Stumbling on Happiness

And it isn’t just the subtle changes we miss. Even dramatic changes to the appearance of a scene are sometimes overlooked. In an experiment taken straight from the pages of Candid Camera, researchers arranged for a researcher to approach pedestrians on a college campus and ask for directions to a particular building.25 While the pedestrian and the researcher conferred over the researcher’s map, two construction workers, each holding one end of a large door, rudely cut between them, temporarily obstructing the pedestrian’s view of the researcher. As the construction workers passed, the original researcher crouched down behind the door and walked off with the construction workers, while a new researcher, who had been hiding behind the door all along, took his place and picked up the conversation. The original and substitute researchers were of different heights and builds and had noticeably different voices, haircuts and clothing. You would have no trouble telling them apart if they were standing side by side. So what did the Good Samaritans who had stopped to help a lost tourist make of this switcheroo? Not much. In fact, most of the pedestrians failed to notice–failed to notice that the person to whom they were talking had suddenly been transformed into an entirely new individual.

Are we to believe, then, that people cannot tell when their experience of the world has changed right before their eyes? Of course not. If we take this research to its logical extreme we end up as extremists generally do: mired in absurdity and handing out pamphlets. If we could never tell when our experience of the world had changed, how could we know that something was moving, how could we tell whether to stop or go at an intersection, and how could we count beyond one? These experiments tell us that the experiences of our former selves are sometimes as opaque to us as the experiences of other people, but more important, they tell us when this is most and least likely to be the case. What was the critical ingredient that allowed each of the foregoing studies to produce the results it did? In each instance, volunteers were not attending to their own experience of a particular aspect of a stimulus at the moment of its transition. In the colour-swatch study, the swatches were swapped in another room during the thirty-second break; in the reading study, the text was changed when the volunteer’s eye had momentarily jiggled away; in the door study, the researchers switched places only when a large piece of wood was obstructing the volunteer’s view. We would not expect these studies to show the same results if burnt umber became fluorescent mauve, or if this became t h a t, or if an accountant from Poughkeepsie became Queen Elizabeth II while the volunteer was looking right at her, or him, or whatever. And indeed, research has shown that when volunteers are paying close attention to a stimulus at the precise moment that it changes, they do notice that change quickly and reliably.26 The point of these studies is not that we are hopelessly inept at detecting changes in our experience of the world but rather that unless our minds are keenly focused on a particular aspect of that experience at the very moment it changes, we will be forced to rely on our memories–forced to compare our current experience to our recollection of our former experience–in order to detect the change.

Magicians have known all this for centuries, of course, and have traditionally used their knowledge to spare the rest of us the undue burden of money. A few pages back you chose a card from a group of six. What I didn’t tell you at the time was that I have powers far beyond those of mortal men, and therefore I knew which card you were going to pick before you picked it. To prove it, I have removed your card from the group. Take a look at figure 5 and tell me I’m not amazing. How did I do it? This trick is much more exciting, of course, when you don’t know beforehand that it’s a trick and you don’t have to wade through several pages of text to hear the punchline. And it doesn’t work at all if you compare the two figures side by side, because you instantly see that none of the cards in figure 4 (including the one you picked) appears in figure 5. But when there is some possibility that the magician knows your chosen card–either by sleight of hand, shrewd deduction or telepathy–and when your jiggly eyes are not looking directly at the first group of six as it transforms into the second group of five, the illusion can be quite powerful. Indeed, when the trick first appeared on a website, some of the smartest scientists I know hypothesized that a newfangled technology was allowing the server to guess their card by tracking the speed and acceleration of their keystrokes. I personally removed my hand from the mouse just to make sure that its subtle movements were not being measured. It did not occur to me until the third time through that while I had seen the first group of six cards, I had only remembered my verbal label for the card I had chosen, and hence had failed to notice that all the other cards had changed as well.27 What’s important to note for our purposes is that card tricks like this work for precisely the same reason that people find it difficult to say how happy they were in their previous marriages.

