Pursuit and Assessment of Happiness Can Be Self-Defeating

One of the great ironies to come out of happiness research is the finding that attempting to be happy, and thinking about whether one is happy, actually undermines one's success in being happy.

Some notes on a chapter by Jonathon Schooler (a psychologist at UC-Santa Barbara), Dan Ariely (behavioral economist from Duke), and George Loewenstein (a decision scientist at Carnegie Mellon):

There are three main problems that interfere with people's ability to optimize their own levels of utility (happiness):

1. "People may have limited explicit access to the utility they get from experience." In other words, people have trouble figuring out how happy something they are doing or have done makes them. (This is separate from the issue of predicting how happy something will make them, at which people also suck, as we will see.)

There is a distinction between the happiness that you experience and how you will evaluate that experience later. Research on flow states has shown that people who are busy on engaging, challenging tasks may be very happy while not noticing it at the time.

Determining whether something makes you happy is an inferential process. People will look to "self-observation, situational context, and theories about how they 'should' be feeling...in order to translate visceral states into an explicit hedonic appraisal." Two prominent social psychological theories are relevant here: Bem's Self Perception Theory says that people make inferences about their own attitudes the same way they infer those of others. Festinger's Cognitive Dissonance Theory posits that people alter their attitudes to reduce the inner conflict that comes from having discrepancies between their attitudes and behavior. "Both processes can come into play depending on circumstances": large discrepancies are likely influenced by cognitive dissonance while smaller discrepancies may be more tied to self perception theory.

People are also sensitive to "anchoring effects" in determining how much something is worth to them: the value that they place on something is affected by the initial reference value (e.g. would you pay $X? Would you pay $Y?). For example, in an experiment, they had students who were offered to listen to part of a recording of The Leaves of Grass; initially, some students were asked "Would you pay $10?" to listen to the recording, while others were asked "Would you do it if you were paid $10?" Later, they were asked how much they would pay/be paid to listen to an even longer recording, and both groups increased the amount. So those who were initially asked a question that implied that listening should have a value to them that they would be willing to pay were willing to pay more to listen to more, while those who were set up with the idea that they should be paid to listen wanted even more money to listen to a longer recording. This is despite the fact that both groups were reacting to the same offer (and presumably did not differ systematically in how much they like Walt Whitman poetry).

2. "Efforts to assess one's utility level can adversely affect the utility" (sort of like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle). This is similar to findings in decision-making research, in which people who are asked to verbally reflect upon their decision processes increase the weight they attach to things that could be verbalized relative to their gut feelings. For example, in a jam-tasting experiment, participants who were asked to verbalize their evaluations achieved a correlation with Consumer Reports experts of a lowly 0.16, while those who just tasted them and rated them achieved a correlation of 0.56 with expert opinion.

"Hedonic introspection may increase the focus on the self, so attention devoted to the experience is reduced, causing the individual to overlook subtle aspects of the experience or think about what could or should have been rather than what was," leading to disappointment. They note that chronically unhappy people show higher levels of self-consciousness, self-focused attention, and ruminative thinking (though they are also more realistic about their situations). However, it's not clear to me that research has been done to demonstrate whether self-focused attention leads to unhappiness or unhappiness leads to self-focused attention or what.

3. Despite being enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as an inalienable right (though there is a very interesting backstory on how the right to property became the right to the pursuit of happiness that is not within the purview of this post), the conscious pursuit of happiness - "treating activities as a means toward something else, rather than as ends in themselves" - can backfire. Activities undertaken for "extrinsic rewards lose their intrinsic appeal" and pursuing happiness can lead to increased introspection, which we've already seen can undermine one's happiness.

People have faulty theories about what will make them happy. They "tend to underestimate the tendency to adapt hedonically to positive and negative continuing experiences...and over-select goals that produce lasting material changes, such as an increase in income or status." In an experiment, participants played the Dictator Game - the person was given an amount of money and told to decide how much to keep for himself and how much to give to the other player. Those who gave a higher amount away to the other player reported overall higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction. But again, it's not clear to me how the causality there works; I could just as easily see a happy person being willing to give away more money than an unhappy person. (Note: the fact that people do not just keep the entire amount for themselves poses difficulties for the economic rational-man hypothesis.)

The authors did try to get a more clear sense of the causality in a pair of experiments; they had people monitor their experience (or not) while listening to music or celebrating New Year's Eve. (They also had some manipulation of the "pursuit" variable that I did not take note of, but that I recall had to do with making a special effort to enjoy their New Year's Eve celebrations.) They found that those who pursued happiness and monitored the experience reported lower levels of happiness with the experience; they theorize that this is because high expectations lead to disappointment.

Implications for Economics:
- Economic models that emphasize the deliberate pursuit of self-interest may not be the optimal approach once the costs of the "effortful focus of utility maximization is entered into the equation." Decreasing the emphasis on self-interest may increase net utilities even if the overall material output is reduced. (Or, my take: we could be happier with less stuff if we weren't losing utility in pursuing all that stuff that we think will make us happy, but probably won't. Or, maybe someone else's take: maybe those Europeans with less money and less of a frenzy to obtain it aren't so wrong after all.)

Implications for Psychology:
- These studies "add to the growing body of evidence that thinking and reflection are not always productive activities."
- "Unhappiness may be more likely to induce an explicit meta-awareness of one's hedonic state." I would say that this is true to my own experience; I generally can tell these days when things have been going well because I find that I haven't been thinking about it much at all.

They recommend that the optimal approach is to periodically engage in monitoring of your hedonic state (happiness level) and pursuit of happiness.

Reference: The psychology of economic decisions / edited by Isabelle Brocas and Juan D. Carrillo. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.