Everybody talks about happiness these days .
I had somebody count the number of books with " happiness " in the title published in the last five years and they gave up after about 40 , and there were many more .
There is a huge wave of interest in happiness , among researchers .
There is a lot of happiness coaching .
Everybody would like to make people happier .
But in spite of all this flood of work , there are several cognitive traps that sort of make it almost impossible to think straight about happiness .
And my talk today will be mostly about these cognitive traps .
This applies to laypeople thinking about their own happiness , and it applies to scholars thinking about happiness , because it turns out we 're just as messed up as anybody else is .
The first of these traps is a reluctance to admit complexity .
It turns out that the word happiness is just not a useful word anymore because we apply it to too many different things .
I think there is one particular meaning to which we might restrict it but , by and large , this is something that we 'll have to give up and we 'll have to adopt the more complicated view of what well-being is .
The second trap is a confusion between experience and memory : basically it 's between being happy in your life and being happy about your life or happy with your life .
And those are two very different concepts , and they 're both lumped in the notion of happiness .
And the third is the focusing illusion , and it 's the unfortunate fact that we can 't think about any circumstance that affects well-being without distorting its importance .
I mean , this is a real cognitive trap .
There 's just no way of getting it right .
Now , I 'd like to start with an example of somebody who had a question and answer session after one of my lectures reported a story .
He said he 'd been listening to the symphony and it was absolutely glorious music and at the very end of the recording , there was a dreadful screeching sound .
And then he added , really quite emotionally , it ruined the whole experience .
But it hadn 't .
What it had ruined were the memories of the experience .
He had had the experience .
He had had 20 minutes of glorious music .
They counted for nothing because he was left with a memory ; the memory was ruined , and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep .
What this is telling us , really , is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other people in terms of two selves .
There is an experiencing self , who lives in the present and knows the present , is capable of re-living the past , but basically it has only the present .
It 's the experiencing self that the doctor approaches -- you know , when the doctor asks , " Does it hurt now when I touch you here ? "
And then there is a remembering self , and the remembering self is the one that keeps score , and maintains the story of our life , and it 's the one that the doctor approaches in asking the question , " How have you been feeling lately ? " or " How was your trip to Albania ? " or something like that .
Those are two very different entities , the experiencing self and the remembering self and getting confused between them is part of the mess of the notion of happiness .
Now , the remembering self is a storyteller .
And that really starts with a basic response of our memories -- it starts immediately .
We don 't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories .
Our memory tells us stories , that is , what we get to keep from our experiences is a story .
And let me begin with one example .
This is an old study .
Those are actual patients undergoing a painful procedure .
I won 't go into detail .
It 's no longer painful these days , but it was painful when this study was run in the 1990s .
They were asked to report on their pain every 60 seconds .
And here are two patients .
Those are their recordings .
And you are asked , " Who of them suffered more ? "
And it 's a very easy question .
Clearly , Patient B suffered more .
His colonoscopy was longer , and every minute of pain that Patient A had Patient B had and more .
But now there is another question : " How much did these patients think they suffered ? "
And here is a surprise : And the surprise is that Patient A had a much worse memory of the colonoscopy than Patient B.
The stories of the colonoscopies were different and because a very critical part of the story is how it ends -- and neither of these stories is very inspiring or great -- but one of them is this distinct ... but one of them is distinctly worse than the other .
And the one that is worse was the one where pain was at its peak at the very end .
It 's a bad story .
How do we know that ?
Because we asked these people after their colonoscopy , and much later , too , " How bad was the whole thing , in total ? " and it was much worse for A than for B in memory .
Now this is a direct conflict between the experiencing self and the remembering self .
From the point of view of the experiencing self , clearly , B had a worse time .
Now , what you could do with patient A , and we actually ran clinical experiments , and it has been done , and it does work , you could actually extend the colonoscopy of Patient A by just keeping the tube in without jiggling it too much .
That will cause the patient to suffer , but just a little and much less than before .
And if you do that for a couple of minutes , you have made the experiencing self of Patient A worse off , and you have the remembering self of Patient A and lot better off , because now you have endowed Patient A with a better story about his experience .
What defines a story ?
And that is true of the stories that memory delivers for us , and it 's also true of the stories that we make up .
