Photo by Wilhei
Some people seem to have all the good luck in the world, whereas others seem to stumble from one misfortune to the next.

How about you? Are you lucky?

Here’s an example of the kind of luck I tend to have: Some years ago I decided to write a book on how to enhance relationships. I made a five year plan of all the steps, told everyone I met about my plan (some where sceptical), and put up a website with articles. Eight weeks later I receive an email from a publisher inviting me to submit a test chapter for a planned book on relationships. You can imagine my scream of delight! This is how Learn to Love came into being.

Richard Wiseman, professor at University of Hertfordshire has made a study of lucky people. Why are some people lucky and others not? Can you learn to be lucky? These are questions that drive his research and they are the focus of his first book The Luck Factor.

In his research, Wiseman interviewed thousands of people and even ran a project called Luck School, where students could learn to be luckier. The results of this work reveal that people are not born lucky. Instead, lucky people use basic principles to create good fortune.

• Notice the unexpected

You can maximise your opportunities by noticing lucky encounters. Personality tests reveal that unlucky people are more tense and anxious than lucky people, and research has shown that anxiety disrupts people’s ability to notice the unexpected.

In his second book Did You Spot the Gorilla?, Wiseman recounts a significant experiment. Volunteers watched a 30-second film of people playing basketball. Viewers were told to count the number of passes made by one team. Afterwards they were asked whether they had seen anything unusual. Astonishingly, only a very few observed that halfway through the film, a man dressed as a gorilla walked on court and beat his chest at the camera!
This exmaple shows how easy it is to miss opportunities because we tend to look for the obvious.

• Listen to your intuition

Our gut instincts are often bang-on. Maybe they are a form of innate wisdom. I emigrated from Europe to New Zealand on a hunch. People asked me why I wanted to drag my husband and toddler to the other side of the world and leave a great career as a professional musician and university lecturer. I couldn’t readily answer, because there wasn’t much to support such a decision rationally. Now, 25 years later, I recognise that it was the best thing I could have done. My hunch paid of against all odds.

Wiseman says that lucky people tend to make decisions following their intuition. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo by Lou Murphy
Does more choice make us happier?
This is the question that drives Barry Schwartz, professor of psychology at Swarthmore College.

For example, yesterday I went to the supermarket to get some olive oil. There wasn’t just one brand. There were many different options: cold pressed, virgin, light, from Italy, from Greece, from New Zealand. In fact, there were over 30 different options for me to choose from. And the same goes for everything we encounter, from jobs to detergents: we’re faced with endless options.

So, does more choice make us happier?

Of course this is a question that only applies to our affluent, Western society. Because in poor countries, people have few options.

As Schwartz points out, an official dogma in our Western society proclaims: The more individual freedom someone has, the happier he or she will be.

Here are some problems that come with abundant choice.

• Choice make for preoccupation.

I am sure you too know about that: ‘Shall I stay or go?’, ‘Shall I quit this job for that one?’, ‘Shall I have an operation or not?’, ‘Shall I choose this person to be my life partner or that one?’ The list is endless. If we were to add up all the minutes and hours that we spend preoccupied with choices - I think it would add up to a large slice of our life.

• Too much choice equals paralysis.

We know this phenomenon as dithering! Actually, there is some interesting data here. A researcher investigated how people choose one of the many voluntary retirement funds that are on offer for employees in the USA. She found that for every 5 more options, the participation when down by 2%. So, if an employer reduced available options down from fifty to five, their participation rate went up by 20%. That is, when faced with too much choice, people stopped choosing because they felt overwhemed.

• More options make us dissatisfied with what we have.

Like Marty Seligman, Schwartz also makes the point that if we have more options, we end up less satisfied with the choice we have made. Why? Because if our choice doesn’t turn out to be perfect (which is won’t), then it is easy to imagine that another choice would have been better. The easier it is to choose, the easier it is to feel regret about the choice we made.

• Choice leads to self-blame.

The effect of the escalation of expectations is that if things don’t turn out right, we tend to blame ourselves. Schwartz sees a link between the explosion of depression in the industrial Western world, and the disappointment and self-blame that comes from too many choices.

As you can see, this is a substantial list of drawbacks that come with abundant choice. According to Schwartz, some choice is better than non, but more choice is worse than some.

According to Schwartz, people fall into two groups according to how they respond to choices. He calles them ‘Maximizers’ and ‘Satisficers’.

Are you a Maximizer or a Satisficer?

Answer the following question to find out:

“When I am in the car listening to the radio, I often check other stations to see if something better is playing, even if I am relatively satisfied with what I’m listening to” - yes or no?

If you answered ‘yes’, you are a Maximizer. If you answered ‘no’, you are a satisfizer. Research shows that Maximizers Do Better, Satisficers Feel Better.

Here are recommendations by Schwartz that he offered graduate students at their leaving ceremony:

• Don’t be a maximizer. Learn that “good enough” is good enough. You may end up with results of decisions that are slightly less good, but you’ll feel much better about them.

He qualifies this recommendation and says,

• Choose when to choose. There are many domains in life where we can consult experts when we have to make an important decision, to take some of the burdens off your shoulders.

• Foster loving relationships.

Close relationships impose constraints on our life. Schwartz’ point is that these constraints are not a cost; they are actually part of the benefit!

• Follow a Calling.

A calling satisfies - and binds. People with a calling are doing something that will not lose its value, even if they are stuck doing it for the next forty years.

• Keep your expectations reasonable. Don’t expect perfection in your work, in your love life, with your friends, with your kids.

• Agonize less about your many decisions. You can use that time and energy instead getting to know and understand all the people in your life.

