What makes us think we’re so darned special? Three things, at least. First, even if we aren’t special, the way we know ourselves is. We are the only people in the world whom we can know from the inside. We experience our own thoughts and feelings but must infer that other people are experiencing theirs. We all trust that behind those eyes and inside those skulls, our friends and neighbors are having subjective experiences very much like our own, but that trust is an article of faith and not the palpable, self-evident truth that our own subjective experiences constitute. There is a difference between making love and reading about it, and it is the same difference that distinguishes our knowledge of our own mental lives from our knowledge of everyone else’s. Because we know ourselves and others by such different means, we gather very different kinds and amounts of information. In every waking moment we monitor the steady stream of thoughts and feelings that runs through our heads, but we only monitor other people’s words and deeds, and only when they are in our company. One reason why we seem so special, then, is that we learn about ourselves in such a special way.
The second reason is that we enjoy thinking of ourselves as special. Most of us want to fit in well with our peers, but we don’t want to fit in too well.39 We prize our unique identities, and research shows that when people are made to feel too similar to others, their moods quickly sour and they try to distance and distinguish themselves in a variety of ways.40 If you’ve ever shown up at a party and found someone else wearing exactly the same dress or necktie that you were wearing, then you know how unsettling it is to share the room with an unwanted twin whose presence temporarily diminishes your sense of individuality. Because we value our uniqueness, it isn’t surprising that we tend to overestimate it.
The third reason why we tend to overestimate our uniqueness is that we tend to overestimate everyone’s uniqueness—that is, we tend to think of people as more different from one another than they actually are. Let’s face it: All people are similar in some ways and different in others. The psychologists, biologists, economists, and sociologists who are searching for universal laws of human behavior naturally care about the similarities, but the rest of us care mainly about the differences. Social life involves selecting particular individuals to be our sexual partners, business partners, bowling partners, and more. That task requires that we focus on the things that distinguish one person from another and not on the things that all people share, which is why personal ads are much more likely to mention the advertiser’s love of ballet than his love of oxygen. A penchant for respiration explains a great deal about human behavior—for example, why people live on land, become ill at high altitudes, have lungs, resist suffocation, love trees, and so on. It surely explains more than does a person’s penchant for ballet. But it does nothing to distinguish one person from another, and thus for ordinary folks who are in the ordinary business of selecting others for commerce, conversation, or copulation, the penchant for air is stunningly irrelevant. Individual similarities are vast, but we don’t care much about them because they don’t help us do what we are here on earth to do, namely, distinguish Jack from Jill and Jill from Jennifer. As such, these individual similarities are an inconspicuous backdrop against which a small number of relatively minor individual differences stand out in bold relief.
Because we spend so much time searching for, attending to, thinking about, and remembering these differences, we tend to overestimate their magnitude and frequency, and thus end up thinking of people as more varied than they actually are. If you spent all day sorting grapes into different shapes, colors, and kinds, you’d become one of those annoying grapeophiles who talks endlessly about the nuances of flavor and the permutations of texture. You’d come to think of grapes as infinitely varied, and you’d forget that almost all of the really important information about a grape can be deduced from the simple fact of its grapehood. Our belief in the variability of others and in the uniqueness of the self is especially powerful when it comes to emotion.41 Because we can feel our own emotions but must infer the emotions of others by watching their faces and listening to their voices, we often have the impression that others don’t experience the same intensity of emotion that we do, which is why we expect others to recognize our feelings even when we can’t recognize theirs.42 This sense of emotional uniqueness starts early. When kindergarteners are asked how they and others would feel in a variety of situations, they expect to experience unique emotions (“Billy would be sad but I wouldn’t”) and they provide unique reasons for experiencing them (“I’d tell myself that the hamster was in heaven, but Billy would just cry”).43 When adults make these same kinds of predictions, they do just the same thing.44
Our mythical belief in the variability and uniqueness of individuals is the main reason why we refuse to use others as surrogates. After all, surrogation is only useful when we can count on a surrogate to react to an event roughly as we would, and if we believe that people’s emotional reactions are more varied than they actually are, then surrogation will seem less useful to us than it actually is. The irony, of course, is that surrogation is a cheap and effective way to predict one’s future emotions, but because we don’t realize just how similar we all are, we reject this reliable method and rely instead on our imaginations, as flawed and fallible as they may be.
