Stumbling on Happiness

by Daniel Gilbert

  This fact was illustrated by a study in which college students at the University of Virginia were asked to predict how they would feel a few days after their school’s football team won or lost an upcoming game against the University of North Carolina.11 Before making these predictions, one group of students (the describers) was asked to describe the events of a typical day, and one group of students (the nondescribers) was not. A few days later the students were asked to report how happy they actually were, and the results showed that only the nondescribers had drastically overestimated the impact that the win or the loss would have on them. Why? Because when nondescribers imagined the future, they tended to leave out details about the things that would happen after the game was over. For example, they failed to consider the fact that right after their team lost (which would be sad) they would go get drunk with their friends (which would be lovely), or that right after their team won (which would be lovely) they would have to go to the library and start studying for their chemistry final (which would be sad). The nondescribers were focused on one and only one aspect of the future—the outcome of the football game—and they failed to imagine other aspects of the future that would influence their happiness, such as drunken parties and chemistry exams. The describers, on the other hand, were more accurate in their predictions precisely because they were forced to consider the details that the nondescribers left out.12

  It is difficult to escape the focus of our own attention—difficult to consider what it is we may not be considering—and this is one of the reasons why we so often mispredict our emotional responses to future events. For example, most Americans can be classified as one of two types: those who live in California and are happy they do, and those who don’t live in California but believe they’d be happy if they did. Yet, research shows that Californians are actually no happier than anyone else—so why does everyone (including Californians) seem to believe they are?13 California has some of the most beautiful scenery and some of the best weather in the continental United States, and when non-Californians hear that magic word their imaginations instantly produce mental images of sunny beaches and giant redwood trees. But while Los Angeles has a better climate than Columbus, climate is just one of many things that determine a person’s happiness—and yet all those other things are missing from the mental image. If we were to add some of these missing details to our mental image of beaches and palm trees—say, traffic, supermarkets, airports, sports teams, cable rates, housing costs, earthquakes, landslides, and so on—then we might recognize that L.A. beats Columbus in some ways (better weather) and Columbus beats L.A. in others (less traffic). We think that Californians are happier than Ohioans because we imagine California with so few details—and we make no allowance for the fact that the details we are failing to imagine could drastically alter the conclusions we draw.14

  The tendency that causes us to overestimate the happiness of Californians also causes us to underestimate the happiness of people with chronic illnesses or disabilities.15 For example, when sighted people imagine being blind, they seem to forget that blindness is not a full-time job. Blind people can’t see, but they do most of the things that sighted people do—they go on picnics, pay their taxes, listen to music, get stuck in traffic—and thus they are just as happy as sighted people are. They can’t do everything sighted people can do, sighted people can’t do everything that they can do, and thus blind and sighted lives are not identical. But whatever a blind person’s life is like, it is about much more than blindness. And yet, when sighted people imagine being blind, they fail to imagine all the other things that such a life might be about, hence they mispredict how satisfying such a life can be.

  On the Event Horizon

  About fifty years ago a Pygmy named Kenge took his first trip out of the dense, tropical forests of Africa and onto the open plains in the company of an anthropologist. Buffalo appeared in the distance—small black specks against a bleached sky—and the Pygmy surveyed them curiously. Finally, he turned to the anthropologist and asked what kind of insects they were. “When I told Kenge that the insects were buffalo, he roared with laughter and told me not to tell such stupid lies.”16 The anthropologist wasn’t stupid and he hadn’t lied. Rather, because Kenge had lived his entire life in a dense jungle that offered no views of the horizon, he had failed to learn what most of us take for granted, namely, that things look different when they are far away. You and I don’t mix up our insects and our ungulates because we are used to looking out across vast expanses, and we learned early on that objects make smaller images on our retinas when they are distant than when they are nearby. How do our brains know whether a small retinal image is being made by a small object that is nearby or a large object that is distant? Details, details, details! Our brains know that the surfaces of nearby objects afford fine-grained details that blur and blend as the object recedes into the distance, and thus they use the level of detail that we can see to estimate the distance between our eye and the object. If the small retinal image is detailed—we can see the fine hairs on a mosquito’s head and the cellophane texture of its wings—our brains assume that the object is about an inch from our eye. If the small retinal image is not detailed—we can see only the vague contour and shadowless form of the buffalo’s body—our brains assume that the object is a few thousand yards away.

