Experiment: Synthetic Happiness (not what you think)

[psood0nym]

So Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert’s experiment went like this: Experimenters got permission from the families of anterograde amnesiacs (like in “Memento”, always forgetting) to test just how real synthetic happiness, or the happiness we create through unconscious processes, really is. The patients were asked to rate 6 Monet prints from their most favorite to their least favorite.

When this experiment is performed on healthy participants, they are told they can choose either the rank 3 or rank 4 print to keep for themselves, they all pick print 3 as they prefer it slightly. A few weeks later, when asked to rate the same prints again, almost all the normal participants rank the print they chose more highly, and the print they didn’t receive (originally ranked 4th) as rank 5 or 6. In other words, “the one I have is better than I thought and the one I couldn’t keep is worse). Most psychologists interpret this result as ego defense mechanisms at work and indeed, most of us would say “they’re just deceiving themselves, they don’t REALLY like the one they own any better”.

However, the exact same results were obtained with the amnesiacs even though the print was taken from their room while they were away and they could not remember either having owned it or having rejected the other choice. They didn’t deceive themselves; their “affective, hedonic, and aesthetic response” was fundamentally reoriented to make them happier with their circumstances.

Another example is that one year after winning the lottery or having a terrible accident, both lottery winners and paraplegics rate themselves as being, on average, equally as happy. It seems that if you’re mostly happy now you’ll always be mostly happy, and unfortunately, if your mostly miserable, you will always remain that way no matter what your achievements are or your circumstances become. Because we become accustom to almost any circumstances, the only way I can see to improve happiness is by pursuing a diverse array (so you can’t grow accustomed to them) of simple goals that cause short-term joy. Likewise, we should avoid circumstances that cause non-repetitive short-term pains or sadness. Perhaps abandoning long-term life goals that keep you from such joys will make you more truly “successful”. I’m not advocating hedonism, just disputing the importance of ambition and success as they relate to happiness. What do you think?

 

[skywise]

I think this is pretty interesting. I disagree with your conclusions though. If the amnesiacs don't remember that they can't having painting 4 then why would it make them happy to know that they have painting 3 instead? It seems like its easier to explain without appeal to happiness. Maybe being around painting 3 longer just leaves them with aesthetic appreciation for it, even if they don't remember how they acquired it. It was a Monet afterall, and time would presumably increase one's aesthetic appreciation of it. It seems to me that an amnesiac might develop the same preference even if everyday he looked at a painting that he was strictly forbidden to have. Being forbidden to have this painting might even make him said, but just spending more time looking and yearning for it could make him choose it over a painting he could or did have.

Also, even if you're right and the happiness is correlated, the experiment is pretty short term right? Maybe being around and accustomed to something over a period of a lifetime makes people more happy than a diverse set of short-term things. Also, why do you think this experiment shows that if you're miserable you'll always be miserable? I don't think any of the examples, in themselves, suggest that.

 

[psood0nym]

^About some of this, given what I posted, you’re right. Problem is if I post too much people will skip it entirely. I’ll try to remedy that.

The idea is that unconscious processes are at work making us happier with the circumstances we must endure and the choices we’ve already made. The reason patients dislike the rank 4 painting even less when asked to re-rank them is theoretically because disliking it makes their original choice more clear cut and less ambiguous (a better choice they can be happier about).

I believe the anterograde amnesiac patients had the prints for under a day before they were taken away so they did not really have time to get to like them more. Also, in the past studies with healthy participants I mentioned, the rankings were the same whether they were asked to re-rank the prints a day later or weeks later. So unless people can increase their aesthetic appreciation VERY quickly I think the idea that time increases appreciation won’t hold up for this case.

Also, even if you're right and the happiness is correlated, the experiment is pretty short term right? Maybe being around and accustomed to something over a period of a lifetime makes people more happy than a diverse set of short-term things. Also, why do you think this experiment shows that if you're miserable you'll always be miserable? I don't think any of the examples, in themselves, suggest that.

