Measuring Experienced Well-Being
How do you measure well-being? The traditional survey question reads: “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?”
Kahneman was suspicious that the remembering self would dominate the question, and that people were terrible at “considering all things.” The question tends to trigger the one thing that gives immense pleasurable (like dating a new person) or pain (like an argument with a co-worker).
To measure experienced well-being, he led a team to develop the Day Reconstruction Method, which prompts people to relive the day in detailed episodes, then to rate the feelings. Following the philosophy of happiness being the “area under the curve,” they conceived of the metric U-index: the percentage of time an individual spends in an unpleasant state.
They reported these findings:
- There was large inequality in the distribution of pain. 50% of people reported going through a day without an unpleasant episode. But a minority experience considerable emotional distress for much of the day, for instance from illness, misfortune, or personal disposition.
- Different activities have different U-indices. Morning commute: 29%; childcare: 24%; TV watching: 12%; sex: 5%.
- The weekend’s U-index is 6% lower than weekdays, possibly because people have more control over putting time into pleasurable activities.
- Different cultures show different U-indices for the same activities. Compared to American women, French women spend less time with children but enjoy it more, perhaps because of more access to child care. French women also spend the same amount of time eating, but they enjoy it more, possibly because they mentally focus on it rather than mindlessly eat in a rush.
- Your current mood depends largely on the current situation, not on general factors influencing general satisfaction.
- Things that affect mood: coworker relations, loud noise, time pressure, a boss hovering around you.
- Things that do not affect mood: benefits, status, pay.
- Some activities generally seen as positive (like having a romantic partner) don’t improve experienced well-being. This might be partially because of tradeoffs—women in relationships spend less time alone, but they also have less time with friends. They spend more time having sex, but they also spend more time doing housework and caring for children.
Suggestions for Improving Experienced Well-being
How can you improve your moment-to-moment happiness?
- Focus your time on what you enjoy. Commute less.
- To get pleasure from an activity, you must notice that you’re doing it. Avoid passive leisure time in places like TV, and spend more time in active leisure time, like socializing and exercise.
Reducing the U-index should be seen as a worthwhile societal goal. Reducing the U-index by 1% across society would be a huge achievement, with millions of hours of avoided suffering.
Experienced Well-Being vs Life Evaluations
Where well-being is measured by methods like the Day Reconstruction Method, life evaluation (or life satisfaction) is measured by the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale:
“Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”
Compared to the moment-by-moment experience of well-being, this question takes a broader view of where you are in life.
Some things affect experience and life evaluation differently:
- Things that affect life evaluation more than experience
- Education
- Money: in the United States, after about $75,000 of annual income, more money increases evaluation without increasing experience.
- One theory to explain this: a higher income might reduce ability to enjoy small pleasures of life. A simple bar of chocolate might be more enjoyable when you have less wealth.
- Things that affect experience more than life evaluation
- Ill health
- Living with children
- Religion
Temperament, which is largely determined by genetics, affects both experienced well-being and life satisfaction.
- This can explain why certain changes like marriage show low correlations with well-being - it works for some and not for others.
Goals make a big difference in satisfaction.
- People who care about money and get it are more satisfied than those who wanted money and didn’t get it, or those who didn’t care about money and didn’t get it.
- One recipe for dissatisfaction: setting goals that are especially difficult to attain. (The goal that led to the most dissatisfaction: “becoming accomplished in a performing art.”)
Severe poverty amplifies the experienced effects of misfortunes.
- For the top ⅔ of individuals by wealth, a headache increases negative experience from 19% to 38%. For the poorest tenth, it starts at 38% and moves to 70%. Not only do the poor have a higher setpoint of negative experience, a misfortune increases the negative experience. The same result applies to divorce and loneliness.
- The beneficial effects of the weekend are smaller for the poor.
Focusing Illusion
Considering overall life satisfaction is a difficult System 2 question. When considering life satisfaction, it’s difficult to consider all the factors in your life, weigh those factors accurately, then score your factors.
As is typical, System 1 substitutes the answer to an easier question, such as “what is my mood right now?”, focusing on significant events (both achievements and failures), or recurrent concerns (like illness).
The key point: Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it. Your mood is largely determined by what you attend to. You get pleasure/displeasure from something when you think about it.