Fig. 5

Happy Talk

Reba and Lori Schappell claim to be happy, and that disturbs us. We are rock-solid certain that it just can’t be true, and yet, it looks as though there is no foolproof method for comparing their happiness with our own. If they say they are happy, then on what basis can we conclude that they are wrong? Well, we might try the more lawyerly tactic of questioning their ability to know, evaluate or describe their own experience. ‘They may think they’re happy’, we could say, ‘but that’s only because they don’t know what happiness really is.’ In other words, because Lori and Reba have never had many of the experiences that we singletons have had–spinning cartwheels in a meadow, snorkeling along the Great Barrier Reef, strolling down the avenue without drawing a crowd–we suspect they may have an impoverished background of happy experiences that leads them to evaluate their lives differently than the rest of us would. If, for instance, we were to give the twins a birthday cake, hand them an eight-point rating scale (which can be thought of as an artificial language with eight words for different intensities of happiness), and ask them to report on their subjective experience, they might tell us they felt a joyful eight. But isn’t it likely that their eight and our eight represent fundamentally different levels of joy, and that their use of the eight-word language is distorted by their unenviable situation, which has never allowed them to discover how happy a person can really be? Lori and Reba may be using the eight-word language differently than we do because for them, birthday cake is as good as it gets. They label their happiest experience with the happiest word in the eight-word language, naturally, but this should not cause us to overlook the fact that the experience they call eight is an experience that we might call four and a half. In short, they don’t mean happy the way we mean happy. Figure 6 shows how an impoverished experiential background can cause language to be squished so that the full range of verbal labels is used to describe a restricted range of experiences. By this account, when the twins say they are ecstatic, they are actually feeling what we feel when we say we are pleased.

Fig. 6. The language-squishing hypothesis suggests that when given a birthday cake, Lori and Reba feel exactly as you feel but talk about it differently.

Squishing Language

The nice things about this language-squishing hypothesis are (a) it suggests that everyone everywhere has the same subjective experience when they receive a birthday cake even if they describe that experience differently, which makes the world a rather simple place to live and bake; and (b) it allows us to go on believing that despite what they say about themselves, Lori and Reba aren’t really happy after all, and thus we are perfectly justified in preferring our lives to theirs. The less nice things about this hypothesis are numerous, and if we worry that Lori and Reba use the eight-word language differently than we do because they have never enjoyed the thrill of a cartwheel, then we had better worry about a few other matters too. For instance, we had better worry that we have never felt the overwhelming sense of peace and security that comes from knowing that a beloved sibling is always by our side, that we will never lose her friendship no matter what kind of crummy stuff we may say or do on a bad day, that there will always be someone who knows us as well as we know ourselves, shares our hopes, worries our worries, and so on. If they haven’t had our experiences, then we haven’t had theirs either, and it is entirely possible that we are the ones with the squished language–that when we say we feel overjoyed, we have no idea what we are talking about because we have never experienced the companionate love, the blissful union, the unadulterated agape that Lori and Reba have. And all of us–you, me, Lori, Reba–had better worry that there are experiences far better than those we have had so far–the experience of flying without a plane, of seeing our children win Academy Awards and Pulitzer Prizes, of meeting God and learning the secret handshake–and that everyone’s use of the eight-word language is defective and that no one knows what happiness really is. By that reasoning, we should all follow Solon’s advice and never say we are happy until we are dead because otherwise, if the real thing ever does come along, we will have used up the word and won’t have any way to tell the newspapers about it.

But these are just the preliminary worries. There are more. If we wanted to do a thought experiment whose results would demonstrate once and for all that Lori and Reba just don’t know what happiness really is, perhaps we should imagine that with a wave of a magic wand we could split them apart and allow them to experience life as singletons. If after a few weeks on their own they came to us, repudiated their former claims and begged not to be changed back to their former state, shouldn’t that convince us, as it has apparently convinced them, that they were previously confusing their fours and eights? We’ve all known someone who had a religious conversion, went through a divorce or survived a heart attack and now claims that her eyes are open for the very first time–that despite what she thought and said in her previous incarnation, she was never really happy until now. Are the people who have undergone such marvellous metamorphoses to be taken at their word?

