Description: People associate my name with the work on affective forecasting through bringing together the facts that my laboratory and hundreds of others in psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics have discovered and melding them into a single story about the nature of happiness. Affective forecasting is the process by which people look into their future and make predictions about what they’ll like and what they won’t like.

Question: Affective Forecasting

Transcript: it’s easy to be the world’s foremost authority on affective forecasting when you make up the term yourself. Affective forecasting, which is what I spend most of my time studying these days, is the process by which people look into their future and make predictions about what they’ll like and what they won’t like. And when you make decisions – whether they’re large ones about to marry Jim or Charlie, to move to Anchorage or Cleveland . . . or small ones like whether to have a donut or a croissant, or you know, wear the read blouse or the green blouse – all of these decisions are predicated on some estimation that your brain is making very rapidly that one of them will feel better than the other one. How does your brain do that, and how well does it do that? Those are the questions that the study of affective forecasting tries to answer.

Question: Impact Bias

Transcript: Impact bias is the tendency for people to believe that events will have a stronger and more enduring impact than they usually do. And that tends to be the form that most errors in affective forecasting take. Most of the time when people are wrong about how they’ll feel about the future, they’re wrong in the direction of thinking that things will matter to them more than they really do. We are remarkable at our ability to adjust and adapt to almost any situation; but we seem not to notice about ourselves. And so we mistakenly predict that good things will make us happy . . . really happy for a really long time . . . bad things, why they’ll just slay us. It turns out neither of these things is by and large true.

Question: Why are we susceptible to impact bias?

Well there’s a whole host of reasons why people are susceptible to this impact bias. One, for example, is we have a remarkable capacity for rationalization. People are very good at finding the good in the bad – very good at making the best of the situations that they are irrevocably stuck with. But they don’t know they have this talent. So when we think, “How would I feel if my spouse left me?” we’d go, “Oh my god. I’d be devastated! I’d be devastated for weeks, months, years, perhaps.” What we’re overlooking is the fact that within a relatively short time, we wouldn’t be thinking of our spouse the same way we do now. We’d be starting to see all the ways in which she really wasn’t right for us. He didn’t really share as many interests as I once thought. The sex wasn’t as good as I remembered, etc.

Well all of these are illusions of prospection. But you know, rationalization has a funny, bad reputation. Most people think of it as making stuff up. It’s not making stuff up. It’s finding ways to see the world that are both accurate and pleasant. Almost anything can be seen in multiple ways. Almost everything has a good view, a bad view. The brain is very good at finding the good view. The good view isn’t any more wrong than the bad view is. So in a sense, what our brains do is they go shopping among the various ways of thinking about the situations we’re in, and they settle on the most positive one. That’s a talent. That’s not a foible.

Question: Can people be happy in the present?

Transcript: Well I think forecasting for the future is the way we live happy lives now. You know, people ask me, “Don’t you think that we’d just all be a lot happier if we would just live in the moment and be here and now?” And the answer is, “Well yeah, for a second.” But if you don’t want to look forward in time . . . you don’t want to make plans, you don’t want to arrange a life so that it’s optimal rather than suboptimal, then you should be a mosquito or a toaster or something that doesn’t look into the future. Our ability to look into the future and think about what would make us most happy is the way that we get to a present that pleases us. And I don’t see these things as being at odds. I see them as going hand-in-hand.

Question: Historically, what has made people happy?

Transcript: Well, of course we don’t know how the antecedents of happiness have changed over time because there’s no good fossil record of smiling. The serious scientific research on happiness has really only begun in the last couple of decades. Nonetheless I think it’s an educated guess to say that social relationships have been and continue to be the primary predictor of human happiness. We are a social mammal, and the thing that makes us happy is the affiliation and esteem, respect, good will of other human beings. We like . . . we are happy when we have family. We are happy when we have friends. And almost all the other things we think make us happy actually are just ways of getting more family and friends.

Question: Can technology make us happy?

Transcript: I think technology could be quite relevant to our happiness. That is, we could use technology to improve it. But I don’t think we do. And I think the reason we don’t is we don’t really know what to aim for. We don’t know what kinds of things make us happy. And so we don’t invent machines that will help us do them. Nobody, to my knowledge, has yet to create a technology that allows you to spend more time with your family. And yet this is something we know makes people, in general, happier. We could use technology to our advantage, but I don’t think we necessarily do.

Now there’s another kind of technology that could influence happiness, and that’s technology that influences brain states directly. Happiness is, of course, just something your brain is doing. It’s an experience you have because your brain – your neurons – are in a certain dance. It’s possible that we will have technological interventions that will enable your neurons to do that dance without having to experience something in the world that makes that happen. Right now we have such interventions. We have drugs; but they’re very brute, you know? You take a happy pill, it does a whole lot more than make you feel a little better. It changes, you know . . . it interferes with cognitive abilities. It can make you dizzy. It can make you nauseous. It’s conceivable that in the future, we’ll have technologies that simply will increase your happiness. The question is whether we’ll want to use them. It’s a very . . . I . . . and I’m not for it or against it, but it’s a very important decision to make. Do we want to disassociate happiness from its usual antecedents? Do we want people to be able to be happy without doing the things that we usually think of us as earning happiness? It’s a great question, and one we’re definitely going to have to answer.

Recorded on: 6/12/2007