Fig. 20.
Uncertainty can preserve and prolong our happiness, thus we might expect people to cherish it. In fact, the opposite is generally the case. When a new group of students was asked which of the two cards shown in figure 20 would make them happier, 75 percent chose the one with the meaningless explanation. Similarly, when a group of students was asked whether they would prefer to know or not know which of the simulated students had written each of the glowing reports in the online chat-room study, 100 percent chose to know. In both cases, students chose certainty over uncertainty and clarity over mystery—despite the fact that in both cases clarity and certainty had been shown to diminish happiness. The poet John Keats noted that whereas great authors are “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” the rest of us are “incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge.”39 Our relentless desire to explain everything that happens may well distinguish us from fruit flies, but it can also kill our buzz.
Onward
The eye and the brain are conspirators, and like most conspiracies, theirs is negotiated behind closed doors, in the back room, outside of our awareness. Because we do not realize that we have generated a positive view of our current experience, we do not realize that we will do so again in the future. Not only does our naïveté cause us to overestimate the intensity and duration of our distress in the face of future adversity, but it also leads us to take actions that may undermine the conspiracy. We are more likely to generate a positive and credible view of an action than an inaction, of a painful experience than of an annoying experience, of an unpleasant situation that we cannot escape than of one we can. And yet, we rarely choose action over inaction, pain over annoyance, and commitment over freedom. The processes by which we generate positive views are many: We pay more attention to favorable information, we surround ourselves with those who provide it, and we accept it uncritically. These tendencies make it easy for us to explain unpleasant experiences in ways that exonerate us and make us feel better. The price we pay for our irrepressible explanatory urge is that we often spoil our most pleasant experiences by making good sense of them.
Our tour of imagination has covered a lot of ground—from realism to presentism to rationalization—so before moving on to our final destination, it may be useful to locate ourselves on the big map. We’ve seen how difficult it is to predict accurately our emotional reactions to future events because it is difficult to imagine them as they will happen, and difficult to imagine how we’ll think about them once they do. Throughout this book, I’ve compared imagination to perception and memory, and I’ve tried to convince you that foresight is just as fallible as eyesight and hindsight. Fallible eyesight can be remedied by glasses and fallible hindsight can be remedied by written records of the past—but what of fallible foresight? There are no spectacles that can sharpen our view of tomorrow and no records of things to come. Can we remedy the problems of foresight? As we are about to see, we can. But we generally choose not to.
PART VI
Corrigibility
corrigibility (kor•i•dzĭ•b´l•ĭ•tee)
Capable of being corrected, reformed, or improved.
CHAPTER 10
Once Bitten
Experience, O, thou disprov’st report!
Shakespeare, Cymbeline
THE LAST DECADE has seen an explosion of books about poop. When my two-year-old granddaughter crawls up onto my lap, she typically brings with her a fat stack of picture books, including several that explore in considerable detail the miracle of defecation and the mysteries of indoor plumbing. Some offer detailed descriptions for the budding anatomist; some offer little more than drawings of happy children, squatting, standing, and wiping. Despite their many differences, each of these books communicates the same message: Grown-ups do not poop in their pants, but if you do, then don’t worry too much about it. My granddaughter seems to find this message both reassuring and inspirational. She understands that there is a right way and a wrong way to poop, and that while we don’t expect her to poop the right way just yet, we do want her to notice that most of the people around her have learned to poop the right way, which suggests that with a little practice and a little coaching, she can learn to poop the right way too.
As it turns out, the benefits of practice and coaching are not limited to this particular skill. In fact, practice and coaching are the two means by which we learn just about everything we know. Firsthand knowledge and secondhand knowledge are the only two kinds of knowledge there are, and no matter what task we master—pooping, cooking, investing, bobsledding—that mastery is always a product of direct experience and/or of listening to those who have had direct experience. Babies poop in their diapers because they are rookies and because they cannot take advantage of the lessons that veterans can provide. Because babies lack both firsthand knowledge and secondhand knowledge of proper potty protocol, we expect them to make a stinky mess—but we also expect that within a few years, practice and coaching will begin to have their remedial effects, innocence will yield to experience and education, and pooping errors will disappear altogether. So why doesn’t this analysis extend to errors of every kind? We all have direct experience with things that do or don’t make us happy, we all have friends, therapists, cabdrivers, and talk-show hosts who tell us about things that will or won’t make us happy, and yet, despite all this practice and all this coaching, our search for happiness often culminates in a stinky mess. We expect the next car, the next house, or the next promotion to make us happy even though the last ones didn’t and even though others keep telling us that the next ones won’t. Why don’t we learn to avoid these mistakes in the same way that we learn to avoid warm diapers? If practice and coaching can teach us to keep our pants dry, then why can’t they teach us to predict our emotional futures?
