Thinking, Fast and Slow (62 page)

Choice and Consequence: Thomas Schelling,
Choice and Consequence
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).

misleading frame
: Richard P. Larrick and Jack B. Soll, “The MPG Illusion,”
Science
320 (2008): 1593–94.

rate of organ donation in European countries
: Eric J. Johnson and Daniel Goldstein, “Do Defaults Save Lives?”
Science
302 (2003): 1338–39.

35: Two Selves

“wantability”
: Irving Fisher, “Is ‘Utility’ the Most Suitable Term for the Concept It Is Used to Denote?”
American Economic Review
8 (1918): 335.

at any moment
: Francis Edgeworth,
Mathematical Psychics
(New York: Kelley, 1881).

under which his theory holds
: Daniel Kahneman, Peter P. Wakker, and Rakesh Sarin, “Back to Bentham? Explorations of Experienced Utility,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
112 (1997): 375–405. Daniel Kahneman, “Experienced Utility and Objective Happiness: A Moment-Based Approach” and “Evaluation by Moments: Past and Future,” in Kahneman and Tversky,
Choices, Values, and Frames
, 673–92, 693–708.

a physician and researcher
: Donald A. Redelmeier and Daniel Kahneman, “Patients’ Memories of Painful Medical Treatments: Real-time and Retrospective Evaluations of Two Minimally Invasive Procedures,”
Pain
66 (1996): 3–8.

free to choose
: Daniel Kahneman, Barbara L. Frederickson, Charles A. Schreiber, and Donald A. Redelmeier, “When More Pain Is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End,”
Psychological Science
4 (1993): 401–405.

duration of the shock
: Orval H. Mowrer and L. N. Solomon, “Contiguity vs. Drive-Reduction in Conditioned Fear: The Proximity and Abruptness of Drive Reduction,”
American Journal of Psychology
67 (1954): 15–25.

burst of stimulation
: Peter Shizgal, “On the Neural Computation of Utility: Implications from Studies of Brain Stimulation Reward,” in
Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology
, ed. Daniel Kahneman, Edward Diener, and Norbert Schwarz (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), 500–24.

36: Life as a Story

had a lover
: Paul Rozin and Jennifer Stellar, “Posthumous Events Affect Rated Quality and Happiness of Lives,”
Judgment and Decision Making
4 (2009): 273–79.

entire lives as well as brief episodes
: Ed Diener, Derrick Wirtz, and Shigehiro Oishi, “End Effects of Rated Life Quality: The James Dean Effect,”
Psychological Science
12 (2001): 124–28. The same series of experiments also tested for the peak-end rule in an unhappy life and found similar results: Jen was not judged twice as unhappy if she lived miserably for 60 years rather than 30, but { thk-e she was regarded as considerably happier if 5 mildly miserable years were added just before her death.

37: Experienced Well-Being

life as a whole these days
: Another question that has been used frequently is, “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days? Would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” This question is included in the General Social Survey in the United States, and its correlations with other variables suggest a mix of satisfaction and experienced happiness. A pure measure of life evaluation used in the Gallup surveys is the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale, in which the respondent rates his or her current life on a ladder scale in which 0 is “the worst possible life for you” and 10 is “the best possible life for you.” The language suggests that people should anchor on what they consider possible for them, but the evidence shows that people all over the world have a common standard for what a good life is, which accounts for the extraordinarily high correlation (
r
= .84) between the GDP of countries and the average ladder score of their citizens. Angus Deaton, “Income, Health, and Well-Being Around the World: Evidence from the Gallup World Poll,”
Journal of Economic Perspectives
22 (2008): 53–72.

