Happiness by Design Read online

  Now consider perhaps the most famous critique of happiness, developed by Robert Nozick, a philosopher who came to prominence in the 1970s. He asks you to imagine being connected up to what he calls an “experience machine.” Every neurotransmitter in your brain would be connected to a system that could simulate the happiest life for you. You could have a fabulous career, fantastic kids, and a great partner, all without any pain or suffering. In a straight choice, which life would you choose: your “real life” with all of its associated pain and suffering or an “artificial life” with greater happiness created by the experience machine? Nozick suggests that most of us would choose the former.11 As with the cheating partner, the authenticity of real life seems to be of value to us beyond simply feeling good.

  But I think most philosophers, with a few notable exceptions like Roger Crisp, have been too quick to jump to this conclusion. In both examples above, you know what the alternative scenario is. You cannot think about not knowing about an affair without first thinking about knowing about it. You can’t unknow what you know. So the cat is already out of the bag when you do the thought experiment. I would probably also be persuaded to choose reality over being a brain in a vat if I was aware of being a brain in a vat. But if the thought experiment were taken literally, your life right now could be one big experience machine—and you wouldn’t know. And since you would never know, it makes most sense to live the life with the greatest happiness in it.

  Many of the conclusions reached by philosophers are based on thought experiments that I don’t think stand up to scrutiny. By making them the focus of attention, they ensure that concerns for the truth, etc., are bound to be considered important. And they do so in a contrived way—how can you truly imagine not knowing your wife is cheating when you are told she is, or being a brain in a vat when you know you could otherwise be a “real” person?

  In my own work, I have asked survey participants whether or not they would take a pill to improve their happiness. Only one-quarter of participants said they would be willing to do so; the remaining three-quarters objected in various ways to “unnatural” enhancements of happiness and to a “quick fix.”12 These are interesting responses, especially given the widespread use, and acceptability, of drugs to treat depression. It is possible that improving happiness is seen as less acceptable than treating misery. So in the survey that established that pleasure and purpose matter to people, Rob Metcalfe and I also asked people whether they agreed that government policy should seek to (a) improve happiness and (b) reduce misery. There was more support for the second statement. Such findings have important implications for how happiness (and depression and misery) are discussed in the popular press and in policy circles.13 Policy makers wishing to promote the use of happiness measures might instead refer to them as measures of misery. While empirical studies like this can fuel interesting discussions, we are still left having to make judgments about what ultimately matters in life.

  Desires in themselves

  Many economists and philosophers will maintain that getting more of what you want is what really counts in life. This is why economists spend so much time talking about income: all else equal, more money means that you can buy more of what you want. It is not the income in itself that makes you better off but, rather, the increase in choice that means you can satisfy more of your desires.14 You could choose to buy more stuff or you could decide to work a little less, or maybe both.

  But why would you want more possessions or more leisure time unless you imagined (correctly or otherwise) that you would be happier as a result? If something won’t ever show up at all in your happiness or in the happiness of those you care about (which can sometimes include strangers), I cannot see where its value can reside.

  Let me give an example to illustrate (and a chance to get something off my chest, if I’m being totally honest). I like to read, and, as I hope you can tell, I read loads of academic papers and nonfiction books. But over the years, many people have told me that I should read novels. I have never read a novel in my life (unless you count Of Mice and Men at school—we were also supposed to read The Mayor of Casterbridge but have you seen how long that is?). Let’s suppose that I listen to these people and that I develop a taste for literature and that I then devote time to reading other stories. I have developed a new preference, and it is being satisfied. So that would be enough for many economists and philosophers to say that I was better off, especially as reading novels is likely to be seen by them as a preference worth having.

  But what if I was not made any happier from reading novels? Developing a new preference that is now satisfied isn’t important in itself. It only makes me better off if it makes me or those I care about happier than we were before I started reading. I make no grand claims for the significance of anything—a job, a spouse, a house, The Mayor of Casterbridge—beyond its effect on happiness. Everything except happiness requires some justification or other: it is just obvious that happiness matters.15

  Now, other considerations, such as achievement or authenticity, are clearly important. But they are only important because of their instrumental value; that is, they matter only insofar as they produce more happiness. They may generally promote more happiness but we should not be slaves to them. It would be masochistic and sadistic of me to tell the truth about something if I knew for sure that I would create only misery for myself and others. We’ve all heard of pathological liars. Telling the truth in such circumstances would be an example of being pathologically honest. We need to judge each behavior on its specific consequences for happiness and not on the basis of whether or not it accords to a generally good rule.

