Stumbling on Happiness Part 5 of 5: Partridge and Gumbo
June 11, 2010 by dr. lam · Leave a Comment
Suppose you were at a ritzy restaurant and you and your dining companion both wanted the wasabi-encrusted partridge but ordering the same thing would be too gauche. Therefore, you opt for the venison gumbo, which is a close second choice for you. Both of you decide to share your meal. At the end of the meal, you are very happy at your wonderful arrangement.
Now suppose the maître d’ offers you a free meal once a month at his best table but you would have to choose what you would like for the entire year. You do so by thinking you would go with the partridge every other time and fill in the blanks with the venison gumbo and perhaps even the mahimahi. How happy would you be?
In a study in which subjects were given their favorite snack once a month and another group was given their first favorite snack alternated by their second favorite snack every other month, the first group won in terms of overall happiness. Does that not in essence violate the idea of variety is the spice of life? Not really.
Variety can be important unless the time interval is lengthened far enough apart then it is better to indulge your primary passion. In the case with the partridge, if you ate a morsel of partridge every minute, you would grow weary of your partridge rather quickly. However, if you ate only one bite of partridge every ten minutes, you would be better off just eating the partridge and not wasting time with eating any gumbo.
We tend to plan future choices poorly because we think that variety is important for our enjoyment. This is only the case if insufficient time is present between episodes of enjoyment. Hence, we should probably just order our favorite dish at the restaurant so long as we are not eating there every night.
Stumbling on Happiness Part 4 of 5: The Future Is Now
June 10, 2010 by dr. lam · Leave a Comment
Remember the Jetsons? Think of how the future seemed to us back then. All the women were in their aprons making dinner for the husband with the thin tie and fedora who came home after 5 pm. Interestingly, everyone was also white. There was no room for Africans, Hispanics, or Asians. In short, our perception of the future based on our active imagination is fully steeped in our present situation.
When people were asked in a phone questionnaire how happy they were with their lives, if the day outside was bright and shiny there was a much higher chance they would say the were happy and would be happy. When it was rainy, so were they. We tend to project our future thoughts based on our current reality.
When people got off a treadmill and were asked what they would be most in need of, e.g., food or water, after several days of hiking, the majority said they would be thirsty. When subjects were asked the same question before they got on a treadmill, the answer came back more often that they would be hungrier than thirstier. Another example of how we project our future situation based on our current feelings. That is why not to go grocery shopping on an empty stomach, as we all know.
Stumbling on Happiness Part 3 of 5: Absenteeism
June 9, 2010 by dr. lam · Leave a Comment
We as humans tend to perceive our past, present, and future circumstances by what happened, is happening, and what we imagine will happen but leave out what did not happen, what is not happening, and what we fail to imagine. In other words, we put together in our mind only the positive, concrete examples of things rather stringing together items that did not happen that could influence how we see things more accurately.
For example, individuals were asked which of the following two countries are the most similar: Ceylon, Nepal, West Germany, East Germany. The most frequent response was West and East Germany. When asked which of the aforementioned 4 countries were the most dissimilar, the response was the same. How could two countries be the most similar yet the most dissimilar? The phrasing of the question has a lot to do with it. When asked about similarities, people responded with what they could clearly see as similar, the word Germany. They failed to consider the absence of similarity between the two former governments. When asked about dissimilarities, the stark contrast in government became the centerpiece in one’s mind and the person fails to consider the absence of dissimilarity, i.e., the name.
When asked about which city would be more favorable to live in: Los Angeles or Columbus, OH, most would say Los Angeles because of the temperate climate, the palm trees, and Hollywood. However, studies have shown that LA citizens are no more happier than Ohions because they also possess traffic, smog, long distance commutes, high real estate rates, cable rates, etc. As people of imagination, we tend to fail to imagine the details that also count because we tend to simplify things. What we leave out can be as important as what we leave in.
Gilbert recounts how we think that blind people are much worse off than sighted people or at least that they would be very sad. But we fail to see that they adapt to that blindness and can become as happy as sighted people. We tend to simplify everything from our vantage point and do not carry a reasonable balance sheet on happiness.
