Stumbling on Happiness

by Daniel Gilbert

  For example, volunteers in one study were students who were invited to join an extracurricular club whose initiation ritual required that they receive three electric shocks.22 Some of the volunteers had a truly dreadful experience because the shocks they received were quite severe (severe-initiation group), and others had a slightly unpleasant experience because the shocks they received were relatively mild (mild-initiation group). Although you might expect people to dislike anything associated with physical pain, the volunteers in the severe-initiation group actually liked the club more. Because these volunteers suffered greatly, the intensity of their suffering triggered their defensive systems, which immediately began working to help them achieve a credible and positive view of their experience. It isn’t easy to find such a view, but it can be done. For example, physical suffering is bad (“Oh my God, that really hurt!”), but it isn’t entirely bad if the thing one suffers for is extremely valuable (“But I’m joining a very elite group of very special people”). Indeed, research shows that when people are given electric shocks, they actually feel less pain when they believe they are suffering for something of great value.23 The intense shocks were unpleasant enough to trigger the volunteers’ psychological defenses, but the mild shocks were not, hence the volunteers valued the club most when its initiation was most painful.24 If you’ve managed to forgive your spouse for some egregious transgression but still find yourself miffed about the dent in the garage door or the trail of dirty socks on the staircase, then you have experienced this paradox.

  Intense suffering triggers the very processes that eradicate it, while mild suffering does not, and this counterintuitive fact can make it difficult for us to predict our emotional futures. For example, would it be worse if your best friend insulted you or insulted your cousin? As much as you may like your cousin, it’s a pretty good bet that you like yourself more, hence you probably think that it would be worse if the epithet were hurled your way. And you’re right. It would be worse. At first. But if intense suffering triggers the psychological immune system and mild suffering does not, then over time you should be more likely to generate a positive view of an insult that was directed at you (“Felicia called me a pea-brain . . . boy, she can really crack me up sometimes”) than one that was directed at your cousin (“Felicia called Cousin Dwayne a pea-brain . . . I mean, she’s right, of course, but it wasn’t very nice of her to say”). The irony is that you may ultimately feel better when you are the victim of an insult than when you are a bystander to it.

  This possibility was tested in a study in which two volunteers took a personality test and then one of them received feedback from a psychologist.25 The feedback was professional, detailed, and unrelentingly negative. For example, it contained statements such as “You have few qualities that distinguish you from others” and “People like you primarily because you don’t threaten their competence.” Both of the volunteers read the feedback and then reported how much they liked the psychologist who had written it. Ironically, the volunteer who was the victim of the negative feedback liked the psychologist more than did the volunteer who was merely a bystander to it. Why? Because bystanders were miffed (“Man, that was a really crummy thing to do to the other volunteer”), but they were not devastated, hence their psychological immune systems did nothing to ameliorate their mildly negative feelings. But victims were devastated (“Yikes, I’m a certified loser!”), hence their brains quickly went shopping for a positive view of the experience (“But now that I think of it, that test could only provide a small glimpse into my very complex personality, so I rather doubt it means much”). Now here’s the important finding: When a new group of volunteers was asked to predict how much they would like the psychologist, they predicted that they would like the psychologist less if they were victims than if they were bystanders. Apparently, people are not aware of the fact that their defenses are more likely to be triggered by intense than mild suffering, thus they mispredict their own emotional reactions to misfortunes of different sizes.

