The Science of Well-being | Why Our Expectations Are So Bad

Annoying Features of the Mind (Cognitive Biases)

1. Our strongest intuitions are often misleading 

• Miswanting (term coined by Tim Wilson at the University of Virginia & Dan Gilbert at Harvard): act of being mistaken about what and how much you're going to like these things in the future
• The mind gives us intuitions about what's going to make us happy but it can be wrong
• Why does this mis-wanting occur? What is up with our mind that it delivers to us incorrect predictions about what we're going actually like? What are the biases that caused these?

2. We judge ourselves relative to reference points which are often irrelevant and make us feel worse than we should

• constantly judging relative a salient, but often completely irrelevant reference point 

Ebbinghaus illusion

which of the two orange circles do you think is the larger orange circle? 

-they are exactly the same size which you can see once the blue circles are gone

-the presence of these other circles on the outside (reference point blue circles) makes it so we actually don't see the circles at the same size even though they are
-we only see them relative to the circles around them

• We constantly judge relative to other stuff out there in the world—it messes up our judgement of what the thing we really care about
• Do we actually see these kinds of reference points messing up our happiness judgments? 

Reference Point #1: Ourselves

• Whatever your counterfactual is, it's affecting your happiness
• It's not what you have, it's what you think you could have had
• Ex. How much salary do you need? What's the salary that you get your required income that would make you happy? 
• It just goes up depending on what you were making before. You constantly bump yourself up. Our idea of a good income is not just done in absolute terms, it's done relative to some reference point

Reference Point #2: Social Comparisons

• We care about where we stand relative to other people, even more than our own absolute level
• Ex. You're more likely to want someone to be paid less, rather more than you. You're less happy that somebody else makes more than you, even though it doesn't affect your earnings

Solnick and Hemenway's survey: "Imagine you were to pick a job with one of two situations. Which would you prefer—"Have a job where you earn $50,000, but everyone else in your firm at your same level is only earning $25K OR a job where you are actually earning $100,000, but everyone else around you in your similar pay grade is actually earning $250,000 dollars?"

• Over 50% of people choose having half of the income so they won't be less than others, even though the second option doubles your pay
• We would assume that our minds would use reasonable reference points but they don't

O'Guinn and Schrum wanted to see whether people who were exposed to crazier and crazier reference points, more unrealistic standards of salaries and incomes, actually got messed up.
They found as you go up in your TV watchings, you also go up in your estimation of other people's average wealth. You also go down in your estimate of your own wealth relative to others. So the more TV you watch, the more unhappy you are with your own income.

• Nowadays there's a very special, new set of reference points—social media
• When making upward social comparisons, you definitely think that target is better than you
• When you're making downward social comparisons, you don't get that same bump for yourself
• Our minds suck at picking reference points. It just soaks in whatever reference point we get, with barely any filter. The more you can kind of force that filter on it, the better you will be

If we created a culture of social media where you gave the full picture of what it looked like then those might be yardsticks that actually didn't have these detrimental effects. You can pick your social comparison group to be way different than you. That can cause you to realize you can use the power of social comparison for good, because you're realizing that what looks bad to you is not actually that bad in the scheme of things if you use other people. The act of kind of counting your blessings is a sort of form of that and can be really powerful.

3. Our minds are programmed to adapt and ultimately get used to things 

• We just have these minds that adapt over time and habituate
• Hedonic Adaptation: process of becoming accustomed to both positive stuff & negative stuff, such that the effects you get from that emotionally don't work as well over time
• Dan Gilbert (book: Stumbling Into Happiness) notes that wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen but this wanes with repetition

You get everything you want and you get used to them. They become the new normal. They stop bringing you the happiness that you expect. And they reset your reference point for the future. This is one of the reasons that when we get this stuff, it doesn't make us happy.

4. We don’t realize how good we are at adapting and coping and mis-predict how certain outcomes will make us feel

Impact Bias: tendency to overestimate the emotional impact of a future event both in terms of intensity and its duration

• We think it's better than it's going to be at the moment we get it & we think that it's going to last longer than it really does.
• Mis-predicting the duration prevents us from taking certain actions bc it may be risky. 
• There might be a bad outcome & w think it's going to affect us for a long time, but it doesn't.

Does the impact bias get lessened every time you have the experience? No. Every single time, you still mis-predict the next time that you're like, "this time I'm still going to be really upset" and you're just not. We don't get better at impact bias as we get more experience with it.

Focalism: we tend to think about just one thing about an events, forgetting everything else that could happen in our lives

You focus on one bad thing but a year from now, you're going to be doing many things & a lot will have happened. Your life will be filled with stuff that is not just that one bad thing. It's not going to be as bad as you think but focalism mean you ignore all of the other stuff, leading to mis-predicting.

Immune Neglect: we are sometimes unaware of the power of our "psychological immune system." We have this tendency to adapt to and cope with negative events. We're pretty resilient. We actually don't like when sucky things happen to us & our minds don't like to feel really awful so we have
lots of mechanisms for feeling better when we feel really awful. You engage in those mechanisms much more so than you realize. 

Kindness & Social Connection

• Focus on positive practices that enhance our social lives
• Make a habit of increasing our social connection & taking part in more random acts of kindness
• Happy people are motivated to do kind things for others
• Simple act of doing a random act of kindness can come with a host of positive benefits 
• Doing nice stuff for others can increase our mood & our feelings of social connection