Happiness

by Ed Diener

  The Natural Process of Adaptation is a Vital Component of Psychological Wealth

  Adaptation is the psychological mechanism that is responsible for governing the emotional baseline. Adjusting to new circumstances allows us to learn new skills, tolerate change, and seek improvement. Adaptation also acts as a buffer against the bad events in our lives, and prevents us from permanently succumbing to negativity. It is intuitively obvious that adaptation to tough times is desirable, but what about the usefulness of adapting to good times? Even this serves an important function. Returning to our mildly pleasant baseline allows us the room to experience the emotional highs and euphoria of exceptional events when they come along. If we did not have some room for growth in happiness, we would not care about personal growth, new goals, or exciting surprises. Adaptation is the reason you feel particularly great when your daughter graduates from college, instead of experiencing it as just another good day. Psychological wealth includes the ability to cope with bad events, but many fail to realize that it also means understanding that continual euphoria is not a desirable goal.

  The Set Point Can Change

  The happiness set point is not really a set point at all, but a "set range." Although there are genetic influences on our happiness, with some fortunate folks being born a bit happier than others, change is possible for all people. Like losing weight, lasting emotional change requires sustained effort to modify the ways you think and behave. In addition, if your circumstances improve substantially - such as benefiting from newfound social support or experiencing financial security for the first time - you can probably raise your well-being. Even for some of the folks who seem to have such a low set point that they require medications or therapy, treatment can usually be effective.

  Conclusions

  In the end, you cannot blame your current level of happiness on your parents and the genes they passed along to you. Yes, emotions - like intelligence, height, and weight - have a genetic component. But just as you can use your intelligence in different ways, for example to invent new life-saving medical technologies or to remember every telephone number of every girlfriend you ever dated, there are also choices you can make and habits you can form that will raise or lower your happiness. Thinking positively, surrounding yourself with upbeat friends, and not giving in to pessimistic thinking are all strategies that can temper a depressive disposition or enhance a happy one. In the following chapters, we will examine how to make better decisions about your happiness and avoid common "happiness forecasting" errors. Later, we will describe the mental strategies that can raise your happiness.

  Although adaptation to certain powerful circumstances is often not complete, we do adapt to some degree to virtually all circumstances. You must learn to use the natural tendency toward adaptation to your advantage - to maximize feelings of well-being, but also to accomplish your goals. If you can think ahead to your future circumstances, and understand to which events and transitions you will easily adapt, it can help you plan goals and take appropriate risks. If, for instance, you are the type of person who does not need intense stability, you can likely predict that a move to a new city, while difficult, will be something you can handle psychologically. Instead of focusing on the tough aspects of the move, you can look down the emotional road and reassure yourself that in several months your new town will feel like home. Similarly, it will be helpful to identify areas that are tough for you to get used to. Each of us can adapt to certain types of changes more easily than to others.

  Even if you fall on hard times, and even the luckiest of us do occasionally, you will be able to anticipate coping strategies, such as learning a new skill, meeting new people, using humor and prayer, and surrounding yourself with supportive friends, which will likely help you bounce back quicker than you otherwise would. For people who struggle through the pain of a divorce and similar negative events, it is helpful to understand that adaptation will occur, and there are personal coping strategies that can help the transition be more successful. In the darkest days of her bereavement, the author Joan Didion found hope in our findings that things do slowly get better for widows.

  In a way, the scientific findings on adaptation are the best of all worlds. We can take heart in the knowledge that we can cope and adapt to even bad events, at least over time. We suffer pain when things go bad, and this can help us adjust and grow, but adapting back to normal and not staying chronically unhappy is the goal. We also adapt to life's better moments. At first, it might seem unfortunate to adapt to good things, but this is what allows us to continue growing, to react afresh to new rewards, and to develop new goals. When very good circumstances in our lives occur, such as a wonderful marriage, our life satisfaction can increase, even after the initial high is over. But our life satisfaction is unlikely to increase to perfection because we want other goals and future events to be rewarding - we do not want to remain in a euphoric state. People who seek ongoing ecstasy are impoverished in a psychological sense because they are chasing the impossible, often with behaviors that are destructive.

  Although continuous euphoria is not the goal, raising your set point will be a desirable goal for many readers. The search is on, both for you and for scientists, to seek out those things that don't just produce temporary increases in happiness, but can actually raise your emotional set point. It is also important to set realistic expectations about adapting to emotional highs. You must realize that occasional euphoria and intense happiness, while enjoyable, will not last. You profit from these occasional emotional spikes that come with successes, but don't lament the fact that these states are temporary. Adaptation to both good and bad events is part of our psychological wealth because it helps us move forward in life. To be stuck in either a depressed or euphoric world would be detrimental because we could not function well. Thus, people who adapt to some degree, even to good events, are psychologically wealthier than those who do not.