The Least Likely of Times
There are many good things about getting older, but no one knows what they are. We fall asleep and wake up at all the wrong times, avoid more foods than we can eat, and take pills to help us remember which other pills to take. In fact, the only really good thing about getting older is that people who still have all their hair are occasionally forced to stand back and admire our wealth of experience. They think of our experience as a form of wealth because they assume it allows us to avoid making the same mistake twice—and sometimes it does. There are a few experiences that those of us who are filthy rich with it just don’t repeat, and bathing a cat while drinking peppermint schnapps comes to mind for reasons I’d rather not discuss right now. On the other hand, there are plenty of mistakes that we highly experienced folks seem to make over and over again. We marry people who are oddly like the people we divorced, we attend annual family gatherings and make an annual vow never to return, and we carefully time our monthly expenditures to ensure that we will once again be flat broke on all the dates that begin with a three. These cycles of recidivism seem difficult to explain. After all, shouldn’t we learn from our own experience? Imagination has its shortcomings, to be sure, and it is perhaps inevitable that we will mispredict how future events will make us feel when we’ve never experienced those events before. But once we’ve been married to a busy executive who spends more hours at work than at home, once we’ve attended a family reunion at which the aunts fight with the uncles who do their best to offend the cousins, and once we’ve spent a few lean days between paychecks acquiring intimate knowledge of rice and beans, shouldn’t we be able to imagine these events with a reasonable degree of accuracy and hence take steps to avoid them in the future?
We should and we do, but not as often or as well as you might expect. We try to repeat those experiences that we remember with pleasure and pride, and we try to avoid repeating those that we remember with embarrassment and regret.1 The trouble is that we often don’t remember them correctly. Remembering an experience feels a lot like opening a drawer and retrieving a story that was filed away on the day it was written, but
as we’ve seen in previous chapters, that feeling is one of our brain’s most sophisticated illusions. Memory is not a dutiful scribe that keeps a complete transcript of our experiences, but a sophisticated editor that clips and saves key elements of an experience and then uses these elements to rewrite the story each time we ask to reread it. The clip-and-save method usually works pretty well because the editor usually has a keen sense of which elements are essential and which are disposable. That’s why we remember how the groom looked when he kissed the bride but not which finger the flower girl had up her nose when it happened. Alas, as keen as its editorial skills may be, memory does have a few quirks that cause it to misrepresent the past and hence causes us to misimagine the future.
For example, you may or may not use four-letter words, but I trust you’ve never counted them. So take a guess: Are there more four-letter words in the English language that begin with k (k-1’s) or that have k as their third letter (k-3’s)? If you are like most people, you guessed that the k-1’s outnumber the k-3’s.2 You probably answered this question by briefly checking your memory (“Hmmm, there’s kite, kilt, kale . . . “), and because you found it easier to recall k-1’s than k-3’s, you assumed there must be more of the former than the latter. This would normally be a very fine deduction. After all, you can recall more four-legged elephants (e-4’s) than six-legged elephants (e-6’s) because you have seen more e-4’s than e-6’s, and you have seen more e-4’s than e-6’s because there are more e-4’s than e-6’s. The actual number of e-4’s and e-6’s in the world determines how frequently you encounter them, and the frequency of your encounters determines how easily you can remember those encounters.
Alas, the reasoning that serves you so well when it comes to elephants serves you quite poorly when it comes to words. It is indeed easier to recall k-1’s than k-3’s, but not because you have encountered more of the former than the latter. Rather, it’s easier to recall words that start with k because it is easier to recall any word by its first letter than by its third letter. Our mental dictionaries are organized more or less alphabetically, like Webster’s itself, hence we can’t easily “look up” a word in our memories by any letter except the first one. The fact is that there are many more k-3’s than k-1’s in the English language, but because the latter are easier to recall, people routinely get this question wrong. The k-word puzzle works because we naturally (but incorrectly) assume that things that come easily to mind are things we have frequently encountered.
