Happiness by Design Read online

  There have still been many specific instances of “flight,” though, such as avoiding radio and television interviews; any live broadcast used to be completely off-limits. More important, my stammer continued to affect how I felt, resulting in considerable anxiety while speaking and in advance of important occasions when I felt my fluency mattered. So about six years ago I decided to attend a stammering conference in Croatia. On the plane ride home, I met a couple of speech therapists from the Michael Palin Centre in London. They kindly agreed to see me, although the center focuses on dealing with stammers in children.

  This therapy was very different from my previous experience. The focus was now on the attention I paid to stammering; hardly any of it was about my actual speech. I learned to pay much more attention to my current experiences, which mitigated the fear of how bad my speech might be and the worry about how bad it had just been. I also began paying attention to the internal feedback I received from speaking events, which was nearly always pretty good, so I could feed this information forward into my thoughts about future speaking events. Paying attention to how your behavior affects your feelings is critical to understanding what makes you happy and what does not.

  I also realized that the attention I paid to my speech, and to my lack of fluency, was completely at odds with the attention paid to it by others. In fact, as I later learned when I “came out” as a stammerer, only a few people were actually aware of it. Most thought I simply spoke in an idiosyncratic way. Some of my current students who commented on earlier drafts of this book were surprised to know that someone whom they have seen speak in many different public fora had such concerns about his speech. Another important lesson was just how little it mattered even to those who knew me, how little they were judging me. My beliefs about myself were also at the heart of dealing with my stammer: it ceased to define who I was.

  Once I stopped paying so much attention to my speech, it stopped bothering me as much. So changing behavior and enhancing happiness is as much about withdrawing attention from the negative as it is about attending to the positive. These days, my happiness, however you measure it, is hardly affected by my stammer. All in all, a reallocation of attention explains why I don’t stammer anywhere near so much now, and why I don’t really care when I do. Stammering less has helped, of course, but paying less attention to it matters much more. I am happier as a result.

  What applies to my stammer applies to all the possible causes of your happiness and to all that you might do to be happier. Your happiness is determined by how you allocate your attention. What you attend to drives your behavior and it determines your happiness. Attention is the glue that holds your life together.

  The professional catalyst for a focus on the allocation of attention comes from my training as an economist, which leads me to begin tackling any problem as an allocation issue. We see scarcity everywhere, and so the allocation of resources is critical to bringing about desirable outcomes. Your attentional resources are sometimes directed at the activities you are engaged in, and at other times you will be thinking about all sorts of things, like what to have for dinner, or you might simply be daydreaming. Attention devoted to one stimulus is, by definition, attention that is not devoted to another. When you are texting one friend, you are not paying attention to the other friend sitting next to you. It is no coincidence that we use the term “pay attention” in everyday language.

  The scarcity of attentional resources means that you must consider how you can make and facilitate better decisions about what to pay attention to and in what ways. If you are not as happy as you could be, then you must be misallocating your attention. You will be the happiest you can be when you allocate your attention as best as you can.

  The idea that you are what you attend to has been around for more than a century.3 My interest in attention was sparked by working with Daniel Kahneman in Princeton. My own contribution here is to show how attention acts as a production process that converts stimuli into happiness.

  Previous attempts to explain the causes of happiness have all mistakenly sought to relate inputs, such as income, directly to the final output of happiness. But my approach recasts the inputs as stimuli vying for your attention, with their effects on your happiness determined by how much they are attended to. So the effect of income on your happiness is determined not only by how much money you have but also by how much attention you pay it. The same inputs—money, marriage, sex, stammering, or whatever—can affect your happiness a lot or a little depending on how much attention you pay to them.

  Some inputs, such as noise, naturally draw more attention to themselves than others, but you have some control over the impact they have on how you feel. I hope you agree with me when I say that this is pretty liberating.

  A more humbling consideration is that much of what we attend to, and any resulting behavior, will be driven by unconscious and automatic processes. Indeed, the last couple of decades of research in behavioral science have taught us a simple yet very important lesson: much of what we do simply comes about, rather than being thought about. Whether or not you buy that big bar of chocolate depends largely on whether it is on display at the till and much less on any real, conscious decision to devour a giant candy bar. Life is full of examples like this. I’m not sure I know at what stage I normally put my seat belt on in the car. Do you? And do you go straight to the fridge when you get home from school or work, without really thinking about it?

  We are all creatures of our environment. Consider data from over three million teenagers in California, which show that having a fast-food restaurant one-tenth of a mile from school increases the obesity rate among the children at that school by more than 5 percent. Similarly, for pregnant women, a fast-food restaurant within a half mile of their house leads to a 1.6 percent increase in the chance of gaining over forty-four pounds during their pregnancy.4 Gaining weight has a lot to do with the opportunity to do so.