Abundant choice does not make us happier

I think it’s important to keep in perspective that there are many people living in poverty who desperately need more choices. And there are people in authoritarian regimes who need more choice. But those of us who live in one of the Western industrial nations are confronted by too much choice.

There is an interesting line in a well-known Zen poem that bears on today’s theme:

The Great Way is not difficult;
Just avoid picking and choosing.

 

What is your experience of happiness versus choice?

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Relevant links

• Secrets of Happiness Series:
  Part 1: Authentic Happiness
  Part 2: What are Your Signature Strengths?
  Part 3: Future Happiness? Why We get it so Wrong

• Find books by Barry Schwartz here.
• A talk given by Barry Schwartz to student leavers
• Video clip of TED talk by Barry Schwartz: The Paradox of Choice
• An interesting article: Can Limitations and Restrictions be Liberating?

Photo by Venkane
Let’s imagine that you find an ancient lamp, give it a rub - and out pops a genie. “You can wish for three things which will make you happy,” he booms.

What would you wish for?

I’m sure that if I met a genie, I’d make some great choices! You too?

Well, we might both get it wrong.

According to Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard, what we would use when answering the genie’s question is part of the brain called prefrontal cortex. It is an experience simulator. Human beings can imagine experience. Just think back to the last time you braced yourself in the dentist’s chair or browsed a travel brochure: We can taste the experience before we have it.

Let’s test our experience simulator and see how accurate it is. I’ll use a question that Gilbert once asked his audience: “What would make you happier, winning Lotto or becoming a paraplegic?”

No contest! When faced with these two options for happiness, we wouldn’t exactly choose to become a paraplegic, right?
Wrong!

Research shows that lottery winners and paraplegics - one year after the event - are equally happy!

My experience simulator reported that I would be happy in the one situation and unhappy in the other. But I was wrong. The thing is that our experience simulator is faulty and we really don’t have a clue about what will make us happy. Why not?
This is the question that Daniel Gilbert pursues in his research.

The reason why our experience simulator is inaccurate, according to Gilbert, is because we have the ability to synthesize (or create) happiness. Gilbert calls this our psychological immune system and here is how it works:

We have an innate ability to change our view of the world so that we can feel better about the conditions we find ourselves in. This creating or synthesizing of happiness is a natural and subconscious process.

Gilbert differentiates between ‘natural’ and ‘synthetic’ happiness. ‘Natural’ happiness’ is what we feel when we get what we want. ‘synthetic’ happiness is what we make when we don’t get what we want.

Imagine for a moment that you are in your seventies. You have spent the last decades in prison for a crime you didn’t commit. At last DNA evidence proves your innocence and you are released. What do you feel when you look back on those many lost years in prison?

This happened to Moreese Bickham who spent 37 years behind bars in a US penitentiary before being released when new evidence showed his innocence.

After being release, he was asked by a reporter, “How do you feel about your time in prison?” Moreese answered: “I don’t have one minute of regret. It was a glorious experience!”

A ‘glorious experience’?

Research shows that losing our job, failing an exam, losing a partner, have far less impact on our experience of happiness than we expect them to have.

Why? Because happiness can be synthesized. That is, our mind can produce happiness.

Gilbert’s term ‘synthetic’ sounds as if that kind of happiness were not the real thing. But it is.

Synthetic happiness is the power to use our mind in order to change how we experience life.

An interesting point is that some circumstances are more conducive for producing synthetic happiness than others. Our psychological immune system works best when we are totally trapped! (I’ll be taking up the theme of freedom versus happiness in the next installment of this series).

Here’s an interesting bit of research:

Gilbert designed an experiment in which photography students at the end of a course had to either relinquish one of their two favourite photos at once, or could deliberate for four days over which one to give away. The question bugging Gilbert was: which of the two groups would ultimately be happier with their choice?

This experiment replicates situations we all experience in life. Sometimes choice seems wide open; at other times there is little or no choice and we have to live with what we have.

Which situation makes us happier? What do you think?

It turned out that the group that had to relinquish one photo on the spot liked the photo they kept a lot better than the one they had to give up - even days, weeks and months afterwards. In contrast, those who had the choice, didn’t really like the photo they finally chose - even after a long time. Here is what Gilbert concluded:

Freedom, the ability to make up your mind and change your mind, is the friend of natural happiness but the enemy of synthetic happiness.

Later Gilbert followed on with the experiment to see whether we are good at predicting what makes us happy.

He chose students at random and offered them a place in two different photography courses. They were told that in course A they would have to relinquish one photo immediately at the end of the course, whilst in course B they would be able to deliberate for four days to find which photo they would like to keep. 66% chose the second option. That is, 66% chose the option that would make them deeply dissatisfied with the picture they kept!

Just imagine - when choosing a happier outcome, 66% got it wrong!
(Maybe that explains why there are so many divorces…)

Here’s a summary of Gilberts research:

• Whatever happens to us in life only affects our feeling of happiness in the short term;
• We mistakenly think that we can ‘find’ happiness, when we actually ’synthesize’ or create happiness in the mind;
• We’re hopeless at predicting what might make us happy in the future.

I reckon that this has implications on how we make decisions in life, don’t you?

What are your thoughts on this?

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Relevant links:

• A brillliant TED talk by Daniel Gilbert. (Thank you for alerting me to TED talks, Miraz)
• Daniel Gilbert’s book ‘Stumbling on Happiness’ and website
  Interview with Daniel Gilbert
• Gilbert’s interesting article on ‘The Vagaries of Religions Experience’
• Secrets of Wellbeing Series - Part 1: Authentic Happiness
  
• Secrets of Wellbeing Series - Part 2: What are Your Signature Strengths?

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This post was written by Mary Jaksch