Sorry, I’m not entirely sure what you’re asking here, hopefully this answers it: The idea is that we are always floating around some mean level of happiness no matter what long term circumstances we endure (rich/poor, paraplegic/marathon runner). Both the experiment and the questionnaires of the lottery winner and paraplegics support this. If that mean level of happiness is quite low, i.e. you’re miserable/you’ve always been mostly unhappy, you will always be pulled back toward that level. We are pulled back towards that mean when we grow accustom to something most would judge as awful (becoming paraplegic) or great (winning the lottery). The key then, it would seem, is to not grow accustom to the sources of joy in our lives. Achievements or circumstances that we think will give us long-term joy (achieving our life’s ambition) we will invariably grow accustom to. So the key to increase happiness is to always be deriving joy from a wide variety of sources that give you, ideally deep, short-term joy.

 

[Solidly-here]

Psood0nym concludes: "It seems that if you’re mostly happy now you’ll always be mostly happy, and unfortunately, if your mostly miserable, you will always remain that way no matter what your achievements are or your circumstances become."

The "best" way to feel in life is happy.
Happy that I have enough.
Happy that I am alive.

The quote is basically true, to a point. I believe that a mostly happy person will be happy for the rest of his Life.

I believe that sad people usually remain so, too. The easiest way to exist is to be sad. Sadness takes NO effort. Just look at everything and say: "This doesn't matter (or, this is not really good)." You never have to try to be UP. Happy people tend to "work" on being happy. It takes effort.

But, at least these sad-sacks have a chance to change their attitude. At some point, many always-sad people realize that they are "missing" the FUN in Life. At this time, they can (if they truly wish it) change their attitude.

The same is NOT true for mostly happy people. They already have the benefits of seeing Life as Fun, and fulfilling.

Life is a lot more painful for the sad people. A happy person has little (or NO) incentive to allow himself to degenerate into a sadness-filled Life.

 

[psood0nym]

^There have been fairly recent findings in genetics that point to reasons for why people who have always been mostly happy people stay mostly happy and vice versa.

"individuals with one or two short alleles of the 5-HTT serotonin transporter gene become depressed more often after stressful events than individuals with two long alleles of this gene (Caspi, et. al., 2003)."

Having one or two short alleles of this gene is not uncommon, it is not an abnormality or disorder. It seems that even in healthy normal people there is a lot of variability in resilience and the ability to "bounce back" at the level of subjectively experienced emotion. Undoubtedly these purely biochemical influences are part of the "unconscious" mechanisms synthesizing happiness.

 

[Solidly-here]

"individuals with one or two short alleles of the 5-HTT serotonin transporter gene become depressed more often after stressful events than individuals with two long alleles of this gene."

I've read that. This does not happen to everyone with this "abnormality." It is simply a tendency.

Also, this is discussing Depression, which is a special category of existing. Many people have NEVER been Depressed. I assume that many people with this "abnormality" are in the group of people who've never been Depressed.

And, no matter what physiologic/chemical things that are going on in a person's brain, a mind is very powerful, and can decide how it is going to face things.

 

[psood0nym]

^Agreed. I simply mean to stress that it is difficult to actively combat something that is unconscious and that these unconscious forces, both as banes and boons to our happiness, are present in all people, healthy and unhealthy alike. Like with many genetic conditions, there will be people more and less susceptable to the effects of this gene on their subjective experience. My suggestion for actively combating misery and increasing happiness given these unconscious conditions is to spend more time pursuing happiness from a wide variety of sources that give you, ideally deep, short-term joy. I'm asking, in addition to, or replacing this, what is the best way/strategy for pursuing happiness given you accept some or most of what I have implied about the nature of happiness above?

 

[Solidly-here]

"what is the best way/strategy for pursuing happiness?"

For a person who does NOT have much happiness, the first thing is to WANNA be happy.

I have heard many people say that they wish they could be happier.
Most of those same people do NOT really WANNA be happy, they just want to bitch about it.

There are (probably) 10,000 ways for a person to pursue happiness.
One, introductory way to find happiness is to be grateful.
Maybe start-off with being grateful that I have Food and Housing.
If I can feel grateful for these things, then I can open my heart to being happy.

