Our “experiencing self” and our “remembering self” experience happiness differently. (Daniel Kahneman)
Now everyone is talking about happiness. I once asked one person to count all the books with the word «happiness» in the title published in the last 5 years, and he gave up after the 40th, but of course there were even more. The rise in interest in happiness is huge among researchers. There are many tutorials on this subject. Everyone wants to make people happier. But despite such an abundance of literature, there are some cognitive traps that practically do not allow you to think correctly about happiness. And my talk today will be mainly about these cognitive traps. This applies to ordinary people who think about their happiness, and to the same extent scientists who think about happiness, since it turns out that we are all equally confused.
The first of these pitfalls is an unwillingness to admit how complex the concept is. It turns out that the word «happiness» is no longer such a useful word, because we apply it to too many different things. I think that there is one specific meaning that we should limit ourselves to, but, in general, this is something that we will have to forget about and develop a more comprehensive view of what well-being is.
The second trap is the confusion of experience and memory: that is, between being happy in life and feeling happy about your life or feeling that life suits you. These are two completely different concepts, but both of them are usually combined into one concept of happiness.
And the third is the illusion of focus, and it’s a sad fact that we can’t think of any circumstance that affects our well-being without distorting its significance. This is the real cognitive trap. And there is simply no way to get it all right.
I would like to start with the example of a person who took part in a question and answer session after one of my lectures and told a story. He told how once he was listening to a symphony, and it was just amazing music, but at the very end of the recording there was a terrible grinding sound. And then he added, rather emotionally, that it spoiled the whole experience. But it’s not. This spoiled the memory of the experience. He experienced this experience. He experienced 20 minutes of great music. But they didn’t matter, because all that was left was his memory; the memory was corrupted, and the memory was the only thing he had left. And the implication from this, in fact, is that we may perceive ourselves and others through the prism of two selves. One is our experiencing self, the one who lives in the present moment, and knows only the present, and can experience past experience, but, in fact, has only the present. This is the experiencing self that the doctor refers to, you know, when he asks, «Does it hurt when I touch here?» And there is the remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that keeps the score and keeps the history of our lives, and this is the one that the doctor goes to with the question, «How have you been feeling lately?» or “How was your trip to Albania?” or something like that. These are two completely different entities, the experiencing self and the remembering self, and the confusion between them creates confusion with the concept of happiness.
The remembering self is the storyteller. And it starts with the basic response of our memories—it starts right away. We tell stories not only when we intend to tell them. Our memory tells us stories, everything we take away from our experience is history. And let me give you one example. This is one old study. Real patients undergo a painful procedure. I won’t go into details. It’s painless these days, but back then, in the 1990s, it was different.
They were asked to talk about their feelings every minute. Here are two patients. And their data. And you are asked: “Which of them suffered more?” And this is a very simple question. It is clear that Patient B suffered more. His colonoscopy was longer. And for every minute of pain that Patient A endured, Patient B also endured, plus extra time. But another question arises: “How much did the patients themselves think they suffered?” And here we are in for a surprise. It is that Patient A’s memories of colonoscopies are much worse than Patient B’s. The stories of these procedures varied, and because a very important part of them is how they end, and none of them are especially uplifting — but one one of them is definitely… (Laughter) but one of them is definitely worse than the other. And the one that is worse is the one that had the most pain at the end of the procedure. This is a bad story. How do we know this? Because we asked people after the colonoscopy and also much later. “How bad was it, overall?” And for A, it was much worse for memory than for B. And there is a direct conflict between the experiencing and remembering self. From the point of view of the experiencing self, it is obvious that Patient B had a more difficult experience. And now what can you try with patient A, and we actually did clinical studies and it worked, you can extend patient A’s colonoscopy by leaving the TUE inside but not moving it too much. This will give the patient discomfort, but not much pain, much less than before. And, if you do this for a couple of minutes, you will put patient A’s experiencing self in a worse position, but his remembering self much better, because now you have given patient A a better story about his experience.
