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Saturday, 12 February 2005
Are you happy now?
pasting random tidbits of an article i found interesting:

There's a lot of randomness in the decisions that people make. I think people are quite often wrong in predicting how they'll feel about the outcome of the decisions they make. They tend to exaggerate the emotional result of almost anything they do. Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it. So just thinking about any change that you want to make in your life tends to make you exaggerate its importance.



Temperament and character are the main determinants of happiness.


GMJ: So if we're mostly wrong when we predict what will make us happy, how come we're most often mildly pleased?

Kahneman: It's called the phenomenon of adaptation. In general, the differences between groups of different circumstances are much smaller than you expect. So, for instance, paraplegics tend to be much less miserable than people expect, and lottery winners are much less happy than people expect. And I think that we have a handle on what is happening there.

What we believe now is that, to a large extent, you change what you pay attention to over time. So, when you're first married or first become a paraplegic or whatever, that is what you think about most often. If you aren't paraplegic and think about what being a paraplegic is like, then you're always miserable while you're thinking about it. But if you are a paraplegic, you will gradually start thinking of other things, and the more time you spend thinking of other things, the less miserable you are going to be. That's why you tend to exaggerate the effect of paraplegia if you aren't one and think less about it if you are one -- because paraplegics are not full-time.

So your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you're thinking about and what you're paying attention to. Adaptation seems to be, to a substantial extent, a process of reallocating your attention. Many years ago, we did a study in which we asked people if they would be happier if they lived in California. Most people think they would be, and that's because the climate is better in California. And people in California think they're happier than people who live in other places. But when you actually measure it, you don't find it. Non-Californians are just as happy as Californians. In fact, when you live in a place, you don't think about its climate very much. You don't think about any of its characteristics very much. You just go through your day.

Posted by blog/c_is_for at 12:57 PM PST
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