Happiness by Design

by Paul Dolan

  It is vital that you ask the right questions in order to more accurately get at the likely effects of your decision on your happiness. So don’t ask your friends, “What do you think about me taking the new job?” where the focus of attention will be on differences between the jobs that may not show up in the experiences of your decision. Instead ask, “How do you think my day-to-day life will be in a couple of months if I take the new job?”

  Overall, it is entirely possible that other people might not be quite as susceptible to projection bias on your behalf as you are for yourself. In particular, your family and friends will be much more detached from your own current feelings about a decision. You might have fallen in love with a man, a car, or a house, and you would let this cloud your decision about whether to jump in, but your friends can adopt—or at least be explicitly asked to adopt—a “cooler” perspective on the likely consequences of your decision.

  When others remember your happiness, they might not be as influenced by peak-end effects as you are. I am sure that Les remembers how good my nights out with her were in our prechildren partying days better than I do, and I am equally convinced that I remember how good her nights out with me were better than she does. As much as I hate to admit it, she probably has a better memory for them than I do. Studies have shown that under timed conditions, women remember both more positive and more negative autobiographical life events than do men.25 In any case, the point is that other people might have a more accurate memory of what made you happy in the past than you do.

  Recall also from our discussion of mistaken beliefs that you are likely to bring your attitudes in line with your behavior rather than vice versa. If you’re thinking about getting married, you probably have a favorable attitude toward the person you are considering tying the knot with. You bring your attitude toward making a long-term commitment to that person in line with your behavior of already being in a committed relationship with that person. Ask your friend how being married might turn out and they could remind you how your prospective partner spends all their time at the office and that you will hardly see them (which might be a good thing, of course). To reiterate, the way you frame the question really matters. Don’t ask “Should I get married?” but rather “What will being married be like?”

  Far from being a weakness, it is a sign of strength to ask others for opinions about your behavior and your happiness. Just think how clearly you can see the mistakes others are making: they can see your mistakes just as clearly. Moreover, the conversations you have with other people about your and their happiness can be pleasurable and purposeful in themselves.

  People in a boat similar to yours, or who know people that are, are ideally suited to helping you answer these questions. You probably wouldn’t ask your dentist for advice about buying a car. So you won’t want to ask someone who lives in Miami if you’d be happy in Alaska. Just as you need to ask someone who has recently purchased a car for advice before doing so yourself, you need to ask someone who has lived in Alaska, or knows someone who has, if you’d like it there. The more similar this person is to you in terms of values, beliefs, expectations, and experiences, the better the person will be able to advise you about your happiness. People like you affect what you do and they might also be a good guide to how you will feel.

  Overall, other people are an excellent guide to how far you are away from allocating your attention in ways that bring you the most pleasure and purpose. They can help you pay closer attention to your experiences in life. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman has claimed that the experiencing self does not have a voice (being drowned out by the evaluating self). When we had lunch recently, Danny and I agreed that other people are more likely to listen to our experiences.

  By paying attention to your experiences of pleasure and purpose, other people are likely to arrive more quickly at the conclusion that perhaps you should stop doing something that is making you miserable, while you cling to the often mistaken belief that one day it will get better. Recall my friend who works at MediaLand and who evaluates her job positively—in spite of the fact that it makes her miserable on a daily basis. I can see an experiencing self that is suffering perhaps more clearly than she can. Since reading a draft of this book, my friend has started looking for a new job.

  Let others decide

  Another more radical option is sometimes to let people you trust actually make decisions for you. Allow your desires, projections, and beliefs to be reflected in their choices. This will free up your attentional energy for use elsewhere. Psychologists have alerted us to the possibility that the psychological cost of a choice depends on how many options are available. You will often feel worse when you have more choices—this is known as the paradox of choice.26 How long do you spend at the store selecting from twenty-five different shampoos? Letting someone else choose for you, or at least letting them help you choose, may be particularly effective if there is uncertainty about the outcome of a choice, because you’ll have very little idea about what would have happened if you’d selected the other option; or if the stakes aren’t particularly high, because the outcome won’t have as big an impact on you as agonizing over the decision will.

  As a small example of limiting choice to benefit myself in the end, I often let someone else choose my meal for me when I go out for dinner. Anyone who knows me knows that it’s all about protein, so as long as the meal is loaded with it, I’m happy. Not only do I not have to agonize over the menu, but it’s quite exciting not knowing what someone will order for me. And I also get to engage in general chitchat rather than being distracted by the menu. Now, this works for me, but it would be tricky for us all to do this and some people might not like the added pressure of choosing someone else’s dinner as well as their own. But I reckon a happiness-improving strategy could emerge as we each choose different degrees of control and delegation over different decisions. You might want to consider a decision you could delegate, and who you would delegate it to.

