Don't Just Remember Happiness, Experience It

Photo Credit: savannchan

This posting builds on some of the thinking from my write-up of the Tech urSelf vision/methodology. I'd like to continue the discussion of why it's more difficult for people to know themselves than they realize, and how urWell can be a useful tool for solving this problem. The inspiration for this reasoning came to me at the Presence Conference I recently attended (wearing my academic researcher/professor hat) in Edinburgh, Scotland. One of the keynote speakers, Giuseppe Riva, who laid some of the important groundwork for my dissertation research, told me to consider the relationship between intuitive and rational thinking when people use avatars as tools. Research on this relationship, for which Daniel Kahneman (heralded as one of the most important social scientists of his generation) won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, suggests that we often use intuitive heuristics in decision-making, which can lead to good outcomes (e.g., responding quickly to danger) as well as bad (e.g., making irrational decisions about money). Intuitive thinking leads to patterns in behavior that are not optimal for our wellness, and thus (I think) by using tools that encourage rational thinking about our behaviors, we can avoid negative patterns and make decisions that are better for our wellness.

Kahneman’s awesome research gets even more relevant to urWell because he started studying (the perception of) happiness. One of his major contributions in this area is the Peak-End Rule, which basically says that we judge the pleasantness/unpleasantness of past experiences from our memory of the high/low points and the ending. For example, if you had a vacation that was mostly boring, but there was one super-awesome experience and the flight home wasn't so bad, then you are more likely to think it was a better vacation than one that was pretty good overall but with no super-awesome moments. I used the peak-end rule to inform some of the questions we designed for gauging wellness (props to Peter Vorderer for putting me onto this path back in May).

In Kahneman’s recent TED talk, he says that the experience of happiness and memory of happiness are quite different concepts. Although you may be happy or unhappy in the moment, afterwards, your perception of how happy/unhappy you were may be unrelated (he says that there's a correlation of .5, which is pretty low). 

To illustrate the point, he suggests this thought experiment:

First, think of a great vacation you would like to go on. Now, imagine that you would be required to delete all of your photos from the vacation and even have your memory wiped of the entire experience. Would you still choose the same vacation or would you choose another one?

I'm guessing you'd go for something a little more creative …and maybe even hedonistic. :)

This is a problem! People make decisions based on their memories, not their experiences, and so people essentially make decisions that encourage happy memories, but not necessarily happy experiences. Kahneman calls this the tyranny of remembering self and this is one of the main reasons that to "know thyself" is a difficult endeavor.

Two more quick examples:

1) It turns out that for people who make more than $60k/year in America, there is no correlation at all between income and experiential happiness (i.e., people who make $60k/yr have equally good experiences as people who make $600k/yr), but, there is a strong correlation between income and remembering happiness. In other words, people who earn $600k/yr think they were happier in the past than people who earn $60k, even though both groups of people have equally good experiences.

2) Kahneman found that people who live in Ohio and California have equally good experiences, but people in Ohio think Californians are happier than they are, and Californians think that they are happier than people in Ohio.

Both of these examples illustrate how the tyranny of the remembering self can influence people to overvalue certain facets of life (i.e., money and climate) that do not actually make much of a difference in the quality of their experiences.

What's a happiness-seeking smartphone user to do? ...use urWell!

By facilitating happiness rating on a daily basis, urWell essentially allows people to remember their experiential happiness. Further, urWell analyzes changes, trends, and interrelationships in this personal data, which is pretty difficult to do over time even for remembered happiness. To put it another way, urWell helps people avoid faulty intuitive thought and instead think rationally about what makes them happiest.

"Dedicated to the rational pursuit of happiness" ...maybe that should be a new Tech urSelf slogan. Or maybe that sounds like we take the fun out of happiness. ;)