For example, people generally don’t like to buy the most expensive item in a category, hence retailers can improve their sales by stocking a few very expensive items that no one actually buys (“Oh my God, the 1982 Château Haut-Brion Pessac-Léognan sells for five hundred dollars a bottle!”) but that make less expensive items seem like a bargain by comparison (“I’ll just stick with the sixty-dollar zinfandel”).25 Unscrupulous real estate agents bring buyers to dilapidated dumps that are conveniently located between a massage parlor and a crack house before bringing them to the ordinary homes that they actually hope to sell, because the dumps make the ordinary homes seem extraordinary (“Oh, look, honey, no needles on the lawn!”).26 Our side-by-side comparisons can be influenced by extreme possibilities such as extravagant wines and dilapidated houses, but they can also be influenced by the addition of extra possibilities that are identical to those we are already considering. For example, in one study, physicians read about Medication X and were then asked whether they would prescribe the medication for a patient with osteoarthritis.27 The physicians clearly considered the medication worthwhile, because only 28 percent chose not to prescribe it. But when another group of physicians was asked whether they would prescribe Medication X or an equally effective Medication Y for a patient with the same disease, 48 percent chose to prescribe nothing. Apparently, adding another equally effective medication to the list of possibilities made it difficult for the physicians to decide between the two medications, thus leading many of them to recommend neither. If you’ve ever caught yourself saying, “I’m having such a hard time deciding between these two movies that I think I’ll just stay home and watch reruns instead,” then you know why physicians made the mistake they did.28
One of the most insidious things about side-by-side comparison is that it leads us to pay attention to any attribute that distinguishes the possibilities we are comparing.29 I’ve probably spent some of the unhappiest hours of my life in stores that I meant to visit for fifteen minutes. I stop at the mall on the way to the picnic, park the car, dash in, and expect to reemerge a few minutes later with a nifty little digital camera in my pocket. But when I get to Wacky Bob’s Giant Mega Super Really Big World of Cameras, I am confronted by a bewildering panoply of nifty little digital cameras that differ on many attributes. Some of these are attributes that I would have considered even if there had been only one camera in the display case (“This is light enough to fit in my shirt pocket so I can take it anywhere”), and some are attributes I would never have thought about had the differences between cameras not been called to my attention (“The Olympus has flash output compensation, but the Nikon doesn’t. By the way, what is flash output compensation?”). Because side-by-side comparisons cause me to consider all the attributes on which the cameras differ, I end up considering attributes that I don’t really care about but that just so happen to distinguish one camera from another.30 For example, what attributes would you care about if you were shopping for a new dictionary? In one study, people were given the opportunity to bid on a dictionary that was in perfect condition and that listed ten thousand words, and on average they bid $24.31 Other people were given the opportunity to bid on a dictionary with a torn cover that listed twenty thousand words, and on average they bid $20. But when a third group of people was allowed to compare the two dictionaries side by side, they bid $19 for the small intact dictionary and $27 for the large torn dictionary. Apparently, people care about the condition of a dictionary’s cover, but they care about the number of words it contains only when that attribute is brought to their attention by side-by-side comparison.
Comparing and Presentism
Now let’s step back for a moment and ask what all of these facts about comparison mean for our ability to imagine future feelings. The facts are these: (a) value is determined by the comparison of one thing with another; (b) there is more than one kind of comparison we can make in any given instance; and (c) we may value something more highly when we make one kind of comparison than when we make a different kind of comparison. These facts suggest that if we want to predict how something will make us feel in the future, we must consider the kind of comparison we will be making in the future and not the kind of comparison we happen to be making in the present. Alas, because we make comparisons without even thinking about them (“Man, that coffee has gotten expensive!” or “I’m not paying double to see this concert”), we rarely consider the fact that the comparisons we are making now may not be the ones we will be making later.32 For example, volunteers in one study were asked to sit at a table and predict how much they would enjoy eating potato chips a few minutes later.33 Some of the volunteers saw a bag of potato chips and a chocolate bar sitting on the table, and others saw a bag of potato chips and a tin of sardines sitting on the table. Did these extraneous foods influence the volunteers’ predictions? You bet they did. Volunteers naturally compared the potato chips with the extraneous food, and they predicted that they’d like eating the potato chips more when they compared the chips to the sardines than when they compared the chips to chocolate. But they were wrong. Because when volunteers actually ate the potato chips, the sardine tin and the chocolate bar that were sitting on the table had no influence whatsoever on their enjoyment of the chips. After all, when one has a mouthful of crispy, salty, oily, fried potatoes, another food item that just so happens to be sitting there on the table is largely irrelevant—just as the person you might have been making love with is largely irrelevant when you are in the middle of making love with someone else. What the volunteers didn’t realize was that the comparisons they made as they imagined eating a chip (“Sure, chips are okay . . . but chocolate is so much better”) were not the comparisons they would make when they were actually chowing down on one.
