In short, it is not good for us to be depressed or euphoric for long. This state of affairs might seem dismaying, because it implies that there are limits to the happiness any event can bring us. Actually, there is both good news and bad news. The good news is that if humans are programmed to avoid prolonged emotional swings to the positive or negative ends, then there are protective mechanisms that keep us from experiencing prolonged negative states. Sometimes these mechanisms go awry, of course, as evidenced by the incidence of chronic depression. Most people, however, have built-in mechanisms that help them cope with negative life events. The bad news is that these mechanisms might also make it difficult to prolong our pleasurable reactions to positive events. People possess physiological and psychological mechanisms that, basically, rain on their parades."
One such mechanism occurs at the physiological, neurochemical level, in response to internal changes that cause affective responses. According to opponent process theory, physical events that cause extreme affective responses are disruptive, and the body must have some means of restoring equilibrium. It does so by initiating an "opponent process," which produces the opposite affective response. The ingestion of cocaine, for example, triggers negative, opponent processes to neutralize the positive feelings caused by the drug. Touching a hot stove triggers positive, opponent processes to neutralize the resulting pain.
Opponent process theory has become a popular way of accounting for responses to physical stimuli such as drugs. One interesting feature of the theory is the idea that over time, with repeated exposure to a stimulus, the opponent process becomes stronger and longer in duration. A stimulus that initially causes a great deal of pleasure, such as cocaine, causes less and less pleasure over time, because the opponent process it triggers grows in strength.
Opponent process theory helps explain what happens at a physiological level when bodily systems are disrupted, such as neurochemical responses to drug ingestion. It does not deal as well with psychological responses to complex emotional events such as winning a lottery, falling in love, or losing a loved one. In order to explain why the emotions such complex events trigger are often short-lived, we need to examine the kinds of psychological and behavioral responses people have to them.'
One type of response is a quite conscious, deliberative one, whereby people take steps to keep their emotions in check. This is obvious when it comes to negative emotions; we don't like to feel bad and often try to improve our moods, such as renting a funny movie. It is less obvious with positive emotions-why would we deliberately spoil a good feeling? Although such cases may be rare, they do exist. Laughing uproariously at a funeral is unlikely to engender goodwill, and people might take steps to lower their mood before entering the funeral parlor (e.g., by thinking sad thoughts). Similarly, if people know they have to concentrate on something, such as working with another person on a task, they purposefully avoid putting themselves in too good a mood.'s
Thus, there are both physiological processes (the opponent process) and deliberative behavioral strategies that serve to moderate positive and negative emotions. Neither of these processes, however, can account fully for people's amazing resilience to positive and negative life events. I believe an important set of psychological processes has been overlooked, processes that I call making sense through psychological "ordinization."
MAKING SENSE
Imagine that a high school student named Sarah finds out that she has been accepted by the University of Virginia, her first choice of college. When she opens the acceptance letter and reads the words "We are happy to inform you ... :'she feels a rush of extreme pleasure and excitement, much like Paul McNabb when his name was announced as the milliondollar winner. Soon, however, she finds herself thinking about her acceptance less and less. When it does come to mind, she does not experience the same "ping" of pleasure; indeed, "I will be a UVa student" becomes part of the background of her identity-something that is normal and ordinary, not novel and exciting.
The same kind of psychological ordinization occurs after negative events. When a life-changing negative event occurs, such as the death of a loved one, we can hardly think of anything else. The person dominates our thoughts, and, like my friend Carolyn, we feel like we will never get over the loss. It seems impossible that the person is gone. Consider a character named Francie in a short story by D. Eisenberg, who has just learned that her mother has died: "If you were to break, for example, your hip, there would be the pain, the proof, telling you all the time it was true: that's then and this is now. But this thing-each second it had to be true all over again; she was getting hurled against each second. Now. And now again-twack! Maybe one of these seconds she'd smash right through and find herself in the clear place where her mother was alive, scowling, criticizing.""
We have all had this "twack" experience after major positive and negative life events. We can hardly think about anything else, and when we do, the event suddenly slams back into our consciousness. "No, it can't be! But wait, it is!" (Sudden rush of positive or negative feelings). Little by little, however, the "twacks" diminish, and the event no longer has so much emotional power. How does this happen?
Psychological processes are triggered, I suggest, that transform the events from the extraordinary to the ordinary, in a way that robs them of their emotional power. We weave events into our knowledge of ourselves and the world, in a way that makes the event seem normal, ordinary, even expected. When something happens that is novel or inconsistent with people's expectations about the world, they engage in mental work to come to terms with and explain the new event. If possible, people assimilate it into their current theories and expectations. Doing this often involves a reconstrual of the event to make it seem more understandable and predictable.