  Let’s go from eating to cheating. Much as we might like to think otherwise, when given the chance to, most of us will cheat at least a little bit, but not enough to interfere with a positive self-image of ourselves. Allow a group of students taking a general knowledge test to mark themselves and report their own scores, and they will report getting about four more questions right (out of fifty) than those who have the teacher check their paper. So not that many more right, then: that really would be cheating. Our propensity to cheat, just like our propensity to eat, has less to do with the type of person we are and more to do with the opportunity to do so.5

  As you might more easily expect, my stammer is worse in some situations than in others. My most serious bouts of disfluency have all occurred in stressful situations and, as I think any stammerer will tell you, it is simply impossible to stammer, authentically, when we are on our own. My speech and how it affects me are influenced by who I am and also by my environment. Much of when and how my stammer manifests itself, though, and how I then respond to times of disfluency, feels completely random to me. If it has any coherence beneath the surface, I am unaware of it. So any attempts to understand human behavior and happiness must properly account for the effects of external context as well as internal cognition—for “contextology” as well as psychology.

  This is a book in two integrated parts. Part 1 will “discover” happiness in a bit more detail. Elaborating on what I have just alluded to, it will show how happiness is caused by what we pay attention to. But before getting into what causes happiness, we must first define it. I’ll show that the key to happiness is finding pleasure and purpose in everyday life. Building on the foundations of part 1, and informed by the latest evidence from behavioral science, part 2 provides you with some suggestions about how to “deliver” happiness for yourself and those you care about. The key here is to organize your life in ways so that you can go with the grain of your human nature and be happier without having to think too hard about it. This is happiness by design.

&nbs
p; PART 1

  Developing Happiness

  Many books on happiness make prescriptions about what to do in order to be happier, without defining what happiness is in the first place. But the pursuit of happiness requires a definition of just what is being pursued, and so chapter 1 will define happiness for us as experiences of pleasure and purpose over time.

  Using this definition, chapter 2 will present some new research, in which people report how happy they are as they go about their daily activities, and which supports the idea that some activities we get pleasure from, like watching TV, are different from those that bring us purpose, such as work. Chapter 3 sets out the best, and perhaps the only, way to really understand what causes happiness. Inputs like income and stammering don’t directly cause the outcome of happiness—but the attention paid to them does. I’ll introduce the notion of a production process of happiness, my blend of economics and psychology, which I hope will change the way we think about happiness and how to produce more of it. Chapter 4 considers three major attentional obstacles that stand in the way of us making decisions that are consistent with being happier.

  1

  What is happiness?

  Your life goes well when you are happy. But what exactly is happiness? I’m not asking what happiness is affected by, but what it actually is. The different ways in which we define happiness affect what we can do to improve it. So a clear definition should be, but rarely is, a fundamental concern for any book on happiness. Having worked at the interface of economics, psychology, philosophy, and policy for two decades, I think I am well placed to make a strong case for the following definition: happiness is experiences of pleasure and purpose over time. This definition is novel, it’s coherent, and it resonates with people in my research and in my life; and I hope it will with you, too. It is also measurable, which is vital if we are to advance our understanding of happiness. Now let’s take a step back.

  Happiness as evaluation

  Happiness has not typically been measured in this experience-based way; rather, it has been assessed using evaluations of how well life is going overall. A personal anecdote illustrates the difference nicely. A few weeks ago, I went out for dinner with one of my best friends, whom I have known for a long time. She works for a prestigious media company and basically spent the whole evening describing how miserable she was at work; she variously moaned about her boss, her colleagues, and her commute. At the end of dinner, and without a hint of irony, she said, “Of course, I love working at MediaLand.”

  There is actually no real contradiction here: she is experiencing her work in one way and evaluating it in another way.1 The distinction between experience and evaluation is rather like the difference between being filmed and having your photograph taken. My friend was describing the daily “film” of her job as miserable and the overall “snapshot” as quite satisfying in comparison.

  We shall see that this is not only a common thing to do but it’s also a common mistake to make about our happiness. Many of the assumptions we make about happiness and about ourselves have a lot to do with the fact that we generally pay more attention to what we think should make us happy rather than focusing on what actually does. My friend is not happy at work but her experiences have less influence on her behavior than do her evaluations. She loves the idea of working at MediaLand and this is what she acts upon. As a result, she is less happy, day to day, than she could be.