For example, even though Northerners despise their weather and Californians enjoy theirs, in research studies, climate makes no difference in life satisfaction.
Why is this? When people are asked about life satisfaction, climate is just a small factor in the overall question. You tend to think much more about your love life, your career, your family and friends, and the bills you need to pay. Climate is likely a distant concern.
However, when you consider the question, “are Californians more satisfied with life than Northerners because of the weather,” climate becomes a focal point. You overweight the climate factor in the life satisfaction question; you conjure the available image of hiking, rather than the reality that lives are similar throughout; you overestimate how often Californians think about the weather when asked about a global evaluation.
This idea leads to a number of counter-intuitive results:
- Consider the question: “how much pleasure do you get from your car?” Now a different question: “when do you get pleasure from your car?”
- The answer to the second question is when you think about it—which is not often, including when you’re driving it.
- However, to answer the broader first question, you substituted the easier, narrower question: “how much pleasure do you get from your car when you do think about it?”
- Chronic stressors cause more dissatisfaction than you would predict. This includes chronic pain, chronic loud noise, and depression. By being ever-present, these stressors constantly bring the problem into central focus.
- Certain activities that engage you—like social activities—retain your focus and give you more.
Mispredictions of Happiness
The focusing illusion leads to mispredictions of happiness, for ourselves and others.
When you forecast your own future happiness, you overestimate the effect a change will have on you (like getting a promotion), because you overestimate how salient the thought will be in future you’s mind. In reality, future you has gotten used to the new environment and now has other problems to worry about.
You may pay significant amounts for improvements in life satisfaction, even though it has no effect on experienced happiness.
- Colostomy patients show no difference in experienced happiness compared to healthy people. Yet they would trade away years of life for no longer having a colostomy.
- The remembering self has a focusing illusion about life that the experiencing self endures comfortably.
However, when you predict the happiness of others, you focus on the aspects of their experience that are most salient to you. You ignore that the person may have habituated to her circumstances, or that the aspect has counterbalancing benefits or drawbacks.
- If you’re preoccupied with lacking money, you predict wealthier people are happier than they are, even though they’ve adjusted to wealth and are likely no happier than you are.
- People predict paraplegics have a higher U-index than they really do. After adjustment, paraplegics stop thinking about their condition. They enjoy friends and get mad about politics, just like you.
Adaptation to a new situation consists in large part of thinking less and less about it.
Antidotes to the Focusing Illusion
(Shortform note: the following are our additions and not explicitly described in the book.)
- To evaluate your life satisfaction, create a life rubric, where you list the factors and their weightings, then score each of the factors. This might make you happier and grateful for what you have, rather than focusing on single sore points that stick out.
- Choose to spend time on pleasurable activities that will engage your focus. You pay little attention to the TV as you passively watch, but you retain focus in social interaction or playing team sports.
- Reflect on your past experiences to inform future ones—how much did buying something in the past make you happier today? What activity are you really thankful to your past self for doing? Do more of what you appreciate your past self for having done.
Conclusions on Happiness
Putting it all together - which self should we cater to, the remembering self or the experiencing self?
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman doesn’t have a clear answer, but he rules out that either the remembering self or the experiencing self should be focused on exclusively.
Catering only to the remembering self invites unnecessary suffering. Our memories are fallible, being subject to duration neglect and peak-end rule.
- The remembering self favors short periods of intense joy over long periods of moderate happiness.
- The remembering self avoids long happy periods if it knows a poor ending will come.
- In the extreme, the remembering self would endure decades of pain ending in one jubilee right before death, remembering that joyful moment in the last minutes of life.
Catering only to the experiencing self treats all moments of like alike, regardless of the future benefit.
- Some instances have memories that give more value than others.
- A moment can also alter the experience of subsequent moments.
- Learning music can enhance future playing or listening for years.
- A traumatic event can cause PTSD and misery over a lifetime.
- Making money today can unlock new experiences for your future experiencing self.
- In the extreme, the experiencing self would greedily pursue whatever maximized happiness this moment, with little regard for the future self.
Both the remembering self and the experiencing self must be considered—their interests do not always coincide.
For a population, it’s not clear which to maximize, say for treating health conditions. Should we minimize experienced pain, or should we solve whatever people are most willing to pay to be relieved from? These are all fruitful questions for continuing research and philosophy.