  10

  Our Crystal Balls: Happiness

  Forecasting

  We all would like to know the future. For as long as humans have roamed the planet and for as long as we will remain here, we will be - to some extent - preoccupied with the future. We are curious to know if the dinner party will go well, if our mothers will like their birthday presents, which stocks will perform well, and whether our flights will arrive on time.

  By trying to gather information and speculate with acumen about things to come, we maximize our chances of achieving our goals, whether they are making a connecting flight or being promoted to sales manager. If the future doesn't pique your curiosity, nothing will. Unfortunately, the future remains, at best, a guessing game - one that has gone on since humans developed an advanced brain with a frontal cortex capable of thinking about tomorrow. Our pets pretty much live in the here and now, but we spend a lot of time contemplating what's ahead.

  Humans have long employed experts - like weather forecasters - in predicting the future. The Hebrews had prophets, the ancient Greeks had soothsayers and oracles, European kings were served by astrologers and wise men, and powerful generals had their strategists. In each instance, people in these specialized crafts tried to gather information and cobble together some good guesses about what might happen tomorrow, next week, or further down the road. They tried to predict the likely outcomes of battles, the course of illnesses, the end of a risky journey, or the fate of a people.

  Even in modern times, we turn to pollsters, financial analysts, and economists to know what might happen in the future. While we might not have an actual crystal ball telling us what will happen to us, we often go about our lives as if we did. We make decisions all the time based on what we think will happen. We choose jobs, boyfriends, and homes all because we can, to some degree, imagine how these will work out for us in months or years to come.

  How do we do at predicting what will make us happy? Over time, we become experts at our own emotions, and are able not only to experience our current moods, but to predict how we might feel
in the future. We are good at guessing the valence, or direction, of our emotions. That is, we can accurately predict when we will feel generally good, and when we will feel rotten. We don't need to be tortured to know that it will be unpleasant, and you probably need little convincing that sex tomorrow would be pleasurable. The same holds true for other feelings. It is a good bet that you will feel proud on the day your daughter graduates from law school, and that you will feel sad on the day you learn your father has passed away. These predictions, which often occur subconsciously, are important because they factor into the decisions we make. They are part of the mental algebra of buying a new home or deciding to marry.

  How accurate are we at making emotional predictions? Well, if you were a worker at a carnival, and predicting your happiness was like guessing everyone's weight, you would be pretty darn good at it. Sure, you might purposefully overestimate the men's weight by an average of nine pounds, and underestimate the women's by fourteen, but you would still be in the close vicinity of the correct weights. In fact, it is important, from a functional point of view, that people are good at knowing what will make them happy and what will make them feel sad or afraid. If we couldn't rely at all on our emotional foresight, our feelings would lose much of their usefulness to us.

  At this point, you may be asking yourself, "If folks are so good at predicting how we are going to feel in the future, how come so many people end up regretting poor choices?" It is easy to call to mind a friend who is dating a guy who clearly makes her unhappy, or a nephew who accepted an offer to a prestigious university only to find himself miserable midway through winter term. Our lives and those of our friends are replete with stories of bad decisions, instances of self-perpetrated unhappiness, and I-should-have-known-betters. People sometimes choose jobs they hate and buy homes they can't afford. Is it just a matter of ignoring the emotional warning signs? Is it a case of their emotional tracking systems being broken?

  The ability of people to try to predict how they will feel in the future is called happiness forecasting, and research on the topic shows that folks make some fascinating, and predictable, mistakes when guessing their own feelings. For instance, the psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Tim Wilson conducted a study in which they asked young professors to predict how obtaining tenure or not might affect them emotionally. As you might expect, the young professors reported that they would feel elated if they were awarded tenure and would feel crushed if it were denied to them. Interestingly, this is not what Gilbert and Wilson found to be true once tenure decisions were actually made. Those who received tenure felt relieved and excited for a short time, but they soon adjusted and it was business as usual. Those unfortunate professors who did not receive tenure felt a stab of emotional pain, but it was much less painful than they expected. Thus, they were able to predict in the correct direction - receiving tenure would be pleasant and being denied tenure would be unpleasant - but they incorrectly predicted the duration and intensity of these feelings.

  New research on happiness forecasting is showing results similar to Gilbert and Wilson's. There is now evidence that it is not only newly minted university professors who make affective forecasting errors, but that the phenomenon is widespread. For instance, researchers found that people incorrectly predicted the extent to which they will experience distress when learning the results of their HIV tests, with people believing a positive result would be emotionally devastating and a negative result would be like a new emotional lease on life. It was found that people consistently overestimated the impact both for the pleasant and unpleasant outcomes. That is, people predicted they would be in greater distress five weeks after learning they were HIVpositive than those who got positive results actually were. This is not to say that those unfortunate people who acquired HIV were not upset. Of course they were. Rather, it is testimony to the ability to adapt that they were not as upset as we would expect.

  The good news is that researchers have discovered an easily identifiable set of reasons why people make happiness forecasting errors. We now understand a lot about the way people think, arrive at judgments, and make decisions, and we know where individuals systematically go wrong in their mental calculus. After you read this chapter, you should know where you are likely to go wrong in anticipating your own happiness, and correct the thinking errors to which you are likely to fall victim.

