More on the complexity of happiness: New TED lecture by Daniel Kahneman

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel laureate who has spent his long life making dozens of startling discoveries regarding judgment and decision-making. More recently, he has done considerable work in hedonic psychology. He recently appeared at TED to discuss the "The riddle of experience vs. memory." [caption id="attachment_11875" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image by Nruboc at Dreamstime.com (with permission)"]Image by Nruboc at Dreamstime.com (with permission)[/caption] There is no person better qualified than Kahneman to describe how the human psyche is rife with "cognitive traps." In this TED talk Kahneman explains that these traps "make it difficult to think about happiness." One foundational problem is that humans tend to resist admitting complexity; happiness is a monolithic term for most of us. Kahneman states, however, that "happiness is no longer a useful word, in that it applies to many things. We need to completely give up the simple word "happiness" in order to effectively communicate. One of the biggest problems is that there is a huge confusion between experience and memory when it comes to determining happiness. The distinction is with A) happiness IN your life versus B) happiness ABOUT your life (or WITH your life). The problem with trying to determine one's own happiness is exacerbated by the "focusing illusion." The effect of this illusion is that "we can't think about any circumstance that affects well-being without distorting its importance." Kahneman gave an example of a friend who claimed that a scratching sound at the very end of a music recording ruins the entire experience. This is utter nonsense, since the scratching sound occurred only at the end of the recording. It didn't ruin the entire experience. Rather, it ruined "the memory of the experience." Human beings consist of two selves: the experiencing self (who lives in the moment) and the remembering self (who keeps score and maintains the story of our lives, selecting and maintaining our memories. For the remembering self, a critical part of any story is how it ends. If it ends badly, the memory of the entire experience is contaminated (In this video, Kahneman describes earlier studies regarding colonoscopies which dramatically illustrated this point). Time is a funny thing for human beings. For our experiencing self, a two-week vacation is twice as good as a one-week vacation. For the remembering self, a two-week vacation might not be any better than a one-week vacation--"time has very little impact on the story" for the remembering self. [More . . . ]

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Milgram redux

There's a new French documentary based upon a faked French television show ("The Game of Death"). The "show" was based on the experiments Stanley Milgram conducted at Yale in the 1960's.

On the TV show, the game consisted of one participant asking questions to another player locked inside a booth with an electrode hooked up to his or her wrist. Any wrong answer meant the first player had to push a lever that subjected the victim in the booth to electrical charges up to 460 volts as punishment. The audience applauded and chanted "Punishment! Punishment! Punishment!" when the contestant inside the booth answered wrong.
The results were startling, just as they were in Milgram's study: 80% of the contestants administered what they believed to be lethal electric shocks. BTW, it's not clear whether the audience consisted entirely of stooges--I assume that all audience members were stooges and that they had been instructed to encourage the reckless behavior of the contestants (if not, the consistently terrible audience reaction was phenomenally more interesting to me than the behavior of the contestants). The CNN reporter reporting on this French "show" was perplexed by the behavior of the contestants on this "show." She was flummoxed by the contestant's willingness to administer (what they believed to be) painful and apparently deadly shocks to innocent people. She quoted the show's French producer: "People were willing to act against their own morals, their own principles when they were ordered to do something extreme by a source they they trust is legitimate." According to the CNN reporter, the lesson is that "even the most well-adjusted person can be swayed to act in horrendous ways if the situation leads them to it--that anyone is vulnerable to this." The host of the CNN news show, Campbell Brown added, "I hope that's not the case." But the evidence is ubiquitous that people will happily allow entire communities of other people to needlessly suffer and die. We tolerate mass death of millions of innocent people, including children, through starvation and malaria right here on planet Earth, even though we could substantially alleviate those disasters if we only acted. We tolerate and even cheer on wars that have no purpose relating to "freedom," even though we know that using our terrifying weapons often takes the lives of numerous innocent human beings. We fail to guarantee a minimum safety net of health care for those who can't afford it, resulting in more deaths. We tolerate thousands of institutions that are "schools" only in name rather than insisting on paying a bit more for first rate teachers--we know that these sad public "schools" are ruining lives, but most of us couldn't care less (if we cared, would we be doing something about the situation? Consider too, these eight other ways to kill 3,000 people. How is it that we tolerate any of this? But we do tolerate needless suffering every day, most of it through our inaction. "The Game of Death" demonstrates (just as Milgram had earlier demonstrated) that people are also willing to hurt and kill through their one actions, not merely inactions. For the most part, however, I find this action/inaction distinction to be legalistic and distracting. Highly moral people don't make this distinction when lives are on the line. How can people on the "show" be so cruel? In my opinion, the Milgram study is a finding that relates to limited human attentional capacity. Our limited and rickety working memory can easily be filled with things (such as audience encouragement and the "authority figure" of a show host) which leaves little room for moral processing. Simply fill up our heads with TV, "the threat of terrorism," or whatever, and we are willing to not attend to everything else. We are incredibly fallible beings. I would also suggest that Hannah Arendt's concept of banality of evil illustrates this human vulnerability to attentional distraction. I explain my reasoning regarding human attention capacity in the context of Arendt's work here. Back to the "Game of Death". . . Some of the contestants purportedly explained that the power of television made them do those horrendous things, but this claim confuses me. I suspect that the live audience served as a proxy for that "television audience" (there actually wasn't any such audience, at least until the documentary came out). But assume that the live audience boo'd and hissed when shocks were administered, thereby working at cross-purposes with the show host. In such as case, I would assume that far fewer "lethal" shocks would have been administered. My belief, then, is that the fact that there was a television audience (even an imagined one) didn't cause the contestants to act in any particular way. Rather, the effect of that audience depends on how that audience reacts. No research needs to be cited for the fact that we are social animals and that we feel immense pressure to do the things that are approved by others around us (though I will cite this famous study by Solomon Asch). Some might find this sort of "show" bizarre, but I find it valuable, and I hope that the documentary reaches a wide audience. Humans cognition is a complex and conflicting bag of tricks, many of which work counter to others. That is one reason I have repeatedly stressed at this site that we should first and foremost think of humans as human animals, not the demigods . We desperately need the humility and the skepticism that usually comes with the acknowledgment that we are frail and fallible. Consider that when when humans are thinking least clearly, we are nonetheless capable of feeling certain that we are correct. We are a lot less competent than we'd like to believe. The French "show" is dramatic evidence that merely presenting an audience and an "authority figure" can severely inflict moral blindness. These two things blinded the contestants to the most basic rule morality: don't needlessly hurt and kill others. The more likely that human animals become consciously aware of their gaping cognitive and moral vulnerabilities (I consider these part and parcel), they are less likely to do great damage to other humans. Perhaps this show will remind us that we regularly need to exercise social skepticism and put on the moral brakes, even when those around us seem certain.