What determines the overall tone of the story? And this applies to the stories that memory provides us with, as well as the stories we make up. History is defined by changes, significant moments and endings. The end is very, very important, and, in this case, the end was decisive. So, the experiencing self. It has moments of experience, one after another. And if you ask: what happens to these moments? The answer is very simple. They disappear forever. What I’m saying is that most of the moments of our lives — and I’ve calculated — you know, the psychological present lasts three seconds. Which means, imagine, there are about 600 million of them in their life. About 600 per month. Most of them leave no trace. Most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self. And yet, somehow, it seems that they should matter, that what happens during these moments is our life. It is a limited resource that we expend while we are on this earth. And how to spend it seems like an appropriate question, but that’s not the kind of story the remembering self keeps for us.
So we have a remembering self and an experiencing self, and they are indeed quite different from each other. Their biggest difference lies in their approach to time. From the perspective of the experiencing self, if you are on vacation and the second week of your trip is as good as the first, then a two-week trip should be twice as good as a one-week trip. But for the remembering I, it works differently. For the remembering self, a two-week trip is hardly better than a one-week trip because no new experiences are added. History does not change. And in this perspective, time is the critical variable that distinguishes the remembering self from the experiencing self. Time has little effect on this story. In addition, the remembering self does more than memorize and tell stories. It’s really the decision maker, because if you have a patient who’s had, say, two colonoscopies by two different surgeons and decides which one to choose, in that case the choice will fall on the one who has the least negative memory. , which surgeon he will choose. The testing self has no voice in this choice. We are not really choosing between two experiences. We choose between two memories of experience. And even when we think about the future, we don’t usually think of our future as an experience. We think of our future as a cherished memory. And, you know, in general, you can look at this as the tyranny of the remembering Self, and you can say that the remembering Self is dragging the experiencing Self through the experience that the experiencing Self does not need. I have a feeling that when we go on vacation, it often happens that we go on vacation, in large part to please our remembering selves. And it’s a bit hard to justify that, I guess. I mean, how often do we then return to our memories? This is one of the explanations that are given for the dominance of the remembering self. And when I think about it, I think about a vacation when we went to Antarctica a few years ago, which was definitely my best trip, and I think about it often enough, relatively how rarely I think about other trips. I may have been revisiting my memories of that three week trip, I would say, for about 25 minutes over the past four years. Also, if I ever opened a folder with 600 photos, I would waste another hour. And now it’s three weeks and a maximum of an hour and a half. It would seem that there is a discrepancy here. And I may be an uncharacteristic case, because I have a very weak appetite for memories, but even if you do this more than I do, a sincere question arises. Why do we place such a high value on memory compared to the value of experience?
So, I want you to think about a thought experiment. Imagine your next vacation trip. And imagine that you know that at the end of it all your photos will be destroyed and you will take an amnesiac so that you will not remember anything. Well, would you still choose the same trip? (Laughter) And if you chose the other way, there is a conflict between your two selves, and you have to think about how to resolve it, and it’s actually far from easy, because if you think through the prism of time, one answer. And if through the prism of memory — the answer is different. Why we choose certain trips is a problem that confronts us with a choice between two selves. Further, two I entail two concepts of happiness. There are indeed two conceptions of happiness that we can use, each for its respective self. How happy is the experiencing self, you ask? And then: how happy are the moments in the life of the experiencing self? And all this — happiness for the moments is a rather complicated process. What are the feelings that can be measured? And, by the way, we are now in a position to understand quite tolerably the idea of the happiness of the experiencing self in time. If you ask about the happiness of the remembering self, it is something completely different. It’s not how happy someone lives. It’s about how satisfied or satisfied a person is when they think about their life. Very different concepts. Anyone who does not distinguish between the two is sure to get confused in understanding happiness, and I myself am one of those well-being students who have been confused in the study of happiness in this way for quite some time. The distinction between the happiness of the experiencing self and the satisfaction of the remembering self was made not so long ago, and now attempts are being made to measure both states separately, Gallup conducted an international survey in which half a million people took part and answered questions about what they think about their life and their experience. In addition, other attempts are being made. So, recently we have begun to study happiness through the prism of two selves. And the main lesson, I think, that we have learned is that they are really very different from each other. You can know how satisfied someone is with their life, but that doesn’t give you an idea of how happy they are living their life, and vice versa. Just to give you an idea of the ratio, the ratio is about ½. What does it mean if you met someone and were told that their father was six feet tall, how much would you know about his own height? That is, you would learn something about his height, but the uncertainty here is very large. Exactly the same amount of uncertainty you will have if I tell you that someone gave themselves an 8 out of 10 point scale, evaluating their life, there is a lot of uncertainty about how happy they are from the point of view of the experiencing self. So the ratio is extremely low. We know something about what controls satisfaction with happiness for the self. We know that money is important, goals are very important. We know that happiness often comes from satisfying the people we like by spending time with them. There are other pleasures, but these are the most important.
