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Antes de contestar a esta aparentemente sencilla pregunta, mediten con un par de minutos con calma y después vean la siguiente charla del psicólogo y premio Nobel de Economía Daniel Kahneman porque muy probablemente se sorprenderán de la verdadera respuesta.
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00:00Everybody talks about happiness these days.
00:03I had somebody count the number of books with happiness in the title published in the last five years,
00:09and they gave up after about 40, and there were many more.
00:14There is a huge wave of interest in happiness among researchers.
00:19There is a lot of happiness coaching.
00:21Everybody would like to make people happier.
00:24But in spite of all this flood of work, there are several cognitive traps that sort of make it almost
00:31impossible to think straight about happiness,
00:33and my talk today will be mostly about these cognitive traps.
00:37This applies to lay people thinking about their own happiness, and it applies to scholars thinking about happiness
00:43because it turns out we're just as messed up as anybody else's.
00:47The first of these traps is a reluctance to admit complexity.
00:51It turns out that the word happiness is just not a useful word anymore because we apply it to too
00:59many different things.
01:01I think there is one particular meaning to which we might restrict it, but by and large,
01:06this is something that we'll have to give up, and we'll have to adopt a more complicated view of what
01:12well-being is.
01:13The second trap is a confusion between experience and memory.
01:17Basically, it's between being happy in your life and being happy about your life or happy with your life,
01:24and those are two very different concepts, and they're both lumped in the notion of happiness.
01:29And the third is it's the focusing illusion, and it's the unfortunate fact that we can't think about any circumstance
01:36that affects well-being
01:37without distorting its importance.
01:40I mean, this is a real cognitive trap.
01:42There's just no way of getting it right.
01:45Now, I'd like to start with an example of somebody who had a question-and-answer session after one of
01:54my lectures reported a story,
01:56and that was a story.
01:57He said he had been listening to a symphony, and it was absolutely glorious music,
02:03and at the very end of the recording, there was a dreadful screeching sound.
02:08And then he added, really quite emotionally, it ruined the whole experience, but it hadn't.
02:17What it had ruined was the memory of the experience.
02:20He had had the experience.
02:21He had had 20 minutes of glorious music.
02:24They counted for nothing because he was left with a memory, the memory was ruined,
02:29and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep.
02:33What this is telling us, really, is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other people in terms
02:39of two selves.
02:41There is an experiencing self who lives in the present and knows the present.
02:48It's capable of reliving the past, but basically it has only the present.
02:52It's the experiencing self that the doctor approaches.
02:55Because, you know, when the doctor asks, does it hurt now when I touch you here?
03:00And then there is a remembering self.
03:03And the remembering self is the one that keeps core and maintains the story of our life,
03:09and it's the one that the doctor approaches in asking the question,
03:17how have you been feeling lately?
03:19Or how was your trip to Albania?
03:20Or something like that.
03:21Those are two very different entities, the experiencing self and the remembering self.
03:27And getting confused between them is part of the mess about the notion of happiness.
03:33Now, the remembering self is a storyteller.
03:39And that really starts with a basic response of our memory.
03:44It starts immediately.
03:45We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories.
03:48Our memory tells us stories.
03:51That is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.
03:55And let me begin with one example.
04:00This is an old study.
04:02Those are actual patients undergoing a painful procedure.
04:05I won't go into detail.
04:06It's no longer painful these days, but it was painful when this study was run in the 1990s.
04:13They're asked to report on their pain every 60 seconds.
04:16And here are two patients.
04:18Those are their recordings.
04:20And you are asked, who of them suffered more?
04:23And it's a very easy question.
04:25I mean, clearly, patient B suffered more.
04:27His colonoscopy was longer.
04:29And every minute of pain that patient A had, patient B had, and more.
04:35But now there is another question.
04:37How much did these patients think they suffered?
04:40And here is a surprise.
04:43And the surprise is that patient A had a much worse memory of the colonoscopy than patient B.
04:50The stories of the colonoscopies were different.
04:53And because a very critical part of the story is how it ends.
04:59And neither of these stories is very inspiring or great, but one of them is distinctly worse than the other.
05:09And the one that is worse is the one where pain was at its peak at the very end.