Onward
Despite its watery connotation, the word hogwash refers to the feeding—and not to the bathing—of pigs. Hogwash is something that pigs eat, that pigs like, and that pigs need. Farmers provide pigs with hogwash because without it, pigs get grumpy. The word hogwash also refers to the falsehoods people tell one another. Like the hogwash that farmers feed their pigs, the hogwash that our friends and teachers and parents feed us is meant to make us happy; but unlike hogwash of the porcine variety, human hogwash does not always achieve its end. As we have seen, ideas can flourish if they preserve the social systems that allow them to be transmitted. Because individuals don’t usually feel that it is their personal duty to preserve social systems, these ideas must disguise themselves as prescriptions for individual happiness. We might expect that after spending some time in the world, our experiences would debunk these ideas, but it doesn’t always work that way. To learn from our experience we must remember it, and for a variety of reasons, memory is a faithless friend. Practice and coaching get us out of our diapers and into our britches, but they are not enough to get us out of our presents and into our futures. What’s so ironic about this predicament is that the information we need to make accurate predictions of our emotional futures is right under our noses, but we don’t seem to recognize its aroma. It doesn’t always make sense to heed what people tell us when they communicate their beliefs about happiness, but it does make sense to observe how happy they are in different circumstances. Alas, we think of ourselves as unique entities—minds unlike any others—and thus we often reject the lessons that the emotional experience of others has to teach us.
AFTERWORD
My mind presageth happy gain and conquest.
Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part III
MOST OF US MAKE at least three important decisions in our lives: where to live, what to do, and with whom to do it. We choose our towns and our neighborhoods, we choose our jobs and our hobbies, we choose our spouses and our friends. Making these decisions is such a natural part of adulthood that it is easy to forget that we are among the first human beings to make them. For most of recorded history, people lived where they were born, did what their parents had done, and associated with those who were doing the same. Millers milled, Smiths smithed, and little Smiths and little Millers married whom and when they were told. Social structures (such as religions and castes) and physical structures (such as mountains and oceans) were the great dictators that determined how, where, and with whom people would spend their lives, which left most folks with little to decide for themselves. But the agricultural, industrial, and technological revolutions changed all that, and the resulting explosion of personal liberty has created a
bewildering array of options, alternatives, choices, and decisions that our ancestors never faced. For the very first time, our happiness is in our hands.
How are we to make these choices? In 1738, a Dutch polymath named Daniel Bernoulli claimed he had the answer. He suggested that the wisdom of any decision could be calculated by multiplying the probability that the decision will give us what we want by the utility of getting what we want. By utility, Bernoulli meant something like goodness or pleasure.1 The first part of Bernoulli’s prescription is fairly easy to follow because in most circumstances we can roughly estimate the odds that our choices will get us where we want to be. How likely is it that you’ll be promoted to general manager if you take the job at IBM? How likely is it that you’ll spend your weekends at the beach if you move to St. Petersburg? How likely is it that you’ll have to sell your motorcycle if you marry Eloise? Calculating such odds is relatively straightforward stuff, which is why insurance companies get rich by doing little more than estimating the likelihood that your house will burn down, your car will be stolen, and your life will end early. With a little detective work, a pencil, and a good eraser, we can usually estimate—at least roughly—the probability that a choice will give us what we desire.
The problem is that we cannot easily estimate how we’ll feel when we get it. Bernoulli’s brilliance lay not in his mathematics but in his psychology—in his realization that what we objectively get (wealth) is not the same as what we subjectively experience when we get it (utility). Wealth may be measured by counting dollars, but utility must be measured by counting how much goodness those dollars buy.2 Wealth doesn’t matter; utility does. We don’t care about money or promotions or beach vacations per se; we care about the goodness or pleasure that these forms of wealth may (or may not) induce. Wise choices are those that maximize our pleasure, not our dollars, and if we are to have any hope of choosing wisely, then we must correctly anticipate how much pleasure those dollars will buy us. Bernoulli knew that it was much easier to predict how much wealth a choice might produce than how much utility a choice might produce, so he devised a simple conversion formula that he hoped would allow anyone to translate estimates of the former into estimates of the latter. He suggested that each successive dollar provides a little less pleasure than the one before it, and that a person can therefore calculate the pleasure they will derive from a dollar simply by correcting for the number of dollars they already have.
The determination of the value of an item must not be based on its price, but rather on the utility it yields. The price of the item is dependent only on the thing itself and is equal for everyone; the utility, however, is dependent on the particular circumstances of the person making the estimate. Thus there is no doubt that a gain of one thousand ducats is more significant to a pauper than to a rich man though both gain the same amount.3
Bernoulli correctly realized that people are sensitive to relative rather than absolute magnitudes, and his formula was meant to take this basic psychological truth into account. But he also knew that translating wealth into utility was not as simple as he’d made it out to be, and that there were other psychological truths that his formula ignored.
