“a dream team”: The economist was Alan Krueger of Princeton, noted for his innovative analyses of unusual data. The psychologists were David Schkade, who had methodological expertise; Arthur Stone, an expert on health psychology, experience sampling, and ecological momentary assessment; Norbert Schwarz, a social psychologist who was also an expert on survey method and had contributed experimental critiques of well-being research, including the experiment on which a dime left on a copying machine influenced subsequent reports of life satisfaction.
intensity of various feelings: In some applications, the individual also provides physiological information, such as continuous recordings of heart rate, occasional records of blood pressure, or samples of saliva for chemical analysis. The method is called Ecological Momentary Assessment: Arthur A. Stone, Saul S. Shiffman, and Marten W. DeVries, “Ecological Momentary Assessment Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology,” in Kahneman, Diener, and Schwarz, Well-Being, 26–39.
spend their time: Daniel Kahneman et al., “A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day Reconstruction Method,” Science 306 (2004): 1776–80. Daniel Kahneman and Alan B. Krueger, “Developments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-Being,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20 (2006): 3–24.
physiological indications of emotion: Previous research had documented that people are able to “relive” feelings they had in a past situation when the situation is retrieved in sufficiently vivid detail. Michael D. Robinson and Gerald L. Clore, “Belief and Feeling: Evidence for an Accessibility Model of Emotional Self-Report,” Psychological Bulletin 128 (2002): 934–60.
state the U-index: Alan B. Krueger, ed., Measuring the Subjective Well-Being of Nations: National Accounts of Time Use and Well-Being (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
distributio {i>dll-Being: Ed Diener, “Most People Are Happy,” Psychological Science 7 (1996): 181–85.
Gallup World Poll: For a number of years I have been one of several Senior Scientists associated with the efforts of the Gallup Organization in the domain of well-being.
more than 450,000 responses: Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, “High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-Being,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (2010): 16489–93.
worse for the very poor: Dylan M. Smith, Kenneth M. Langa, Mohammed U. Kabeto, and Peter Ubel, “Health, Wealth, and Happiness: Financial Resources Buffer Subjective Well-Being After the Onset of a Disability,” Psychological Science 16 (2005): 663–66.
$75,000 in high-cost areas: In a TED talk I presented in February 2010 I mentioned a preliminary estimate of $60,000, which was later corrected.
eat a bar of chocolate!: Jordi Quoidbach, Elizabeth W. Dunn, K. V. Petrides, and Moïra Mikolajczak, “Money Giveth, Money Taketh Away: The Dual Effect of Wealth on Happiness,” Psychological Science 21 (2010): 759–63.
38: Thinking About Life
German Socio-Economic Panel: Andrew E. Clark, Ed Diener, and Yannis Georgellis, “Lags and Leads in Life Satisfaction: A Test of the Baseline Hypothesis.” Paper presented at the German Socio-Economic Panel Conference, Berlin, Germany, 2001.
affective forecasting: Daniel T. Gilbert and Timothy D. Wilson, “Why the Brain Talks to Itself: Sources of Error in Emotional Prediction,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364 (2009): 1335–41.
only significant fact in their life: Strack, Martin, and Schwarz, “Priming and Communication.”
questionnaire on life satisfaction: The original study was reported by Norbert Schwarz in his doctoral thesis (in German) “Mood as Information: On the Impact of Moods on the Evaluation of One’s Life” (Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 1987). It has been described in many places, notably Norbert Schwarz and Fritz Strack, “Reports of Subjective Well-Being: Judgmental Processes and Their Methodological Implications,” in Kahneman, Diener, and Schwarz, Well-Being, 61–84.
goals that young people set: The study was described in William G. Bowen and Derek Curtis Bok, The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Some of Bowen and Bok’s findings were reported by Carol Nickerson, Norbert Schwarz, and Ed Diener, “Financial Aspirations, Financial Success, and Overall Life Satisfaction: Who? and How?” Journal of Happiness Studies 8 (2007): 467–515.
