Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don’t get what we wanted. To many of us, synthetic happiness doesn’t sound a real deal, but from field studies to laboratory studies, it has been observed over and again that even life-altering events like losing a limb, not getting a much-anticipated promotion or losing a romantic partner have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have.
How does this happen? Human beings have something that we might think of as a psychological immune system, a kind of survival system. This system is made of largely non-conscious cognitive processes that help them to feel better about the worlds in which they find themselves*.
Dan Gilbert suggests that synthetic happiness is every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for. To prove it, he designed and carried out some interesting and thought-provoking scientific experiments.
Gilbert and his colleagues created a photography course and allowed students to come in and learn how to use a darkroom. They gave each student a camera to take 12 pictures of their favorite scenes or people around the Harvard campus. Then the students got to choose the two best pictures and blew them up to two gorgeous eight-by-ten glossies of meaningful things to them. After all that work they were told to keep one picture and give one up as evidence of the class project. Half of the students were instructed that they could change their mind in the next few days and the other half were pressured to make a choice right away because the pictures were going to be mailed to the headquarter immediately.
Contrary to the both groups’ own prediction that they were going to come to like the picture of their choice a little more than one they left behind, the group that was allowed to change their mind didn’t like their picture, and they still didn’t like it after the swap period was over. On the other hand, the people who were stuck with that picture with no choice liked it a lot!
The experiment didn’t end there. Gilbert brought in a whole new group of Harvard students and offered them the same photography course. This time they were given the option to choose which course they’d like to be in: the one with the choice or the one without. Two thirds of the students chose to be in the class where they’d have the opportunity to swap, which meant they’d end up deeply dissatisfied with the picture.
In another classic experiment called the free choice paradigm, subjects were asked to rank say Monet prints from the most liked to the least liked. Then the researchers told each subject that they happened to have some extras that he had ranked 3 and 4. The subject could choose one for keep. Sometime later, it could be 15 minutes or 15 days later, the same prints were put before the subjects who were asked to re-rank them. This time the order of the ranking changed, with the prints they got moving to the top. Happiness synthesized!
You may say “What’s the big deal? Ownership or looking at the picture for 15 days could have influenced their view.” Gilbert pushed it one step further. They repeated the same experiment with the hospital patients who suffered from short-term memory loss (anterograde amnesia). Amazingly, these people also liked better the one in their possession, but they didn’t remember they owned it. This demonstrates that when people synthesize happiness, they really change their affective, hedonic, aesthetic reactions to that poster**.
Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism said this, “the great source of both the misery and disorders of human life seems to arise from overrating the difference between one permanent situation and another … Some of these situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others, but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardor which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse for the horror of our own injustice.” In other words: yes, some things are better than others, but “‘Tis nothing good or bad / But thinking makes it so.” (by Bard) rings true as well.
So don’t smirk next time someone announces that his current job with significantly lower pay is much better than his previous one. The psychological immune system works best when we are totally stuck. Although there is nothing wrong with pursuing natural happiness by setting up goals and working towards them, we should savor the process more than the end results. A simple lifestyle with fewer complicated choices may also lead to more happiness.
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*http://socyberty.com/lifestyle-choices/happiness-can-you-synthesize-happiness/
** http://www.braincrave.com/viewblog.php?id=465