by Ed Diener
In order to make happy choices, listen to your heart, don't worry about getting the very best all the time, and evaluate each outcome on its own merits rather than against others. Follow this dictum: Search for a decent parking spot and take it; don't waste your life searching for the best spot in the whole lot.
The Cute Puppy Error: Wanting Versus Liking
There is a difference between wanting something, even wanting it very much, and liking it once you have it. This is wonderfully exemplified in all the children we have ever known. There in the store, or in the television ad, is something that little Jack or Jill wants so, so much. They just beg the adults, and pester them until they get it. Once obtained, the object is given an intense hour of play and then consigned to the toy box forever. Whatever was so attractive about that toy was not so fun in actual play. One of our daughters demonstrated this same phenomenon with her requests for a pet. Her parents resisted her enthusiastic entreaties for a dog for many months, finally relenting and obtaining a cute mutt from the animal shelter. Our daughter was elated, and promised to feed and walk "Jack," as well as play with him and oversee his activities. She had great fun with Jack that lasted exactly one day. After that, no amount of cajoling or threats could get her to remember to take Jack for a walk and feed him, much less clean up Jack's poop. Quite simply, she had played with him, the novelty wore off, and he was no longer fun.
Psychologists describe different brain systems for wanting versus liking. Just because a cute puppy activates the wanting system does not mean that it will later continue to stimulate the liking system. The classic divergence between the two systems is shown in addictions, such as to nicotine. Without cigarettes, the smoker comes to want them very much, even to the point of desperation, but smoking produces mild pleasure at best, not an intense enjoyment that is commensurate with the wanting. The more a person smokes, the less they enjoy each cigarette but the more they want one if none are available. The discrepancy between wanting and liking is yet another reason our decisions can go astray. It is also one reason the economists' model of well-being based on people's market choices is not a perfect guide to happiness.
How might the wanting versus liking distinction apply to us? We can all think of times when we were like the short-term puppy lover. We wanted something shiny and fancy, only to discover that ownership of the item did not produce lasting enjoyment. Perhaps acquiring the item or activity is most of the fun; once obtained, it loses its allure. We may have also experienced the opposite - wanting to avoid something only to discover that the thing was in fact enjoyable. This is one reason that in the section above we so strongly recommend getting experience with the place, object, or job before fully committing ourselves to it.
How can we avoid the cute puppy error in our own lives? Several steps are needed - examining why we want something, considering how our experience will be with it after the initial rush of acquisition passes, and reminding ourselves of that possible wanting-liking dichotomy, at least in the important choices and acquisitions we make. The first step is the hardest-seeing what it is that makes us want a thing, and asking whether that will continue to make us like it for a long time. We might want to show the purchase to others, or proudly tell others about the choice we have made. But what happens when the excitement of show-and-tell wears off?
The second strategy for avoiding the wanting-liking mismatch is to carefully question how the decision will enhance your life in several months, after the novelty has worn off. Will it by then have faded into the background, consigned to the psychological toy box? You are deciding to trade in your trusty-comfortable, reliable, and loving Toyota for a Porsche. An exciting, but costly, choice. After the excitement and the pride of showing the car to friends wears off, will the Porsche enhance your daily experience? Will the car fade into the background as you adapt, or even become a negative due to certain problems that may come with the car? Quite simply, you must take the third step: carefully examine whether you will like the car as much as you want the car. There is a little kid in all of us, and that can be fun. But we have to live for a long time with the choices we make as adults, and so it is most important for us to comprehend the cute puppy error.
Conclusions
Happiness, as it turns out, is not just a feeling in the present. Our future happiness is, in some ways, as important as the joy and satisfaction we experience in the now. Anticipating emotional rewards and punishments is crucial to the choices we make, from the mundane purchasing of a stereo to important life decisions such as occupation and marriage. And anticipation can be half the fun of life. Fortunately, we are pretty good at predicting how we will feel down the road. We know, generally, what will be satisfying and which things will rub us the wrong way. More often than not, we understand what types of movies, meals, and parties we will enjoy, which people we will like and dislike, and which circumstances will make us comfortable or unhappy. We can predict with reasonable certainty that we will bask in a compliment from a spouse and feel embarrassed if we are called up on stage to volunteer at a magic show. We know that donating money to a good cause will feel rewarding, and that getting lost in a foreign city will be worrying. Being able to guess our future feelings, with some degree of accuracy, is important because it helps motivate us to seek out positive, meaningful experiences and avoid unpleasant ones.
Still, we are not perfect. For as good as we are at guessing our future emotions, we make mistakes. There are several predictable thinking errors people commonly make that lead them to incorrectly predict their own future emotions in general, and future happiness in particular:
1 Focusing on a single salient feature or period of time in a choice, rather than looking at the big picture.
2 Overestimating the long-term impact of our choices.
3 Forgetting that happiness is an ongoing process, not a destination.
4 Paying too much attention to external information while overlooking personal preferences and experience.
5 Trying to maximize decisions rather than focusing on personal satisfaction.
6 Confusing wanting something for liking it later, and forgetting to evaluate whether we will enjoy the choice once its novelty wears off.
