Erika’s post regarding Psychology’s Top Blunders brought to mind another pitfall to those who do psychology. One aspect of Erika is post is that priming can corrupt the results of projection testing. This reminded me of an article I recently read regarding attempts to measure how “happy” people are. The article is “Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion.”  I found the article in the June 30, 2006 edition of Science (http://www.sciencemag.com/ -available only to subscribers online).

Experimenters have often tried to find how satisfied someone is with his or her life, but such questions elicit a global evaluation. People tend to exaggerate the importance of a single factor on their overall well-being. The authors refer to this as the “focusing illusion.” This illusion can be the source of error in personal decision-making. 

Here’s an example. First, assume the experimenter asks these two questions in this order: 1) “How happy are you with your life in general?” and 2) “How many dates did you have last month?” In this case, there is no statistical correlation between the two questions. When you reverse the order of this questioning, however, the correlation becomes highly significant. “The dating question evidently caused that aspect of life to become salient and its importance to be exaggerated when the respondents encountered the more general question about their happiness.” The authors indicate that these focusing effects have also been observed when the respondent’s attention is first directed to their marriage or health.…