If my Health is good, then I can be happy that I don't have a disease that many others do have: Cancer, AIDS, Stroke.
Those other sick people would be the happiest people in the World if they could just be as physically well as I am.
I am a LUCKY man.

Smile, you're on Candid Camera.
When I smile, I feel happy (or at least, happier).
The oppposite is also true: When I'm happy, I will smile (or at least, smile more often).

If a person is uncomfortable smiling in Public, then practice it at home (not in front of a mirror).
If you can't smile, then you don't WANNA be happy.
Some people think that their smile looks like a person straining to take a dump, but we are our worst critic.

A smile not only makes me feel happier, it makes those people around me feel happier too.
When I am surrounded by happy people, that happiness is contagious; I feel it too.

Create a little happiness . . . It's a Good Thing.

 

[PinholeStar]

^

 

[psood0nym]

"what is the best way/strategy for pursuing happiness?"

For a person who does NOT have much happiness, the first thing is to WANNA be happy.

I have heard many people say that they wish they could be happier.
Most of those same people do NOT really WANNA be happy, they just want to bitch about it.

There are (probably) 10,000 ways for a person to pursue happiness.
One, introductory way to find happiness is to be grateful.
Maybe start-off with being grateful that I have Food and Housing.
If I can feel grateful for these things, then I can open my heart to being happy.

If my Health is good, then I can be happy that I don't have a disease that many others do have: Cancer, AIDS, Stroke.
Those other sick people would be the happiest people in the World if they could just be as physically well as I am.
I am a LUCKY man.

If I understand your example correctly, one way for people to feel happier is to be grateful. Since we cannot simply feel grateful or realize that we should be grateful for what we have had for so long, we develop this feeling through acting as though we are grateful—sew a habit, reap a character (like smiling and feeling happier)—and seeking out perspectives that clearly show just how lucky we are. I agree that this can work and does work; in fact, giving and receiving smiles are a good example of the kind of short-term joys we’ve been talking about. However, I don’t think people forego this kind of active route to happiness JUST because they want to bitch about their misery. I think complaining gives them the feeling that others care about their suffering and the thought that they are empathized with gives them brief solace. The initial period of acting happy but not feeling it makes them feel pathetic, smiles wear thin, and that surge of gratefulness upon its realization fades. The lottery winner quickly forgets the blessing of financial freedom and, at the other end of the spectrum, the paraplegic forgets, at least on a default emotional level, the curse of being paralyzed (even though when they could walk they may have been extremely grateful they weren’t paralyzed!). Given the experiment, I would have to conclude that even if a person with AIDS was cured, though they might be very grateful for a period of time, if they were mostly miserable before contracting the disease their gratefulness and elation would wear thin and they would return to their old average of misery.

When the unhappy are constantly being returned to their default misery, motivation feels like hypocrisy, and every time their efforts do not elicit some great emotional success, it feels like irredeemable failure. You are correct in that we can better safeguard our own happiness by developing “happy characters”, first by acting like them, and then by becoming them through habit. However, while it may always be in the realm of possibility to “Will” oneself to happiness over time, many people simply don’t; this makes the strategy, at least on its own, impractical. Before most people can be diligent at pursuing happiness, they need to raise their “average level” of happiness to the point where when they fall back from failure, they still see that failure as redeemable.

I believe I owe my contentment in life mostly to hewing a “content character” over time--I was mostly able to do this thanks to my innate resilience to depression--but that I owe much of my happiness to psychedelic drugs. They fill precisely the role Gilbert’s experiments seem to demand. By moderating their intake over time and using a wide variety of substances in a wide variety of dosage ranges and contexts I ensure I do not grow accustom to the psychedelic experience. Their short duration also helps ensure this, while the depth of the experience provides a constant renewal of substance to my life that is inaccessible by any other means (for almost 8 years now). Unfortunately, to attempt this without descending into dependence, abuse, or other detrimental behaviors, it is almost required that you, at least, already be content with your life before hand. For this reason, psychedelics are best used for becoming even happier, rather than for raising oneself from an average state of misery to one of contentment.