“a dream team”
: The economist was Alan Krueger of Princeton, noted for his innovative analyses of unusual data. The psychologists were David Schkade, who had methodological expertise; Arthur Stone, an expert on health psychology, experience sampling, and ecological momentary assessment; Norbert Schwarz, a social psychologist who was also an expert on survey method and had contributed experimental critiques of well-being research, including the experiment on which a dime left on a copying machine influenced subsequent reports of life satisfaction.

intensity of various feelings
: In some applications, the individual also provides physiological information, such as continuous recordings of heart rate, occasional records of blood pressure, or samples of saliva for chemical analysis. The method is called Ecological Momentary Assessment: Arthur A. Stone, Saul S. Shiffman, and Marten W. DeVries, “Ecological Momentary Assessment Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology,” in Kahneman, Diener, and Schwarz,
Well-Being
, 26–39.

spend their time
: Daniel Kahneman et al., “A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day Reconstruction Method,”
Science
306 (2004): 1776–80. Daniel Kahneman and Alan B. Krueger, “Developments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-Being,”
Journal of Economic Perspectives
20 (2006): 3–24.

physiological indications of emotion
: Previous research had documented that people are able to “relive” feelings they had in a past situation when the situation is retrieved in sufficiently vivid detail. Michael D. Robinson and Gerald L. Clore, “Belief and Feeling: Evidence for an Accessibility Model of Emotional Self-Report,”
Psychological Bulletin
128 (2002): 934–60.

state the U-index
: Alan B. Krueger, ed.,
Measuring the Subjective Well-Being of Nations: National Accounts of Time Use and Well-Being
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

distributio {i>dll-Being
: Ed Diener, “Most People Are Happy,”
Psychological Science
7 (1996): 181–85.

Gallup World Poll
: For a number of years I have been one of several Senior Scientists associated with the efforts of the Gallup Organization in the domain of well-being.

more than 450,000 responses
: Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, “High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-Being,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
107 (2010): 16489–93.

worse for the very poor
: Dylan M. Smith, Kenneth M. Langa, Mohammed U. Kabeto, and Peter Ubel, “Health, Wealth, and Happiness: Financial Resources Buffer Subjective Well-Being After the Onset of a Disability,”
Psychological Science
16 (2005): 663–66.

$75,000 in high-cost areas
: In a TED talk I presented in February 2010 I mentioned a preliminary estimate of $60,000, which was later corrected.

eat a bar of chocolate!
: Jordi Quoidbach, Elizabeth W. Dunn, K. V. Petrides, and Moïra Mikolajczak, “Money Giveth, Money Taketh Away: The Dual Effect of Wealth on Happiness,”
Psychological Science
21 (2010): 759–63.

38: Thinking About Life

German Socio-Economic Panel
: Andrew E. Clark, Ed Diener, and Yannis Georgellis, “Lags and Leads in Life Satisfaction: A Test of the Baseline Hypothesis.” Paper presented at the German Socio-Economic Panel Conference, Berlin, Germany, 2001.

affective forecasting: Daniel T. Gilbert and Timothy D. Wilson, “Why the Brain Talks to Itself: Sources of Error in Emotional Prediction,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
364 (2009): 1335–41.

only significant fact in their life
: Strack, Martin, and Schwarz, “Priming and Communication.”

questionnaire on life satisfaction
: The original study was reported by Norbert Schwarz in his doctoral thesis (in German) “Mood as Information: On the Impact of Moods on the Evaluation of One’s Life” (Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 1987). It has been described in many places, notably Norbert Schwarz and Fritz Strack, “Reports of Subjective Well-Being: Judgmental Processes and Their Methodological Implications,” in Kahneman, Diener, and Schwarz,
Well-Being
, 61–84.

goals that young people set
: The study was described in William G. Bowen and Derek Curtis Bok,
The Shape of the River
:
Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Some of Bowen and Bok’s findings were reported by Carol Nickerson, Norbert Schwarz, and Ed Diener, “Financial Aspirations, Financial Success, and Overall Life Satisfaction: Who? and How?”
Journal of Happiness Studies
8 (2007): 467–515.

