Quitting (previously published as Mastering the Art of Quitting) (10 page)

When we think about how happy a future event will make us—say, getting married or having a baby—our imaginings are oversimplified as well, especially when it comes to the details that will evoke emotion. You're imagining yourself, serene in your white dress, on the day you've dreamed about, with your guy waiting for you at the altar. What you're not anticipating is the groomsman's boorish toast, the way your about-to-be sister-in-law is making snide remarks about everything, and the like. You catch our drift?

The other problem is that people also tend to oversimplify and overestimate how they imagine themselves reacting to a future, hypothetical situation. Our projections of how we will act and what we will feel are often very different from what will actually transpire when and if the situation does arise. Our predictions are aided and abetted by the above-average effect. When we look into the future, we fully expect that our most admirable (and most above-average) self will show up, as a fascinating study on sexual harassment showed.

Researchers Julia Woodzicka and Marianne LaFrance first asked
197 women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one how they would react if a male interviewer, age thirty-two, asked them the following questions during a job interview for a research assistant position: (1) Do you have a boyfriend? (2) Do people find you desirable? (3) Do you think it is important for women to wear bras to work? (Women readers might want to ask themselves how they would respond to the interviewer. Men might want to consider it as well.)

Not surprisingly, 62 percent of the women imagined taking the interviewer on—either confronting him about why he was asking or telling him the question was out of line. Of the respondents, 28 percent said they'd either walk out or confront the interviewer. And 68 percent asserted that they would refuse to answer at least one of the questions. Most of the women said they would be angry
or enraged if they found themselves in this situation; only 2 percent thought they would be afraid.

The researchers then created a lab setting with an actual interview, with the participants believing they were really up for a research position. The three questions used in the theoretical experiment were used for half of the participants. The control group was asked strange and rather random questions, but ones that weren't harassing: (1) Do you have a best friend? (2) Do people find you morbid? (3) Do you think it important for people to believe in God?

The difference between how women imagined themselves reacting in a harassing scenario and how they actually reacted was remarkable. Every woman answered every question. Not one woman walked out. None of them confronted the interviewer—or even told him that “it was none of his business.” In fact, 52 percent of the women ignored the harassing nature of the questions; they simply answered them without comment. Although 36 percent of the women did ask why the question or questions were being posed, 80 percent of those who asked only did so at the very end of the interview, not when the question was being asked. Most important, while the women imagining the situation said they'd be angry, only 16 percent of the women thrust into the situation were. But 40 percent of them did feel afraid.

This experiment underscores why it's relatively easy to predict how we will react emotionally to an uncomplicated event (“I got an A in chemistry” or “I flunked my English exam”) but much more difficult when we are predicting a more complicated, more emotionally nuanced life situation. Presumably how students reacted was influenced by their desire for the research position (they thought it was real, after all), their need to please, perhaps their own temerity or insecurity, or any number of other things that—in the course of life—produce a very different emotional state from the one we've predicted for ourselves. Other studies confirm much the same thing.

The problem with tomorrow, after all, is that we haven't been there yet. This explains why the scenarios we have in our heads as we contemplate quitting or other stressful moments of decision
may not play out the way we anticipate and may make us feel disappointed in ourselves. It also explains our general tendencies to second-guess ourselves.

According to Wilson and Gilbert, in addition to overestimating the impact of future events on their lives, people don't have a bead on how long their emotions will last. Taken together, this phenomenon is called
the
impact bias
. Wilson and Gilbert argue that “people make sense of their worlds in a way that speeds recovery from emotional events and that this sense-making process is largely automatic and unconscious. Humans inexorably explain and understand events that were initially surprising and unpredictable and this process lowers the intensity of emotional reaction to the event.” There's both good and bad news here. Let's consider the bad news first.

The bad news is that people overestimate how long a wished-for result or event will actually make them happy. The goal could be making partner or getting a promotion or numerous other events. The stress and anxiety you feel as you inch toward your goal make you absolutely sure that once you achieve the goal, you will be happy for a long, long time. But unfortunately, the extraordinary moment—the one you've dreamed of—becomes, in time, part of the ordinary scheme of things and thus rarely delivers the lasting cascade of happiness you were anticipating.

The good news, though, is that people also overestimate how long a dreaded event will make them unhappy. While the good stuff doesn't keep us happy for as long as we anticipate, the bad stuff won't keep us down for as long as we think, either. Most of you reading this page will remember a time in your life when you were recovering from one loss or another—it could be in any area of life. You may remember thinking, “I'll never get over this,” or “I'll never be happy again.” But you were happy again, weren't you? This is a function of what Wilson and Gilbert call
“the psychological immune system,”
which works to ameliorate the impact of negative information, again on a largely unconscious basis. Our psychological defenses help us feel better by making sense of a negative event
and by restructuring our thoughts about it (put plainly, rationalizing it). The system defends us more completely if we're unaware we're doing it.

Here's an example of how this works. It's similar to one that Wilson and Gilbert use. Say you've been unceremoniously dumped by a lover or spouse. At first, everything you remember about him or her is lovable and excruciatingly painful. But then, other, much more negative details and memories begin to fill in the empty space: the way he always took slugs directly out of the juice container, or the endless clutter of her makeup by the sink; his penchant for controlling a conversation, or her inability to be on time; or how he'd suddenly fly off the handle for no apparent reason, or her habit of constantly interrupting. You get the picture.

The genius of this kind of self-protection is that we're not consciously aware that we're doing it. The person who has spurned you hasn't changed, of course; you've just adapted your mental image of him or her. So too the awful humiliation of being fired by the boss without warning is replaced by the recognition that the guy was a jerk, the job was enormously boring, and the company dysfunctional anyway.