Most of us have had similar experiences. We compare the small, elegant speakers with the huge, boxy speakers, notice the acoustical difference, and buy the hulking leviathans. Alas, the acoustical difference is a difference we never notice again, because when we get the monster speakers home we do not compare their sound to the sound of some speaker we listened to a week earlier at the store, but we do compare their awful boxiness to the rest of our sleek, elegant, and now-spoiled décor. Or we travel to France, meet a couple from our hometown, and instantly become touring buddies because compared with all those French people who hate us when we don’t try to speak their language and hate us more when we do, the hometown couple seems exceptionally warm and interesting. We are delighted to have found these new friends, and we expect to like them just as much in the future as we do today. But when we have them over for dinner a month after returning home, we are surprised to find that our new friends are rather boring and remote compared with our regular friends, and that we actually dislike them enough to qualify for French citizenship. Our mistake was not in touring Paris with a couple of dull homies but in failing to realize that the comparison we were making in the present (“Lisa and Walter are so much nicer than the waiter at Le Grand Colbert”) is not the comparison we would be making in the future (“Lisa and Walter aren’t nearly as nice as Toni and Dan”). The same principle explains why we love new things when we buy them and then stop loving them shortly thereafter. When we start shopping for a new pair of sunglasses, we naturally contrast the hip, stylish ones in the store with the old, outdated ones that are sitting on our noses. So we buy the new ones and stick the old ones in a drawer. But after just a few days of wearing our new sunglasses we stop comparing them with the old pair, and—well, what do you know? The delight that the comparison produced evaporates.
The fact that we make different comparisons at different times—but don’t realize that we will do so—helps explain some otherwise puzzling conundrums. For instance, economists and psychologists have shown that people expect losing a dollar to have more impact than gaining a dollar, which is why most of us would refuse a bet that gives us an 85 percent chance of doubling our life savings and a 15 percent chance of losing it.34 The likely prospect of a
big gain just doesn’t compensate for the unlikely prospect of a big loss because we think losses are more powerful than equal-sized gains. But whether we think of something as a gain or a loss often depends on the comparisons we are making. For example, how much is a 1993 Mazda Miata worth? According to my insurance company, the correct answer this year is about $2,000. But as the owner of a 1993 Mazda Miata, I can guarantee that if you wanted to buy my sweet little car with all of its adorable dents and mischievous rattles for a mere $2,000, you’d have to pry the keys out of my cold, dead hands. I also guarantee that if you saw my car, you’d think that for $2,000 I should not only give you the car and the keys but that I should throw in a bicycle, a lawn mower, and a lifetime subscription to The Atlantic. Why would we disagree about the fair value of my car? Because you would be thinking about the transaction as a potential gain (“Compared with how I feel now, how happy will I be if I get this car?”) and I would be thinking about it as a potential loss (“Compared with how I feel now, how happy will I be if I lose this car?”).35 I would want to be compensated for what I expected to be a powerful loss, but you would not want to compensate me because you would be expecting a less powerful gain. What you would be failing to realize is that once you owned my car, your frame of reference would shift, you would be making the same comparison that I am now making, and that the car would be worth every penny you paid for it. What I would be failing to realize is that once I didn’t own the car, my frame of reference would shift, I would be making the same comparison that you’re making now, and that I’d be delighted with the deal because, after all, I’d never pay $2,000 for a car that was identical to the one I just sold you. The reason why we disagree on the price and quietly question each other’s integrity and parenthood is that neither of us realizes that the kinds of comparisons we are naturally making as buyers and sellers are not the kinds of comparisons we will naturally make once we become owners and former owners.36 In short, the comparisons we make have a profound impact on our feelings, and when we fail to recognize that the comparisons we are making today are not the comparisons we will make tomorrow, we predictably underestimate how differently we will feel in the future.
Onward
Historians use the word presentism to describe the tendency to judge historical figures by contemporary standards. As much as we all despise racism and sexism, these isms have only recently been considered moral turpitudes, and thus condemning Thomas Jefferson for keeping slaves or Sigmund Freud for patronizing women is a bit like arresting someone today for having driven without a seat belt in 1923. And yet, the temptation to view the past through the lens of the present is nothing short of overwhelming. As the president of the American Historical Association noted, “Presentism admits of no ready solution; it turns out to be very difficult to exit from modernity.”37 The good news is that most of us aren’t historians and thus we don’t have to worry about finding that particular exit. The bad news is that all of us are futurians, and presentism is an even bigger problem when people look forward rather than backward. Because predictions about the future are made in the present, they are inevitably influenced by the present. The way we feel right now (“I’m so hungry”) and the way we think right now (“The big speakers sound better than the little ones”) exert an unusually strong influence on the way we think we’ll feel later. Because time is such a slippery concept, we tend to imagine the future as the present with a twist, thus our imagined tomorrows inevitably look like slightly twisted versions of today. The reality of the moment is so palpable and powerful that it holds imagination in a tight orbit from which it never fully escapes. Presentism occurs because we fail to recognize that our future selves won’t see the world the way we see it now. As we are about to learn, this fundamental inability to take the perspective of the person to whom the rest of our lives will happen is the most insidious problem a futurian can face.
