by Paul Dolan
One of the classic studies in this research area found that men are more likely to call a woman who gives him her phone number immediately after having crossed a suspension bridge compared to ten minutes after crossing it.42 The men project their aroused feelings in the moment to their future feelings about how they would feel on a date with the woman.
Since then, there have been many demonstrations of projection bias. Students’ choices about which university to attend are influenced by the weather on the day they visit campus with, surprisingly, cloudier days predicting a greater likelihood of enrollment.43 The purchase of winter clothes depends on the weather on the day of purchase, with more clothes being purchased on colder days and then subsequently returned.44 And you have almost certainly noticed that if you shop for next week’s food while you are hungry, you are likely to buy more than you intended.45 What’s interesting about this example is that so few of us seem to learn from our past mistakes. We keep falling into the trap of buying more food when we are hungry. It’s as if we are hardwired to mess up, which is not surprising since our ancestors were nearly always hungry, and they did not have the luxury of knowing they could just run to the supermarket.
Your future feelings will ebb and flow in ways that your current feelings do not appear to account for. Take the extreme but resonant case of 168 terminally ill cancer patients (who were no longer seeking treatment) voluntarily admitted to the Riverview Health Centre Palliative Care Unit in Winnipeg, Canada, from 1993 to 1995. Their will to live was shown to vary by about sixty points on a hundred-point scale from “complete will to live” to “no will to live” over the course of a month, and by about thirty points over twelve hours. These huge differences can be explained by how the patients felt at the moment that they were asked the question.46
In less stark scenarios, think about how your feelings now guide your decisions. Do you always say yes when asked out, and then wonder why you’re so bored on dates? Does an early Sunday brunch with your friends sound like a good idea on Friday night but not from the comfort of your bed come Sunday morning? Did you wind up enjoying going out for an evening bike ride even though it was hard to pull yourself away from the TV? Implicit in many of your decisions is the assumption that your current sentiments of pleasure and purpose, or misery and futility, will carry over.
Having said this, there are also occasions when our behavior is driven by our anticipation of future feelings, which may be different to how we feel now.47 As an example, consider our reluctance to swap lottery tickets with others even if we are offered money to do so. We don’t want to swap because we anticipate the feelings of regret that will ensue if we traded away the winning ticket.48
But we’re often wrong about how much regret we will feel. Commuters who have just missed their trains feel less disappointed than other people predict they themselves would feel if they had just done so. And participants who can win a prize by correctly guessing the cost of common supermarket items, like gum and detergent, regret missing out on the right answers less than others expect they would if they were in their shoes.49 Overall, then, we are prone to mispredict our future feelings.
Misremembering
Not only do we make poor projections into the future, but we are also prone to misremembering the fullness of a past experience. Take a second to recall your last holiday. How much did you enjoy it? Would you go back again? If you are anything like other people, two factors will explain your answers: the peak moment of pleasure or pain and the final moment of pleasure or pain. This is known as the peak-end effect.50 Further, your overall assessment of an experience doesn’t even pay that much attention to how long it lasted. This is known as duration neglect.51
Your memories, even the most recent ones, are etched with extremity and recency at the expense of duration. They are imperfect guides to the flow of past experiences but they do determine how you feel about the past and, crucially, they drive your future behavior. Think about your favorite films. You’d be hard-pressed to tell me how long each one lasted, but you’ll certainly remember your favorite scene and most likely the final one, too. That’s why screenwriters or playwrights will often spend a great deal of time making the last scene full of sparks and emotion. The whole film might be rubbish, but if the finale is genuinely good and memorable you’ll most likely recall the whole film as having been good. The overall happiness you get from the film is what you experience while watching it and what you draw from as memories of the experience afterward. In other words, overall happiness comes from all the sentiments you experience as a result of it.
The takeaway from this is that the duration of an event might be less important than how the event ended if the ending plays a prominent part in your future recollections of the event. Some of the best nights out may have been short but ended very sweetly, and these may be the ones you recall most later on. So how the event ended might be more important than how long the event lasted if you draw more on your memories of the ending of the event than on your memories of the rest of it—which we often do, of course.
Consider the experiences of those attending a performance at the New York Philharmonic on January 10, 2012. In the final moments of the eighty-two-minute performance (of Mahler’s Symphony no. 9), an alarm on an audience member’s iPhone went off. Despite the beauty of the previous eighty-one minutes of the performance, many audience members later recalled how their whole experience had been ruined.52 But can that be correct? After all, only the final minute was ruined. But it was also the most important minute—the peak and the end.
In principle, it is possible to say whether, on balance, an overall experience was good or bad by accounting for how much the bad memory of the experience plays into future experiences. Memories of the past are experiences in the present. Just how often will those who were at the New York Philharmonic think about their ruined night out? If the pain of their memories exceeds the pleasure they experienced during the first eighty-one minutes, then it was overall a bad experience. If not, it was overall good.
