Spring 2011 Happiness Class Class Notes 2

3/1/2011

de Botton, "Expectation" and "Meritocracy"

• Image of Nixon and Khruschev facing off on the value of material wealth.
• Consider profound changes in standard of living from end of medieval times to present.
• FDR recommending the Sears catalogue as one book to show Soviet people the advantages of American life.

Expectation

• de Botton implies that our "social comparison" abilities might have been jolted by the great increases in wealth from the Industrial Revolution and capitalism. Result might be increased "Status Anxiety".

• Shift from Medieval Christianity, quote p. 28.
• Traces the growth of idea of government being "justified" by its performance in the social contract. Rise of meritocratic thinking.
• Alexis de Tocqueville and American's "strange melancholy" -- an unexpected consequence of lifting barriers of aristocratic society is that members of society may experience more adverse social comparison and anxiousness about success.
• James on self-esteem: quotient of Success and Pretentions.
• Given de Botton's argument, it makes sense that myth of the self-made man would be prominent in Am. Culture.

"The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be."

Meritocracy

• Three Old Stories about Failure

Gilbert, Chapters 4-6

Chapter 4: In the Blind Spot of the Mind's Eye

• Comparions of Adolph Fisher & George Eastman. Point: Need to 2nd guess how we impose seemingly objective criteria on others' lives.
• Brain reweaves experience: study with cars and stop signs/yield signs. Information acquired after the event alters memory of the event.
• Two highly confirmed results: Memory fills in. We don't typically notice it happening.
• Model of Mind (84) Prior to 19th century:

"philosophers had thought of the senses as conduits that allowed information about the properties of objects in the world to travel from the object and into the mind. The mind was like a movie screen in which the object was rebroadcast. The operation broke down on occasion, hence people occasionally saw things as they were not. But when the senses were working properly, they showed what was there. This theory of realism was described in 1690 by the philosopher John Locke: brains "believe" they don't "make believe" .

• Model of Mind brought in with Kant at beginning of 1800's:

Kant's idealism: "Kant's new theory of idealism claimed that our perceptions are not the result of a physiological process by which our eyes somehow transmit an image of the world into our brains but rather, they are the result of a psychological process that combines what our eyes see with what we already think, feel, know, want, and believe, and then uses this combination of sensory information and preexisting knowledge to construct our perception of reality. "

• Still, we act like realists: truck moving study
• We fill in details: imagine a plate of spaghetti.

Chapter 5: The Hound of Silence

• We don't train on what's not there: pigeons, detecting pattern change in trigrams.

Why do non-describer sports fans overestimate impact of losing a big game? They don't thing about the whole picture -- what's going to happen after the game, etc. Details the describers fill in. (Interesting practical lesson here.)

Time frame matters: example of agreeing to baby sit in a month vs. tomorrow night.

Chapter 6: The Future is Now

• Being wrong about the future: possibility of heavy planes flying. 112
• 113: Examples of current experience displacing past experience: dating couples, worries about exams, memories of Perot supporters.
• Examples of how we fail to predict how future selves will feel. 115: Volunteers choosing candy bars or knowing answers.
• We fail to account for the way future experience will change future preferences.
• Sneak Prefeel -- evidence suggests brain can have emotional responses to imaginings of the future. We simulate future events, we don't just experience them reflectively.
• How to Select Posters: In poster selection study, the "thinkers" are less satisfied with their choices.
• Limits of Prefeeling: "We can't see or feel two things at once, and the brain has strict priorities about what it will see, hear, and feel and what it will ignore. ... For instance, if we try to imagine a penguin while we are looking at an ostrich, the brain's policy won't allow it."122
• Read cartoon on bottom of p. 125 "Imagination cannot easily transcend the boundaries of the present, and one reason for this is that it must borrow machinery that is owned by perception. The fact that these two processes must run on the same platform means that we are sometimes confused about which one is running. We assume that what we feel as we imagine the future is what we'll feel when we get there, but in fact, what we feel as we imagine the future is often response to what's happening in the present."