The good news is that by identifying these errors and learning about why they occur, we can guard against them. We may never be able to overcome them entirely, but we certainly can reduce their impact on our lives. By considering a wide range of information, by remembering our ability to cope and adapt, by tapping personal experience, and by remembering that happiness is an ongoing process, you will be far more likely to make decisions that will make you optimally happy. To make good happiness forecasts, get some experience when you can, and check with others who have had similar experiences to the one you will have. Focus on the entire picture, not just on some salient aspect of it, and think what it will be like after a year, not just during the initial period when things may be either more stressful or more exciting. By becoming a good happiness forecaster, through practice and experience, you will substantially increase your psychological wealth. People who are psychologically impoverished never seem to figure out what makes them happy, and they continue to make bad choices throughout their lives.
One last suggestion about improving your important decisions: eat a healthy breakfast before you make them. Recent research shows that people have better "executive functioning," which includes planning and self-control, when glucose and glycogen in the brain are at high levels. You don't want to be making big decisions when fasting, unless you chug some sweetened lemonade first. Eat a healthy breakfast before making that important decision. And always remember that good decisions are as much about your making them turn out right as they are about which choice you actually make.
11
Take AIM on Happiness: Attention,
Interpretation, and Memory
Our friend Randy is employed in the computer industry and has the enviable position of working from home. Randy is a devoted father of two
young children, and his home office in Seattle allows him the opportunity to participate more fully in his kids' lives. Randy is thankful for the chance to drive his children to school in the morning and music lessons in the afternoon. Not long ago, he had just dropped his daughter at her violin lesson when he was rear-ended by a furniture truck. Although he wasn't injured, Randy was badly shaken. The trunk of his car was smashed, his taillights were broken, and his rear bumper came loose. The driver of the truck was apologetic and the two men exchanged insurance information. Randy patted the trucker on the back with a huge smile and sense of relief. "At least my daughter wasn't in the car," he said. Randy's optimistic attitude was more than cosmetic. He really was glad that his daughter had avoided a potentially harmful and traumatic experience. Although Randy knew that dealing with the tow truck, insurance company, and auto body shop might be a hassle, he left the scene of the accident feeling that he was a lucky person!
Randy's case is, of course, a perfect example of the power of positive thinking. Positive thinking is not about ignoring negative events or pretending that life is better in the face of adversity. Positive thinking does not magically make things happen. Nor is an upbeat outlook alone enough to overcome hardship. Rather, positive thinking is a mindset in which you recognize your blessings more than you pay attention to daily hassles.
The power of positive thinking can be seen in psychotherapy, where counselors commonly - and to great effect - use a technique called "reframing" to encourage their clients to view their problems in a new, more positive light. Reframing is exactly what Randy did when he shifted his view of the wreck as scary and an annoyance to one of great relief that his daughter was not involved. Everyday language is full of phrases to describe this mode of thinking, such as "When life hands you lemons, make lemonade," and "See the glass as half full." Because positive thinking can be enormously effective, it has made its way into mainstream culture. Many self-help books encourage readers to take up this new way of thinking, and close friends try to get us to "cheer up" by looking at "the bright side," "the silver lining."
The good news is that the research on subjective well-being and other psychological topics confirms that happiness is, to some degree, in your head. While a rosy attitude won't be able to gloss over a painful divorce or cancer diagnosis, positive attitudes can help. When people come to us and ask for advice about how to be happier, we usually point to positive thinking as a fruitful route to increasing well-being. Not only is it easier to change your attitude than it is to change your address, level of education, or income, a shift toward positive thinking can often lead to more gains in happiness than a change of life circumstances. This realization can enhance your psychological wealth!
Unfortunately, most people aren't sure exactly how to apply the advice to think more positively. For folks who are chronically focused on problems and difficulties, this mental shift is challenging. And, for the rest of us, there don't seem to be many clear definitions of what, exactly, positive thinking is, or specific steps to follow to achieve it. Fortunately, results from scientific studies in cognitive psychology suggest that positive thinking is possible, and that the path to it need not be the product of guesswork. Importantly, we need not throw out our connection to reality in order to adopt positive thinking.
In this chapter, we walk you through the nuts and bolts of a happy mindset by encouraging you to "take AIM at happiness." AIM is our acronym representing the basic components of a positive attitude that are necessary for happiness: attention, interpretation, and memory. Because attitudes to life are central to happiness, using the AIM model is essential to your psychological wealth. When most people consider positive thinking, they tend to focus on the interpretation part of AIM. They try to recast negative thoughts in a new, shinier light, but usually overlook how vitally important attention and memory are to the happiness equation. Positive thinking is more than simply looking on the bright side; successful positivity means paying attention to successes and blessings, and being open-minded to positive explanations of events, as well as recalling the good times. Although we doubt that the kind of positive attitudes suggested by self-help gurus are magic cure-alls, we do know that they can increase your happiness.
