Diving for Clams (research series)

Happy people know what they want, but they are not ambitious. They are not the people who build civilizations.  - Susan Greenfield, Pharmacologist, Oxford University

The experiments I am helping to conduct here deal with happiness in some form or another. To my surprise, one experiment I have been invited to assist with is a replication and expansion of a famous 1978 experiment titled "Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?" This study tried to determine how the happiness reported by recent lottery winners differed from that reported by recently paralyzed individuals. I'd like to briefly share the results of this and other studies I liked, as the findings will certainly affect how I choose to spend the rest of my life. And maybe they will affect how you choose too :)

Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?
On a regular day, we predict that winning the lottery will make us very happy - probably forever - and we predict that becoming paralyzed will make us very unhappy - probably forever. But this is found not to be the case.
The reported levels of happiness of three groups - lottery winners, non-winners (regular people), and paralyzed individuals - were evaluated. Surprisingly, the reported happiness between lottery winners and paralyzed individuals did not differ as much as anyone expected after a period of time. And when the reported happiness of lottery winners was compared to that of non-lottery winners (i.e. me and probably you), there was no significant difference. Why is there little or no difference? Because the brain adapts to the circumstance. Good things and bad things happen to us and they make us happy and unhappy respectively - but these effects don't last long. In our minds, we overestimate the consequences of both conditions because we fail to account for own adaptation to the condition. We eventually adapt and return to our previous level of happiness. This is sometimes referred to in psychology as the "hedonic treadmill".

High Income Improves Evaluation of Life, but not Emotional Well-Being
This is a recent study done by Daniel Kahneman, a nobel-prize winning psychologist at Princeton University. After studying the surveys of over 450,000 people, it was found that emotional well-being (the key to a happy life) DOES increase with higher income... but only up to $75,000 a year. Damn. And that's per household, not individually. Damn, again. Incomes higher than 75k did not increase emotional well-being. So in essence, to reach our optimum level of happiness, it appears that we don't need to make more than $75,000 per year. That brings up a juicy question - why do we *think* that making more than that will make us happier?

Decisions and Revisions: The affective forecasting of changeable outcomes
Participants were asked to take photos of the surrounding area (Harvard campus) and choose their 2 favorite photographs. Half of the participants were told that they could keep 1 of the 2 photographs, and that their choice was final and could not be changed. The other half of the participants were told that they had a few days in which they could change their minds and exchange their selected photograph for the other photograph. Many participants who had the option to exchange their photograph did so, and reported less satisfaction with the photograph they initially chose. The other participants who could not exchange their initial choice, reported a drastically higher level of satisfaction with the photograph they were "stuck" with. We believe that it's better to have more choices, but more choices don't seem to lead to greater happiness. More choices may even lead to the opposite: less happiness. The mind will adapt, conform, and be satisfied with the current circumstance if you let it - that is, if you choose to be content with what you have.

Maximizing Versus Satisficing: Happiness Is a Matter of Choice
Are you a maximizer - someone who tries to make the best possible choice among a set of possible options, such as reading tons of reviews before making a purchase - or a satisficer - someone who, when presented with a set of possible options, makes a choice without much deliberation or, rather, a choice that is simply good enough? This study revealed that maximization had low correlations with happiness, optimism, self-esteem, and life-satisfaction; and instead, the correlations it did have were with depression, perfectionism, self-blame, and regret. Satisficing, therefore, seems to promote greater levels of happiness than maximizing.
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So, where do these results leave us? Somewhere pretty weird. Our society (referring to societies in North America and Western Europe) lead us to believe that success (like winning the lottery) makes us happy, that money (above $75,000 per year) makes us happy, that having numerous options (and the ability to change our minds about a chosen option) makes us happy, and that making the best possible choice (maximizing an outcome) makes us happy - but apparently, none of these things do. So what now? If this is all true, then how should we live our lives? If we honestly believe that the "pursuit" of happiness is the best possible way of spending our time on this planet, recent psychological findings should lead us to abandon, or at the very least make us question, our collective fundamental beliefs of where happiness is found.

This is no small matter. Based on the 4 studies I mention above, along with a litany of other studies that replicate and support these findings, we, as a society, appear to have boarded the wrong happiness train. If I told you that happiness was located in an eagle's nest at the top of the Himalayas, we're currently diving for clams in the Mariana Trench. The bottom line is that many of our long-held and intimate perceptions may very well be wrong and worthy of lengthy reevaluation. The question remains though, what do we do with this new information?