(no subject)
I recall first encountering the term "hedonic psychology" (the study of pleasure and happiness) a little over a year ago, I believe. The main person behind these studies seems to be Dan Gilbert (or perhaps he is merely the only person utilizing the aforementioned phrase and thus appears disproportionately in my search results, either way is not much matter). It's a rather fascinating little area of research. The main area of interest regards how we predict or imagine a certain scenario will make us feel versus how it actually makes us feel when it occurs. People tend to overestimate the intensity and duration of affect whether positive or negative. The notion is that people often do not take into account one's ability to "synthesize happiness". The idea is that there are two types of happiness: "natural happiness" and "synthetic happiness". Natural happiness is what occurs when one achieves a certain goal which is expected to bring forth positive emotion. Synthetic happiness is the happiness we create within ourselves by altering our perspective of things when we do not get that which we previously desired.
Thus, as Dan Gilbert explains in this lecture, when one looks at the reported levels of happiness of people who won the lottery a year ago and compare that with the reported levels of happiness of people who became a paraplegic a year ago, the levels of happiness are about the same. Hence, one's satisfaction seems to be dependent upon one's ability to conjure up these positive feelings despite circumstances.
Human beings have something that we might think of as a psychological immune system. A system of cognitive processes, largely non-conscious cognitive processes, that help them change their views of the world, so that they can feel better about the worlds in which they find themselves. Like Sir Thomas, you have this machine, unlike Sir Thomas, you seem not to know it. We synthesize happiness but we think happiness is a thing to be found.
It is also said in the lecture:
In fact a recent study- this almost floors me- a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people, suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness.
This I tend to disagree with slightly if only because I know of things that happened much longer ago which still make me unhappy or less happy on a very regular basis. But, I believe that to be the exception, as said, and not the rule.
Psychologist Dan Gilbert challenges the idea that we'll be miserable if we don't get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel real, enduring happiness, he says, even when things don't go as planned. He calls this kind of happiness "synthetic happiness," and he says it's "every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for."
If I remember correctly, this was the article I had found about a year or so ago:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gilbert06/gilbert06_index.html
And some excerpts:
"Yes, the experience of saving money is not the same as the experience of saving orphans. But both experiences can be described as a set of locations on multiple dimensions, and one of those dimensions is happiness. The two experiences give rise to different amounts of happiness, but not different kinds. The reason the experiences feel so different is that they entail different amounts of happiness as well as different amounts of everything else.
This sounds like a semantic abstraction, and it isn't. It is a deeply important point. Science is an attempt to replace qualitative distinctions with quantitative distinctions. Once upon a time there were two kinds - hot and cold - and it was a huge breakthrough when scientists realized that these two kinds were simply manifestations of different amounts of molecular motion."
-------------
"We are often quite poor at predicting what will make us happy in the future for two reasons. First, we have been given a lot of disinformation about happiness by two sources: Genes and culture. Both genes and cultures are self-perpetuating entities that need us to do things for them so that they can survive. Because we are interested in our own happiness and not theirs, both entities fool us into believing that's what is good for them is also good for us. We believe that having children will make us happy, that consuming goods and services will make us happy. But the data show that money has minor and rapidly diminishing effects on happiness, and that parents are generally happier watching TV or doing housework than interacting with their children."
----------------------
"The main error, of course, is that we vastly overestimate the hedonic consequences of any event. Neither positive nor negative events hit us as hard or for as long as we anticipate. This "impact bias" has proved quite robust in both field and laboratory settings.
Oddly, we don't seem to learn all that much from our own experience. To learn from experience requires that we be able to remember it, and research shows that people are about as bad at remembering their past emotions as they are predicting their future emotions. That's why we make the same errors again and again. For example, in one of our studies, Democrats predicted they'd be devastated if Bush won the 2004 presidential election, and as we always find, they were not nearly as devastated as they predicted. But several months after the election, they remembered being just as devastated as they had expected to be. It turns out that this is a very common pattern of memory errors. Retrospection and prospection share many of the same biases and hence reinforce each other."