Although a poor man generally obtains more utility than does a rich man from an equal gain, it is nevertheless conceivable, for example, that a rich prisoner who possesses two thousand ducats but needs two thousand ducats more to repurchase his freedom, will place a higher value on a gain of two thousand ducats than does another man who has less money than he. Though innumerable examples of this kind may be constructed, they represent exceedingly rare exceptions.4
It was a good try. Bernoulli was right in thinking that the hundredth dollar (or kiss or doughnut or romp in the meadow) generally does not make us as happy as the first one did, but he was wrong in thinking that this was the only thing that distinguished wealth from utility and hence the only thing one must correct for when predicting utility from wealth. As it turns out, the “innumerable exceptions” that Bernoulli swept under the rug are not exceedingly rare. There are many things other than the size of a person’s bank account that influence how much utility they derive from the next dollar. For instance, people often value things more after they own them than before, they often value things more when they are imminent than distant, they are often hurt more by small losses than by large ones, they often imagine that the pain of losing something is greater than the pleasure of getting it, and so on—and on and on and on. The myriad phenomena with which this book has been concerned are just some of the not-so-rare exceptions that make Bernoulli’s principle a beautiful, useless abstraction. Yes, we should make choices by multiplying probabilities and utilities, but how can we possibly do this if we can’t estimate those utilities beforehand? The same objective circumstances give rise to a remarkably wide variety of subjective experiences, and thus it is very difficult to predict our subjective experiences from foreknowledge of our objective circumstances. The sad fact is that converting wealth to utility—that is, predicting how we will feel from knowledge of what we will get—isn’t very much like converting meters to yards or German to Japanese. The simple, lawful relationships that bind numbers to numbers and words to words do not bind objective events to emotional experiences.
So what’s a chooser to do? Without a formula for predicting utility, we tend to do what only our species does: imagine. Our brains have a unique structure that allows us to mentally transport ourselves into future circumstances and then ask ourselves how it feels to be there. Rather than calculating utilities with mathematical precision, we simply step into tomorrow’s shoes and see how well they fit. Our ability to project ourselves forward in time and experience events before they happen enables us to learn from mistakes without making them and to evaluate actions without taking them. If nature has given us a greater gift, no one has named it. And yet, as impressive as it is, our ability to simulate future selves and future circumstances is by no means perfect. When we imagine future circumstances, we fill in details that won’t really come to pass and leave out details that will. When we imagine future feelings, we find it impossible to ignore what we are feeling now and impossible to recognize how we will think about the things that happen later. Daniel Bernoulli dreamed of a world in which a simple formula would allow us all to determine our futures with perspicacity and foresight. But foresight is a fragile talent that often leaves us squinting, straining to see what it would be like to have this, go there, or do that. There is no simple formula for finding happiness. But if our great big brains do not allow us to go surefootedly into our futures, they at least allow us to understand what makes us stumble.
NOTES
Foreword
1. The notes in this book contain references to the scientific research that supports the claims I make in the text. Occasionally they contain some extra information that may be of interest but that is not essential to the argument. If you don’t care about sources, aren’t interested in nonessentials, and are annoyed by books that make you flip back and forth all the time, then be assured that the only important note in the book is this one.
Chapter 1: Journey to Elsewhen
1. W. A. Roberts, “Are Animals Stuck in Time?” Psychological Bulletin 128: 473–89 (2002).
2. D. Dennett, Kinds of Minds. (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
3. M. M. Haith, “The Development of Future Thinking as Essential for the Emergence of Skill in Planning,” in The Developmental Psychology of Planning: Why, How, and When Do We Plan?, ed. S. L. Friedman and E. K. Scholnick (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997), 25–42.
4. E. Bates, J. Elman, and P. Li, “Language In, On, and About Time,” in The Development of Future Oriented Processes, ed. M. M. Haith et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
5. B. M. Hood et al., “Gravity Biases in a Nonhuman Primate?” Developmental Science 2: 35–41 (1999). See also D. A. Washburn and D. M. Rumbaugh, “Comparative Assessment of Psychomotor Performance: Target Prediction by Humans and Macaques
(Macaca mulatta),” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 121: 305–12 (1992).
6. L. M. Oakes and L. B. Cohen, “Infant Perception of a Causal Event,” Cognitive Development 5: 193–207 (1990). See also N. Wentworth and M. M. Haith, “Event-Specific Expectations of 2- and 3-Month-Old Infants,” Developmental Psychology 28: 842–50 (1992).
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