 

[Solidly-here]

Psood0nym responds: "Since we cannot simply feel grateful or realize that we should be grateful for what we have had for so long, we develop this feeling through acting as though we are grateful—sew a habit, reap a character (like smiling and feeling happier)—and seeking out perspectives that clearly show just how lucky we are.

... The initial period of acting happy but not feeling it makes them feel pathetic, smiles wear thin, and that surge of gratefulness upon its realization fades. ... Given the experiment, I would have to conclude that even if a person with AIDS was cured, though they might be very grateful for a period of time, if they were mostly miserable before contracting the disease their gratefulness and elation would wear thin and they would return to their old average of misery."

Acting "as if" I am happy is an excellent way to figure-out what happy is like.
Then, if the person REALLY wants to be happy, then he can continue (and feel more-and-more happy as he goes along). If he chooses to go back to feeling miserable, then that is his choice. But, when a person REALLY wants to change, he can keep remembering: "I do NOT want to feel miserable. I WANT to feel happy." He can: Re-Train his Brain. A little brain-washing can go a long way.

And, you're right about the AIDS example (at least about its after-effect). While a person has a Death-Sentence hanging over his head, he will think: "Boy, if I could get rid of this disease, I will be grateful for the rest of my Life." But, if (and when) that DOES occur, then he can choose to forget that this dream-come-true is worth being happy about.

This reminds me of a Tooth-ache. While a person is suffering through a painful Tooth-ache, he says to himself: "WOW! Not having a Tooth-ache is the best feeling in the World." Later, as he is driving home from the Dentist's office, he quickly forgets that being tooth-ache-Free is ecstasy.

This is like a person who is in danger of dying (like stuck in a snow-bank, on a deserted road). She prays to God: "Oh God, if I ever get out of here, I will ____ ." Then, when a passing 4-Wheel-Drive picks her up, and she warms up, that "promise" will (most likely) fall by the way-side.

So, if a person wants to be happy, he needs to keep remembering: "What I want is to be happy."
______________________

I spent all of my Life, from at least 9 years old, living through bout-after-bout of Depression.
About 4 years ago, I began Meditating (and other Positive things).
For the past 3 years, I have been Depression-free.
It is NOT easy, continually working toward my Goal: Don't worry, be Happy.
It is ALSO not easy to be miserable. But miserable requires no work.
Life is all about trade-offs: I trade my working toward happiness for not working for miserable-ness.

 

[MyDoorsAreOpen]

My encounters with Japanese culture gave me a lot of food for thought when it comes to true and lasting happiness. The Japanese are, in my experience, a people who tend to react emotionally to things based on their perception of 'the proper response in this situation' or 'the emotional response that is called for here'. They consider a personal reaction that differs from this 'appropriate' reaction to be a very selfish thing to indluge.

By and large, I have found the Japanese to be a fairly happy and mentally healthy people, sensationalized stories of psycho killers and rapists nonwithstanding. I think a lot of this is becuse they actively condition themselves to find certain experiences joyful, as they see appropriate, and this is a very conscious (as opposed to unconscious) process for them. The line between 'it is proper to smile and laugh and offer words of praise in situation X' and 'situation X makes me happy' blurs eventually.

This is not to say that 'saying I'm happy when I'm not' doesn't go on a lot in Japan. It does. And it's the subject of a lot of their great literature. But I think for those people, this is a bearable liability of the by-and-large successful process they have for 'enjoying things simply because my people enjoy them', which is a complicated way of saying, 'others' companionship is a reliable source of joy.'

How someone learns to define and conceptualize an event or situation has a large bearing on how much joy it will bring them. Psychologists would probably explain this in terms of association and conditioning.

 

[psood0nym]

^Japanese people’s active and conscious self-conditioning as it relates to experiencing true pleasure from situations where their culture demands they experience pleasure seems like a great real world example of what we’ve been discussing. Undoubtedly, the “great literature” you wrote of offers insights into how exactly it is they do this; do you, however, recall any specific approaches or revealing examples? Don’t they have among the world’s highest suicide rate? Is the “happiness”, by and large, you saw in them mostly genuine, a symptom of cultural demands, or both equally?