I've been looking for new reading material and so decided to order his book "Stumbling Upon Happiness" to glance it over:
Found here.
And, as a side note, there is a neat little firefox extension called "book burro" which helps one find the cheapest prices on books online. It pops up when you visit a page selling a book, and you can expand it to show various prices from around the web. You can find the best price, click on it and it will take you to the page to buy the book. I've found it quite handy:
http://bookburro.org/
Now, I shall go try to synthesize some happiness...
Thus, as Dan Gilbert explains in this lecture, when one looks at the reported levels of happiness of people who won the lottery a year ago and compare that with the reported levels of happiness of people who became a paraplegic a year ago, the levels of happiness are about the same. Hence, one's satisfaction seems to be dependent upon one's ability to conjure up these positive feelings despite circumstances.
Human beings have something that we might think of as a psychological immune system. A system of cognitive processes, largely non-conscious cognitive processes, that help them change their views of the world, so that they can feel better about the worlds in which they find themselves. Like Sir Thomas, you have this machine, unlike Sir Thomas, you seem not to know it. We synthesize happiness but we think happiness is a thing to be found.
It is also said in the lecture:
In fact a recent study- this almost floors me- a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people, suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness.
This I tend to disagree with slightly if only because I know of things that happened much longer ago which still make me unhappy or less happy on a very regular basis. But, I believe that to be the exception, as said, and not the rule.
Psychologist Dan Gilbert challenges the idea that we'll be miserable if we don't get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel real, enduring happiness, he says, even when things don't go as planned. He calls this kind of happiness "synthetic happiness," and he says it's "every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for."
If I remember correctly, this was the article I had found about a year or so ago:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gilbert06/gilbert06_index.html
And some excerpts:
"Yes, the experience of saving money is not the same as the experience of saving orphans. But both experiences can be described as a set of locations on multiple dimensions, and one of those dimensions is happiness. The two experiences give rise to different amounts of happiness, but not different kinds. The reason the experiences feel so different is that they entail different amounts of happiness as well as different amounts of everything else.
This sounds like a semantic abstraction, and it isn't. It is a deeply important point. Science is an attempt to replace qualitative distinctions with quantitative distinctions. Once upon a time there were two kinds - hot and cold - and it was a huge breakthrough when scientists realized that these two kinds were simply manifestations of different amounts of molecular motion."
-------------
"We are often quite poor at predicting what will make us happy in the future for two reasons. First, we have been given a lot of disinformation about happiness by two sources: Genes and culture. Both genes and cultures are self-perpetuating entities that need us to do things for them so that they can survive. Because we are interested in our own happiness and not theirs, both entities fool us into believing that's what is good for them is also good for us. We believe that having children will make us happy, that consuming goods and services will make us happy. But the data show that money has minor and rapidly diminishing effects on happiness, and that parents are generally happier watching TV or doing housework than interacting with their children."
----------------------
"The main error, of course, is that we vastly overestimate the hedonic consequences of any event. Neither positive nor negative events hit us as hard or for as long as we anticipate. This "impact bias" has proved quite robust in both field and laboratory settings.
Oddly, we don't seem to learn all that much from our own experience. To learn from experience requires that we be able to remember it, and research shows that people are about as bad at remembering their past emotions as they are predicting their future emotions. That's why we make the same errors again and again. For example, in one of our studies, Democrats predicted they'd be devastated if Bush won the 2004 presidential election, and as we always find, they were not nearly as devastated as they predicted. But several months after the election, they remembered being just as devastated as they had expected to be. It turns out that this is a very common pattern of memory errors. Retrospection and prospection share many of the same biases and hence reinforce each other."
I've been looking for new reading material and so decided to order his book "Stumbling Upon Happiness" to glance it over:
Found here.
And, as a side note, there is a neat little firefox extension called "book burro" which helps one find the cheapest prices on books online. It pops up when you visit a page selling a book, and you can expand it to show various prices from around the web. You can find the best price, click on it and it will take you to the page to buy the book. I've found it quite handy:
http://bookburro.org/
Now, I shall go try to synthesize some happiness...