“being very well-off financially”
: Alexander Astin, M. R. King, and G. T. Richardson, “The American Freshman: National Norms for Fall 1976,” Cooperative Institutional Research Program of the American C {he on, Rouncil on Education and the University of California at Los Angeles, Graduate School of Education, Laboratory for Research in Higher Education, 1976.

money was not important
: These results were presented in a talk at the American Economic Association annual meeting in 2004. Daniel Kahneman, “Puzzles of Well-Being,” paper presented at the meeting.

happiness of Californians
: The question of how well people today can forecast the feelings of their descendants a hundred years from now is clearly relevant to the policy response to climate change, but it can be studied only indirectly, which is what we proposed to do.

aspects of their lives
: In posing the question, I was guilty of a confusion that I now try to avoid: Happiness and life satisfaction are not synonymous. Life satisfaction refers to your thoughts and feelings when you think about your life, which happens occasionally—including in surveys of well-being. Happiness describes the feelings people have as they live their normal life.

I had won the family argument
: However, my wife has never conceded. She claims that only residents of Northern California are happier.

students in California and in the Midwest
: Asian students generally reported lower satisfaction with their lives, and Asian students made up a much larger proportion of the samples in California than in the Midwest. Allowing for this difference, life satisfaction in the two regions was identical.

How much pleasure do you get from your car?
: Jing Xu and Norbert Schwarz have found that the quality of the car (as measured by Blue Book value) predicts the owners’ answer to a general question about their enjoyment of the car, and also predicts people’s pleasure during joyrides. But the quality of the car has no effect on people’s mood during normal commutes. Norbert Schwarz, Daniel Kahneman, and Jing Xu, “Global and Episodic Reports of Hedonic Experience,” in R. Belli, D. Alwin, and F. Stafford (eds.),
Using Calendar and Diary Methods in Life Events Research
(Newbury Park, CA: Sage), pp. 157–74.

paraplegics spend in a bad mood?
: The study is described in more detail in Kahneman, “Evaluation by Moments.”

think about their situation
: Camille Wortman and Roxane C. Silver, “Coping with Irrevocable Loss, Cataclysms, Crises, and Catastrophes: Psychology in Action,” American Psychological Association, Master Lecture Series 6 (1987): 189–235.

studies of colostomy patients
: Dylan Smith et al., “Misremembering Colostomies? Former P
atients Give Lower Utility Ratings than Do Current Patients,”
Health Psychology
25 (2006): 688–95. George Loewenstein and Peter A. Ubel, “Hedonic Adaptation and the Role of Decision and Experience Utility in Public Policy,”
Journal of Public Economics
92 (2008): 1795–1810.

the word
miswanting: Daniel Gilbert and Timothy D. Wilson, “Miswanting: Some Problems in Affective Forecasting,” in
Feeling and Thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition
, ed. Joseph P. Forgas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 178–97.

Conclusions

too important to be ignored
: Paul Dolan and Daniel Kahneman, “Interpretations of Utility and Their Implications for the Valuation of Health,”
Economic Journal
118 (2008): 215–234. Loewenstein and Ubel, “Hedonic Adaptation and the Role of Decision and Experience Utility in Public Policy.”

guide government policies
: Progress has been especially rapid in the UK, where the use of measures of well-being is now official government policy. These advances were due in good part to the influence of Lord Richard Layard’s book
Happiness: Lessons from a New
Science
, first published in 2005. Layard is among the prominent economists and social scientists who have been drawn into the study of well-being and its implications. Other important sources are: Derek Bok,
The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Ed Diener, Richard Lucus, Ulrich Schmimmack, and John F. Helliwell,
Well-Being for Public Policy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Alan B. Krueger, ed.,
Measuring the Subjective Well-Being of Nations: National Account of Time Use and Well-Being
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Joseph E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi,
Report of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress
. Paul Dolan, Richard Layard, and Robert Metcalfe,
Measuring Subjective Well-being for Public Policy: Recommendations on Measures
(London: Office for National Statistics, 2011).