  Reasons People Incorrectly Predict Their Future Happiness

  The human mind is built to think efficiently. We are able to make very quick and accurate judgments about the speed of oncoming traffic, how threatening we think a stranger is, and how much we like the teacher of our evening class. The capacity to make judgments and identify personal preferences helps us survive and function in a complex world. Take the example of assumptions. Common wisdom tells us that assumptions are presumptuous and mistaken. The fact is, just the reverse is true. All of us make hundreds, if not thousands, of assumptions every day that enable us to get by in the world. Think of a simple trip to the post office. Chances are, you do not begin an exchange with the postal worker by asking, "Excuse me, do you speak English?" or "Are you selling stamps today?" You assume she does, and proceed from there. It saves time and embarrassing awkward moments. However, as we all know, assumptions occasionally can be wrong. Have you ever asked a store clerk for a price on an item only to find out you were talking with a fellow shopper? In all likelihood you misinterpreted some piece of information-perhaps the other customer was wearing a shirt similar to that of employees. Although humans are, by and large, quick and efficient thinkers, we also make some systematic errors. Some of these predictable errors lead us to incorrectly predict our own future happiness.

  Not Seeing the Big Picture: The Focusing Illusion

  In the early 1980s, our family moved to St. Thomas, in the US Virgin Islands. We rented a house and bought a car. It was a sabbatical year for Ed, and his wife was a professor at the local college. The kids were enrolled in school and a new, more tropical life was under way. Our time there was fantastic, with lovely weather, interesting culture, fresh food, and beaches. We sailed, swam, scuba dived, and read in the hammock on the porch. During the course of our tenure on the island, we met a slew of people from the mainland who visited on a cruise or vacation, fell in love with the place, and decided to move there. Most of them lasted about six months before figuring out that island life was not for them. A few lasted only weeks!

  Why couldn't people accurately predict how happy they would be living in St. Thomas? In part, they never took the whole picture into consideration. Sure, the island boasts what is reported to be one of the ten most beautiful beaches in the world; the sun is unfailing, and the water inviting. But what most visitors overlooked was the rest of the details once the day at the beach comes to a close. At that time, frequent blackouts threw whole portions of St. Thomas into darkness for hours. There was no regular garbage collection, and some inhabitants tossed their waste out on the side of the road. Driving was dangerous and wrecks were common. Food was expensive. Other than water sports, leisure activities were limited. In other words, many of the people we met seemed to focus on the beach and water sports while ignoring the bills, traffic, and living conditions.

  This common mental trap is called the "focusing illusion," and occurs when one fact about a choice particularly stands out in our minds, so much so that we tend to overlook other important characteristics. If we were to ask you to rate the happiness of a newly divorced woman, chances are you would give us a somewhat low rating. After all, she is newly divorced. But the divorce can cast such a large shadow in her mind that she might be overlooking other possible positive aspects of her life: more free time, fewer fights with her husband, the ability to pursue her career in the way she always wanted, the freedom to date, and so forth. Further, much of the time, in her own mind, she is not a divorced woman, because she is attending to being a shopper, an employee, and a friend. In a sense, she is only a part-time divorced person, when her attention is drawn to that
fact, or she chooses to dwell on it.

  The Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague David Schkade studied the focusing illusion and discovered when we are most likely to make these types of errors. The focusing illusion occurs when people focus on a distinctive feature of a possible choice (for example, St. Thomas has beaches and Cheyenne does not). In one study, the researchers asked university students in the Midwest and in California which of the two groups was happier. Both predicted the Californians would be more positive - after all, they have an enviable climate - when in fact both groups reported about equal levels of life satisfaction. By focusing on the weather, respondents forgot about other important aspects of the two locations, such as traffic and the trustworthiness of one's neighbors.

  This same focusing illusion can be seen in the instance of purchasing a new home. Most prospective buyers tour the house and imagine how they will decorate, where the kids will sleep, and what they might do with the yard. It is easy to picture these things because the physical details of the house easily stand out. What we tend to overlook is how friendly the neighbors are, how well the basement drains in the rainy season, how bad the traffic will be when we drive to work, whether the shops we frequent are nearby, and whether the train on the tracks a half mile away will keep us awake at night.

  You are particularly likely to be biased by the focusing illusion when you are paying attention to or evaluating something that is obviously positive or negative. Take, for example, folks living in the slums of Kolkata. Their lives, filled as they are with hunger, police harassment, poor healthcare, and unemployment, are bound to stand out in your mind as miserable. Our research shows that, on average, people living in the slums of Kolkata rate their life satisfaction as about neutral, and some feel slightly positive! If this sounds surprising to you, it is because you, like us, overlooked the close family relationships, soccer games, religious celebrations, new babies, weddings, card games, and many other positive events that are a daily part of slum life. We term this the "pathetic fallacy," and it is the cousin of the "paradise fallacy."