My main point is that we should not perceive happiness as a substitute for well-being. This is a completely different concept. And now, very quickly, another reason why we can’t clearly understand happiness is that we pay attention to different things when we think about life and when we actually live it. So if you ask how happy people are in California, you won’t get the right answer. When you ask this question, you think that people there should be happier if, say, you live in Ohio. (Laughter) And what happens is, when you think about life in California, you think about the contrast between it and other places, and the difference, for example, in climate. But it turns out that climate is not particularly important to the experiencing self, and not even particularly important to the reflective self, which decides how happy a person is. But now, as the reflective self takes over the reins, the result may be—for some people—a move to California. And it’s quite interesting to see what happens to people who go there in the hope of becoming happier. Well, the experiencing self will not be any happier. We know this for sure. But here’s what will happen. They will consider themselves happier because when they think about it, they will remember the terrible weather in Ohio. And they think they made the right decision. It is very difficult to think unambiguously about well-being, and I hope that I have conveyed to you how difficult it is. Thank you.
(Applause)
Chris Anderson: Thank you. I have a question for you. Thank you very much. When we spoke on the phone a few weeks ago, you mentioned a rather interesting result obtained by Gallup. Can you tell us a little about it since you still have some time left?
Daniel Kahneman: Of course. I think the most interesting result of this survey was a number that we never expected to get. We received it in connection with the happiness of the experiencing self. When we traced how feelings vary depending on income, it turned out that if the income is below 60 dollars a year, for Americans, and the segment there is quite large — about 000, but this is a large segment of representatives, with an income of less than 600 dollars a year …
Chris Anderson: 60.
Daniel Kahneman: 60.
Audience: (Laughter)
Daniel Kahneman: $60 a year, people are miserable, and the poorer they are, the more miserable they are. But everything above this figure — we get an absolutely even straight line. Seriously, I’ve rarely seen charts so straight forward. So it’s obvious that money doesn’t buy you empirical happiness, but a lack of it absolutely leads to unhappiness, and we can measure it very, very clearly. As for the second self, remembering, the situation is different. The higher the income, the greater the satisfaction. It’s not about feelings.
Chris Anderson: But Danny, all American aspirations are about life, freedom, the pursuit of happiness. If this discovery is taken seriously, it will turn on its head everything we believe in, such as the taxation system and so on. Is it likely that government officials, the country as a whole, will take such a study seriously and follow a social policy based on it?
Daniel Kahneman: You know, there is official recognition of research on the role of happiness in social policy. It’s slowly happening in the US, no doubt, but it’s happening in the UK and elsewhere. People are realizing that they have to take happiness into account when they think about social policy. This will take a long time, and people will argue about whether they want to explore empirical happiness or measure quality of life, so we’ll need to discuss that soon enough. How to Increase Happiness This can happen in different ways depending on your way of thinking, and whether you are thinking about the remembering self or the experiencing self. This will have policy implications. In the coming years, I think. In the United States, attempts are being made to measure the level of empirical happiness of the population. I think within the next decade or two it will become part of the national statistics.
Chris Anderson: Well, I think this issue will be, or at least should be, the most interesting political discussion in the next few years. Thank you so much for discovering behavioral economics. Thank you Danny Kahneman.