Happiness

by Ed Diener

  Once again, Simons's experiments show that this is often not the case: about half the people in his studies never notice the switch. If the woman behind the counter is exchanged with another person with similar qualities, many people fail to pick up on the swap. For instance, if the clerk is middle-aged and has short hair and glasses, people might not notice the exchange for another short-haired, bespectacled middle-aged woman. If, on the other hand, the hotel clerk is swapped for a young man, or a person of a different ethnicity, people are quick to notice. Change blindness occurs because people have the tendency to encode things by broad category rather than by detail, as a means of simplifying complex information. We seem to notice general information during transactions, but not specific characteristics of the person if they aren't relevant to the transaction.

  Consider how you perceive those around you. Like most people, you might start by viewing others in broad categories such as "employee," "Australian," "female," and "young," and then notice more complexity and detail as you get to know them better. This is quite natural. It is also common for folks to pay attention to a single feature that stands out: a person in a wheelchair arrests our attention because we see fewer such people over the course of the day; it is useful to code a conversational partner by gender because it helps us decide what to say and how to say it; we react to children very differently than we do to adults. It often makes sense to define people according to these categories. Of course, we proceed to understand people as individuals the longer we know them, but condensing information to a few descriptive categories can be handy during initial interactions.

  Where we focus our attention has been shown to have a direct bearing on happiness. Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky and her colleagues are interested in the thinking habits of happy and unhappy people. They noticed that unhappy people had the tendency to ruminate on their own failings and character flaws. You may have noticed this tendency to dwell on the negative in some of your own friends. Lyubomirsky decided to test the effects of self-reflection by having research participants focus either on themselves or on a distracter, and then record their moods. In the self-focus condition, participants were asked to pay attention to such things as "who you strive to be," "your bodily sensations," and "what your feelings might mean." In the distraction condition, participants were asked to imagine such things as "a boat ride across the Atlantic Ocean." How did looking inward versus outward affect people's moods? Lyubomirsky and her colleagues found that focusing attention on oneself could make even happy people unhappy, and that directing attention away from the self had the power to make even unhappy people happier. Of course, some amount of self-reflection is probably healthy, even if it means small bouts of sadness or worry. But too much attention focused inwardly seems to drag down happiness over the long run.

  When analyzing the power of positive thinking, it is helpful to remember that we can have positive interpretations only of what we are attending to. That is, we can only decide if the glass is half empty or half full if we are looking at the glass in the first place! There are people who chronically look at the negative aspects of their lives, and who focus on their failures and setbacks. There are also those who constantly see the faults and shortcomings of others. In contrast, there are those who have cultivated the habit of seeing life's blessings and the beauty and goodness around them. Positive thinking, then, is as much about putting positive information into your head to begin with as it is about interpreting life events as being good or bad.

  Noticing - or failing to notice - good things in the social and physical environment is much like the gorillas in our midst. We may tune our attention to problems around us, the little mistakes of others, and fail to notice the good things. For example, we may recognize when a co-worker fails to compliment our new haircut or when our in-laws forget our birthday, but fail to notice when our spouse does us a little favor or when the sunset is magnificent. Because there are always both plentiful good things and bad things a person can notice, a person with the habit of attending mostly to the bad inherits the problems of living in an ugly world. In contrast, a person who develops the habit of attending to beauty, the small good works of others, and what is going right in life will enjoy a pleasant worldview.

  Interpretation

  A close family member regularly entertains dinner guests with a fantastic story about a time she went on vacation to Cancun, Mexico. On her last day at the beachside resort, she and her husband prepared to check out of their hotel. He took the luggage to the rental car and she took a shower. When she came out of the bathroom, with nothing on but a towel wrapped over her hair, she was shocked to find a local man standing in the bedroom. She screamed, and flicked the man with the wet towel until he managed to scoot by her and fled the hotel room. With a rush of adrenaline, our friend got dressed and stalked off to the lobby to notify the staff and call the police.

  When she arrived at the front desk, the woman saw, to her amazement, that the clerk was the very same man who had been in her room! He turned red when he saw her and smiled weakly. What had happened was this: The hotel clerk had seen our friend's husband get into the car with the suitcases and had assumed that it was a guest trying to leave the hotel without paying. Not wanting to jump to conclusions, the clerk rushed up to the room and knocked on the door, but since our friend was in the shower there was of course no answer. The hotel clerk then walked along a narrow ledge from an adjacent balcony, eight floors up, and entered the room through the window just at the unfortunate moment that our friend emerged from the bathroom naked. In the end, the man apologized for the misunderstanding and everyone went away a little embarrassed - and with a terrific story to tell.

