Chapter 15: Happiness
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Welcome to the Psych podcast, the podcast where we discuss everything intro Psych I'm joined, as always, by my friend and colleague Paul Bloom. Paul, how happy are you today?
I'm doing well, David. I'd say I'm an eight on a scale of one to ten. How about you?
I thought you were going to say one to 100, and I was going to be very concerned.
No, I'm happy. I enjoy these conversations, and my life as a whole, I think, is going well.
I agree. I'd say eight. I might even go to nine today.
Wow.
Just how I'm feeling today. And like you, I enjoyed these conversations. So today our conversation is going to be all about well, your chapter is called The Good Life. We could say we're talking about happiness, but people might think of the good life what is a good life as an even broader topic than happiness. So what do we mean when we say we're interested in whether a life is good or not?
I think that's a good question. A good question. To begin with, you and I are going to go and talk about research in the field of positive psychology, which often looks at the sort of factors that lead some people to say they're happier than others, experiences that make people happy, and so on. But the question of good life is broader and isn't, I think, essentially an empirical scientific question. It's kind of a philosophical question. What do we want out of life? And if you ask people, they'll tell you they want to be happy. That's kind of good answer, but that's kind of vague. When they want to be happy, they're talking about short term pleasures. Are they talking about a life that, in general, they're satisfied with? What about being a good person, being moral? What about leading a meaningful life or a spiritual life or a connected life or an interesting life? I think there's a lot of great research in psychology on happiness, but somebody could accuse our field of focusing too narrowly on that and not on other things. And I think the other things need to be taken into account.
One of the things that the researchers in the field have pointed out is that people might not have a good grasp of what makes them happy to begin with. So even if they say, my goal is to be a happy person, and you ask them, well, what makes you happy? They might be miscalibrated. So things like pursuing meaningful goals or being a moral person might in fact be what makes people feel happy, but people don't realize it.
That's right. And the very notion of happiness carves apart. Danny Kahneman, who's one of the deepest thinkers on this issue and many others, distinguishes between two sorts of meanings of happiness. So one sort of meaning I could capture by at different points in your day, just randomly asking you, how happy are you right now? How are you feeling? One to ten, you give me a set of answers. So I do this for a month and I ask you ten times a day. So I get 300 samples. The other notion of happiness is sort of at the end of the day, I ask you, all things be considered how happy are you with your whole life? And you give me an answer. Now, it turns out that these answers correlate they're related to one another. People who have high happiness at sort of moment to moment are pretty happy with their lives. And people who are low tend to be low, but they aren't the same. They aren't one and the same. You can be high in one and low in the other. Kunaman distinguishes between experienced happiness, which is the sort of sum total of your pleasures and pains over your life, and remembered happiness, which is how happy? When I ask you to judge your.
Life as a whole, you know, I always think to myself when I hear about these experience sampling studies that you mentioned where you get pinged ten times a day, well, that would make me unhappy.
Yes, there's kind of a deep point there which Dan Gilbert makes, which is when we're asked how happy we are, it sort of shifts our attention. At the moment we're thinking about that we're kind of a different person than the kind of person who's simply having experiences positive and negative.
Right?
And I think here there's a real philosophical shift. So there's one view that says the most important thing to do is to maximize these day to day experiences. And this is what a lot of utilitarians would say the better to life is just having a lot of pleasure and a little pain. And Dan Gilbert himself thinks anything else is an illusion. That's all you should talk about. Another tradition, which Kahneman believes and many others believe, is that it's not really about your pleasure and pain. It's sort of general satisfaction when you consider it, when you think about it, how good your life is. And I think this is an important distinction. It's not the kind of thing that you and I could run experiments and find answer. It's just two very different worldviews each that has, I think, points in its defense.
I get the intuition that Gilbert has that maybe this is an illusion, but I can't shake the feeling that what does matter for me is ultimately, when I reflect back on my experiences, whether or not they were happy. But I do realize myself that my memory does tend to wipe out a lot of negativity. So as I'm recalling, for instance, my time at graduate school, when I talk to graduate students and they seem stressed out and they say being a grad student is really tough, I say, oh, man, I loved it. It was just me having these coffee meetings with my advisors and my fellow graduate students and just talking about ideas and running studies. And then when I really think about it, I think, oh, yeah, there was a lot of misery. I just don't tend to remember the anxiety about whether my career was going in the right way. But if I go along and just don't try hard to remember those things, my memory is full of happy moments. Suppose if you're given two options. One is to have a bunch of negative events and a memory of a really positive overall life or a bunch of happy events and a memory of a really negative life. I think I'd go for the broader, the grander assessment of my life.
I share that intuition. But Gilbert's counterargument is that, well, that's just because right now, thinking back, you're being selfish and you want to sort of capture the feeling that you associate with accomplishment and success and leading a good life. And you're kind of being vicious to that part of your past that was just miserable. And so he says that, what if you spend 99% of your time lying in a pool, feeling nice and cool, relaxed, eating ice cream and just in this blissful state, and then each day, at the end of day, you think, my life is a failure. It's a mess. Okay? That's 1% of sadness versus 99% of happiness. You'd be a fool to give up that life.
Well, being called a fool by Dan Gilbert is probably something that has happened.
Before both of us personally. Probably. Dan's a very smart guy and a very sharp critic of our views.
He is. If I had to do the grunt work for 90% of my day and be miserable, but I could take a pill that wiped the memory and I only had this global evaluation that the work had been done, I would do it. Maybe I am being selfish to that.
90% grunt work guy or take another situation. And there's philosophical thought experiments. Here's a simpler version. Suppose you could be injected with a drug that gives you the feeling, same feeling you get from heroin. And for the rest of your life you'd be in kind of a quasi vegetative state, but feeling immense, unbearably, positive pleasure just a wash with joy. But as a vegetable, you'd have no relationships, you'd have no friendships, you'd have no accomplishments. Imagine you could live as long in this state as you would live right now. Would you choose it?
No, I would not.
Yeah, I wouldn't choose it either. But the hedonists would say, we're just making a mistake.
So let's talk a little bit about the various things that people think make a good life. You mentioned pleasure, and this was a debate early on in the philosophical treatment of utilitarianism as a theory. A utilitarian somebody who believes that we ought to maximize the good in people's lives. They have to come up with a definition of what they mean by good and the earliest attempts were just pleasure. This hedonic feeling. So giving everybody ecstasy all the time might be consistent with the goals of a particular kind of utilitarianism. But that was criticized. And so people say well, when we say the good, we mean a life full of meaning or one with good relationships, or one in which you accomplish goals that you set out for yourself, or one that satisfies your desires. And what those desires might be is something that you have to decide based on your values. There are a lot of things that might go into what makes a good life. Do you have a particular grand theory of what would make a good life?
I'm a pluralist here. In the previous book The Sweet Spot I defend the sort of pluralism where it says that there's many things we try to maximize and we shouldn't be forced to choose. There's a balance because sometimes they play off one another and people have to establish which ones to give priority to at different times. But we could, in the end, try to work on satisfying them all. There's a nice quote by the economist Tyler Cowan that I put into the Psych book and I'll just read this here because I really like this. What's good about an individual human life can't be boiled down to any single value. It's not all about beauty or all about justice or all about happiness. Pluralist theories are more plausible postulating a variety of relevant values, including human well being, justice, fairness, beauty, the artistic peaks of human achievement, the quality of mercy and the many different and indeed sometimes contrasting kinds of happiness. Life is complicated and I would fully buy into that.
I like that too. It does point to a bit of an ambiguity about the research on happiness. Using the word happiness to describe this body of research might be doing it a disservice because oftentimes
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