Japan has always deeply intrigued me; it’s just so expensive to visit! The idea of a collectivist agrarian society rather quickly catapulted—via focused authoritarian rule and then massive foreign assistance—into vast, impersonal, monolithic cityscapes is sociologically and psychologically fascinating. I always imagined many of the Japanese’s seemingly bizarre idiosyncrasies and fetishes were due in large part to the compounded isolation of the individual in living in an impersonal metropolis, which is itself built within a collectivist society. I imagine that the natural impulses towards individualism are simply left to fester and mutate into all kinds of disturbing thought styles and pathologies: voyeurism, buying young teenagers used underwear in vending machines, masochism, and funding for making Legend of the Overfiend.

 

[ifonly]

So Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert’s experiment went like this: Experimenters got permission from the families of anterograde amnesiacs (like in “Memento”, always forgetting) to test just how real synthetic happiness, or the happiness we create through unconscious processes, really is. The patients were asked to rate 6 Monet prints from their most favorite to their least favorite.

When this experiment is performed on healthy participants, they are told they can choose either the rank 3 or rank 4 print to keep for themselves, they all pick print 3 as they prefer it slightly. A few weeks later, when asked to rate the same prints again, almost all the normal participants rank the print they chose more highly, and the print they didn’t receive (originally ranked 4th) as rank 5 or 6. In other words, “the one I have is better than I thought and the one I couldn’t keep is worse). Most psychologists interpret this result as ego defense mechanisms at work and indeed, most of us would say “they’re just deceiving themselves, they don’t REALLY like the one they own any better”.

However, the exact same results were obtained with the amnesiacs even though the print was taken from their room while they were away and they could not remember either having owned it or having rejected the other choice. They didn’t deceive themselves; their “affective, hedonic, and aesthetic response” was fundamentally reoriented to make them happier with their circumstances.

Another example is that one year after winning the lottery or having a terrible accident, both lottery winners and paraplegics rate themselves as being, on average, equally as happy. It seems that if you’re mostly happy now you’ll always be mostly happy, and unfortunately, if your mostly miserable, you will always remain that way no matter what your achievements are or your circumstances become. Because we become accustom to almost any circumstances, the only way I can see to improve happiness is by pursuing a diverse array (so you can’t grow accustomed to them) of simple goals that cause short-term joy. Likewise, we should avoid circumstances that cause non-repetitive short-term pains or sadness. Perhaps abandoning long-term life goals that keep you from such joys will make you more truly “successful”. I’m not advocating hedonism, just disputing the importance of ambition and success as they relate to happiness. What do you think?

wow mate, great post. i cant say much, but i definately know that when im trying to choose betwen things and its a close call, i will deliberately focus on finding negative attributes with one thing, and positives with another, in order to make my decision clearer and make me feel better about it. im sure others must do the same?

also, sweet. ima gonna be a happy man

 

[zorn]

Hi pseudonym,

Interesting post! I basically agree with your overall point. But I think your interpretation of the painting experiment is probably wrong. There's a much simpler explanation -- namely, we know there are many different sorts of memory. My understanding is that most anterograde amnesiacs (eg people with Korsakoff's syndrome) lack the ability to form declarative memories. That is, video-like memories of the type "this is how breakfast went this morning" or memories of new facts they were told. But there's a large body of research showing they still form other types of memories. For example, they can still learn new skills (like riding a bike or driving) and then remember them. And they can form emotional associations -- if they have a very unpleasant encounter with some person, they will respond negatively to that person the next day, even though they won't have any conscious memories of the previous encounter.

It seems likely that this is the type of memory at play in these choice-alteration experiments. Committing ourselves to a choice presumably leads to making 'defensive' / 'consistency' associations; that is, strengthening the associations implied by the choice. Since this isn't a conscious process, there's no reason to expect that it needs the ability to consciously recall the event, viz. episodic memory.