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Primer on positive psychology by Martin Seligman

Tonight I viewed Martin Seligman's excellent 2004 TED lecture on positive psychology. Seligman introduced his talk by bemoaning the many decades during which psychology utilized only the "disease model," which he described as "Spot the loon." Some good things came of it, of course. Sullivan mentions that we can now treat many psychological illnesses (admitted only a small percentage all of them) and we can sometimes make miserable people less miserable. The disease model ignored normal people and high talent people, however. It also failed to help normal functioning people to become happier. Seligman carefully made the point that the skill set for avoiding dysfunction is dramatically different than the skills necessary for improving happiness. The concerns of positive psychology take over where the disease model left off. Positive psychology concerns both human strengths and human weaknesses. It includes building up the best things in life as well as preparing the worst. It includes helping to make the lives of normal people more fulfilling and nurturing talent (including genius). Positive psychology seeks to do all these things, to complement psychology's traditional aim of healing pathology. But what is happiness? Based on Seligman's research, happiness comes in three flavors (the following is from Seligman's website, Authentic Happiness, where you can take various self-tests at this site to determine your level of happiness):

First The Pleasant Life, consisting in having as many pleasures as possible and having the skills to amplify the pleasures. This is, of course, the only true kind of happiness on the Hollywood view. Second, The Good Life, which consists in knowing what your signature strengths are, and then recrafting your work, love, friendship, leisure and parenting to use those strengths to have more flow in life. Third, The Meaningful Life, which consists of using your signature strengths in the service of something that you believe is larger than you are.
For another basic outline of these approaches, see here. Traditionally, the first of these three forms of happiness, Pleasant Life (also called "pleasant emotion") was considered to be the entirety of happiness. Examples include social relationships, backrubs, a full stomach, orgasms, hobbies and entertainment. Pleasant Life activities invoke a form of happiness that consists of a "raw feeling" that is obvious--you know when it's happening. Pleasant Life feelings can be generated by spending time with others. Those who like to spend considerable time alone (I know one of them) have often been perceived as less happy. That characterization is not necessarily accurate, though, once we consider the two other basic forms of happiness. [More . . . ]

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Placebos and magic

At TED, magician/comedian Eric Mead discusses "The Magic of the Placebo." Based on the studies considering reports of patients, it turns out that needles injecting inert substances are more powerful than blue-colored pills containing inert substances, which are more powerful than white pills, which are more powerful than tablets. No active ingredient in any of these, yet we see predictable differences in the power of these "medicines." Belief is what makes placebos work. But YOU are not so naive as to be taken in by something with no active ingredient, right? If you're squeamish about needles, you'll find this talk extra-interesting. After viewing this video, I saw the story-telling power of Hollywood in a new light.

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What is intelligence?

A few months ago, I collected many definitions of "intelligence." One version of intelligence measures the ability to use language well. It turns out that using language well can be affected greatly by practice. David Shenk reports on this topic in an Atlantic article titled, "The 32-Million Word Gap":

The differences were astounding. Children in professionals' homes were exposed to an average of more than fifteen hundred more spoken words per hour than children in welfare homes. Over one year, that amounted to a difference of nearly 8 million words, which, by age four, amounted to a total gap of 32 million words. They also found a substantial gap in tone and in the complexity of words being used. As they crunched the numbers, they discovered a direct correlation between the intensity of these early verbal experiences and later achievement. "We were astonished at the differences the data revealed," Hart and Risley wrote in their book Meaningful Differences. "The most impressive aspects [are] how different individual families and children are and how much and how important is children's cumulative experience before age 3."

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