Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory | Talk Video | TED.com - 0 views
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cognitive traps. This applies to laypeople thinking about their own happiness, and it applies to scholars thinking about happiness, because it turns out we're just as messed up as anybody else is
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cognitive traps. This applies to laypeople thinking about their own happiness, and it applies to scholars thinking about happiness, because it turns out we're just as messed up as anybody else is.
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The first of these traps is a reluctance to admit complexity. It turns out that the word "happiness" is just not a useful word anymore, because we apply it to too many different things
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The second trap is a confusion between experience and memory; basically, it's between being happy in your life, and being happy about your life or happy with your life. And those are two very different concepts, and they're both lumped in the notion of happiness.
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he third is the focusing illusion, and it's the unfortunate fact that we can't think about any circumstance that affects well-being without distorting its importance. I mean, this is a real cognitive trap. There's just no way of getting it right.
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They counted for nothing because he was left with a memory; the memory was ruined, and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep.
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What this is telling us, really, is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other people in terms of two selves.
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There is an experiencing self, who lives in the present and knows the present, is capable of re-living the past, but basically it has only the present.
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then there is a remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that keeps score, and maintains the story of our life, and it's the one that the doctor approaches in asking the question, "How have you been feeling lately?" or "How was your trip to Albania?" or something like that.
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Those are two very different entities, the experiencing self and the remembering self, and getting confused between them is part of the mess about the notion of happiness.
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the remembering self is a storyteller.
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"How much did these patients think they suffered?" And here is a surprise. The surprise is that Patient A had a much worse memory of the colonoscopy than Patient B.
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The stories of the colonoscopies were different, and because a very critical part of the story is how it ends. And neither of these stories is very inspiring or great -- but one of them is this distinct ... (Laughter) but one of them is distinctly worse than the other.
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And the one that is worse is the one where pain was at its peak at the very end; it's a bad story. How do we know that? Because we asked these people after their colonoscopy, and much later, too, "How bad was the whole thing, in total?" And it was much worse for A than for B, in memory.
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What defines a story? And that is true of the stories that memory delivers for us, and it's also true of the stories that we make up. What defines a story are changes, significant moments and endings. Endings are very, very important and, in this case, the ending dominated.
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From the point of view of the experiencing self, if you have a vacation, and the second week is just as good as the first, then the two-week vacation is twice as good as the one-week vacation. That's not the way it works at all for the remembering self. For the remembering self, a two-week vacation is barely better than the one-week vacation because there are no new memories added. You have not changed the story. And in this way, time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes a remembering self from an experiencing self; time has very little impact on the story.
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We actually don't choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences.
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when we think about the future, we don't think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories.
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basically you can look at this, you know, as a tyranny of the remembering self, and you can think of the remembering self sort of dragging the experiencing self through experiences that the experiencing self doesn't need.
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we go on vacations, to a very large extent, in the service of our remembering self
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Why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the weight that we put on experiences?
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there is a conflict between your two selves, and you need to think about how to adjudicate that conflict, and it's actually not at all obvious, because if you think in terms of time, then you get one answer, and if you think in terms of memories, you might get another answer. Why do we pick the vacations we do is a problem that confronts us with a choice between the two selves.
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The distinction between the happiness of the experiencing self and the satisfaction of the remembering self has been recognized in recent years, and there are now efforts to measure the two separately.
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now we are capable of getting a pretty good idea of the happiness of the experiencing self over time. If you ask for the happiness of the remembering self, it's a completely different thing. This is not about how happily a person lives. It is about how satisfied or pleased the person is when that person thinks about her life. Very different notion. Anyone who doesn't distinguish those notions is going to mess up the study of happiness, and I belong to a crowd of students of well-being, who've been messing up the study of happiness for a long time in precisely this way.
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You can know how satisfied somebody is with their life, and that really doesn't teach you much about how happily they're living their life, and vice versa.
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What that means is if you met somebody, and you were told, "Oh his father is six feet tall," how much would you know about his height? Well, you would know something about his height, but there's a lot of uncertainty. You have that much uncertainty. If I tell you that somebody ranked their life eight on a scale of ten, you have a lot of uncertainty about how happy they are with their experiencing self. So the correlation is low.
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if you want to maximize the happiness of the two selves, you are going to end up doing very different things.
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it turns out that climate is not very important to the experiencing self and it's not even very important to the reflective self that decides how happy people are
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their experiencing self is not going to get happier. We know that. But one thing will happen: They will think they are happier, because, when they think about it, they'll be reminded of how horrible the weather was in Ohio, and they will feel they made the right decision.
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When we looked at how feelings, vary with income. And it turns out that, below an income of 60,000 dollars a year, for Americans
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60,000 dollars a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. I mean I've rarely seen lines so flat
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money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery, and we can measure that misery very, very clearly.
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n terms of the other self, the remembering self, you get a different story. The more money you earn, the more satisfied you are. That does not hold for emotions.
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people are going to debate whether they want to study experience happiness, or whether they want to study life evaluation, so we need to have that debate fairly soon.
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How to enhance happiness goes very different ways depending on how you think, and whether you think of the remembering self or you think of the experiencing self.
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CA: Well, it seems to me that this issue will -- or at least should be -- the most interesting policy discussion to track over the next few years. Thank you so much for inventing behavioral economics.