  Don’t try too hard

  It is important not to try too hard to be happy. I think this could go some way toward explaining why I (and I am speaking entirely for myself here) hate taking part in “organized happiness.” I hate pub trivia and karaoke with a passion. I am not a big fan of weddings or birthday parties, either. All these events are supposed to be enjoyable but the pressure to have fun can sometimes ruin the experience. So don’t think about it too hard.

  Moreover, if you’re thinking too hard about being happier and aren’t feeling any happier, you’re likely to become less happy as you get frustrated with yourself (as I surely would if I tried to enjoy members of the public murdering some rock and pop classics). Some of the most influential books on happiness focus a lot about how to think yourself happy, take a positive approach, and so on—and you might well be someone who wants to adopt a positive approach. But imagine that you dedicate effort to thinking positively, and it doesn’t work immediately. Now there’s an even greater incongruity between the person you are and the person you want to be and this makes you even more miserable.

  You can also try too hard not to be miserable. It turns out that paying lots of attention to a recent traumatic event only serves to lock in the extreme and negative emotions that might have subsided had they not had such attention focused on them.27 Intensive trauma therapy, which does exactly this, is a damaging solution searching for a problem that may not actually exist. In spite of good evidence that too much attention to a trauma within the first month or so after the event can make things worse, this therapy is still offered to—in fact, largely foisted upon—trauma victims, such as the first responders affected by the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001. Moreover, as many researchers have noted, we need to accept some sadness in our lives from time to time. It is a natural human response and we should not always treat it as pathology.28

  Indeed, given that we are prone to making various mistakes about our happines
s, and given the important role of unconscious attention, you might consider not thinking too much at all.

  In an interesting application of this idea, participants were shown photographs of men who had put pictures of themselves in personal ads. Half of the photographs were of men seeking women, and the other half were of men seeking men. It turned out that people were just as successful at discerning a man’s sexual orientation from their photograph if they looked at it for fifty milliseconds as compared to ten seconds: participants in each of these time conditions were right about the guy’s dating preferences about 60 percent of the time (statistically, this is much better than 50 percent, which chance would predict). Your gaydar in unconscious system 1 is just as good as it is in conscious system 2.29

  In fact, it is possible that you will make even better decisions if you only briefly consider a choice, then stop consciously thinking about it for a while, and briefly return to thinking about it again later on. Imagine being shown a set of five posters from which you are allowed to select one to take home. Three of the posters are abstract art and the other two depict flowers and birds; so something for everyone. Now imagine you could either (1) choose a poster to take home immediately after looking at them simultaneously, (2) choose a poster after looking at them simultaneously and then solving anagrams for seven and a half minutes, or (3) choose a poster after thinking carefully about each one and viewing them one at a time. I suspect that you probably would like to be in the group that has the luxury of pondering their choice. But when students at the University of Amsterdam were called several weeks after making a choice in one of the three conditions, those who had taken a break and solved anagrams were the most satisfied with their choice than those in the other two groups.30

  Choosing between cars is a little more complex than choosing between posters. Yet it would appear that giving our unconscious mind a chance to process information about fuel consumption, tire quality, and upholstery can improve our choices here, too. Participants were provided with descriptions of cars with a number of desirable and undesirable characteristics and then randomly divided into three groups along the lines of the poster study. Again, those who took a break had the best chance of picking the cars with the most positive attributes. When the researchers put these participants under MRI scanners to see their brains while they were making choices, they found that different parts of the brain were activated during conscious and unconscious thought, suggesting that the unconscious mind is processing decision information even when the conscious mind is otherwise occupied.31

  All the participants in these studies were told how long they could consciously think about their choice. Yet when provided with information about a set of lottery outcomes to choose between, participants chose the one with the best odds when they got to think about it as long as they wanted to before making a choice, compared to being told they could think about their choice for exactly four minutes.32 Context matters, as always, and the evidence base in this area is still growing and sparking much debate.

