Tem

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.