3/15/2011

Gilbert, 7, Time Bombs

Space, Time and Future Preferences

• We spatialize time because it's an abstract thing and thinking of its spatially helps make it concrete.
• Hedonic adaptation -- factors affecting the habituation rate -- (start list)
• False prediction of future pleasure -- p. 130 study on snack predictions.
• Gilberts partial point -- variety has a cost… [But it doesn't follow that it's not in your happiness-interest to pay it sometimes.]
• Slogan of the night: "Pleasure isn't linear."
• Spagetti satisfaction predictions under condition of multi-tasking, p. 136.

Parade of Biases

• Anchoring Bias (135), Sensitivity to changes, (accounts for preferences for steady income increases, even it net payout is lower).
• Preference for the marked down vacation, even if more costly than a marked up one.
• Famous Khaneman and Tversky "mental accounting" study -- (140)
• We compare the present to the past instead of to the possible. (coffee example)
• But we also make mistakes when we compare the present to the possible. (tv purchase example, wine example, dictionary comparison, chips/chocolate vs. chips/sardines)
• Loss aversion (145)

Csiksentmihalyi, Chapters 1-3

Structures of Everyday Life

• Focus on how we spend our time and the state of mind/affect we experience from diff. activities in daily life
• Experience Sampling Method -- p. 14ff

The Content of Experience

• Theoretical position, p. 21: Wants to ask less for self-reports of happiness and more about the moods and affect that might be functionally related to happiness.
• Discussion of emotions, goals, and thoughts in terms of the organization of "psychic energy", roughly, the cognitive / emotive state of my mind at a particular moment or during an activity.
• FLOW, p. 29ff.

"It is the fall involvement of flow, rather than happiness, that makes for excellence in life. When we are in flow, we are not happy, because to experience happiness we must focus on our inner states, and that would take away attention from the task at hand."

How We Feel When Doing Different Things

• Table 2: Quality of Experience in Everyday Activities
• Schizophrenic patient and ESM
• Implicit hypothesis: People have different strategies and degrees of awareness of how to manage their affect (a form of self-care). Happiness might be improved by developing these capacities for self-care.

3/22/2011

Savoring

Bryant & Veroff, Chapters 1 & 8, and other notes

Chapter 1

• Savoring: capacity to attend to, appreciate and enhance positive experiences.
• Distinguishing savoring from pleasure -- reflective dimension to savoring.
• Need to suppress "social and esteem needs" for savoring.

• Savoring distinguished from other processes. In relation to:

• Mindfulness -- savoring narrower
• Meditation
• Flow

From Chapter 3

• Factors affecting the intensity of enjoyment experienced.

• Duration -- case of two positive events simultaneously vs. over time.
• Reduction of Stress --
• Complexity -- in the pleasures themselves vs. in web of relationships
• Attentional Focus --
• Balanced Self-Monitoring
• Interactive Consequences

Types of Savoring -- see handout from Chapter 5

Chapter 8

• Factors connecting Coping and Savoring: Social Support, Writing about life experiences, Downward hedonic contrast, Humor, Spirituality & Religion

• Essential Pre-conditions for Savoring

• Freedom from Social and Esteem Concerns
• Present Focus
• Attentional Focus

• Exercises

• Vacation in Daily Life
• Life Review -- "chaining"
• Camera Exercise

Additional Suggested Exercises for Happiness Practicum on Savoring:

1. Simple Savoring Exercise -- You and an orange. 2. Complex Savoring Exercise -- Cooking dinner for a friend.

Watkins, "Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being"

• Focus on emotional benefits of expressing gratitude.
• Distinguishes gratitude as a practice vs. trait. Latter is habituated.
• Researching the direction of causation -- p. 172ff: if it's possible to manipulate gratitude conditions and see a quasi-functional relationship on mood. Seems to have been weakly confirmed. Still possible to have bidirectional causation.
• Series of studies on emotional benefits, p. 174ff -- "Participants in the grateful condition felt better about their lives as a whole and were more optimistic about the future than students in both of the other comparison conditions." 174. Second study tested specific technique of downward comparison and compared it to control and "hassles" condition.

• How does gratitude contribute to happiness?

