as reading or gardening, which over time have become both pleasurable and purposeful.