Sometimes events are so unexpected and so discrepant from our worldviews that they are very difficult to assimilate. Our loved ones die suddenly, or we discover, after thinking we are terminally ill, that the diagnosis was wrong and we are in good health. When an event is not easily explained by what we know, we alter what we know to accommodate the new event. We change our worldview in ways that make the event seem relatively normal and predictable. To be sure, this can take awhile. When major, life-changing events occur, we experience repeated "twacks," when the event dominates our thoughts. Gradually, however, the twack attacks diminish in frequency and power. Our worldview has changed to accommodate the event, and we do not think about it very often.
There is nothing particularly novel about my description of the processes of assimilation and accommodation. The developmental psychologist Jean Piaget described this process over fifty years ago, to explain how children come to understand their physical and social environments. Many other psychologists have discussed how prone people are to reduce uncertainty, find meaning, and explain novel events-in short, to make sense of their worlds. The emotional consequences of making sense, however, have seldom been discussed. I suggest that once emotional events have been explained, tied into a neat little package, and stored away in our minds, we think about them less, and they lose much of their emotional power. Hence, a fundamental paradox: people try to make sense of novel events so that they can repeat the good ones and avoid the bad ones, but in the process the experiences lose their future hedonic power.
"I KNEW IT ALL ALONG ..."
One way the human sense maker works is by coming to view an event as more predictable and inevitable after it occurs. Think back, for example, to the impeachment of President Clinton in late 1998 and early 1999. As the events unfolded, whereby the House of Representatives voted to impeach the president and the Senate held a trial to see if he should be removed from office, it was not at all clear what the outcome would be. Some felt that the Senate would vote to convict the president because enough Democrats were so outraged by his behavior that they would cross party lines and vote against him. Others felt that Clinton, like President Nixon before him, would resign before undergoing a humiliating trial in the Senate, or t
hat a trial would be averted by a plea bargain, whereby the Senate would vote to censure the president for his conduct in return for avoiding a trial. Most people believed that even if a trial were held and Clinton was acquitted, his presidency would be crippled and he would find it extremely difficult to govern.
The president was acquitted, and, strangely, the government went on pretty much as it did before-an outcome that few predicted. In retrospect, however, this outcome seems like something we should have expected. Surely few Democrats would vote to convict a president in their own party, especially in the highly partisan atmosphere of the impeachment proceedings. And who could be surprised that such a resilient politician as Bill Clinton would survive the whole process relatively untarnished? Once people know what the outcome of an event is, they construct explanations that make it seem inevitable, much more so than before it occurred, when many other outcomes seemed just as likely.
This hindsight bias is not a conscious process. If we knew that we were exaggerating the predictability of an event, it seems unlikely that we would do so. It is not as if people say, "I've explained why Clinton survived the impeachment process relatively unscathed, so now I'll change my view of how predictable I thought this was before the trial." Rather, this change of perspective happens quickly and nonconsciously. And because the event now seems predictable-ho hum, anyone could have seen it coming-it does not seem as novel and exciting, and its emotional power is reduced.
If people's proclivity to make sense of the world spoils the pleasure they experience from novel events, then it follows that those who have difficulty making sense should obtain more long-lasting pleasure. This seems to be a small benefit of the tragedy of Alzheimer's disease. People who suffer from Alzheimer's lose the ability to form new memories and thus cannot explain novel events in any lasting way. Because everything is experienced for the first time, novel pleasures do not fade as quickly as they do for the rest of us.
Alzheimer's keeps things new. After onset, the unfamiliar can never become familiar. The Alzheimer's mind is constantly flooded with new stimuli; everything is always in the moment, a rich, resonant, overwhelming feeling. "I've noticed that I have a large amount of appreciation for whatever I'm focused on," commented [one Alzheimer's sufferer]. "It is very clear and real. Look away and it is gone. Look back and it is fresh and new ..." Ever-freshness, then, may be considered an Alzheimer's consolation prize.20
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL IMMUNE SYSTEM
Although the ordinization process operates on both positive and negative events, serving to keep our emotions within a useful, adaptive range, it works harder to minimize the impact of negative occurrences. We want to get over our setbacks, failures, and disappointments as quickly as possible, and to wallow in our achievements and successes. The paradox is that as much as we want to maintain our reactions to positive events, there are nonconscious processes in place that make us "recover" from them quickly. In contrast, people want to recover from negative events, and there are extra defenses people have to accomplish this.
Some of these defenses are quite conscious and deliberate. All of us have strategies we use to cheer ourselves up when we are feeling blue, such as commiserating with a friend, going to the movies, playing basketball, or seeking solace in a box of chocolates. These strategies often have only short-term effects, however. When we get back from playing basketball or wipe the final smear of chocolate off of our lips, our failures are still staring us in the face.