  Our friend's tale is a modern classic of interpretation. Many situations in life are unclear or ambiguous, and we are forced to fit together the pieces of the puzzle into a picture that makes sense. In this case, our friend assumed the strange man in her hotel room was a would-be rapist rather than a hotel employee. On the other side of the story, the hotel clerk assumed the man leaving with his luggage was absconding back to America without paying. In both cases the interpretation was understandable, but incorrect.

  Ed once set out to show Robert and his teenage buddies how important interpretation is for how we experience events. He asked Robert and his friends whether they liked cockroaches, and the group proclaimed loudly that they hated the little creatures. Ed then went out to the garage and "caught" some cockroaches and brought them inside in a salad bowl. (Actually, they were mail-order cockroaches from a laboratory, but the adolescents didn't know this.) Anguished cries arose from the boys as Robert's older sisters, Marissa and Mary Beth, put their hands in the bowl and let the cockroaches climb over them. The teenagers recoiled further when Ed smashed the cockroaches and put them in the microwave.

  After minutes of cooking, the cockroaches came out crispy and sizzling hot. Ed and the girls all quickly seized a cockroach and popped it in their mouths. The macho teenage boys were aghast, and sweat was visible. When Ed invited them to have a bite, they all refused. "Look," Ed explained, "it's all in your mind. People all over the world eat bugs; they are just another source of protein. You have learned they are dirty, and you are disgusted by them. But the intense heat has killed all the germs, and they are harmless." Robert ate a cockroach, but his friends still declined. Over the years, the Diener home developed a reputation as a strange place. But notice the valid lesson: whether something is viewed as food or as disgusting offal is in the mind of the beholder. Whether something is good or bad depends on how you interpret it.

  Psychological research indicates that interpretation plays an important role in how we go about our days. Take, for instance, the classic study by Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril titled "They Saw a Game," based on a football game between Dartmouth and Princeton in 1951. It was an exceptionally rough game, and the All-American Princeton quarterback was taken out in the second quarter with a broken nose and concussion. In the next quarter, Dartmouth's quarterback
was taken out after his leg was broken. In the end, Princeton won. One week after the game, the researchers showed participants a film of the match. Hastorf and Cantril asked the participants to judge who started the rough play. Presumably, we live in a physical world where there are objective facts and the number of infractions ought to be easy to tabulate. It should be a simple matter, for instance, to see if a player is off sides, makes a fair catch, unfairly pushes another player, or continues playing after the whistle is blown. But, truth be told, we know things are not always so simple.

  Hastorf and Cantril found that the participants who attended Dartmouth viewed the game through a pro-Dartmouth lens, and those who attended Princeton favored their own school. The Princeton students, for instance, "saw" the Dartmouth team make twice as many illegal plays as the Dartmouth students did. How is it that the Dartmouth students could overlook half the penalties? Or is it that Princeton students were overly strict with their criteria for illegal play? When asked which team was at fault for instigating the rough play, the researchers found very discrepant answers. While only 36 percent of the Dartmouth students thought their own side was to blame, a whopping 86 percent of the Princeton students faulted Dartmouth. This classic study highlights a universal truth we have all experienced: people interpret the same objective events around them based on their own personal values, biases, selective attention, and sense of identity.

  Positive thinking works in much the same way. How we interpret the world around us plays a large and important role in how happy we are. For folks who have a tendency to interpret events in the world as harsh and threatening, it is likely that their mood will be more negative and distrusting. For people who see the world as full of promise and opportunity, these rose-colored glasses will likely translate to more happiness. We recently came across a wonderful letter to the editor that illustrates the benefits of a positive mindset. Often, air travel is seen as a hassle, with weather and mechanical delays, long lines at security, expensive fares, and overwhelmed clerks. The writer of this letter, which we have paraphrased below, has a refreshingly different take:

  Everyone complains about the airlines, but I love air travel. I am 82 years old, and recently had the adventure of my year on an airplane. The flight hit so much air turbulence and stormy weather that we had to be diverted to another airport several hundred miles to the south. The airline could not get us to our destination that night, so they put us up at a local hotel and gave us a meal coupon. I got to see another city for free, got a free room in a nice hotel, and a couple of free meals. Along the way, I met tons of nice people. Life is just great with adventures like these. The following day I arrived home safely, with fond memories. Shoot, some people think flying is a hassle, but it is really a great adventure!

  This gentleman takes positive interpretation to an unbelievable extreme, but we are willing to bet that he is happy. What a wonderful way to live life!

  Although interpretation colors how we see the world, it is not enough to say that interpreting events positively leads to happiness. If it were that easy, everyone would already be doing it and we would all be a bit happier. It makes sense to dig a little deeper and examine how, exactly, it is possible to think more positively. One way of doing this is by studying the thinking habits of chronically happy and unhappy people. Through a course of several clever studies, Sonja Lyubomirsky identified ways in which dispositionally happy people think in ways that bolster their moods: social comparison and retrospective judgment.