  Once we accept that the experience of happiness (for yourself and others) is the final arbiter of the rightness of what you do, we can move away from making moral judgments based on ill-conceived ideas about what is right and wrong. We can instead use factual assessments of the consequences for pleasure and purpose to judge the goodness of what we and others do (including policy makers) and to guide our views about how society ought to be organized.16

  So experiences of pleasure and purpose are all that matter in the end. Hedonism is the school of thought that holds that pleasure is the only thing that matters in the end. By adding sentiments of purpose to pleasure, I define my position as sentimental hedonism. I am a sentimental hedonist and I think that, deep down, we all are.

  If you remain convinced that concerns beyond happiness are not mistaken desires, you should still care greatly about happiness because it is the best way to bring about those other outcomes. There have been many studies to show, using causal methods, that those who experience better emotions live longer, are in better health, recover from viruses more quickly, take less time off work, are more successful in their careers, are generally more productive, and have happier marriages.17 In a study of siblings, kids who have a sunnier disposition are more likely to get a degree, get hired, and get promoted.18 Good emotions also foster original thinking and improve our ability to resolve conflicts.19 Furthermore, those of us who are seen to be in a good mood are thought of as more attractive, which means getting better grades at school and more money at work.20

  So much for pleasure. What about the effects of purpose? Although there are fewer studies, the effects seem to be just as important. Engaging in meaningful and purposeful activities promotes better health, social integration, and daily functioning.21 Some of the activities linked to successful aging that people consider purposeful are golfing and exercise.22 Moreover, a lack of purpose at work, unsurprisingly, has been shown to result in lower productivity and increased absenteeism.23 Students who feel bored during their free time are more likely to drop out before graduation from high school.24 And at home, couples who report boredom during their marriage now are less likely to be satisfied with it nine years later on.25 Happiness really does matter, however you look at it.

  Mistaken projections

  We frequently make mistakes a
bout how much something will make us happy, even when we are convinced that happiness is all there is. We make mistakes about our future happiness when we pay undue attention to (a) the effects of a change; (b) the differences between two options; (c) current feelings; or (d) unrepresentative snapshots of past experiences.

  Focusing effects

  How much happier would you be if you won a load of money? A lot happier, right? Well, only if you spent a great deal of time thinking about how much happier you are with all that cash. In a different respect, if you were to ask Midwesterners and Californians who they think is happiest, they will both say Californians. How could they not be, given how much nicer the weather is, right? Well, the weather actually only really affects happiness when we think about it—and we don’t think about it that much. So, in fact, Midwesterners are just as happy as Californians, but both groups pay too much attention to the impact of the weather when thinking about who is happiest.26

  When you think about the impact of anything, good or bad, you are basically asking yourself how much it matters when you are paying attention to it, and so you think it matters a lot—and typically a lot more than it will actually matter when you experience it in your life, where your attention will flit around rather than remaining focused on it. This is the focusing effect in action. The fortune cookie maxim here is, “Nothing is quite as important as you think it is while you’re thinking about it.”27

  Here are a couple of questions for you (if you have a car, that is; apologies if not). First, how much pleasure do you get from driving your car, on a scale from 0 to 10? Second, how much did you enjoy your last drive, on the same scale? When PhD and MBA students from the Ross School of Business were asked similar questions, along with questions about the car so that researchers could estimate its market value, there was a high correlation between answers to the first question and market value. So, this question taken at face value would tell us that a more expensive car brings more pleasure. But there was no correlation at all between answers to the second question and market value. So a more expensive car had no effect on the enjoyment of the last drive but it did predict higher levels of reported pleasure from driving it.28

  The difference is explained by attention. When you are asked how much pleasure you get from driving your car, you start thinking about how much pleasure you get from driving your car. You think about the car itself—and the nicer the car, the more pleasure you get from thinking about driving it. But the actual experience of driving is very different, and when doing so you rarely think about the car itself—rather, you are focusing on the idiot in front of you, or arguing with your husband or wife, and thinking about all those other things that have nothing to do with the car that you drive.

  Together with Alan Williams, who was an inspirational professor of health economics at the University of York, I spent a good part of my early academic life asking people to think, hypothetically, about the impact that different states of health would have on their lives. As part of a study we conducted in the early to mid 1990s, three thousand members of the UK general public were asked for their judgments about the relative severity of different imagined health states so that policy makers could make better decisions about which treatments were doing the most good. Participants were asked to imagine being in a poor state of health, such as having problems with walking about, and then to think about how many years of life they would be willing to give up to have those problems removed. This is called the time trade-off method.29 The more years of life people are willing to sacrifice, the more severe the state is seen to be. If I were to give up half of my remaining life to avoid a health problem, then that problem would have to be pretty serious. By asking questions about a whole range of possible health states, it is possible to see which ones people care most about treating.