So it seems to me that we can't conclude from this experiment whether or not the chosen painting makes them "really" happier after they choose it. But perhaps Gilbert addresses this problem in his paper, or there's some facts I'm unaware of. In any case it's a very clever experiment.

---

On your main point -- that we have a hedonic setpoint, so long-term situations largely get washed out -- I mostly agree. However, research suggests some long-term circumstances do have a real, lasting effect on happiness. In particular IIRC, married people tend to be happier than single people; people with regular contact with close friends tend to be happier than those without; and religious people tend to be happier than irreligious ones. So in addition to focusing on short-term sources of happiness/unhappiness, we should focus on cultivating deep, long-lasting relationships, because they actually do have a lasting beneficial effect.

Take care,
Zorn

 

[psood0nym]

It seems likely that this is the type of memory at play in these choice-alteration experiments. Committing ourselves to a choice presumably leads to making 'defensive' / 'consistency' associations; that is, strengthening the associations implied by the choice. Since this isn't a conscious process, there's no reason to expect that it needs the ability to consciously recall the event, viz. episodic memory.

So it seems to me that we can't conclude from this experiment whether or not the chosen painting makes them "really" happier after they choose it. But perhaps Gilbert addresses this problem in his paper, or there's some facts I'm unaware of. In any case it's a very clever experiment.

---

On your main point -- that we have a hedonic setpoint, so long-term situations largely get washed out -- I mostly agree. However, research suggests some long-term circumstances do have a real, lasting effect on happiness. In particular IIRC, married people tend to be happier than single people; people with regular contact with close friends tend to be happier than those without; and religious people tend to be happier than irreligious ones. So in addition to focusing on short-term sources of happiness/unhappiness, we should focus on cultivating deep, long-lasting relationships, because they actually do have a lasting beneficial effect.

There are a few back-up experiments that suggest when we are allowed to commit to a choice we are actually less happy with that choice then when we are told there is only one choice and that we can “take it or leave it”. For example, when participants like two paintings, A and B, and they are told they can choose one to keep, later they report not liking the chosen one as much because they weren’t sure the other was really the inferior painting. However, if the participant is told, “well we have a few of the ‘A’ prints left, but we’re out of ‘B’”, and then are given ‘A’, the participant is much happier with having received ‘A’ than having had to choose between the 2. In addition to Gilbert, people like Barry Schwartz argue that the plethora of consumer choices available today, often between trivial things whose merits one way or the other are ambiguous, are actually making us more miserable (e.g. Frito Lay has over 70 different flavors of potato chips; given all the audio components at Best Buy, you can design literally thousands of different stereos, but you can’t possibly be comfortably informed about all the components and the way they interact with each other). All these unpleasant choices are exactly the kinds of diverse, short-term pains that I have argued lower the average level of happiness in individuals by constantly supplying novel sources of stress we are unable to grow accustomed to.

Also, Skywise brought up emotional attachment earlier (not quite in the same way as you). My argument was, and now is, that to form these non-declarative memories requires either a lot of time or far more emotional investment than one immediately develops for most paintings (such as the very negative encounters you mention). I would not discount the role of non-declarative memories, either in the normal (the original study) or in the anterograde amnesiac participants, but it looks as though it is less attachment to choice and more being forced to make the best of the circumstances we’re stuck with (lottery winner/paraplegic comparision), or more accurately, on being forced into long-term circumstances that place us outside of our homeostatic-joy-set-point, that has the greatest effect on synthesizing/degrading this kind of happiness.

Your points about marriage, close friends, and religion are good additions. Thanks.

 

[skywise]

The idea is that we are always floating around some mean level of happiness no matter what long term circumstances we endure (rich/poor, paraplegic/marathon runner). Both the experiment and the questionnaires of the lottery winner and paraplegics support this. If that mean level of happiness is quite low, i.e. you’re miserable/you’ve always been mostly unhappy, you will always be pulled back toward that level.