PART V
Rationalization
ra•tion•al•i•za•tion (rae•shen•ăl•i•zē•shen)
The act of causing something to be or to seem reasonable.
CHAPTER 8
Paradise Glossed
For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark
FORGET YOGA. Forget liposuction. And forget those herbal supplements that promise to improve your memory, enhance your mood, reduce your waistline, restore your hairline, prolong your lovemaking, and improve your memory. If you want to be happy and healthy, you should try a new technique that has the power to transform the grumpy, underpaid chump you are now into the deeply fulfilled, enlightened individual you’ve always hoped to be. If you don’t believe me, then just consider the testimony of some folks who’ve tried it:
• “I am so much better off physically, financially, mentally, and in almost every other way.” (JW from Texas)
• “It was a glorious experience.” (MB from Louisiana)
• “I didn’t appreciate others nearly as much as I do now.” (CR from California)
Who are these satisfied customers, and what is the miraculous technique they’re all talking about? Jim Wright, former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, made his remark after committing sixty-nine ethics violations and being forced to resign in disgrace. Moreese Bickham, a former inmate, made his remark upon being released from the Louisiana State Penitentiary where he’d served thirty-seven years for defending himself against the Ku Klux Klansmen who’d shot him. And Christopher Reeve, the dashing star of Superman, made his remark after an equestrian accident left him paralyzed from the neck down, unable to breathe without the help of a ventilator. The moral of the story? If you want to be happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise, then skip the vitamin pills and the plastic surgeries and try public humiliation, unjust incarceration, or quadriplegia instead.
Uh-huh. Right. Are we really supposed to believe that people who lose their jobs, their freedom, and their mobility are somehow improved by the tragedies that befall them? If that strikes you as a far-fetched possibility, then you are not alone. For at least a century, psychologists have assumed that terrible events—such as having a loved one die or becoming the victim of a violent crime—must have a powerful, devastating, and enduring impact on those who experience them.1 This assumption has been so deeply embedded in our conventional wisdom that people who don’t have dire reactions to events such as these are sometimes diagnosed as having a pathological condition known as “absent grief.” But recent research suggests that the conventional wisdom is wrong, that the absence of grief is quite normal, and that rather than being the fragile flowers that a century of psychologists have made us out to be, most people are surprisingly resilient in the face of trauma. The loss of a parent or spouse is usually sad and often tragic, and it would be perverse to suggest otherwise. But the fact is that while most bereaved people are quite sad for a while, very few become chronically depressed and most experience relatively low levels of relatively short-lived distress.2 Although more than half the people in the United States will experience a trauma such as rape, physical assault, or natural disaster in their lifetimes, only a small fraction will ever develop any post-traumatic pathology or require any professional assistance.3 As one group of researchers noted, “Resilience is often the most commonly observed outcome trajectory following exposure to a potentially traumatic event.”4 Indeed, studies of those who survive major traumas suggest that the vast majority do quite well, and that a significant portion claim that their lives were enhanced by the experience.5 I know, I know. It sounds suspiciously like the title of a country song, but the fact is that most folks do pretty darn good when things go pretty darn bad.
If resilience is all around us, then why are statistics such as these so surprising? Why do most of us find it difficult to believe that we could ever consider a lifetime behind bars to be “a glorious experience”6 or come to see paralysis as “a unique opportunity” that gave “a new direction”7 to our lives? Why do most
of us shake our heads in disbelief when an athlete who has been through several grueling years of chemotherapy tells us that “I wouldn’t change anything,”8 or when a musician who has become permanently disabled says, “If I had it to do all over again, I would want it to happen the same way,”9 or when quadriplegics and paraplegics tell us that they are pretty much as happy as everyone else?10 The claims made by people who have experienced events such as these seem frankly outlandish to those of us who are merely imagining those events—and yet, who are we to argue with the folks who’ve actually been there?
The fact is that negative events do affect us, but they generally don’t affect us as much or for as long as we expect them to.11 When people are asked to predict how they’ll feel if they lose a job or a romantic partner, if their candidate loses an important election or their team loses an important game, if they flub an interview, flunk an exam, or fail a contest, they consistently overestimate how awful they’ll feel and how long they’ll feel awful.12 Able-bodied people are willing to pay far more to avoid becoming disabled than disabled people are willing to pay to become able-bodied again because able-bodied people underestimate how happy disabled people are.13 As one group of researchers noted, “Chronically ill and disabled patients generally rate the value of their lives in a given health state more highly than do hypothetical patients [who are] imagining themselves to be in such states.”14 Indeed, healthy people imagine that eighty-three states of illness would be “worse than death,” and yet, people who are actually in those states rarely take their own lives.15 If negative events don’t hit us as hard as we expect them to, then why do we expect them to? If heartbreaks and calamities can be blessings in disguise, then why are their disguises so convincing? The answer is that the human mind tends to exploit ambiguity—and if that phrase seems ambiguous to you, then just keep reading and let me exploit it.
Stumbling on Happiness Page 16