• 1: emotional boost from "gift" character of gratitude experiences.
• 2: counteracting hedonic habituation
• 3: focusing attention away from upward comparisons toward downward comparisons.
• 4: coping -- evidence from p. 178ff.
• 5: increasing accessibility and recollection of pleasant life events -- note, this follows from memory bias studies (p. 179)
• 6: increasing actual number or positive events -- esp. through social network. social benefits.
• 7: decrease depressed mood

Emmons, "Gratitude, SWB, and the Brain"

• Broad range of gratitude: from specific feeling about a particular event or circumstance to a general attitude toward life. Life as a gift.
• Definitions: pleasant feeling from received benefit. "undeserved merit" From Fitzgerald (470): appreciation, goodwill, disposition that follows from appreciation and goodwill.
• Gratitude can be a "virtue" if understood as a cultivated disposition to recognize undeserved merit.
• Gratitude response is stronger if the beneficiary intends the benefit.

• Evolutionary Perspective

• "as a cognitive—emotional supplement serving to sustain reciprocal obligations. -Simmel (471) "Thus, during exchange of benefits, gratitude prompts one person (a beneficiary) to be bound to another (a benefactor) during "exchange of benefits, thereby reminding beneficiaries of their reciprocity obligations."
• "Trivers viewed gratitude as an evolutionary adaptation that regulates people's responses to altruistic acts. Gratitude for altruistic acts is a reward for adherence to the universal norm of reciprocity and is a mediating mechanism that links the receipt of a favor to the giving of a return favor."

• Gratitude and SWB

• Strong claim for long term effects of gratitude as a trait: p. 476 -- participants show SWB boost 6 months later.

• Gratitude and the Brain

• Cognitive-affective neuroscience construct (What's happening to your brain when you experience gratitude?)
• General hypothesis: we have structures for both perceiving gratitude in others and expressing it.
• Specific hypothesis: Limbic prefontal networks involved: "; (1) the fusiform face-processing areas near the temporal—occipital junctions, (2) the amygdala and Limbic emotional processing systems that support emotional states, and (3) interactions between these two subcortical centers with the prefrontal regions that control executive and evaluative processes." 483. Like other prosocial emotions.

Specific hypothesis tested with studies of gratitude and mood induction in Parkinson's Disease patients.

• Psychological attitudes at odds with gratitude: "' A number of personal burdens and external obstacles block grateful thoughts. A number of attitudes are incompatible with a grateful outlook on Hfe, including perceptions of victimhood, an in ability to admit one's shortcomings, a sense of entitlement, and an inability to admit that one is not self-sufficient. InIn a culture that celebrates self-aggrandizement and perceptions of deservingness, gratitude can be crowded out.

3/29/2011

Diener, Happiness and Social Relationships

• Demonian thought experiment.
• Centrality of sociability to our natural history and survival/thriving.
• Causal direction between happiness and good relationship seems to be bidirectional
• ESM studies document higher affect in company.
• Duchenne smile studies (53)
• The Work that relationship does. Review from p. 54-55.
• Marriage research: explains the marriage "boost" as a selection effect: happier people get in relationships.
• Caveat: Bella DePaulo's work in "Singled Out"
• Puzzles about effect of children on happiness.

Csiksentmihalyi, Chapter Six, Relationships and the Quality of Life

• Concept of individual as product of social world, social world scripts transitions to adult relationship. samskara - Hindu codes of conduct by age.
• "A relationship that leads to order in consciousness instead of psychic entropy has to meet at least two conditions.

• The first is to find some compatibility between our goals and that of the other person or persons. This is always difficult in principle, given that each participant in the interaction is bound to pursue his or her self-interest." 81
• The second condition for a successful interaction is that one be willing to invest attention in the other person's goals not an easy task either, considering that psychic energy is the most essential and scarce resource we own.

• Claims friendships don't habituate because people are always changing. If you continue to share goals and investment of energy, the pleasure never dies (until you do).
• Discussion of sex apart from relationship.
• Notes some changes from traditional social life: Americans tend to be friends with their parents more -- a novel and recent change. Changes in the coupling of sociability and relationship: marriages not formerly assumed to be about friendship or social intimacy.
• Summary of good family life, read p. 88. Note the focus on the "work" families do in our lives.
• Balance of solitude and social experience. German study by Noelle-Newman on overestimation of desirability of solitude -- (related to recurring historical motif of the "blessed isle" - Rousseau)
• Discusses cities as places of historical challenge to our ability to manage difference and close interaction. Connects to globalism and contrasts to efforts to "restore" communities' traditional social bonds.
• Closes with claims about the social character of creativity and knowledge-seeking.