  My most cited academic paper came out of this research and has had a considerable impact on how the UK National Health Service values the benefit from new drugs and therapies.30 Basically, it puts the time trade-off values from the general public alongside the costs of different treatments and interventions to assess which ones represent the best value for money.31 The UK Home Office uses a similar approach, based on my work, to value the impact of being a victim of crime.32

  While this work has benefited my career, I wish that it had not had such a policy impact, because I can now see the serious forecasting errors made by people asked to imagine future conditions. Working with Daniel Kahneman at Princeton helped me to crystallize these concerns.33 Fundamentally, we are not especially good at knowing how different conditions will affect us when they drift in and out of our attention in the day-to-day experiences of life. People in the United States say they are willing to give up about 15 percent of their life expectancy to avoid problems with walking and about the same to avoid moderate anxiety or depression.34 Yet my own recent research shows that the latter has about ten times as much of an impact on our happiness as the former.35

  Things don’t get much better if we ask only those with experience of the specific health problems. People with problems walking who are asked to imagine having their walking restrictions alleviated will inevitably imagine actively paying lots of attention to walking freely, which they will eventually take for granted.36

  So, in appraising the impact of health and other policy interventions, I think it would be much better to look at the impact of conditions on the happiness of those affected, properly accounting for any adaptation or sensitization processes. And the general public lends some support to the idea that happiness matters: George Kavetsos, Aki Tsuchiya, and I have recently added life satisfaction levels to the description of the health states and found that scenarios including high levels of satisfaction increase the likelihood of preferring to live for longer in poor health.37

  Adam Smith, the founding father of economics, recognized the pervasiveness of focusing effects: “The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another.”38 You think that something will greatly affect your happiness because you are focusing attention on it.

  Rob Metcalfe and I have even shown that what you are asked in a previous survey can affect what you attend to in a current one.39 We took advantage of the fact that the 2008 Champions League Final was between two English soccer clubs, Manchester United and Chelsea. Both sets of supporters predicted that they would be much more affected by the outcome of the event than they in fact were, which had been shown before for other events. But we also found that Chelsea fans (whose team lost the final) were less happy after the event when they had been asked to predict their happiness before the event than those Chelsea fans surveyed only after the event. So, after the event, those who were also asked about their happiness before the final were being reminded of the defeat that had happened between the surveys, whereas the happiness responses of those asked only after the event were not contaminated in this way—and showed that losing the final (even on penalties to English rivals) did not affect them that much at all after a couple of days.

  It is very hard to predict how much something will matter when you are not paying attention to it. It is not surprising, then, that we are all prone to make mistakes about what will continue to grab our attention and what will not.

  Many choices; one experience

  Typically in your day-to-day life, you are not just making predictions about how one thing will affect you, but you are making a choice between two or more options. In so doing, you are prone to mistaking the relative impact of those choices. And again the problem lies in where your attention is directed—in this case, what is attention grabbing in the choice itself as compared to attention grabbing in the consequences of that choice. Distinction bias is the tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately.40 So whenever you are making a choice—about which ice cream to buy, say, or which jo
b to take—you tend to look at what is different about the options instead of paying attention to how you will actually experience your final decision.

  My friend’s kitchen sink is really quite a sight to be seen. She bought a beautiful chrome faucet after jointly evaluating dozens at a really expensive hardware store. She didn’t realize until after the installation that it was much larger in proportion to her sink than it really should have been. This enormous kitchen faucet has been an annoyance to her but a great source of amusement for her family and friends, as we all experience the consequences of her distinction bias when she bought that ridiculous tap.

  Consider deciding whether or not you should buy that house you just looked at. This choice involves a joint evaluation of your current house against the new one. The new one is bigger, so you go for it. But its bigness relative to your current house will soon not matter that much once you move in (unless your kids didn’t have their own bedrooms and now do). The size of any house is constant and not especially interesting from an attentional point of view. In your experience of the new house, you are much more likely to be affected by the noise outside at night; a stimulus that will continue to grab your attention on a regular basis. You’ll quickly adapt to the space for the boxes but not to the noise of the foxes.

  Feelings focused

  Buying a house is a nice example of a further element of mistaken projections; namely, our proclivity to allow how we feel now to affect how we imagine feeling in the future. I simply love that house, so how could I not love living there? Projection bias is what behavioral scientists call the scenario when we mistakenly use our current feelings to project how we will feel in the future.41