Not necessarily. Consider a study in which volunteers were shown some quiz-show questions and asked to estimate the likelihood that they could answer them correctly. Some volunteers were shown only the questions (the question-only group), while others were shown both the questions and the answers (the question-and-answer group). Volunteers in the question-only group thought the questions were quite difficult, while those in the question-and-answer group–who saw both the questions (‘What did Philo T. Farnsworth invent?’) and the answers (‘The television set’)–believed that they could have answered the questions easily had they never seen the answers at all. Apparently, once volunteers knew the answers, the questions seemed simple (‘Of course it was the television–everyone knows that!’), and the volunteers were no longer able to judge how difficult the questions would seem to someone who did not share their knowledge of the answers.28

Studies such as these demonstrate that once we have an experience, we cannot simply set it aside and see the world as we would have seen it had the experience never happened. To the judge’s dismay, the jury cannot disregard the prosecutor’s snide remarks. Our experiences instantly become part of the lens through which we view our entire past, present and future, and like any lens, they shape and distort what we see. This lens is not like a pair of spectacles that we can set on the nightstand when we find it convenient to do so but like a pair of contacts that are forever affixed to our eyeballs with superglue. Once we learn to read, we can never again see letters as mere inky squiggles. Once we learn about free jazz, we can never again hear Ornette Coleman’s saxophone as a source of noise. Once we learn that van Gogh was a mental patient, or that Ezra Pound was an anti-Semite, we can never again view their art in the same way. If Lori and Reba were separated for a few weeks, and if they told us that they were happier now than they used to be, they might be right. But they might not. They might just be telling us that the singletons they had become now viewed being conjoined with as much distress as those of us who have always been singletons do. Even if they could remember what they thought, said and did as conjoined twins, we would expect their more recent experience as singletons to colour their evaluation of the conjoined experience, leaving them unable to say with certainty how conjoined twins who had never been singletons actually feel. In a sense, the experience of separation would make them us, and thus they would be in the same difficult position that we are in when we try to imagine the experience of being conjoined. Becoming singletons would affect their views of the past in ways that they could not simply set aside. All of this means that when people have new experiences that lead them to claim that their language was squished–that they were not really happy even though they said so and thought so at the time–they can be mistaken. In other words, people can be wrong in the present when they say they were wrong in the past.

Stretching Experience

Lori and Reba have not done many of the things that for the rest of us give rise to feelings near the top of the happiness scale–cartwheels, scuba diving, name your poison–and surely this must make a difference. If impoverished experiential backgrounds don’t necessarily squish language, then what do they do instead? Let’s assume that Lori and Reba really do have an impoverished experiential background against which to evaluate something as simple as, say, the dutiful presentation of a chocolate cake on their birthday. One possibility is that their impoverished experiential background would squish their language. But another possibility is that their impoverished experiential background would not squish their language so much as it would stretch their experience–that is, when they say eight they mean exactly the same thing we mean when we say eight because when they receive a birthday cake they feel exactly the same way that the rest of us feel when we do underwater cartwheels along the Great Barrier Reef. Figure 7 illustrates the experience-stretching hypothesis.

Fig. 7. The experience-stretching hypothesis suggests that when given a birthday cake, Lori and Reba talk about their feelings the same way you do but feel something different.

Experience stretching is a bizarre phrase but not a bizarre idea. We often say of others who claim to be happy despite circumstances that we believe should preclude it that ‘they only think they’re happy because they don’t know what they’re missing’. Okay, sure, but that’s the point. Not knowing what we’re missing can mean that we are truly happy under circumstances that would not allow us to be happy once we have experienced the missing thing. It does not mean that those who don’t know what they’re missing are less happy than those who have it. Examples abound in my life and yours, so let’s talk about mine. I occasionally smoke a cigar because it makes me happy, and my wife occasionally fails to understand why I must have a cigar to be happy when she can apparently be just as happy without one (and even happier without me having one). But the experience-stretching hypothesis suggests that I too could have been happy without cigars if only I had not experienced their pharmacological mysteries in my wayward youth. But I did, and because I did I now know what I am missing when I don’t, hence that glorious moment during my spring holiday when I am reclining in a lawn chair on the golden sands of Kauai, sipping Talisker and watching the sun slip slowly into a taffeta sea, is just not quite perfect if I don’t also have something stinky and Cuban in my mouth. I could press both my luck and my marriage by advancing the language-squishing hypothesis, carefully explaining to my wife that because she has never experienced the pungent earthiness of a Montecristo no. 4, she has an impoverished experiential background and therefore does not know what happiness really is. I would lose, of course, because I always do, but in this case I would deserve it. Doesn’t it make better sense to say that by learning to enjoy cigars I changed my experiential background and inadvertently ruined all future experiences that do not include them? The Hawaiian sunset was an eight until the Hawaiian sunset a la stogie took its place and reduced the cigarless sunset to a mere seven.29