The critical point that I want to emphasize here, and which was first made in chapter 1, is that you simply cannot know if an experience was, on balance, a net benefit or a net cost to your overall happiness without considering the frequency and intensity of future experiences of the memory of it.
We often recall experiences as having been “spoiled” because bad aspects of it continue to loom large. From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes perfect sense. Almost getting attacked by a lion when out for a stroll in a new area means that you are less likely to stroll in that area again, no matter how nice the flowers look and smell. But, as so often, context matters. Speaking personally, the memories of many great nights out have stayed with me far longer than those from bad nights.
It is possible that you recall peak moments of pleasure and pain differently, and probably more intensely, than peak moments of purpose and pointlessness, although there might be some important differences between us as individuals (dependent, for example, upon the degree to which we can be categorized as pleasure machines or purpose engines). I have already stated that writing this book has felt purposeful and nothing can change that experience. But my memory of the experience may well be influenced by how successful it is. The more copies it sells, the more likely I will be to recall the experience as having been a purposeful one. And these memories will probably greatly influence any future decision about writing another book.
Whatever your own precise focus, however, you’re unlikely to remember the past in ways that are consistent with the facts. What this means is that your inaccurate memories may steer you toward decisions that are not consistent with the future maximization of your happiness, and away from the need to establish the appropriate balance between pleasure and purpose in your life. Because of one exciting moment you might choose to repeat a holiday where you were bored most of the time or, perhaps more importantly, because of one awful moment you might choose to
quit a job where the majority of your experiences are decent. Job satisfaction is actually an excellent predictor of quit rates, and in the large data sets from Germany and the UK, peak and end job satisfaction are a better predictor of quitting than overall job satisfaction ratings.53
You might want to consider a time when you’ve been wrong in predicting your happiness in the past and what you focused on in your prediction that turned out to be different from the experience. As an example, last Christmas, Les and I took the kids to see Mig in Ibiza. The words “Mig” and “Ibiza” primed me to focus my attention on the prospect of having a good time. But a place that shuts down for the winter is not a good place for a family holiday with two kids who require constant stimulation (or three kids, from Les’s perspective). We spent a lot of money on flights and a villa and had a pretty lousy time despite Mig’s best efforts to find things for the kids to do. Les says she did warn me that this might happen and I’m sure she is right.
Mistaken beliefs
We also make mistakes about who we are and how we would like to be that sometimes get in the way of us being happier. We are often wrong about (a) the kind of people we are and why we do what we do; (b) the expectations we have; and (c) the benefits of accepting who we are.
Delusion
You and a friend have just had an argument. She is furious that you weren’t civil. You think she’s overreacting. There’s no record of what was said. Who’s right? You both are, because there is no objective truth, only your subjective interpretations. You explain your behavior to form stories about yourself that are consistent with your beliefs. You believe you are a respectful person, and she believes you’re wrong.
We are actually quite stubborn about what we believe to be true and so it is hard for us to change our minds. Indeed, how many times in the last few years have you genuinely changed your mind about something significant you believe? Not that often, I suspect. We think we have good, logical reasons for our beliefs but, in reality, our beliefs typically come first and then we attend to reasons that support them. If we really based our beliefs on evidence, we would change our minds much more often as better evidence became available. Instead, we search for information and evidence to support what we believe and ignore information that does not. This is called confirmation bias.54
As a relevant example for me, reviewers of academic journal papers are more likely to publish articles that conform to their own theoretical perspective.55 If the evidence does not quite fit what we believe to be true, we will dismiss it or find ways of explaining how that evidence would actually fit our beliefs if only it were gathered or interpreted “properly.”
In a related way, if there is a discrepancy between our beliefs and our behavior, we will seek to explain away the difference. If you believe that you are a good cook and you cook a bad meal, you can attribute it to poor-quality ingredients, a malfunctioning oven, or the pressure you were under to prepare it in time for your friends’ arrival. So long as you can apportion responsibility for your behavior to sources other than yourself—to the context, other people, and so on—you can continue to see yourself as a good cook. In this way, you can hold a belief about yourself that continually remains at odds with your behavior. Every bad meal has an explanation.