When we are asked to choose between vacation spots: Moderacia (which has average beaches, average weather, average hotels, and average nightlife) and Extremia (which has great beaches, great weather but terrible hotels and terrible nightlife) many pick Extremia. But when asked to cancel a trip, people who picked Extremia would have a greater chance of canceling. The reason is that we tend to pick things based on their favorable qualities and reject things based on the negative attributes.
As we become clearer in understanding our own foibles as human beings, we can perhaps pick better for ourselves using a rational table that includes the absence of things and scores the pluses and minuses better.
Stumbling on Happiness Part 2 of 5: Reweaving the Past
June 8, 2010 by dr. lam · Leave a Comment
If we are creatures of the future as discussed yesterday, how do we envision our past? Not that accurately, as we will see. Our brain is a vast repository of information concerning every event that has ever taken place in our life. Thinking of a hard drive storing even a season’s worth of a particular television show reveals how much storage capacity we are talking about.
We are able to store this information by creating abbreviated versions of our experience and remember only the salient elements of our past. The rest of it is reinvented. We do not retrieve our information as we reweave it, i.e., we fill in the blanks of what our memory cannot recall.
An experiment was performed in which a subject watched a red car pass by a yellow yield sign. Half of the respondents were shown two scenarios: a red car passing a yield sign and another in which a red car passed a stop sign. 90% got the right answer of the red car passing the yield sign. However, when asked a follow-up question, “how many cars passed the stop sign?” 80% of the other half of respondents picked the image of the car passing a stop sign, something they never witnessed. Their brain recreated their memory with a more recent event.
When we watch a bad movie with a good ending, we oftentimes just remember the good ending and adjust our recollection of the movie being good. I claim that the movie, The Sixth Sense, is such a movie. I really hated the whole thing until the twist ending. Then I thought it was brilliant. In actuality, I think the movie still sucked.
What should we do with all of this information? Not much, except it is important that when we judge our present and future decisions based on past actions we need to determine how much of that judgment is predicated on a false reweaving or an accurate retrieval of the past.
Stumbling on Happiness Part 1 of 5: Prediction
June 4, 2010 by dr. lam · Leave a Comment
Wow, another set of blogs on happiness so soon? Yup. I have been fascinated by the subject of what makes us happy as human beings. It is a passionate goal of mine, but I assume for all for you as well.
Dan Gilbert’s book is a cross between The Happiness Hypothesis we just covered and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational that we covered last year. The book helps us understand what makes us happy as human beings whether the reason we are happy is rational or perhaps slightly irrational. I believe that if we are aware of our irrational thoughts, we can either avoid them or at times even indulge them.
In his first chapter, Gilbert says that the one thing that humans possess over the animal kingdom is our ability to think of the future. Not just a simple act of thinking like, “Man, that bear ate my father so I better avoid him” but more complex notions like, “If I invest in this retirement fund now, I will probably be able to stop working sooner.”
What separates us from the animal kingdom is our well-developed frontal lobes that is the central locus for future planning. In 1848 Phineas Gage, a railworker, had a 3.5 foot steel beam rocket through his skull severing his connection between his frontal lobe from the rest of the brain. Evidence showed that he got up from his accident and did just fine. Perhaps the frontal lobe has no use? Think again.
In the mid-part of the twentieth century, frontal lobotomies were performed to reduce anxiety and depression in clinical subjects. However, at the same time these individuals suffered from the inability to plan for the future. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for our future thinking, whether negative (anxiety) or positive (planning).
In Eckhart Tolle’s book, The Power of Now, we discussed last year how if we focus our attention fully in the present we can rid ourselves of all anxiety related to future think. However, is this always a good thing? Gilbert argues otherwise.
In an experiment in a retirement home, some residents were given control over taking care of a plant whereas another group had the plant being taken care of by an attendant. The high-control group (those who took care of their plant) were half as likely to die as the low-control group. Similarly, when another high-control group was given the opportunity to dictate when and how long visiting students would come to chat with them, this group was healthier, happier, and took fewer medications.
In short, our sense of control is intimately tied to our ability to steer our future and that is tied to our happiness. When we feel a lack of control, we can exhibit more signs of unhappiness than those who exhibit some degree of control over their future.
Separating planning (positive control) from anxiety (lack of control) is the trick. Sometimes future think is not a bad thing when we can do so constructively so that we can feel more secure about our present and our future as compared with when we become anxious and negative about our future trajectory.