  Just as objects that are near to us in space appear to be more detailed than those that are far away, so do events that are near to us in time.17 Whereas the near future is finely detailed, the far future is blurry and smooth. For example, when young couples are asked to say what they think of when they envision “getting married,” those couples who are a month away from the event (either because they are getting married a month later or because they got married a month earlier) envision marriage in a fairly abstract and blurry way, and they offer high-level descriptions such as “making a serious commitment” or “making a mistake.” But couples who are getting married the next day envision marriage’s concrete details, offering descriptions such as “having pictures made” or “wearing a special outfit.”18 Similarly, when volunteers are asked to imagine themselves locking a door the next day, they describe their mental images with detailed phrases such as “putting a key in the lock,” but when volunteers are asked to imagine themselves locking a door next year, they describe their mental images with vague phrases such as “securing the house.”19 When we think of events in the distant past or distant future we tend to think abstractly about why they happened or will happen, but when we think of events in the near past or near future we tend to think concretely about how they happened or will happen.20

  Seeing in time is like seeing in space. But there is one important difference between spatial and temporal horizons. When we perceive a distant buffalo, our brains are aware of the fact that the buffalo looks smooth, vague, and lacking in detail because it is far away, and they do not mistakenly conclude that the buffalo itself is smooth and vague. But when we remember or imagine a temporally distant event, our brains seem to overlook the fact that details vanish with temporal distance, and they conclude instead that the distant events actually are as smooth and vague as we are imagining and remembering them. For example, have you ever wondered why you often make commitments that you deeply regret when the moment to fulfill them arrives? We all do this, of course. We agree to babysit the nephews and nieces next month, and we look forward to that obligation even as we jot it in our diary. Then, when it actually comes time to buy the Happy Meals, set up the Barbie playset, hide the bong, and ignore the fact that the NBA playoffs are on at one o’clock, we wonder what we were thinking when we said yes. Well, here’s what we were thinking: When we said yes we were thinking about babysitting in terms of why instead of how, in terms of causes and consequences instead of execution, and we failed to consider the fact that the detail-free babysitting we were imagining would not be the detail-laden babysitting we would ultimately experience. Babysitting next month is “an act of love,” whereas babysitt
ing right now is “an act of lunch,” and expressing affection is spiritually rewarding in a way that buying French fries simply isn’t.21

  Perhaps it isn’t surprising that the gritty details of babysitting that are so salient to us as we execute them were not part of our mental image of babysitting when we imagined it a month earlier, but what is surprising is how surprised we are when those details finally come into view. Distant babysitting has the same illusory smoothness that a distant cornfield does,22 but while we all know that a cornfield isn’t really smooth and that it just looks that way from a far remove, we seem only dimly aware of the same fact when it comes to events that are far away in time. When volunteers are asked to “imagine a good day,” they imagine a greater variety of events if the good day is tomorrow than if the good day is a year later.23 Because a good day tomorrow is imagined in considerable detail, it turns out to be a lumpy mixture of mostly good stuff (“I’ll sleep late, read the paper, go to the movies, and see my best friend”) with a few unpleasant chunks (“But I guess I’ll also have to rake the stupid leaves”). On the other hand, a good day next year is imagined as a smooth purée of happy episodes. What’s more, when people are asked how realistic they think these mental images of the near and far future are, they claim that the smooth purée of next year is every bit as realistic as the lumpy stew of tomorrow. In some sense, we are like pilots who land our planes and are genuinely shocked to discover that the cornfields that looked like smooth, yellow rectangles from the air are actually filled with—of all things—corn! Perception, imagination, and memory are remarkable abilities that have a good deal in common, but in at least one way, perception is the wisest of the triplets. We rarely mistake a distant buffalo for a nearby insect, but when the horizon is temporal rather than spatial, we tend to make the same mistake that Pygmies do.

  The fact that we imagine the near and far futures with such different textures causes us to value them differently as well.24 Most of us would pay more to see a Broadway show tonight or to eat an apple pie this afternoon than we would if the same ticket and the same pie were to be delivered to us next month. There is nothing irrational about this. Delays are painful, and it makes sense to demand a discount if one must endure them. But studies show that when people imagine the pain of waiting, they imagine that it will be worse if it happens in the near future than in the far future, and this leads to some rather odd behavior.25 For example, most people would rather receive $20 in a year than $19 in 364 days because a one-day delay that takes place in the far future looks (from here) to be a minor inconvenience. On the other hand, most people would rather receive $19 today than $20 tomorrow because a one-day delay that takes place in the near future looks (from here) to be an unbearable torment.26 Whatever amount of pain a one-day wait entails, that pain is surely the same whenever it is experienced; and yet, people imagine a near-future pain as so severe that they will gladly pay a dollar to avoid it, but a far-future pain as so mild that they will gladly accept a dollar to endure it.