  Most people are familiar with the psychological phenomenon of social comparison, which is the idea that you compare yourself to others when evaluating yourself. If your neighbor drives a BMW, for example, then you might be less satisfied with your ten-year-old Toyota than you would be if he drove a rusty 1972 Ford. Many laypersons point to social comparison as a major source of unhappiness. Poor people must be unhappy, for instance, if they live in a wealthy nation where they can compare themselves to millionaires.

  The research on social comparison shows that it is not always straightforward. For example, some people are actually inspired by seeing those who are faring better in life. In one set of studies looking at women in a rehabilitation program for patients with heart problems, researchers found that some women were uplifted by other women who had successfully completed the program, while other patients were crestfallen by their peers' recovery of health. Why might some people become inspired while others are dejected by exactly the same thing? What leads a person to think one way or another?

  Lyubomirsky and her colleagues analyzed how chronically happy people use social comparisons. In one study, Lyubomirsky had people form teams of four to solve puzzles in a relay competition. After playing a little while, the researchers gave the participants artificial feedback, either telling them that another team had won, or giving them a low ranking within their team. People who, earlier in the study, had scored in the lowest 25 percent on measures of happiness - that is, those folks who were naturally less happy to begin with - tended to take the social comparison feedback hard, and felt depressed or dejected.

  The happiest folks were unaffected by the social comparison feedback, enjoying the game and feeling pretty good about themselves regardless of the performance of others. In another study, participants solved anagrams while racing against a research confederate, posing as another subject in the experiment, who solved the word puzzles more quickly than the real participant. Unhappy people became upset more easily by their own inferior performance, while happy folks virtually ignored how other people performed. In short, Lyubomirsky's research suggests that more upbeat people tend to engage less in social comparisons, and that they are less sensitive to information about other people's performance.

  In a second set of studies, Lyubomirsky was interested in how people arrive at positive or negative judgments. Common sense tells us that judgments, such as whether or not we like a particular film, are a matter of personal preference. The data suggest that these types of evaluations are the result, at least in part, of positive thinking strategies. In one experiment, participants were asked to rate how appetizing various desserts were. How good does a piece of German chocolate cake look? How about a glazed donut? What about pie? After completing their ratings, the participants were assigned one dessert, but not their favorite, and told they could have it. They were then asked to rate that particular dessert again. Unhappy people, those who fell in the lower quartile on mood measures, tended to be disgruntled with the dessert assigned to them. Happy folks, on the other hand, actually increased their liking for the dessert. That is, they reinterpreted how desirable the confection seemed to be after finding they were stuck with it.

  Lyubomirsky and her colleagues also examined how students reacted to being accepted or rejected by colleges to which they had applied. The happiest students tended to like the college that accepted them even better than they had before receiving the letter of acceptance. After all, if the school employed people with the good sense to accept them, it must be good! Not only did the happiest people boost their liking of the accepting institution, but they also liked rejecting schools less than they had before the admission decision was made. This thinking strategy helped protect folks from feeling overly bad about themselves. Unhappy individuals, by contrast, liked the rejecting schools every bit as much as they ever did and consequently felt dejected. In both studies, Lyubomirsky showed that happy people naturally reinterpret events so that they preserve their self-esteem.

  For years, psychologists have analyzed the way their clients fall into patterns of thinking that leave them feeling distressed. Some people, for instance, have a tendency to blow small problems or criticisms out of proportion, while others doubt themselves because of low selfesteem. The psychologists Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck cataloged the kinds of irrational thinking that cast people into the heart of unhappiness. But there are positive thinking styles as well. Perhaps the best known of all positive cognitive styles is optimism. Optimists are those who retain
a sense of hope for the future and interpret life events in a positive way. Optimism is not simply a matter of inborn temperament, but is also a skill that can be learned by recognizing unhelpful thinking strategies and replacing them with more positive ones. Here is a short list of common thinking pitfalls that leave people feeling bad:

  • Awfulizing, in which people exaggerate how negative an event or a person is. For instance, a person might think to herself, "He is totally inconsiderate because he rarely does the dishes."

  • Distress intolerance, in which people underestimate their ability to recover from a painful event. People tell themselves, for example, that they wouldn't be able to stand going through a divorce. Although breakups are emotionally difficult, some folks believe that they could never recover from a divorce.

  • Learned helplessness, in which folks simply give up because they feel they have no power to change negative circumstances. "Why bother?" is the statement typically associated with this way of thinking.

  • Perfectionism, in which people strive to be faultless rather than just successful. Perfectionists often pay more attention to the small details that went wrong than the big picture of everything that went right.

  • Negative self-fulfilling expectancies, in which one draws negative responses from others by communicating that one expects a negative reaction.