“being very well-off financially”: Alexander Astin, M. R. King, and G. T. Richardson, “The American Freshman: National Norms for Fall 1976,” Cooperative Institutional Research Program of the American C {he on, Rouncil on Education and the University of California at Los Angeles, Graduate School of Education, Laboratory for Research in Higher Education, 1976.
money was not important: These results were presented in a talk at the American Economic Association annual meeting in 2004. Daniel Kahneman, “Puzzles of Well-Being,” paper presented at the meeting.
happiness of Californians: The question of how well people today can forecast the feelings of their descendants a hundred years from now is clearly relevant to the policy response to climate change, but it can be studied only indirectly, which is what we proposed to do.
aspects of their lives: In posing the question, I was guilty of a confusion that I now try to avoid: Happiness and life satisfaction are not synonymous. Life satisfaction refers to your thoughts and feelings when you think about your life, which happens occasionally—including in surveys of well-being. Happiness describes the feelings people have as they live their normal life.
I had won the family argument: However, my wife has never conceded. She claims that only residents of Northern California are happier.
students in California and in the Midwest: Asian students generally reported lower satisfaction with their lives, and Asian students made up a much larger proportion of the samples in California than in the Midwest. Allowing for this difference, life satisfaction in the two regions was identical.
How much pleasure do you get from your car?: Jing Xu and Norbert Schwarz have found that the quality of the car (as measured by Blue Book value) predicts the owners’ answer to a general question about their enjoyment of the car, and also predicts people’s pleasure during joyrides. But the quality of the car has no effect on people’s mood during normal commutes. Norbert Schwarz, Daniel Kahneman, and Jing Xu, “Global and Episodic Reports of Hedonic Experience,” in R. Belli, D. Alwin, and F. Stafford (eds.), Using Calendar and Diary Methods in Life Events Research (Newbury Park, CA: Sage), pp. 157–74.
paraplegics spend in a bad mood?: The study is described in more detail in Kahneman, “Evaluation by Moments.”
think about their situation: Camille Wortman and Roxane C. Silver, “Coping with Irrevocable Loss, Cataclysms, Crises, and Catastrophes: Psychology in Action,” American Psychological Association, Master Lecture Series 6 (1987): 189–235.
studies of colostomy patients: Dylan Smith et al., “Misremembering Colostomies? Former Patients Give Lower Utility Ratings than Do Current Patients,” Health Psychology 25 (2006): 688–95. George Loewenstein and Peter A. Ubel, “Hedonic Adaptation and the Role of Decision and Experience Utility in Public Policy,” Journal of Public Economics 92 (2008): 1795–1810.
the word miswanting: Daniel Gilbert and Timothy D. Wilson, “Miswanting: Some Problems in Affective Forecasting,” in Feeling and Thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition, ed. Joseph P. Forgas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 178–97.
Conclusions
too important to be ignored: Paul Dolan and Daniel Kahneman, “Interpretations of Utility and Their Implications for the Valuation of Health,” Economic Journal 118 (2008): 215–234. Loewenstein and Ubel, “Hedonic Adaptation and the Role of Decision and Experience Utility in Public Policy.”
guide government policies: Progress has been especially rapid in the UK, where the use of measures of well-being is now official government policy. These advances were due in good part to the influence of Lord Richard Layard’s book Hap
piness: Lessons from a New Science, first published in 2005. Layard is among the prominent economists and social scientists who have been drawn into the study of well-being and its implications. Other important sources are: Derek Bok, The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Ed Diener, Richard Lucus, Ulrich Schmimmack, and John F. Helliwell, Well-Being for Public Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Alan B. Krueger, ed., Measuring the Subjective Well-Being of Nations: National Account of Time Use and Well-Being (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Joseph E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Report of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. Paul Dolan, Richard Layard, and Robert Metcalfe, Measuring Subjective Well-being for Public Policy: Recommendations on Measures (London: Office for National Statistics, 2011).
