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One area I’m particularly interested in is happiness. We like to think, I like to
think, that I can predict what will make me happy and unhappy. But in fact we asked people
at the beginning of this course some questions about happiness. We told people at the start
of this episode some things about some fictitious people, so for example, Jones, who earns 20,000
dollars a year, and Smith, who earns 100,000 dollars year; a couple of other people who
had really close supervision at work, versus another person who sort of had free reign;
a person who is married and someone else who is unmarried; someone who had really good
health benefits and somebody else who didn’t.
We asked people to predict how happy these two people were, and what people did predict
was that the people in the unfortunate situation would be completely miserable most of the
time. They'd just be walking around with a frown, completely unhappy. But the people
in the fortunate situation who had excellent benefits and who were earning far more money
than they knew what to do with every year would be really, really happy.
For example, Danny Kahneman has done this experiment where in fact these people aren't
any happier than anybody else. The people in the seemingly unfortunate situations are
just as happy as the people in the seemingly fortunate situations.
This kind of highlights one of the points of this episode, and that is: we don't really
have any conscious access to the determinants of our own behavior. Happiness is exactly
one example of that, so people in those two situations—I mean, we're talking about fictitious
people in this case, but people don't really seem to take into account when something is
going to make them happy or unhappy. So we often, as this experiment demonstrated—money
doesn't necessarily buy happiness even though we think that it does. Often we would take
a higher-paying job at the expense, for example, of commuting longer. Now commuting longer
is horrible for one's happiness, right? Spending time in traffic is probably the worst thing
that people can rate on a scale of happiness. Yet taking more money and moving further out
is something that's commonly done. Again, if you have this idea that money doesn't buy
happiness, that we have no real insight into that fact, then we might make different decisions
about the determinants of our own fates, of what we're planning on doing.
It really seems like we don't have any privileged access into our own consciousness, and happiness
isn't really an exception to that rule.
Exactly. Here's what Richard Nisbett had to say about what makes us happy.