05:15It's a bad story.
05:16How do we know that?
05:17Because we asked these people after their colonoscopy, and much later too, how bad was the whole thing in total?
05:25And it was much worse for A than for B in memory.
05:29Now, this is a direct conflict between the experiencing self and the remembering self.
05:34From the point of view of the experiencing self, clearly B had a worse time.
05:38Now, what you could do with patient A, and we actually ran clinical experiments, and it has been done, and
05:46it does work.
05:47You could actually extend the colonoscopy of patient A by just keeping the tube in without jiggling it too much.
05:54That will cause the patient to suffer, but just a little, and much less than before.
06:02And if you do that for a couple of minutes, you have made the experiencing self of patient A worse
06:08off, and you have made the remembering self of patient A a lot better off.
06:13Because now you have endowed patient A with a better story about his experience.
06:21What defines a story?
06:24And that is true of the stories that memory delivers for us, and it's also true of the stories that
06:30we make up.
06:30What defines a story are changes, significant moments, and endings.
06:37Endings are very, very important.
06:39And in this case, you know, the ending dominated.
06:43Now, the experiencing self lives its life continuously.
06:48It has moments of experience, one after the other.
06:52And you can ask, what happens to these moments?
06:55And the answer is really straightforward.
06:57They are lost forever.
06:58I mean, most of the moments of our life, and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to
07:04be about three seconds long.
07:06That means that, you know, in a life, there are about 600 million of them.
07:10In a month, there are about 600,000.
07:13Most of them don't leave a trace.
07:16Most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self.
07:20And yet, somehow, you get the sense that they should count, that what happens during these moments of experience is
07:28our life.
07:29It's the finite resource that we're spending while we are on this earth.
07:34And how to spend it would seem to be relevant.
07:37But that is not the story that our remembering self keeps for us.
07:41So we have the remembering self and the experiencing self.
07:46And they're really quite distinct.
07:48The biggest difference between them is in the handling of time.
07:53From the point of view of the experiencing self, if you have a vacation and the second week is just
07:59as good as the first,
08:01then the two-week vacation is twice as good as the one-week vacation.
08:06That's not the way it works at all for the remembering self.
08:09For the remembering self, the two-week vacation is barely better than the one-week vacation because there are no
08:15new memories added.
08:16You have not trained the story.
08:19And in this way, time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes our remembering self from our experiencing self.
08:29Time has very little impact on the story.
08:34Now, the remembering self does more than remember and tell stories.
08:39It is actually the one that makes decisions.
08:42Because if you have a patient who has had, say, two colonoscopies with two different surgeons and is deciding which
08:50of them to choose,
08:51then the one that chooses is the one that has the memory that is less bad.
08:57And that's the surgeon that will be chosen.
09:00The experiencing self has no voice in this choice.
09:05We actually don't choose between experiences.
09:08We choose between memories of experiences.
09:10And even when we think about the future, we don't think of our future normally as experiences.
09:17We think of our future as anticipated memories.
09:22And basically, you can look at this, you know, as a tyranny of the remembering self.
09:26And you can think of the remembering self sort of dragging the experiencing self through experiences that the experiencing self
09:34doesn't need.
09:34I have that sense that when we go on vacations, this is very frequently the case.
09:40That is, that it's, we go on vacations to a very large extent in the service of our remembering self.
09:48And this is a bit hard to justify, I think.
09:51I mean, how much do we consume our memories?
09:54That is one of the explanations that is given for the dominance of the remembering self.
09:59And when I think about that, I think about a vacation we had in Antarctica a few years ago, which
10:04was clearly the best vacation I've ever had.
10:07And I think of it relatively often relative to how much I think of other vacations.
10:12And I probably have consumed my memories of that three-week trip, I would say, for about 25 minutes in
10:19the last four years.
10:21Now, you know, if I had ever opened the folder with the 600 pictures in it, I would have spent
10:27another hour.
10:28Now, that is three weeks, and that is at most an hour and a half.
10:33There seems to be a discrepancy.
10:35Now, I may be a bit extreme, you know, in how little appetite I have for consuming memories.
10:40But even if you do more of this, there is a genuine question.
10:46Why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the weight that we put on experiences?