Fortunately, people also are equipped with powerful psychological defenses that operate offstage, rationalizing, reinterpreting, and distorting negative information in ways that ameliorate its impact. When someone tells us that our hair looks like a poorly trimmed hedge, we assume they are joking and can't be serious. When someone turns us down for a date, we convince ourselves that he or she was not right for us after all. When a journal editor rejects one of our articles for publication, we decide that the editor must have extremely poor judgment. These events hurt when they first occur, but very quickly we find ways of warding off the pain by reinterpreting or rationalizing them. Just as we have a physiological immune system that identifies dangerous foreign bodies and minimizes their impact, so do we have a psychological immune system that identifies threats to our self-esteem and finds ways of neutralizing these threats.
In short, the ordinization process operates on both positive and negative emotions, but the psychological immune system is an extra weapon people use to fight negative emotions. The psychological immune system uses the "feel good" criterion discussed in Chapter 2, namely selecting, interpreting, and evaluating incoming information in ways that maintain our self-esteem. One of the most important lessons from social psychology is that people are masterful spin doctors, rationalizers, and justifiers of threatening information and go to great lengths to maintain a sense of well-being. And the psychological immune system operates largely outside of awareness.-''
Why Don't People Realize That They Are So Resilient?
Given all the evidence for how resilient people are, it is striking that people don't realize this when predicting their emotional reactions to future events. Daniel Gilbert and I have found evidence for this lack of appreciation of resilience-the durability bias-in numerous studies. In one, college football fans predicted how happy they would be in the days following a victory or loss by their favorite team. They anticipated that the outcome of the game would influence their overall happiness for two to three days, but it did not. By the following day, people were back to their normal level of happiness. In another, assistant professors predicted that the outcome of their tenure decision would have a large impact on their overall happiness for five years after the decision. In fact, professors who had received tenure in the previous five years were not significantly happier than professors who had been denied tenure.22
INCORRECT PREDICTIONS ABOUT HOW OUR INTERNAL WORLDS WILL CHANGE
Why don't people realize how resilient they are? The short answer is that the ordinization process operates out of view, and thus people overlook it when predicting their emotional reactions. People do not take into account how much their internal worlds will change in ways that will make the event seem normal, expected, or even mundane.
In the case of predicting negative events, Daniel Gilbert and I have referred to this lack of knowledge as "immune neglect," because people fail to appreciate how much their psychological immune system will kick into action and rationalize the event. We demonstrated this in a study in which people interviewed for a desirable job and predicted how unhappy they would be if they were turned down. In one condition, they were interviewed by a single, capricious interviewer who asked irrelevant questions, whereas in another they were interviewed by a team of experts who asked quite relevant questions. People predicted they would be equally unhappy in these two conditions if they did not get the job. When told they had not got the job, however, people in the capricious interview condition recovered more quickly. It was easy for them to rationalize their failure by blaming the interviewer and not themselves, but difficult for the others to blame the expert interviewers. The interesting finding from our perspective is that people did not take into account how easy it would be to rationalize when making their predictions; they thought that not getting the job would hurt just as long in both conditions.
INCORRECT PREDICTIONS ABOUT HOW OUR EXTERNAL WORLDS WILL CHANGE
Another cause of the durability bias is that people fail to take into account the ways in which their external worlds will change after an emotional event. One version of this error is misunderstanding the nature of the event itself. When people imagine what it would be like to win a million dollars, they think about vacations to exotic places and new cars. If they understood that winning the lottery would also entail family feuds, lost friendships, and harassing phone calls in the middle of the night, they would make more accurate predictions about how they would feel. Psychologists refer to this as the misconstrual problem: people make inaccurate pr
edictions about their reactions to emotional events because they are thinking about the event in the wrong way.23
But there are times when people know exactly what an event will entail and still commit the durability bias, such as in the failure-to-getthe-job and football studies mentioned earlier. The misconstrual problem cannot explain these examples, because there were no unexpected consequences of the events that people failed to anticipate. College football fans have lived through many games and can probably anticipate pretty well what will happen when their team wins or loses another one. They still overestimate the duration of their emotional reactions, how ever, because they forget to take into account the fact that as time goes by, many other events will influence their thoughts and feelings. People tend to think about a future event as occurring in a vacuum, without reminding themselves that their life will be full of other activities that will compete for their attention and influence their happiness-a tendency that we have called focalism.21
People are not clairvoyant, of course, and cannot know with certainty what the future will bring. The point is that whatever happens after the event will compete for people's attention, regardless of whether these events are unpredictable (our long-lost cousin shows up on the doorstep and asks to stay with us for a month) or predictable (we go to work, attend meetings, come home, play with our kids). By forgetting this fact, and viewing the future in a vacuum, people overestimate how long the event will influence their happiness. The philosopher Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz put it like this: "The pleasures and pains, joys and sufferings, which people actually experience, often fall short of what they had anticipated ... In anticipating a coming event we have it alone in mind, and make no provision for other occurrences. 1121
Strangers to Ourselves Page 17