Haidt Chapter 9: Divinity with or without God

• Flatland
• Speculative hypothesis: 183: In addition to relationship and status, we perceive/experience "divinity" as a kind of "moral purity". A theory of relationship and culture.
• Research on disgust. Why do we experience disgust? 186
• Psychological anthropologist Richard Shweder, U Chicago: Haidt worked with him on research in morality in India: "Shweder's research on morality in Bhubaneswar and elsewhere shows that when people think about morality, their moral concepts cluster into three groups, which he calls the ethic of autonomy, the ethic of community, and the ethic of divinity." 188 -- evidence on diff. distribution over class. Note observations on research in India. Link bt. purity/divine.
• Cites approvingly: Eliade, The Sacred and Profane -- perceiving sacredness universal among humans.

Elevation and Agape

• Looking for a name for the emotions that we experience when we observe morally outstanding deeds. "Elevation" (ex. Greg Mortensen talk)
• Jefferson onto it. Experience of aesthetic value triggers physical changes in the body and recognizable feeling of elevated sentiments.
• 196: wants to see if elevation is a kind of happiness. research with student Sara Algoe, results seem to separate out different responses: moral elevation vs. response to non-moral excellence like basketball player.
• initial research documents elevation as response. Unclear how moral/non-moral triggers work.
• Vagus Nerve theory -- operation of vagus nerve, relationship to oxytocin. Since oxcytocin causes bonding rather than action, this theory might explain the lack of evidence in an earlier study that elevation leads to action.
• Lactating moms study 198
• Letter from religious person distinquishing two kinds of tears in church. compassion/celebration
• Latter like agape : objectless love

Awe and Transcendence

• cites Darwin / Emerson, idea of elevation from exp of nature.
• Drugs - -entheogens. reports old experiment with mushrooms and religion.
• Awe: "As we traced the word "awe" back in history, we discovered that it has always had a link to fear and submission in the presence of something muchgreater than the self." 202
• Emotion of awe: "Keltner and I concluded that the emotion of awe happens when two conditions are met: a person perceives something vast (usually physically vast, but sometimes conceptually vast, such as a grand theory, or socially vast, such as great fame or power); and the vast thing cannot be accommodated by the person's existing mental structures." 203
• Story of Arjuna Pandava from Gita. Gets a cosmic eye. Extreme case, but Haidt implies this is a model for how we describe spiritual transformation.
• Maslow's work on peak experiences. Side note on clash about the nature of science in psychology. Maslow is considered a founder of humanistic psych.
• Mark Leary, Curse of the Self: Self as obstacle to -- mental chatter -- self as obstacle to vertical development . Read p. 207.

4/5/2011

Major Hypotheses

Gilbert is writing about a psychological immune system that threatens to make us oblivious to reality or that involves distortions of reality in the name of self-protection. But Gilbert's immune system involves similar (the same?) mechanisms that allow us to psychologically "invest" in our experiences. So the critical problem for a theory of happiness, which will be at stake in our analysis of the Gilbert research and speculations from it, is whether the distorting effects of the immune system can be minimized while the beneficial effects of psychological investment can be realized.

Prospection and Retrospection at the cultural level. The process of prospection and retrospection does not just happen from the standpoint of an individual's life. It may also operate on a social level. A political revolution (French, American, Tunisian) might be thought of as a collective gamble on a new way of living in society, a gamble on a vision of social good and happiness. In retrospect, we both "inhabit" the model and see it's limits. Just as our model of individual happiness has to change against the demands of the moving targets of the life span, so also perhaps our cultural model of happiness (liberalism) needs to develop in light of human experience.