10:53So, I want you to think about a thought experiment.
10:57Imagine that for your next vacation, you know that at the end of the vacation, all your pictures will be
11:04destroyed,
11:05and you'll get an amnesic drug so that you won't remember anything.
11:09Now, would you choose the same vacation?
11:14And if you would choose a different vacation, there is a conflict between your two selves.
11:21And you need to think about how to adjudicate that conflict, and it's actually not at all obvious.
11:26Because if you think in terms of time, then you get one answer.
11:32And if you think in terms of memories, you might get another answer.
11:37Why do we pick the vacations we do is a problem that confronts us, you know, with a choice between
11:44the two selves.
11:45Now, the two selves bring up two notions of happiness.
11:51There are really two concepts of happiness that we can apply, one per self.
11:56And so, you can ask how happy is the experiencing self.
12:00And then you would ask how happy are the moments in the experiencing self's life.
12:05And there are happiness for moments is a fairly complicated process.
12:10What are the emotions that can be measured?
12:12And by the way, now we are capable of getting a pretty good idea of the happiness of the experiencing
12:20self over time.
12:22If you ask for the happiness of the remembering self, it's a completely different thing.
12:27This is not about how happily a person lives.
12:30It is about how satisfied or pleased the person is when that person thinks about her life.
12:38Very different notions.
12:40Anyone who doesn't distinguish those notions is going to mess up the study of happiness.
12:45And I belong to a crowd of students of well-being who have been messing up the study of happiness
12:50for a long time in precisely this way.
12:53The distinction between the happiness of the experiencing self and the satisfaction of the remembering self
13:00has been recognized in recent years.
13:03And there are now efforts to measure the two separately.
13:06The Gallup organization has a world poll where more than half a million people have been asked questions
13:12about what they think of their life and about their experiences.
13:17And there have been other efforts along those lines.
13:20So, in recent years, we have begun to learn about the happiness of the two cells.
13:25And the main lesson, I think, that we have learned is that they are really different.
13:31You can know how satisfied somebody is with their life.
13:35And that really doesn't teach you much about how happily they are living their life and vice versa.
13:42You know, just to give you a sense of the correlation.
13:45The correlation is about 0.5.
13:47What that means is if you met somebody and you were told, oh, his father is six feet tall,
13:53how much would you know about his height?
13:55Well, you would know something about his height, but there's a lot of uncertainty.
13:59You have that much uncertainty.
14:01If I tell you that somebody ranked their life eight on a scale of 10, you have a lot of
14:07uncertainty
14:07about how happy they are with their experiencing self.
14:11So, the correlation is low.
14:13We know something about what controls satisfaction of the happiness self.
14:18We know that money is very important.
14:21Goals are very important.
14:22We know that happiness is mainly being satisfied with people that we like, spending time with people that we like.
14:32There are other pleasures, but this is dominant.
14:35So, if you want to maximize the happiness of the two cells, you are going to end up doing very
14:40different things.
14:41The bottom line of what I've said here is that we really should not think of happiness as a substitute
14:49for well-being.
14:50It is a completely different notion.
14:54Now, very quickly, another reason we cannot think straight about happiness is that we do not attend to the same
15:06things
15:06when we think about life and we actually live.
15:09So, if you ask the simple question of how happy people are in California, you are not going to get
15:16to the correct answer.
15:18When you ask that question, you think people must be happier in California if, say, you live in Ohio.
15:26And what happens is when you think about living in California, you are thinking of the contrast between California and
15:35other places.
15:37And that contrast stays in climate.
15:40Well, it turns out that climate is not very important to the experiencing self.
15:44And it is not even very important to the reflective self that decides how happy people are.
15:50But now, because the reflective self is in charge, you may end up, some people may end up moving to
15:58California.
15:59And it is sort of interesting to trace what is going to happen to people who move to California in
16:03the hope of getting happier.
16:04Well, their experiencing self is not going to get happier.
16:09We know that.
16:11But one thing will happen.
16:13They will think they are happier.
16:15Because when they think about it, they'll be reminded of how horrible the weather was in Ohio.
16:22And they will feel they made the right decision.
16:25It is very difficult to think straight about well-being.
16:30And I hope I have given you a sense of how...
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