Do
people always want what they will enjoy, and enjoy what they chose for
themselves? They do, if they are
rational. Rational agents are expected
to know their tastes, both present and future, and they are supposed to make
good decisions that will maximise these interests.
Unfortunately,
human minds are not that rational. In fact,
it is very difficult to distinguish memories from experiences, and we are all
subject to a compelling cognitive illusion that confuses experience with the
memory of it. In Thinking, Fast and
Slow, Daniel Kahneman described this dilemma as a conflict of interests between
the experiencing self and the remembering self.
Imagine
the experience of listening to a symphony on a disc that was scratched near the
end, producing a shocking sound. A music
lover would probably assign the entire episode a failing grade and claim that
the bad ending ruined the whole experience.
But the musical bliss of some 40 minutes had already happened, and the
bad end could not undo it. The
experience was not actually ruined, only the memory of it. And the memory that neglects duration gives
very little weight to the longer state of pleasure.
Similarly,
when asked about their satisfaction with life, most people will just quickly
assign a score to life based on a small sample of highly available ideas,
rather than a careful weighting of every domains of life. An interesting experiment is the
coin-on-the-machine, in which a minor lucky incident of finding a dime on the copying machine, planted there by the experimenter just before the respondents filled out their questionnaires, caused a marked improvement
in reported satisfaction with their life as a whole, comparing with
another group of respondents who had not found one.
The
remembering self focuses its attention to a few critical moments, especially the beginning,
the peak, and the end. Duration is
neglected.
The
morals of the psychological enlightenment from this book: we fail to remember a
lot of happiness after actually experiencing it. Unless we train our mind to overcome such focusing illusion, we will remain unable to pick out the things that made and will make us happy.
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