What remains is the question of what possible evolutionary advantage there is to having such an imprecise notion of what will make us happy. (Gilbert's own book is called
Stumbling on Happiness
for a reason.)

About Positive Thinking

Paradoxically, while positive thinking and an optimistic outlook has been shown to have many benefits—people who think positively tend to be motivated and perform better than those who approach goal-related tasks with a negative point of view—some forms of positive thinking actually work to a person's detriment. Before you're tempted to toss your entire shelf of self-help books out the window—along with all of those affirmations you've been
faithfully reciting all these years and your library of inspirational quotes—there's an important distinction to be made.

In an important series of experiments,
psychologists Lauren B. Alloy and Lyn Y. Abramson
showed that depressed students' view of the amount of control they had over an outcome was more accurate than that of their nondepressed counterparts, who were not just more optimistic but overestimated the amount of agency and control they had. Participants were asked to press (or to refrain from pressing) a button and then to observe whether a green light went on. They were then asked to estimate the amount of control—expressed as a percentage—they had over the light's going on. The truth was that the light was actually being manipulated by an experimenter. But that didn't stop some of the participants from inferring a sense of their own agency from the results.

Alloy and Abramson found that depressed students were more likely to gauge accurately how their actions affected the outcome; nondepressed participants, on the other hand, were more likely to overstate their own agency. These 1979 findings—and what has come to be called
depressive realism
—have been hotly debated in psychological circles ever since, as they are out of sync with the prevailing understanding of depressives as distorting reality since they view the world and events in it through a negative lens. Without taking sides in the debate, what's pertinent to our discussion is that, generally, healthy people tend toward overoptimism (sometimes referred to as
optimistic bias
) when it comes to goals and achievements. The takeaway lesson here is that while positive thinking is, in some instances, useful, it isn't
always
a trusty ally.

The Zen of Expectation

All over America, every day and every week, millions line up to buy a lottery ticket. Women and men, young and old, of every race and creed, well-off and struggling, buy tickets alone or in groups. The New York State Lottery's motto is “Hey, You Never Know,” and it
seems that many people agree with that statement (yes, it's the availability heuristic at work). So they play lucky or random numbers, birthdays, and secret combinations all in the hopes that “today will be my lucky day.” The irony, of course, is that people who win the lottery are rarely happier than they were the day they bought the ticket. That's the problem with “tomorrow” again and the ability to forecast the future; people don't forecast the moochers who'll come out of the woodwork, the long-lost relatives or so-called friends begging for a piece, the advisors who will prey on their financial ignorance, the need to move or get an unlisted phone to live a normal, hassle-free life. Worse still, even when none of that awfulness happened, the winners' experience of ordinary pleasures was also diminished.
As Timothy D. Wilson writes
, after citing study after study that shows the sorry truth about most lottery winners, “if people knew that winning the lottery would not make them any happier and might even cause substantial misery, they might think twice before plunking down their hard-earned dollars for lottery tickets.” (The people who do best with lottery winnings are those who had money, along with investment experience, to begin with and didn't need the lottery to make their dreams come true.)

So if winning the lottery is a pipe dream, what's the difference between a pipe dream and the expectation of a bright future? (The word
pipe dream
came into the American lexicon in the nineteenth century, when smoking opium and the resulting hallucinations were all the rage.) Are all daydreams created equal? Is there a distinction between a possibly inspiring daydream and pure fantasy?

It won't come as a huge surprise that this is a pertinent question both for setting goals and for deciding when and whether to quit them. The guy who dreams about fame and writing the Great American Novel but never writes a word is an easy one to label. But what about the twenty-nine-year-old, stay-at-home mother of three who hadn't written a word since college but who woke up from a dream filled with a cast of characters she couldn't get out of her head? Pipe dream?

Even she had her doubts:
“Though I had a million things to do
, I stayed in bed, thinking about the dream. Unwillingly, I
eventually got up and did the immediate necessities and then put everything that I possibly could on the back burner and sat down at the computer to write—something I hadn't done in so long that I wondered why I was bothering.” By her own account, she wasn't writing for any other audience but herself; she wanted to know how the story came out. But something else happened; she discovered writing made her happy: “Once I got started within that day, I was completely hooked on writing and this was something brand new to me.” She then did a reality check on how she could make this work, along with taking care of her kids.

She finished the manuscript and sent out fifteen letters to literary agents. She was turned down by nine of them and didn't even hear from five. But she did hear back from one agent, who was enthusiastic. Was it a pipe dream or a possibility? Does the result determine which it is?

Not surprisingly, psychologists have tried to answer that question. Dreaming is, after all, a part of setting goals; if you can't imagine or dream it, you can't go after it. But what kind of expectations about tomorrow—remember that Dan Gilbert tells us that we spend one hour out of every eight thinking about tomorrow—ensure success?
Psychologists Gabriele Oettingen and Doris Mayer distinguish between
beliefs about the future (expectations) and images depicting future events (fantasies). Expectations rely on past performance to evaluate the future; fantasies, on the other hand, bear little relationship to past events and usually picture that rosy future as progressing smoothly and effortlessly. Moreover, a fantasy has you enjoying the fruits of the future in the here and now; you aren't thinking about the many hours of work it will take you to actually finish that novel or worrying that you might fail at the effort because there just aren't enough hours in the day or you simply don't have the talent. Instead, your thought process cuts right to seeing your name at the top of the best-seller list or, better still, walking the red carpet when your novel is made into the hit movie of the year.