But we’ve talked enough about me and my holiday. Let’s talk about me and my guitar. I’ve played the guitar for years, and I get very little pleasure from executing an endless repetition of three-chord blues. But when I first learned to play as a teenager, I would sit upstairs in my bedroom happily strumming those three chords until my parents banged on the ceiling and invoked their rights under the Geneva Convention. I suppose we could try the language-squishing hypothesis here and say that my eyes have been opened by my improved musical abilities and that I now realize I was not really happy in those teenage days. But doesn’t it seem more reasonable to invoke the experience-stretching hypothesis and say that an experience that once brought me pleasure no longer does? A man who is given a drink of water after being lost in the Mojave Desert for a week may at that moment rate his happiness as eight. A year later, the same drink might induce him to feel no better than two. Are we to believe that he was wrong about how happy he was when he took that life-giving sip from a rusty canteen, or is it more reasonable to say that a sip of water can be a source of ecstasy or a source of moisture depending on one’s experiential background? If impoverished experiential backgrounds squish our language rather than stretch our experience, then children who say they are delighted by peanut butter and jelly are just plain wrong, and they will admit it later in life when they get their first bite of goose liver, at which time they will be right, until they get older and begin to get heartburn from fatty foods, at which time they will realize that they were wrong then too. Every day would be a repudiation of the day before, as we experienced greater and greater happiness and realized how thoroughly deluded we were until, conveniently enough, now.

So which hypothesis is correct? We can’t say. What we can say is that all claims of happiness are claims from someone’s point of view–from the perspective of a single human being whose unique collection of past experiences serves as a context, a lens, a background for her evaluation of her current experience. As much as the scientist might wish for it, there isn’t a view from nowhere. Once we have an experience, we are thereafter unable to see the world as we did before. Our innocence is lost and we cannot go home again. We may remember what we thought or said (though not necessarily), and we may remember what we did (though not necessarily that either), but the likelihood is depressingly slim that we can resurrect our experience and then evaluate it as we would have back then. In some ways, the cigar-smoking, guitar-playing, pate-eating people we become have no more authority to speak on behalf of the people we used to be than do outside observers. The separated twins may be able to tell us how they now feel about having been conjoined, but they cannot tell us how conjoined twins who have never experienced separation feel about it. No one knows if Reba’s and Lori’s eight feels like our eight, and that includes all the Rebas and Loris that will ever be.

Onward

On the morning of 15 May 1916, the arctic explorer Ernest Shackleton began the last leg of one of history’s most gruelling adventures. His ship, the Endurance, had sunk in the Weddell Sea, stranding him and his crew on Elephant Island. After seven months, Shackleton and five of his crewmen boarded a small lifeboat in which they spent three weeks crossing eight hundred miles of frigid, raging ocean. Upon reaching South Georgia Island, the starving, frostbitten men prepared to disembark and cross the island on foot in the hope of reaching a whaling station on the other side. No one had ever survived that trek. Facing almost certain death that morning, Shackleton wrote:

We passed through the narrow mouth of the cove with the ugly rocks and waving kelp close on either side, turned to the east, and sailed merrily up the bay as the sun broke through the mists and made the tossing waters sparkle around us. We were a curious-looking party on that bright morning, but we were feeling happy. We even broke into song, and, but for our Robinson Crusoe appearance, a casual observer might have taken us for a picnic party sailing in a Norwegian fjord or one of the beautiful sounds of the west coast of New Zealand.30

Could Shackleton really have meant what he said? Could his happy be our happy, and is there any way to tell? As we’ve seen, happiness is a subjective experience that is difficult to describe to ourselves and to others, thus evaluating people’s claims about their own happiness is an exceptionally thorny business. But don’t worry–because before business gets better, it gets a whole lot thornier.

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