  The Inescapability Trigger

  Intense suffering is one factor that can trigger our defenses and thus influence our experiences in ways we don’t anticipate. But there are others. For example, why do we forgive our siblings for behavior we would never tolerate in a friend? Why aren’t we disturbed when the president does something that would have kept us from voting for him had he done it before the election? Why do we overlook an employee’s chronic tardiness but refuse to hire a job seeker who is two minutes late for the interview? One possibility is that blood is thicker than water, flags were made to be rallied around, and first impressions matter most. But another possibility is that we are more likely to look for and find a positive view of the things we’re stuck with than of the things we’re not.26 Friends come and go, and changing candidates is as easy as changing socks. But siblings and presidents are ours, for better or for worse, and there’s not much we can do about it once they’ve been born or elected. When the experience we are having is not the experience we want to be having, our first reaction is to go out and have a different one, which is why we return unsatisfactory rental cars, check out of bad hotels, and stop hanging around with people who pick their noses in public. It is only when we cannot change the experience that we look for ways to change our view of the experience, which is why we love the clunker in the driveway, the shabby cabin that’s been in the family for years, and Uncle Sheldon despite his predilection for nasal spelunking. We find silver linings only when we must, which is why people experience an increase in happiness when genetic tests reveal that they don’t have a dangerous genetic defect, or when the tests reveal that they do have a dangerous genetic defect, but not when the tests are inconclusive.27 We just can’t make the best of a fate until it is inescapably, inevitably, and irrevocably ours.

  Inescapable, inevitable, and irrevocable circumstances trigger the psychological immune system, but, as with the intensity of suffering, people do not always recognize that this will happen. For example, college students in one study signed up for a course in black-and-white photography.28 Each student took a dozen photographs of people and places that were personally meaningful, then reported for a private lesson. In these lessons, the teacher spent an hour or two showing students how to print their two best photographs. When the prints were dry and ready, the teacher said that the student could keep one of the photographs but that the other would be kept on file as an example of student work. Some students (inescapable group) were told that once they had chosen a photograph to take home, they would not be allowed to change their minds. Other students (escapable group) were told that once they had chosen a photograph to take home, they would have several days to change their minds—and if they did, the teacher would gladly swap the photograph they’d taken home for the one they’d left behind. Students made their choices and took one of their photographs home. Several days later, the students responded to a survey asking them (among other things) how much they liked their photographs. The results showed that students in the escapable group liked their photograph less than did students in the inescapable group. Interestingly, when a new group of students was asked to predict how much they would like their photographs if they were or were not given the opportunity to change their minds, these students predicted that escapability would have no influence whatsoever on their satisfaction with the photograph. Apparently, inescapable circumstances trigger the psychological defenses that enable us to achieve positive views of those circumstances, but we do not anticipate that this will happen.

  Our failure to anticipate that inescapability will trigger our psychological immune systems (hence promote our happiness and satisfaction) can cause us to make some painful mistakes. For example, when a new group of photography students was asked whether they would prefer to have or not to have the opportunity to change their minds about which photograph to keep, the vast majority preferred to have that opportunity—that is, the vast majority of students preferred to enroll in a photography course in which
they would ultimately be dissatisfied with the photograph they produced. Why would anyone prefer less satisfaction to more? No one does, of course, but most people do seem to prefer more freedom to less. Indeed, when our freedom to make up our minds—or to change our minds once we’ve made them up—is threatened, we experience a strong impulse to reassert it,29 which is why retailers sometimes threaten your freedom to own their products with claims such as “Limited stock” or “You must order by midnight tonight.”30 Our fetish for freedom leads us to patronize expensive department stores that allow us to return merchandise rather than attend auctions that don’t, to lease cars at a dramatic markup rather than buying them at a bargain, and so on.

  Most of us will pay a premium today for the opportunity to change our minds tomorrow, and sometimes it makes sense to do so. A few days spent test-driving a little red roadster tells us a lot about what it might be like to own one, thus it is sometimes wise to pay a modest premium for a contract that includes a short refund period. But if keeping our options open has benefits, it also has costs. Little red roadsters are naturally cramped, and while the committed owner will find positive ways to view that fact (“Wow! It feels like a fighter jet!”), the buyer whose contract includes an escape clause may not (“This car is so tiny. Maybe I should return it”). Committed owners attend to a car’s virtues and overlook its flaws, thus cooking the facts to produce a banquet of satisfaction, but the buyer for whom escape is still possible (and whose defenses have not yet been triggered) is likely to evaluate the new car more critically, paying special attention to its imperfections as she tries to decide whether to keep it. The costs and benefits of freedom are clear—but alas, they are not equally clear: We have no trouble anticipating the advantages that freedom may provide, but we seem blind to the joys it can undermine.31