I think that the claim that we are pulled back to a mean level of happiness is outside of the scope of the experiment . It could be true that the amnesiacs adjusted their aesthetic preference to cause them to be more happy with their circumstances but it doesn't follow that we're always pulled back towards a mean level of happiness. The lottery winners and paraplegics examples are better support but from these two examples it doesn't follow that by being more short-term focused you'll be happy. A lot of people may be more happy committing to a long-term relationship than having a lot of short-term relations and flings, for example. I think your conclusions are bigger in scope than your evidence supports.

 

[MyDoorsAreOpen]

psood0nym, what you say about greater consumer choices not making society happier overall definitely rings true for me. I find that for any one kind of thing or experience I'm seeking, there's a 'sweet spot' for the number of varieties that will give that 'kid in a candy store' feeling. Much fewer than that and I accept it happily as a phenomenon without a lot of variety. Much more and I get this daunting feeling of 'too much', that no one choice could possibly be all that merited or give me anything close to a good sampling of the entire phenomenon. Anyone who thinks more choices always equals good has really fallen for media propaganda.

To take it out a level, I find there's a subtle, underrated joy in taking a fatalistic view of one's existence -- to say, without the slightest hint of regret, 'This is the home area / family / set of friends / anything else I've been given, and I wouldn't have it any other way. I made choice X because that's what came my way, and that's just how it had to be.'

As for Japan, yes, I'd say frequently the individual self oozes out there in ways Western people would find... well... odd. One of the many writers of off-the-cuff commentaries on Japan once attributed the frequent hobby of obsessive collecting of collectables to this, saying it's about the only way they have for building an ego without making any waves in any greater group whatsoever. But to turn the tables, I'd guess the way Westerners' repressed desires for group or coalition behavior ooze out must strike the Japanese as equally as odd. Drunken fisticuffs between fans of rival sports teams come to mind.

The soiled panties in vending machines is an urban myth, BTW.

 

[psood0nym]

I think that the claim that we are pulled back to a mean level of happiness is outside of the scope of the experiment . It could be true that the amnesiacs adjusted their aesthetic preference to cause them to be more happy with their circumstances but it doesn't follow that we're always pulled back towards a mean level of happiness. The lottery winners and paraplegics examples are better support but from these two examples it doesn't follow that by being more short-term focused you'll be happy. A lot of people may be more happy committing to a long-term relationship than having a lot of short-term relations and flings, for example. I think your conclusions are bigger in scope than your evidence supports.

I don't disagree about my conclusions being bigger in scope than the evidence supports. I just mean to say what it seems like the experiments imply. Certainly the quality of the short-term joys, what I've said should ideally be of "deep" quality, is of utmost importance. Short-term flings fail this later qualification. Like I stated, "I'm not advocating hedonism". The example I've provided of good short-term pleasure for people who are already happy and self-disciplined is the use of a wide array of psychedelic drugs in moderation. I have used this strategy for about 8 years and am very pleased with the results, call it a case study. I point to the work of Barry Schwartz on superfulous and trivial choices as an example of diverse, short-term stresses panning out into general misery to support the reverse end of this "theory". Other supported strategies discussed include "acting happy" based on the "sow a habit, reap a character" philosophy, Japanese social conditioning of joy, and Zorn's suggestions/evidence regarding marriage (quite in line with your long-term relationships point), close friends, and religion. Certainly pursuing deep, or at least wholesome, short-term joys is no guarantee of happiness or the ONLY approach that can be valid, it is simply the strategy that seems implied by evidence that suggests we tend to greatly exaggerate how happy or miserable long-term circumstances will make us. If you have a refinement or alternate idea that accommodates what's been discussed already please share. The purpose of this thread is to find useful strategies for making us happier, not for me to defend quasi-pet-theories beyond reason!

 

[psood0nym]

The soiled panties in vending machines is an urban myth, BTW.

Yeah, wanted to keep it lite so I threw that in last minute instead of "greater social acceptance of pedophilia." Maybe not vending machines now but there's some truth to it if this wikipedia entry is true (it hasn't been disputed yet). It says that vending machine do indeed sell girl's used panties. They're probably pretty rare.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burusera