Gilbert, Chapter 8: Paradise Glossed

• Opening examples of people "re-narrating" horrible events in their lives, including wrongdoing and public humiliation. Asymmetry between people's estimates of misfortune (loss of ability) and estimates of people in those situations.
• "If negative events don't hit us as hard as we expect them to, then why do we expect them to?"
• Suggests that the process of creating and attending to means is crucial (154-155). We respond, in part, to our own representations of reality.
• Importance of context, frequency, and recency in identifying information and salience. Necker cube. Kale and ice cream study, 159. thesis on 160. part of "psychological immune system" (psychological investment system).
• We Cook the Facts (164): By selecting sampling (attending to ads for the cars we bought), by conversational practices (What's the best thing about my ability to _____? Vs. Is there anyone better than me at ____).
• Evidence that we cook the facts comes from situations in which there are symmetrical and predictable inconsistencies in a group's interpretation (sports fans), or studies that show that we select evidence that fits our views (169).

Gilbert, Chapter 9: Immune to Reality (Openness to Investment in Reality)

• Clever Hans
• Confabulation: People are unaware of many influences on them, but when asked will create a story or reason that provides a plausible explanation other than the actual influence. Priming studies. Negative words flashed on screen produces more negative judgements.
• Some evidence (174) to suggest that deliberate methods to induce good feeling fail.
• thesis on 174: not only do we cook the facts, but we need to consume them in a way that doesn't reveal the fabrication or alteration.
• Looking forward/backward: asymmetry in judgements of events when looked at prospectively and retrospectively.
• Judge/Jury Rejection study: prospectively we aren't aware that we'll more easily write off the judge's decision than the jury's. (176)
• Regret: when we blame ourselves for outcomes we might have anticipated. A kind of "personal liability" emotion. Sometimes useful. Problem of the number of things you didn't do. (Possible explanation for research on p. 179 suggesting that we regret omissions more than commissions.)
• Psychological Immune System: triggers: very bad things more than slightly bad things. Concept of "psychological investment" in initiation rites study (181). Triggers at work in the negative feedback study (182).
• Claims that we experience "sunk costs" in relationships. Trade offs between changing our experience and changing our view of our experience. Photo selection satisfaction study involving "escape" and "no escape" conditions. (184). (notice prospection/retrospection assymetry)
• Speculative Theory about how we use explanations: beneficial effect of writing about trauma, study involving identified vs. unidentified admirers. Happiness buzz lasts longer on unidentified. Suggested as support for theory. Other studies suggest explanations can get in the way of emotional impact (!)

McMahon, "Liberalism and Its Discontents"

• Happiness in Franklin & the Declaration of Independence -- important to see the centrality of this concept in the cultural experiment of the Declaration.
• Interesting issue of connection of happiness and property.
• Also, evidence of the way early US worked out relationship between religion and happiness. Jefferson's secularization of Christ. Advice for happiness.
• Francis Hutcheson -- public virtue promotes private pleasure. August 8, 1694 – August 8, 1746. Adam Smith -- relation of capitalist motive to underlying moral sense. Influence of Scottish enlightenment on our cultural experiment in US.
• Alexis de Toqueville's view of American culture (1805-1859) -- observations on American religion (its practicality and closeness to the project of happiness) and worries about the "dark side" of the relentless pursuit of pleasure and private good. Mill quotes de Toqueville approvingly, worrying about Am. "restlessness" amid abundance.
• Mill's crisis of faith in happiness (depression). Insight about the "indirectness" of the pursuit of happiness ("Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so." ). Discussion of model on happiness in On Liberty. Mostly negative, but acknowledgement of need for "experiments in living".
• Max Weber -- social theorist who analyzed the relationship between capitalism and protestant theology -- capital accumulation as a sign and partial assurance of God's blessing. Considered Franklin a case in point (though McMahon points out that in spite of his frugality, Franklin had a "randy" side. Still, he accepted the virtue of denying pleasure in the name of accumulation. Many find in Weber's critique of materialism a critique of later materialist culture.

4/12/2011

Questions for Death & Happiness inquiry

These three questions might help organize our work.

1. What are some of the major cultural models for thinking about death?

2. What features of life are foregrounded when death becomes on object of active thought?

3. Can reflection on death (and practices connected with this reflection) increase or qualitatively change our experience of happiness? If so, by what means?

