How Exposure Bias Affects Your Happiness Expectations
One of the strange things about human psychology is how poorly we are at predicting our own emotional state in the future. We think that good news will make us much happier, and disaster will drag us on indefinitely, but the truth is much more illogical.
This post originally appeared on James Clear’s blog .
In the summer of 2010, Rachelle Friedman was preparing for one of the best periods of her life. She was recently engaged, surrounded by her best friends and enjoying her bachelorette party.
Friedman and her friends were spending the day by the pool when one of them pushed her playfully into shallow water. Friedman swam slowly to the top of the pool until her face appeared. It immediately became apparent that something was wrong. “This is not a joke,” she said.
Her head hit the bottom of the pool and shattered two vertebrae. In particular, a fracture of her C6 vertebra severed her spinal cord and left her permanently paralyzed below the rib cage. She will never walk again.
“We are so happy …”
A year later, Rachel Friedman became Rachel Chapman when she married her new husband. She decided to share some of her thoughts on this experience during an online Q&A session in 2013.
She began by discussing some of the problems you might expect. It was difficult to find a job that could cope with her handicaps. Nerve pain can be unpleasant and uncomfortable.
But she also shared many surprisingly positive responses. For example, when asked if something has changed for the worse, she replied: “Well, everything has changed, but I cannot say anything bad.” Then, when asked about her relationship with her husband, she replied, “I think we are so happy because my injury could have been worse.”
How can you be happy when it seems that everything in life is going wrong? As it turns out, Rachelle’s situation can tell a lot about how our brains respond to traumatic events and what actually makes us happy.
The amazing truth about happiness
Harvard University has a social psychologist named Dan Gilbert. Gilbert’s bestselling book Stumbling Happiness discusses the many ways we miscalculate how situations can make us happy or sad, and uncovers some conflicting ideas about what actually makes us happy.
One of the major discoveries of researchers like Gilbert is that extreme unavoidable situations often trigger a response in our brains that enhances positivity and happiness.
For example, imagine that your home is destroyed in an earthquake, or that you are seriously injured in a car accident and have lost the ability to use your legs. When asked to describe the impact of such an event, most people talk about how devastating it would be. Some people even say that they would rather die than never be able to walk again.
But the researchers found that when people do experience a traumatic event, such as an earthquake or paralysis of the lower limbs, their level of happiness six months after the event is almost the same as the day before.
How can it be?
Impact displacement
Traumatic events tend to trigger what Gilbert calls our “psychological immune system.” Our psychological immune system contributes to the ability of our brains to create a positive outlook and happiness in unavoidable situations. This is the opposite of what we expect when we imagine such an event. As Gilbert says: “People are unaware of the fact that their protection is more likely to be caused by intense rather than mild suffering. Thus, they incorrectly predict their own emotional reactions to adversity of various sizes. “
This effect works in a similar way for exceptionally positive events. For example, think about what it would be like to win the lottery. Many people assume that winning the lottery will immediately bring long-term happiness, but research has shown the opposite.
In a very famous study published by researchers at Northwestern University in 1978, it was found that the level of happiness in people with paralysis of the lower limbs and in lottery winners remained almost unchanged in the year after the event occurred. You read that right. One person won a huge amount of money that changed his life, and the other lost the ability to use limbs, and within one year both people were equally happy.
It is important to note that this particular study has not been replicated since it came out, but the general trend has been confirmed over and over again. We have a strong tendency to overestimate the impact of extreme events on our lives. Extremely positive and extremely negative events don’t actually affect our long-term happiness levels as much as we think.
Researchers call this “bias” because we tend to overestimate the duration or intensity of happiness generated by major events. Impact bias is one example of affective prediction, which is a social psychology phenomenon that refers to our generally terrible ability as people to predict our future emotional states.
Where to go from here
There are two main points I can draw from exposure bias.
First, we tend to focus on what is changing and forget about the things that do not change. When we think about winning the lottery, we imagine this event and all the money it will bring. But we forget about the other 99 percent of life and how it will stay more or less the same.
We will still get annoyed if we don’t get enough sleep. We still have to wait at rush hour. We still need to train if we want to stay in shape. We still need to submit taxes every year.
It will still hurt when we lose a loved one. It will also be nice to relax on the veranda and watch the sunset. We imagine changes, but we forget what remains the same.
Second, a challenge is an obstacle for a particular thing, not for you as a person. According to the Greek philosopher Epictetus, “lameness is an obstacle to your leg, but not to your will.” We overestimate how negative events can harm our lives, for the same reason that we overestimate how positive events can help our lives. We focus on what is happening (for example, we lose a leg), but we forget about all other life events.
Writing thank you letters to friends, watching football games on weekends, reading a good book, eating delicious food. These are all ingredients of a good life that you can enjoy with or without your foot. Mobility issues represent only a small fraction of what is available to you. Negative events can create problem-specific challenges, but the human experience is vast and varied.
There are many opportunities for happiness in life, which may seem very foreign or undesirable to your current imagination.
Impact Bias: How To Be Happy When Things Go Wrong | James Clear