  Explaining Away

  If you’ve ever puked your guts out shortly after eating chili con carne and found yourself unable to eat it again for years, you have a pretty good idea of what it’s like to be a fruit fly. No, fruit flies don’t eat chili, and no, fruit flies don’t puke. But they do associate their best and worst experiences with the circumstances that accompanied and preceded them, which allows them to seek or avoid those circumstances in the future. Expose a fruit fly to the odor of tennis shoes, give it a very tiny electric shock, and for the rest of its very tiny life it will avoid places that smell tennis-shoey. The ability to associate pleasure or pain with its circumstances is so vitally important that nature has installed that ability in every one of her creatures, from Drosophila melanogaster to Ivan Pavlov.

  But if that ability is necessary for creatures like us, it certainly isn’t sufficient, because the kind of learning it enables is far too limited. If an organism can do no more than associate particular experiences with particular circumstances, then it can learn only a very small lesson, namely, to seek or avoid those particular circumstances in the future. A well-timed shock may teach a fruit fly to avoid the tennis-shoe smell, but it won’t teach it to avoid the smell of snowshoes, ballet slippers, Manolo Blahniks, or a scientist armed with a miniature stun gun. To maximize our pleasures and minimize our pains, we must be able to associate our experiences with the circumstances that produced them, but we must also be able to explain how and why those circumstances produced the experiences they did. If we feel nauseous after a few turns on the Ferris wheel and our explanation involves poor equilibrium, then we avoid Ferris wheels in the future—just as a fruit fly would. But unlike a fruit fly, we also avoid some things that are not associated with our nauseating experience (such as bungee jumping and sailboats) and we do not avoid some things that are associated with our nauseating experience (such as hurdy-gurdy music and clowns). Unlike a mere association, an explanation allows us to identify particular aspects of a circumstance (spinning) as the cause of our experience, and other aspects (music) as irrelevant. In so doing, we learn more from our upchucks than a fruit fly ever could.

  Explanations allow us to make full use of our experiences, but they also change the nature of those experiences. As we have seen, when experiences are unpleasant, we quickly move to explain them in ways that make us feel better (“I didn’t get the job because the judge was biased against people who barf on Ferris wheels”). And indeed, studies show that the mere act of explaining an unpleasant event can help to defang it. For example, simply writing about a trauma—such as the death of a loved one or a physical assault—can lead to surprising improvements in both subjective well-being and physical health (e.g., fewer visits to the physician and improved production of viral antibodies).32 What’s more, the people who experience the greatest benefit from these writing exercises are those whose writing contains an explanation of the trauma.33

  But just as explanations ameliorate the impact of unpleasant events, so too do they ameliorate the impact of pleasant events. For example, college students volunteered for a study in which they believed they were interacting in an online chat room with students from other universities.34 In fact, they were actually interacting with a sophisticated computer program that simulated the presence of other students. After the simulated students had provided the real student with information about themselves (“Hi, I’m Eva, and I like to do volunteer work”), the researcher pretended to ask the simulated students to decide which of the people in the chat room they liked most, to write a paragraph explaining why, and then to send it to that person. In just a few minutes, something remarkable happened: The real student received e-mail messages from every one of the simulated students indicating that they liked the real student best! For example, one simulated message read: “I just felt that something clicked between us when I read your answers. It’s too bad we’re not at the same school!” Another read: “You stood out as the one I would like the most. I was especially interested in the way you described your interests and values.” A third read: “I wish I could talk with you directly because . . . I’d ask you if you like being around water (I love water-skiing) and if you like Italian food (it’s my favorite).”