Examples of Cultural Structures for Thinking about Death

• Tibetan Buddhist tradition - Bardo Thodol
• Christian Tradition

Making Death Personal

• Talking about "life in the third quarter"
• Memento Mori

• The Philosophy Bird

• Montainge's Essay

• Intellectual life is already a practice of withdrawl from the body.
• Pleasure it the end of life, virtue the means (Epicurean line)
• How death surprises us (16)
• Montaigne's plan to oppose death

• disarm death of novelty and stangeness
• converse and be familiar with him
• premeditation of death is premeditation of liberty
• "We should always, as hear as we can, be booted and spurred, and ready to go..."
• need to accept the inevitability of unfinished projects.
• to learn to die is to learn to live

• The problem of the "living dead" (Ceasar to the soldier, "Thou fanciest, then, that thou art yet alive."

• 21 Grams - the movie and writer's story (Guillermo Arringa)
• Loren Ladner - recounting of Buddhist practices of meditation at charnel grounds
• Hector Contemplates His Own Death

4/19/2011

Chapter 3: Should Policy Makers Use Happiness Research?

Some arguments about making happiness an aim of public policy.

• Might seem easy to support: Happiness is all good, connected to prosocial aims, what people say they want.

• Arguments against making happiness a goal of government.

• Many people don't define their goals in terms of happiness, but viture, devotion to God, etc.
• Goverment supposed to be neutral to diverse views of the good life.
• Libertarian conceptions of goverment. - gov't's job to protect liberty, not likely to be good at happiness.

• (Might be example of differing time horizons: Welfare state focuses on short time horizon, libertarian on longer time horizon (future self-reliance))

• Still, hard to say "liberty" is the only aim of government. Consensus position isn't there.
• Brave New World objection. Research suggests alot of variation in approaches to happiness. Government is likely to get that wrong, ala Aldous Huxley. 48-49
• Some might argue for the value of unhappiness to creation, but this is overstated. Still, some evidence that happiest 10% not the highest achievers. --Problem of the Happy Child--
• Can't be done. Johnson: "How small, of all that human hearts endure, that part which laws or kings can cause or cure."

• Lyken & Tellegen research, qualified by empirical evidence of changes -- Danes, Soviets, East Germans, maybe more like 50/50...

Arguments against making happiness the ONLY goal of public policy.

• Enforcing the 1st Ammendment often causes unhappiness.
• Focusing only on happiness might lead you to legitimate the "happy poor" --just because people can be happy in some circumstance, doesn't mean they should be (false happiness -- one of our early concepts).
• Preventing "Slavery, false imprisonment, and fraud" are legit. government concerns, even if people don't ranking them highly.

Suppose you decide to use happiness research in publich policy. You still have these problems:

• What do you do when research shows that people's preferences are mistaken or irrational? Override? Cites some history on issue of "dual duties" of elected officials in US-pol system. Seems to justify some weight to happiness research.
• Limits: Policy can't be driven by research in any automatic way. Example of taxing smokers. Open question how you've affected balance of happiness. (consider additional variables such as changing social attitudes).
• Examples of positive uses: (61): might shift resources to youth on basis of findings that old folks are happy. Research favors democracy as a happiness maker. Might be good to empirically test claims of current policies that well being has been improved. At the end: educational opportunities, relief of anxiety about health care, remove distress of mental illness and unemployment. (Presumably some other claims could follow on the principles implicit here. Make a list.)

Chapter 4: The Question of Growth

• Reviews evidence about the weight we give to economic growth as an indicator of national well being.
• Problem of Global environmental impacts from economic growth.
• Debate over Easterlin paradox. 67
• Argument: we need growth for the poor. Reply: Assumes we're not already rich enough to help them. (Conservative could reply...)
• Economic growth can be defended by citing the obj. improvements in life for the poorest in US.
• Friedman argument: growth fosters prosocial goods. 68 -lots of doubt on this 69
• In the end, Bok treats resisting growth like tilting at windmills. In no growth enviroment, suddenly everything is a zero sum. (good point.)
• In any case, you can't actually stop growth without a draconian political effort.
• Discussion at End: Will American's change their minds? evidence that we traded leisure time for television, less socializing, when evidence shows that's not a great happiness trade-off. Maybe cultural ideas will drive change...

Group Discussion

• Review and discuss the "list" of measures that might be justified on happiness research grounds.

• Evaluate the alleged problem that contemporary US culture is preoccupied with growth and that that is unlikely to change. Is that true? Is it a problem? If so, what can be done about it?