Irrational is a strong word: The view of the mind that Dan Ariely has presented in Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (New York: Harper, 2008) is not much different from mine, but we differ in our use of the term.
accept future addiction: Gary S. Becker and Kevin M. Murphy, “A Theory of Rational Addiction,” Journal of Political Economics 96 (1988): 675–700. Nudge: Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
can institute and enforce: Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (New York: Holt, 2009). Daniel Kahneman, Dan Lovallo, and Oliver Sibony, “The Big Idea: Before You Make That Big Decision…” Harvard Business Review 89 (2011): 50–60.
distinctive vocabulary: Chip Heath, Richard P. Larrick, and Joshua Klayman, “Cognitive Repairs: How Organizational Practices Can Compensate for Individual Shortcomings,” Research in Organizational Behavior 20 (1998): 1–37.
Index
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
adaptation level
Add-1 task
adjustment; insufficient
affect heuristic; availability and
affective forecasting
airplane crashes
Ajzen, Icek
Alar scare
algorithms; Apgar scores; hostility to; multiple regression
Allais, Maurice
al-Qaeda
ambiguity, suppression of
American Economic Review
amygdala
anchoring index
anchors, anchoring; as adjustment; associative coherence in; associative memory and; measurement of; as priming effect; random, power of; in System 1 and System 2; uses and abuses of
anesthesiologists
angry faces
anomalies
anterior cingulate
Apgar, Virginia
Apgar scores
aphorisms
Ariely, Dan
Arrow, Kenneth
art experts
artifacts, in research
Asch, Solomon
Ashenfelter, Orley
Asian disease problem
assessments, basic
associations; activated ideas in; causality and; priming and
associative coherence; in anchoring; halo effect and; plausibility and, associative coherence (cont.); WYSIATI (what you see is all there is) and
associative memory; abnormal events and; anchoring and; causality and; confirmation bias and; creativity and; and estimates of causes of death
Åstebro, Thomas
Atlantic, The
attention; in self-control
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Attention and Effort (Kahneman)
Auerbach, Red
authoritarian ideas
availability; affect and; and awareness of one’s biases; expectations about; media and; psychology of; risk assessment and, see risk assessment
availability cascades
availability entrepreneurs
bad and good, distinctions between
banks
bank teller problem
Barber, Brad
Bargh, John
baseball
baseball cards
baseline predictions
base rates; in cab driver problem; causal; in helping experiment; low; statistical; in Tom W problem; in Yale exam problem
basic assessments
basketball
basketball tickets
bat-and-ball problem
Baumeister, Roy
Bayes, Thomas
Bayesian statistics
Bazerman, Max
Beane, Billy
Beatty, Jackson
Becker, Gary
“Becoming Famous Overnight” (Jacoby)
behavioral economics
Behavioral Insight Team
“Belief in the Law of Small Numbers” (Tversky and Kahneman)
beliefs: bias for; past, reconstruction of
Benartzi, Shlomo
Bentham, Jeremy
Berlin, Isaiah
Bernoulli, Daniel
Bernouilli, Nicholas
Beyth, Ruth
bicycle messengers
Black Swan, The (Taleb)
blame
Blink (Gladwell)
Borg, Björn
Borgida, Eugene
“Boys Will Be Boys” (Barber and Odean)
Bradlee, Ben
brain; amygdala in; anterior cingulate in; buying and selling and; emotional framing and; frontal area of; pleasure and; prefrontal area of; punishment and; sugar in; threats and; and variations of probabilities
British Toxicology Society
broad framing
Brockman, John
broken-leg rule
budget forecasts
Built to Last (Collins and Porras)
Bush, George W.
business and leadership practices; at Google
business pundits
Cabanac, Michel
cab driver problem
cabdrivers, New York City
Californians
Camerer, Colin
cancer; surgery vs. radiation for
Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale
Carroll, Lewis
cars and driving; brakes in; driving tests; fuel economy and; pleasure from
cash box
categories
causal base rates
causal interpretations; correlation and; regression effects and
causal situations
causal stereotypes
causes, and statistics
CEOs; optimistic
certainty effect
CFOs
Chabris, Christopher
chance and randomness; misconceptions of
changing one’s mind
Checklist Manifesto, A (Gawande)
chess
children: caring for; depressed; time spent with
China
Choice and Consequence (Schelling)
choice architecture
Thinking, Fast and Slow Page 61