  Now, here’s the catch: Some real students (informed group) received e-mail that allowed them to know which simulated student wrote each of the messages, and other real students (uninformed group) received e-mail messages that had been stripped of that identifying information. In other words, every real student received exactly the same e-mail messages indicating that they had won the hearts and minds of all the simulated people in the chat room, but only real students in the informed group knew which simulated individual had written each of the messages. Hence, real students in the informed group were able to generate explanations for their good fortune (“Eva appreciates my values because we’re both involved with Habitat for Humanity, and it makes sense that Catarina would mention Italian food”), whereas real students in the uninformed group were not (“Someone appreciates my values . . . I wonder who? And why would anyone mention Italian food?”). The researchers measured how happy the real students were immediately after receiving these messages and then again fifteen minutes later. Although real students in both groups were initially delighted to have been chosen as everyone’s best friend, only the real students in the uninformed group remained delighted fifteen minutes later. If you’ve ever had a secret admirer, then you understand why real students in the uninformed group remained on cloud nine while real students in the informed group quickly descended to clouds two through five.

  Unexplained events have two qualities that amplify and extend their emotional impact. First, they strike us as rare and unusual.35 If I told you that my brother, my sister, and I were all born on the same day, you’d probably consider that a rare and unusual occurrence. Once I explained that we were triplets, you’d find it considerably less so. In fact, just about any explanation I offered (“By same day I meant we were all born on a Thursday” or “We were all delivered by cesarean section, so Mom and Dad timed our births for maximum tax benefits”) would tend to reduce the amazingness of the coincidence and make the event seem more pr
obable. Explanations allow us to understand how and why an event happened, which immediately allows us to see how and why it might happen again. Indeed, whenever we say that something can’t happen—for example, mind reading or levitation or a law that limits the power of incumbents—we usually just mean that we’d have no way to explain it if it did. Unexplained events seem rare, and rare events naturally have a greater emotional impact than common events do. We are awed by a solar eclipse but merely impressed by a sunset despite the fact that the latter is by far the more spectacular visual treat.

  The second reason why unexplained events have a disproportionate emotional impact is that we are especially likely to keep thinking about them. People spontaneously try to explain events,36 and studies show that when people do not complete the things they set out to do, they are especially likely to think about and remember their unfinished business.37 Once we explain an event, we can fold it up like freshly washed laundry, put it away in memory’s drawer, and move on to the next one; but if an event defies explanation, it becomes a mystery or a conundrum—and if there’s one thing we all know about mysterious conundrums, it is that they generally refuse to stay in the back of our minds. Filmmakers and novelists often capitalize on this fact by fitting their narratives with mysterious endings, and research shows that people are, in fact, more likely to keep thinking about a movie when they can’t explain what happened to the main character. And if they liked the movie, this morsel of mystery causes them to remain happy longer.38

  Explanation robs events of their emotional impact because it makes them seem likely and allows us to stop thinking about them. Oddly enough, an explanation doesn’t actually have to explain anything to have these effects—it merely needs to seem as though it does. For instance, in one study, a researcher approached college students in the university library, handed them one of two cards with a dollar coin attached, then walked away. You’d probably agree that this is a curious event that begs for explanation. As figure 20 shows, both cards stated that the researcher was a member of the “Smile Society,” which was devoted to “random acts of kindness.” But one card also contained two extra phrases—“Who are we?” and “Why do we do this?” These empty phrases didn’t really provide any new information, of course, but they made students feel as though the curious event had been explained (“Aha, now I understand why they gave me a dollar!”). About five minutes later, a different researcher approached the student and claimed to be doing a class project on “community thoughts and feelings.” The researcher asked the student to complete some survey questions, one of which was “How positive or negative are you feeling right now?” The results showed that those students who had received a card with the pseudo-explanatory phrases felt less happy than those who had received a card without them. Apparently, even a fake explanation can cause us to tuck an event away and move along to the next one.