  Why does this happen? The vivid detail of the near future makes it much more palpable than the far future, thus we feel more anxious and excited when we imagine events that will take place soon than when we imagine events that will take place later. Indeed, studies show that the parts of the brain that are primarily responsible for generating feelings of pleasurable excitement become active when people imagine receiving a reward such as money in the near future but not when they imagine receiving the same reward in the far future.27 If you’ve ever bought too many boxes of Thin Mints from the Girl Scout who hawks her wares in front of the local library but too few boxes from the Girl Scout who rings your doorbell and takes your order for future delivery, then you’ve experienced this anomaly yourself. When we spy the future through our prospectiscopes, the clarity of the next hour and the fuzziness of the next year can lead us to make a variety of mistakes.

  Onward

  Before heading back to Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes couldn’t resist polishing his own calabash and giving Inspector Gregory one last poke in the eye. Holmes confided in Watson: “ ‘See the value of imagination,’ said Holmes. ‘It is the one quality which Gregory lacks. We imagined what might have happened, acted upon the supposition, and find ourselves justified.’ ”28

  A very fine poke, but not a very fair one. Inspector Gregory’s problem wasn’t that he lacked imagination but that he trusted it. Any brain that does the filling-in trick is bound to do the leaving-out trick as well, and thus the futures we imagine contain some details that our brains invented and lack some details that our brains ignored. The problem isn’t that our brains fill in and leave out. God help us if they didn’t. No, the problem is that they do this so well that we aren’t aware it is happening. As such, we tend to accept the brain’s products uncritically and expect the future to unfold with the details—and with only the details—that the brain has imagined. One of imagination’s shortcomings, then, is that it takes liberties without telling us it has done so. But if imagination can be too liberal, it can also be too conservative, and that shortcoming has a story of its own.

  PART IV

  Presentism

  presentism (pre•zĕn•tizm)

  The tendency for current experience

  to influence one’s views of the past and the future.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Future Is Now

  Thy letters have transported me beyond

  This ignorant present, and I feel now

  The future in the instant.

  Shakespeare, Cymbeline

  MOST REASONABLY SIZED LIBRARIES have a shelf of futurist tomes from the 1950s with titles such as Into the Atomic Age and The World of Tomorrow. If you leaf through a few of them, you quickly notice that each of these books says more about the times in which it was written than about the times it was meant to foretell. Flip a few pages and you’ll find a drawing of a housewife with a Donna Reed hairdo and a poodle skirt flitting about her atomic kitchen, waiting for the sound of her husband’s rocket car before getting the tuna casserole on the table. Flip a few more and you’ll see a sketch of a modern city under a glass dome, complete with nuclear trains, antigravity cars, and well-dressed citizens gliding smoothly to work on conveyor-belted sidewalks. You will also notice that some things are missing. The men don’t carry babies, the women don’t carry briefcases, the children don’t have pierced eyebrows or nipples, and the mice go squeak instead of click. There are no skateboarders or panhandlers, no smartphones or smartdrinks, no spandex, latex, Gore-Tex, Amex, FedEx, or Wal-Mart. What’s more, all the people of African, Asian, and Hispanic origin seem to have missed the future entirely. Indeed, what makes these drawings so charming is that they are utterly, fabulously, and ridiculously wrong. How could anyone ever have thought that the future would look like some hybrid of Forbidden Planet and Father Knows Best?

  More of the Same

  Underestimating the novelty of the future is a time-honored tradition. Lord William Thomson Kelvin was one of the most farsighted physicists of the nineteenth century (which is why we measure temperature in kelvins), but when he looked carefully into the world of tomorrow he concluded that “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.”1 Most of his fellow scientists agreed. As the eminent astronomer Simon Newcomb wrote in 1906: “The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery, and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.”2

  Even Wilbur Wright, who proved Kelvin and Newcomb wrong, admitted that in 1901 he had said to his brother that “man would not fly for fifty years.”3 He was off by forty-eight. The number of respected scientists and accomplished inventors who declared the airplane an impossibility is exceeded only by the number who said the same thing about space travel, television sets, microwave ovens, nuclear power, heart transplants, and female senators. The litany of fa
ulty forecasts, missed marks, and prophetic pratfalls is extensive, but let me ask you to ignore for a moment the sheer number of such mistakes and notice instead the similarity of their forms. The writer Arthur C. Clarke formulated what has come to be known as Clarke’s first law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”4 In other words, when scientists make erroneous predictions, they almost always err by predicting that the future will be too much like the present.