What defines a story are changes , significant moments and endings .
Endings are very , very important and , in this case , the ending dominated .
Now , the experiencing self lives its life continuously .
It has moments of experience , one after the other .
And you ask : What happens to these moments ?
And the answer is really straightforward .
They are lost forever .
I mean , most of the moments of our life -- and I calculated -- you know , the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long .
Which means that , you know , in a life there , are about 600 million of them .
In a month , there are about 600,000 .
Most of them don 't leave a trace .
Most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self .
And yet , some how you get the sense that they should count , that what happens during these moments of experience is our life .
It 's the finite resource that we 're spending while we 're on this earth .
And how to spend it , would seem to be relevant , but that is not the story that the remembering self keeps for us .
So we have the remembering self and the experiencing self , and they 're really quite distinct .
The biggest difference between them is in the handling of time .
From the point of view of the experiencing self , if you have a vacation , and the second week is just as good as the first , then the two week vacation is twice as good as the one week vacation .
That 's not the way it works at all for the remembering self .
For the remembering self , a two week vacation is barely better than the one week vacation because there are no new memories added .
You have not changed the story .
And in this way , time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes a remembering self from an experiencing self .
Time has very little impact on this story .
Now , the remembering self does more than remember and tell stories .
It is actually the one that makes decisions because , if you have a patient who has had , say , two colonoscopies with two different surgeons and is deciding which of them to choose , then the one that chooses is the one that has the memory that is less bad , and that 's the surgeon that will be chosen .
The experiencing self has no voice in this choice .
We actually don 't choose between experiences .
we choose between memories of experiences .
And , even when we think about the future , we don 't think of our future normally as experiences .
We think of our future as anticipated memories .
And basically you can look at this , you know , as a tyranny of the remembering self , and you can think of the remembering self sort of dragging the experiencing self through experiences that the experiencing self doesn 't need .
I have that sense that when we go on vacations this is very frequently the case , that is , we go on vacations , to a very large extent , in the service of our remembering self .
And this is a bit hard to justify I think .
I mean , how much do we consume our memories ?
That is one of the explanations that is given for the dominance of the remembering self .
And when I think about that , I think about a vacation we had in Antarctica a few years ago , which was clearly the best vacation I 've ever had , and I think of it relatively often , relative to how much I think of other vacations .
And I probably have consumed my memories of that three week trip , I would say , for about 25 minutes in the last four years .
Now , if I had ever opened the folder with the 600 pictures in it , I would have spent another hour .
Now , that is three weeks , and that is at most an hour and a half .
There seems to be a discrepancy .
Now , I may be a bit extreme , you know , in how little appetite I have for consuming memories , but even if you do more of this , there is a genuine question .
Why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the weight that we put on experiences ?
So I want you to think about a thought experiment .
Imagine that your next vacation you know that at the end of the vacation all your pictures will be destroyed , and you 'll get an amnesic drug so that you won 't remember anything .
Now , would you choose the same vacation ?
And if you would choose a different vacation , there is a conflict between your two selves , and you need to think about how to adjudicate that conflict , and it 's actually not at all obvious because , if you think in terms of time , then you get one answer .
And if you think in terms of memories , you might get another answer .
Why do we pick the vacations we do , is a problem that confronts us with a choice between the two selves .
Now , the two selves bring up two notions of happiness .
There are really two concepts of happiness that we can apply , one per self .
So you can ask : How happy is the experiencing self ?
And then you would ask : How happy are the moments in the experiencing self 's life ?
And they 're all -- happiness for moments is a fairly complicated process .
What are the emotions that can be measured ?
And , by the way , now we are capable of getting a pretty good idea of the happiness of the experiencing self over time .
If you ask for the happiness of the remembering self , it 's a completely different thing .
This is not about how happily a person lives .
It is about how satisfied or pleased the person is when that person thinks about her life .
Very different notion .
Anyone who doesn 't distinguish those notions , is going to mess up the study of happiness , and I belong to a crowd of students of well-being , who 've been messing up the study of happiness for a long time in precisely this way .
The distinction between the happiness of the experiencing self and the satisfaction of the remembering self has been recognized in recent years , and there are now efforts to measure the two separately , the Gallup Organization has a world poll with more that half a million people have been asked questions about what they think of their life and about their experiences .