Attention: Gorillas in Our Midst
What are the chances that you would notice a woman with an umbrella walking through the middle of an exciting play during the Super Bowl or a World Cup soccer match? How about the chances that you would see a person in an alien costume if they walked between the players on the court at your son's high school basketball game? You probably think there is a high likelihood that such an unusual sight would stand out. This would be a reasonable guess, because we often notice things that appear unusual or out of place. But if you are one of thousands of undergraduate students in psychology classes, you probably know better. You know that, even if a person has perfect vision and is very observant, they can often overlook the gorillas in our midst.
The researcher Dan Simons can be credited with one of the most clever and powerful illustrations of attention in the history of psychological experimentation. In his now-classic studies, Simons asks participants to keep track of how many times a basketball is passed by a team wearing white shirts during a video of a basketball exercise. The players, six in all, half wearing white shirts and half wearing black, dart all around one another. As they weave back and forth, the white team passes one ball and the black team passes another, sometimes by bouncing it, sometimes by tossing it through the air. Simons's research participants struggle to keep up, carefully tracking each pass, trying hard not to mix up the two teams or basketballs. As the video ends, Simons asks, "Did you notice anything unusual?" The participants try to think of what might have been out of the ordinary: Was the game played in an office lobby? Maybe there weren't really any teams, just folks passing a ball back and forth? Many participants just shake their heads and say no, nothing stood out as being unusual.
Simons then inquires, "What about the gorilla in the game?" He then plays the same video again and the participants are shocked to see, very clearly, a person in a gorilla suit saunter into the middle of the game, turn toward the camera, pound his chest, and then slowly walk off screen. Many participants protest that the film has been doctored or switched with a new one. It seems astounding, almost impossible, that such a quirky (and now obvious) detail could have been overlooked. Simons insists that it is the same video they just watched, and he is correct. Simons repeated this experiment with a woman walking with an open umbrella, with the same results. In both instances about half the people noticed the unexpected events, and about half overlooked them.
What has happened, amazingly, is that the participants overlooked the gorilla because their attention was so heavily focused on the players in white and attempting to keep track of the number of passes. In their effort to follow one team and accurately tally the passes, most research participants unknowingly block out information about the other team dressed in black. As it happens, they also block out the gorilla.
If you are like most people, you are probably skeptical that you would fall for such tomfoolery. Other people might miss the gorilla, you presume, but not you. Indeed, we would all like to think that we would notice such an outlandish sight. Of course, now that we have told you about the experiment, your chances of seeing the gorilla would be high. We recommend you experience the full joy of this experiment from the experimenter's side by duping your friends by showing them the video clip (available online at www.viscog.beckman. uiuc.edu/djs_lab/demos.html) and watching as they overlook the gorilla! Remember, a few of them will notice the gorilla. But for those friends of yours who miss the hairy creature, the shock and disbelief are priceless.
The take-home message from this powerful experiment is that people are incapable of taking in the whole picture. Our brains are information processors and the world is just too full of stimuli to effectively take it all in. Instead, we have to pick and choose what we pay attention to, and our brains
are evolutionarily adapted to do this well. We tend to be on the lookout for potentially harmful things, are adept at reading social cues, and are pretty good at integrating sights, sounds, and smells without even thinking about it. But when the world becomes demanding or complex, we tend to narrow our attention to the things that matter. This is why, when you drive in heavy traffic, you generally see the road, the other cars, and traffic signs rather than the sky, your shoes, or your fingernails. This is why driving while talking on a cell phone is so dangerous - because it draws some of your attention away from the road.
Inattentional blindness is not simply a phenomenon relegated to videos in psychological studies. It occurs in everyday life, and affects how we see the world around us. For example, in the documentary film Beyond the Call by Adrian Belic, there is a scene in which a group of Cambodian men are playing soccer. The players ran around kicking the ball toward their opponents' goal. Suddenly, Robert noticed that one of the players had only one leg, an unfortunately common sight in Cambodia. Still, it was inspiring to see the man be able to play soccer despite his amputation. Then, slowly, it dawned on Robert that all the players had only one leg! It was a revelation! What at first appeared to be a routine soccer match turned out to be an extraordinary game. Imagine how easy it would have been to overlook this detail with only a cursory glance. You can probably think of similar situations in your own life. Perhaps you went to a crowded party, but once you laid eyes on the woman who was to become your future wife, the gathering seemed thin and she appeared to be everywhere at once.
Simons and his colleagues have conducted other creative experiments on attention as well. For instance, in a series of studies on "change blindness," Simons was curious to see what would happen if he exchanged one person for another mid-conversation. To achieve this, Simons employed a set of tricks in which one person would swap places with another. Imagine, for example, checking into a hotel. The clerk behind the counter drops her pen, reaches down to get it, and another woman pops up to replace her. Would you notice that the hotel employee had been switched with someone new? It is tempting to assume the answer is obvious: of course we would notice such a dramatic change!