  Satisfaction with particular aspects of life, such as work, health, and relationships, will often predict what we do—just as my friend’s relatively positive evaluation of working at MediaLand means that she could stay put—but measures of satisfaction are still not very well placed to capture how we feel.2 My friend is pretty miserable at work, and we should be taking that into account when we measure her happiness.

  Most happiness surveys ask rather vague and abstract questions like “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life?” as well as about satisfaction with particular aspects of life. Of course, one question can never really get at all the complex aspects of happiness, but single questions can help us to approximate what makes most people happy or unhappy. The real problem with this question, however, is that overall life satisfaction is rarely considered in our daily lives; perhaps it is only ever really triggered in studies that measure it.3 The word “satisfaction” is also problematic since it is open to many different interpretations, including “having just about enough,” which does not really measure happiness at all. As such, the results tell us much more about what pops into your head when you answer these questions than they do about your experiences of happiness on a day-to-day basis. And it literally must be what “pops” in, because the time taken to answer what to me feels like a cognitively demanding question is around five seconds.4

  This helps to explain why responses to life satisfaction questions seem to be affected by apparently irrelevant factors, such as whether or not you are asked about your political views before being asked a life satisfaction question, where the effect is nearly as large as becoming unemployed.5 The order of the questions you’re asked matters a lot, too. Your satisfaction with life is much more highly correlated with your marital satisfaction if the marriage question comes before the life satisfaction question instead of after it: being reminded about your relationship first makes it more important in determining your life satisfaction.6

  You “pose” in a particular way when you have your photograph taken. Think of all the times you have posed for the camera in ways that do not reflect your current feelings. A camcorder is much better at showing how happy you are over time. So we need to move away from global snapshots of overall life satisfaction and instead focus more directly on our day-to-day feelings.

  Happiness as feelings

  Your life therefore goes well when you feel happy. You experience a rich array of feelings in any one day, let alone over a lifetime. Psychologists often categorize feelings according to a two-by-two model—“positive and negative” as one category and “aroused and nonaroused” as the other.7 Positive and “negative” speak for themselves; though I put negative in quotation marks because, as I shall discuss shortly, what we consider a negative feeling can sometimes be entirely appropriate with good consequences. You can think of aroused and nonaroused as feelings that are “awakened” or “sleepy,” respectively. So joy is positive and aroused; contentment is positive and nonaroused; anxiety is negative and aroused; and sadness is negative and nonaroused—as shown below.

  Emotions

  Nonaroused

  Aroused

  Positive

  Content, calm

  Joyful, excited

  “Negative”

  Sad, depressed

  Anxious, angry

  We would expect the distinction between positive and negative to affect happiness, and the distinction between aroused and nonaroused matters, too. In contrast to life satisfaction data, data from the Gallup World Poll (a survey of the happiness of adults in 132 countries around the world) show that richer people in any country do not always feel happier than poorer ones. And beyond about $75,000 a year in the United States, more money does not buy any more happiness at all for the average US citizen earning above this amount.8 Being richer might make you think you are happier but it does not necessarily make you feel any happier.

  The idea that your feelings are what matter to your life originated with the work of Jeremy Bentham, an eighteenth-century philosopher and radical who believed in the decriminalization of homosexuality and equal rights for women. Bentham was a child prodigy and attended the University of Oxford at the age of twelve to study law. He soon became disillusioned with the legal system and instead devoted his life to campaigning for
reform. He is well known to visitors of University College London, where he sits embalmed at the entrance to the university. As requested in his will, Bentham’s body was dissected as part of a public anatomy lecture and the skeleton and head were preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet with the skeleton dressed in Bentham’s clothes. His head is actually a wax head, because the mummification process left him looking a little odd. It does have his real hair, though.9

  Bentham argued that pleasure is the only thing that is good for you, and pain the only bad. Some scholars have moved away from using pleasure and pain because of the association with bodily pleasures and pains, preferring instead terms such as enjoyment and suffering.10 According to my broader interpretation, pleasure and pain can also refer to the many other adjectives that describe positive and negative feelings: joy, excitement, and fun on the one hand and anger, anxiety, stress, and worry on the other. So when I use the words “pleasure” and “pain” in this book, I do so as umbrella terms or shorthand for a whole raft of feelings, recognizing also that we can simultaneously feel and display a complex mix of emotions.11

  What you feel is determined by what happens to you but also by the kind of person you are. I am nearly always in an aroused emotional state, most of the time feeling happy but sometimes feeling anxious. I rarely feel content or sad. I quite like it this way and my wife, Les, and my friends tell me they do, too (though I guess they would have left me by now if not). You might be similar to me, or you might be different; calmer, perhaps.