And there have been other efforts along those lines .
So in recent years , we have begun to learn about the happiness of the two selves .
And the main lesson I think that we have learned , is they are really different .
You can know how satisfied somebody is with their life , and that really doesn 't teach you much about how happily they 're living their life , and vice versa .
Just to give you a sense of the correlation , the correlation is about .5 .
What that means is if you met somebody , and you were told , oh his father is six feet tall , how much would you know about his height ?
Well , you would know something about his height , but there 's a lot of uncertainty .
You have that much uncertainty .
If I tell you that somebody ranked their life eight on a scale of ten , you have a lot of uncertainty about how happy they are with their experiencing self .
So the correlation is low .
We know something about what controls satisfaction of the happiness self .
We know that money is very important , goals are very important .
We know that happiness is mainly being satisfied with people that we like , spending time with people that we like .
There are other pleasures , but this is dominant .
So if you want to maximize the happiness of the two selves , you are going to end up doing very different things .
The bottom line of what I 've said here is that we really should not think of happiness as a substitute for well-being .
It is a completely different notion .
Now , very quickly , another reason we cannot think straight about happiness is that we do not attend to the same things when we think about life , and we actually live .
So , if you ask the simple question of how happy people are in California , you are not going to get to the correct answer .
When you ask that question , you think people must be happier in California , if , say , you live in Ohio .
And what happens is when you think about living in California , you are thinking of the contrast between California and other places , and that contrast , say , is in climate .
Well , it turns out that climate is not very important to the experiencing self and is not even very important to the reflective self that decides how happy people are .
But now , because the reflective self is in charge , you may end up -- some people may end up moving to California .
And it 's sort of interesting to trace what is going to happen to people who move to California in the hope of getting happier .
Well , their experiencing self is not going to get happier .
We know that .
But one thing will happen .
They will think they are happier , because , when they think about it , they 'll be reminded of how horrible the weather was in Ohio .
And they will feel they made the right decision .
It is very difficult to think straight about well-being , and I hope I have given you a sense of how difficult it is .
Thank you .
Thank you .
I 've got a question for you .
Thank you so much .
Now , when we were on the phone a few weeks ago , you mentioned to me that there was quite an interesting result came out of that Gallup survey .
Is that something you can share since you do have a few moments left now ?
Sure .
I think the most interesting result that we found in the Gallup survey is a number , which we absolutely did not expect to find .
We found that with respect to the happiness of the experiencing self .
When we looked at how feelings vary with income .
And it turns out that , below an income of 60,000 dollars a year , for Americans , and that 's a very large sample of Americans , like 600,000 , but it 's a large representative sample , below an income of 600,000 dollars a year ... 60,000 .
60,000 . 60,000 dollars a year , people are unhappy , and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get .
Above that , we get an absolutely flat line .
I mean I 've rarely seen lines so flat .
Clearly , what is happening is money does not buy you experiential happiness , but lack of money certainly buys you misery , and we can measure that misery very , very clearly .
In terms of the other self , the remembering self , you get a different story .
The more money you earn the more satisfied you are .
That does not hold for emotions .
But Danny , the whole American endeavor is about life , liberty , the pursuit of happiness .
If people took seriously that finding , I mean , it seems to turn upside down everything we believe about , say for example , taxation policy and so forth .
Is there any chance that politicians , that the country generally , would take a finding like that seriously and run public policy based on it ?
You know I think that there is recognition of the role of happiness research in public policy .
The recognition is going to be slow in the United States , no question about that , but in the UK , it is happening , and in other countries it is happening .
People are recognizing that they ought to be thinking of happiness when they think of public policy .
It 's going to take awhile , and people are going to debate whether they want to study experience happiness , or whether they want to study life evaluation , so we need to have that debate fairly soon , How to enhance happiness , goes very different ways depending on how you think , and whether you think of the remembering self or you think of the experiencing self .
This is going to influence policy , I think , in years to come .
In the United States , efforts are being made to measure the experience happiness of the population .
This is going to be , I think , within the next decade or two , part of national statistics .
Well , it seems to me , this issue will , or at least should be , the most interesting policy discussion to track over the next few years .
Thank you so much for inventing behavioral economics .
Thank you Danny Kahneman .