  Nonetheless, it is interesting to consider whether you could make a better choice of a job or a house or a car if you allowed some time for unconscious contemplation rather than attending to the choice fully until a decision is made.33 Or next time you are in the store deciding between a sassy peach and a saucy pink for your walls, you could think about it briefly, stop thinking about it, and then return to the decision. Or when you are next online looking at all those lovely clothes, go and read the paper or watch TV for a bit, and then come back and choose the best sweater.

  Happier by deciding

  Mistaken desires, projections, and beliefs are pretty pervasive problems, and so you should be realistic and expect to succumb to them now and again. But there are ways of dealing with them. Handily, you get to experience the consequences of your decisions: what you attend to and do affects how you feel (and vice versa). So if you can more accurately monitor the feedback for your happiness from your decisions, you might be able to make more decisions that make you happier. Making your own feedback salient (noticeable and relevant) is the key challenge.

  As we’ve seen, other people can also be a great source of information about your happiness. But a final word of caution here. You do need to weed out those who focus less on your happiness. You may very well receive feedback from others that the attainment of goals matters above all else: for example, from your boss to hit those weekly sales targets or from your partner to take that higher-paying job. Indeed, when you accept a new job that pays more than your old one, typically no one bats an eyelid. It is obvious to them why you changed jobs. But if your new job pays less than your last, your family and friends might well ask what you are playing at. Taking a lower-paying job somehow requires justification, making it less likely that you’ll accept it even if you know it would make you happier. Judgments based on tangible factors that are easy to measure, like salary, are of course much easier to justify than decisions based on intangibles, such as getting on with colleagues or doing more fulfilling work.34 So you need to learn to discard advice that doesn’t include a consideration of how striving for these or other goals affects your happiness.

  And remember not to overmonitor. Your attentional energy needs to take a break from time to time. Indeed, once you have achieved equilibrium, there is no incentive to reconfigure your production process until there is good reason to (e.g., if the stimuli or their effects change). Sometimes not consciously thinking about a decision at all could even result in better decision making if you allow your unconscious attention to process the choice while your conscious attention is allocated elsewhere.

  6

  Designing happiness

  The end of the previous chapter gave us a further look at the impact that unconscious attention has on what we do. Now we’ll focus squarely on how you can organize your life in ways that give your unconscious attention the best shot of being allocated in ways that make you happier.

  In all of this, context is king. The idea that behavior can be changed by “contextology” as much as by our own internal psychology lies at the heart of Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.1 Nudge recommends that policy makers seek to change behavior by going with the grain of human behavior; to change behavior with a contextual nudge rather than by a cognitive shove.

  The really basic insight here is that if you want people to act in a particular way, make it easier for them. In one of many classic examples of this, students were more likely to get vaccinated for tetanus when they had a map of where to get vaccinated than if they were just simply given a pamphlet about the importance of the vaccination.2 And, equally, if you don’t want people to do something, make it harder for them. This is common sense, but it does not mean policy will be designed on the basis of it.

  Around the time that I began working closely with the UK government to bring about population behavior change in areas such as health, energy, and tax payments, I worked with colleagues on a paper called “Mindspace,” developed in the spirit of changing behavior by changing contexts. Mindspace is a nine-letter mnemonic for the most robust influences on behaviors that are driven largely, but not exclusively, by automatic and unconscious processes.3 Based on earlier attempts to develop a checklist by Rob Metcalfe, Ivo Vlaev, and me, Mindspace is deliberately in the form of a checklist so that policy makers can work through the elements, ensuring that they properly account for situational factors that they might otherwise be blind to. We have already seen the power of checklists in chapter 3. Here are the nine elements.

  Messenger

  We are heavily influenced by who communicates information.

  Incentives

  Our responses to incentives are shaped by mental shortcuts.

  Norms

  We are strongly influenced by what others do.
r />   Defaults

  We “go with the flow” of preset options.

  Salience

  Our attention is drawn to what is novel and seems relevant to us.

  Priming

  Our acts are often influenced by unconscious cues.

  Affect

  Our emotional associations can powerfully shape our actions.

  Commitments

  We seek to be consistent with our public promises.

  Ego

  We act in ways that make us feel better about ourselves.

  You can apply a checklist approach in your own life. From Mindspace, messenger and incentives are largely suited to policy; we have already touched on affect and ego in chapter 4 under mistaken projections and mistaken beliefs, respectively; and chapter 5 showed us that salience is a critical factor in getting useful feedback about our happiness. This leaves four overarching and related elements for you to consider: how to prime yourself to act differently, the defaults you set up, the commitments you make, and the norms of those you surround yourself with, as well as using these elements to alter your habits.