What is true of elephants and words is also true of experiences.3 Most of us can bring to mind memories of riding a bicycle more easily than we can bring to mind memories of riding a yak, hence we correctly conclude that we’ve ridden more bikes than yaks in the past. This would be impeccable logic—except for the fact that the frequency with which we’ve had an experience is not the only determinant of the ease with which we remember it. In fact, infrequent or unusual experiences are often among the most memorable, which is why most Americans know precisely where they were on the morning of September 11, 2001, but not on the morning of September 10.4 The fact that infrequent experiences come so readily to mind can lead us to draw some peculiar conclusions. For instance, for most of my adult life I have had the distinct impression that I tend to pick the slowest line at the grocery store, and that whenever I get tired of waiting in the slowest line and switch to another, the line I switched from begins moving faster than the one I switched to.5 Now, if this were true—if I really did have bad karma, bad juju, or some other metaphysical form of badness that caused any line I joined to slow down—then there would have to be someone out there who felt that they had a metaphysical form of goodness that caused any line they joined to speed up. After all, everyone can’t get in the slowest line on every occasion, can they? And yet, nobody I know feels that they have the power to quicken lines by joining them. On the contrary, just about everyone I know seems to believe that they, like me, are inexorably drawn to the slowest of all possible lines, and that their occasional attempts to thwart fate merely slow the lines they join and hasten the lines they abandon. Why do we all believe this?
Because standing in a line that is moving at a rapid pace, or even an average pace, is such a mind-numbingly ordinary experience that we don’t notice or remember it. Instead we just stand there bored, glancing at the tabloids, contemplating the Clark bars, and wondering what idiot decided that batteries of different sizes should be labeled with different numbers of A’s rather than with words we can actually remember such as large, medium, and small. As we do this, we rarely turn to our partners and say, “Have you noticed how normally this line is moving? I mean, it’s just so darned average that I’m feeling compelled to make notes so that I can charm others with the tale at a later date.” No, the line-moving experiences we remember are those in which the guy in the bright red hat who was originally standing behind us before he switched to the other line has made it out of the store and into his car before we’ve even made it to the cash register because the bovine grandmother ahead of us is waving her coupons at the clerk and debating the true meaning of the phrase expiration date. This doesn’t really happen that often, but because it is so memorable, we tend to think it does.
The fact that the least likely experience is often the most likely memory can wreak havoc with our ability to predict future experiences.6 For example, in one study, researchers asked commuters waiting on a subway platform to imagine how they would feel if they missed their train that day.7 Before making this prediction, some of the commuters (any-memory group) were asked to remember and describe “a time you missed your train.” Other commuters (worst-memory group) were asked to remember and describe “the worst time you missed your train.” The results showed that commuters in the any-memory group remembered an episode that was every bit as awful as the episode remembered by commuters in the worst-memory group. In other words, when commuters thought about train-missing, the single most inconvenient and frustrating episodes tended to come to their minds (“I could hear the train arriving and so I started to run to catch it, but I tripped on the stairs and knocked over this guy who was selling umbrellas, and as a result I was a half hour late for a job interview and by the time I got there they had already hired someone else”). Most instances of train missing are ordinary and forgettable, hence when we think about train missing, we tend to remember the most extraordinary instances.
Now, what does this have to do with predicting our emotional futures? K-1 words come quickly to mind because of the way our mental dictionaries are organized and not because they are common, and memories of slow-moving grocery lines come quickly to mind because we pay special attention when we’re stuck in them and not because they are common. But because we don’t recognize the real reasons why these memories come quickly to mind, we mistakenly conclude that they are more common than they actually are. Similarly, awful train-missing incidents come quickly to mind not because they are common but because they are uncommon. But because we don’t recognize the real reasons why these awful episodes come quickly to mind, we mistakenly conclude that they are more common than they actually are. And indeed, when commuters were asked to make predictions about how they would feel if they missed their train that day, they mistakenly expected the experience to be much more inconvenient and frustrating than it likely would have been.
This tendency to recall and rely on unusual instances is one of the reasons why we so often repeat mistakes. When we think about last year’s family vacation we do not recruit a fair and representative sample of instances from our two-week tour of Idaho. Instead, the memory that comes most naturally and quickly to mind is of that first Saturday afternoon when we took the kids horseback riding, crested the ridge on our palominos, and found ourselves looking down into a magnificent valley, the river wending its way to the horizon like a mirrored ribbon as the sun played on its surface. The air was crisp, the woods were quiet. The kids suddenly stopped arguing and sat transfixed on their horses, someone said “Wow” in a very soft
voice, everyone smiled at everyone else, and the moment was forever crystallized as the high point of the vacation. Which is why it instantly springs to mind. But if we rely on this memory as we plan our next vacation while overlooking the fact that the rest of the trip was generally disappointing, we risk finding ourselves at the same overcrowded campground the next year, eating the same stale sandwiches, being bitten by the same surly ants, and wondering how we managed to learn so little from our previous visit. Because we tend to remember the best of times and the worst of times instead of the most likely of times, the wealth of experience that young people admire does not always pay clear dividends.
Stumbling on Happiness Page 21