Our tendency to attribute our behavior to our context or to blame others for it is directly in contrast to how we tend to judge others’ actions. When it comes to other people, we are far more likely to attribute the bad meal to their inability to cook rather than to other causes. This is called the fundamental attribution error.56 When explaining other people’s behavior, we overestimate the effect of their underlying disposition and underestimate the effect of context. This is a central concept in psychological research and there have been thousands of articles published on the topic, many on its implications for how we judge people who are different from us.57
Everything is relative, though, and we still do not appreciate quite how much we are influenced by context. We delude ourselves that we make choices that are driven by system 2 and we ignore the influence of system 1. This is hardly surprising, given that we don’t have conscious access to the automatic and unconscious drivers of our behavior. But we do have access to the behaviors themselves. So we could work out how we acted previously in a given situation and that will be a very good guide to how we will act the next time we are in that situation—and a much better guide than any intention to behave differently.58 Indeed, intentions explain, at most, only about a quarter of the variation in changes in health behaviors, such as exercise, leaving three-quarters to be explained by factors associated with the specific contexts that trigger an action—such as whether you have a nice outdoor area to exercise in or a gym at your office.59
Mistaken beliefs about our immunity to context can get us into serious trouble. Much as some of us might like to think otherwise, most men, and quite a lot of women, too, would cheat on their partners in the “right” context; drunken nights out with attractive friends that end up back at their place, for example. If you consider yourself to be immune to context, you will be much more likely to “find yourself” in those situations where you simply will not be able to help yourself. Only by recognizing the role of context, and insofar as you do not want to cheat, you can try to avoid situations that make it more likely.
While we really must all learn to accept that we are creatures of our environment, there still remains happiness in a bit of self-delusion. Very few of us are as good a cook as we think we are—or as attractive, intelligent, or funny. And this is all fine. Who really wants to have the truth pointed out to them? And even this assumes that there is an “objective truth” out there in the first place, which there rarely is. Most things are relative, including your culinary skills, which are probably fantastic compared to my kids’ and pretty unimaginative compared to Heston Blumenthal’s. As we have seen, the truth, insofar as one exists, is an overrated concept in the experiences of our lives.
There’s a limit to how much we can delude ourselves, however, and sometimes the discordance between our beliefs and our behavior will be hard to explain and the gap can make us unhappy. When this occurs, it’s easier for us to change what we think about a particular behavior than to change the behavior itself. Indeed, behavioral science has taught us that our behavior drives our attitudes every bit as much as, or even more than, the other way around. If we are not satisfied with our work or social lives, for example, we’ll often simply just deem them less important than other aspects of our lives with which we are more satisfied.60
It is well established that you will feel uncomfortable when there is a discrepancy between what you think and what you do. This is known as cognitive dissonance.61 In such circumstances, it is much simpler to bring your attitudes in line with your behavior than vice versa. The theory of cognitive dissonance was originally developed in the 1950s by Leon Festinger. This social psychologist conducted a classic experiment where he asked participants to turn pegs in a tray, a very dull task. These participants were then instructed to convince other people to do the same task and were paid either $1 or $20 to do so. Those who were paid less liked the task more than those who were paid more. Why? Well, getting paid $20 gave the participants a good reason for what they did: “I did it for the money.” Being paid $1 required a different justification to bring their attitudes in line with their behavior: “I didn’t do it for the money; I did it for the joy.”62
Cognitive dissonance is pervasive. It explains why children like certain toys less after they play with other toys, why gamblers at a racetrack think that their horse is more likely to win after they have placed their bet than before, and why people who have been unfaithful to their partners are prone to trivializing their affairs.63 It also applies to politics. In twenty years (1976–96) of US election data, the attitudes of young people were more polarized in the group that were just old enough to vote as compared to those who were just too young; that is, the act of vot
ing in the just-old-enough group drove their attitudes toward the candidate.64
Cognitive dissonance also explains the claim that “you can’t help who you fall in love with,” which is really only ever said when a relationship has turned sour. The word “love” is used as a way to bring attitudes in line with staying in the relationship. Narratives to explain behavior can have dangerous consequences, such as when abused spouses stay with their abusers because they love them.65 Decisions about relationships, like all other decisions in life, should be based on their consequences for experiences of pleasure and purpose over time, and not by narratives surrounding them.
Cognitive dissonance can also be used to explain assumptions about your optimal balance of pleasure and purpose. My friends Mig and Lisa tell themselves that pleasure and purpose, respectively, are all that matter because that makes their beliefs consistent with their ongoing behavior. The state of cognitive dissonance is unpleasant, so this is a way for them to protect their happiness. They could each be even happier, however, if they adjusted the activities in their lives and what they pay attention to in order to find a better balance of pleasure and purpose.
Expecting too much
Another facet of who you are (and particularly your evaluating self) is the expectations you have, which can be established very early on in life. Grace Lordan and I are currently analyzing the data from a large longitudinal survey in the UK to show that, from childhood to adulthood, current income relative to previous income is a significant predictor of life satisfaction and mental health, whether people move up or down.66 There is also evidence, again using reports of life satisfaction and mental health, that the gains from increases in income can be completely offset if your expectations about gains in income rise faster than does income itself.67 Expectations are also central to experiences of purpose in life, as well as to the lack of it. Those who experience the most purpose at work have jobs that fit with their expectations about how they see themselves.68 On the other hand, if you are expecting something to be particularly interesting and it doesn’t meet your expectations, you will be bored.
