Post No.: 0973
Furrywisepuppy says:
‘Focalism’ or the ‘focusing illusion’ – which is linked to ‘what you see is all there is’ (WYSIATI) – occurs when the thing we’re currently thinking about suddenly becomes the most important thing there is. Nothing in life is as important as you think it is than when you’re thinking about it.
So if asked about our life satisfaction, if we’re primed or prompted to think about our career – in that moment of answering that question – our attention will be directed on our career and it’ll therefore loom large and be over-weighted in this global evaluation. Our ‘system one’ will generalise this subpart of our life for the whole of it. Too little or no weight will be given to other important aspects that aren’t presently brought to mind, like perhaps our eyesight or expanding paunch.
A lack of focalism is a reason why we’re not brilliant at dealing with problems that aren’t directly or currently in our faces here and now (like climate change or apparently ‘victimless’ white collar crimes) until they do start to affect us personally or unless we otherwise pay direct attention to these issues (such as via academic study).
Ignorance can be bliss then, for better or worse. A self-reinforcing rumination of a tragic event, and therefore vastly over-weighting that event in your life, can lead to depression. Meanwhile, gratitude exercises can help you to focus on the good things in your life. Constantly dismissing your existing fortunes because you’re greedy and always want more isn’t a healthy or satisfying way to live.
If asked ‘How much pleasure do you get from your car?’ An answer will come to mind immediately. But if asked ‘When do you get pleasure from your car?’ The answer will be that you get pleasure, or displeasure, from your car when you’re thinking about your car, which probably isn’t that often. This means you’ve, via the substitution heuristic, actually answered the question ‘How much pleasure do you get from your car when you think about your car?’ This is a much narrower question than the original question. The substitution caused you to ignore the fact you rarely think about your car from minute to minute. You’re thus likely exaggerating the pleasure/displeasure you derive from it.
A similar bias distorts our judgements of the happiness of those richer than us – whenever we think about rich people, we probably conjure up images of them relentlessly enjoying their supercars and mansions. But focalism arises because they actually spend little time mentally attending to these aspects of their life. You might also think that if only you had their supercars and mansions, you’d be the happiest you could ever be and never want for anything more. But if you acquire those things, you’d eventually, unless repeatedly kept grounded, probably think if only you had yachts and palaces, you’d be the happiest you could ever be and never want for anything more. After all, evaluations of life satisfaction are subjective and relative to whatever we’re comparing to – thus if we enter into wealthier circles and mingle amongst those with slightly more than us, we might think supercars and mansions are nothing special and compare our life to those with yachts and palaces. Meanwhile, those in really poor countries without Internet access or even running taps are most probably thinking, if only they had your bicycle and apartment, they’d be the happiest they could ever be and never want for anything more. We thus hedonically adapt (like when you were giddy about your new phone when you first got it but then it soon became just a phone), and desire is endless.
If you’ve lived in it all your life, living in wealth is like having ten toes – nice, but not something you think about much. Thoughts concerning any aspect of life are more likely to be salient only if a contrasting alternative is highly available (like when thinking about the homeless, or even the middle classes merely 100 years ago – they didn’t have Metal Gear Solid or Red Dead Redemption!) Likewise, how smart one feels depends on whom we hang around with or who’s brought to mind.
Like with the car example, people who acquire great wealth may report that they’re experientially feeling much happier now than they really are from minute to minute – but it’s only because, in that moment, they’re really answering ‘How happy am I when I think about my happiness?’ So their life satisfaction will be improved (yet this is only relevant during those moments when they’re deliberately and directly reflecting on their life satisfaction) but their experiential happiness when they just live day-to-day will be on average no different than before once they’ve become habituated to their new state.
So focalism can cause us to be inaccurate when judging our own, or other people’s, present overall happiness levels; and inaccurate when predicting our own, or other people’s, future affect.
Chronic pain is different because we’re basically being constantly, presently, mentally reminded of it. Our attention cannot easily be withdrawn from it for long. We don’t adapt to pain, noise and distressing thoughts because they evolved to be alarm signals indicating that something’s potentially wrong and demands our attention for our very survival.
Autistic people, rich people, tall people, etc. on average work, read, watch the same TV shows, listen to the same music, enjoy humour and friends, get riled about the traffic or politics, smile when the sun pops out, sleep for about a third of their days and so forth as any other. And when doing these activities, they’re not much different to any other with regards to their mood and experienced well-being.
A person might seem constantly cheerful. But if queried, they might say they’re unhappy because the question will make them think about their recent, say, exam failure in that moment.
Adaptation to a new situation, whether it’s a good or bad situation, is mostly down to thinking less and less about it. A situation only inhabits our mind when we directly think about it and start to compare it with the life we used to lead or the perceived lives of others according to the weight we accord to it.
And because the ‘remembering self’ makes the decisions – if a change in circumstances was deemed adverse, many people would be willing to trade away years of their life for a shorter life without the adverse change if this were possible. Furthermore, if an adverse change were reversible and was reversed, many people would be willing to give up even more of their remaining life to not have to return to that awful episode they remember. So the remembering self falls into a massive focalism error about a life that the experiencing self actually endures quite doggedly, hence we might make some irrational major life decisions.
Post No.: 0959 had more to say about the remembering self.
This misjudgement in affective forecasting can lead to wanting things we really shouldn’t want as much as we do, like exaggerating the affect of buying new material purchases on our future well-being.
Before you purchase a gadget, you’ll likely exaggerate the long-term benefits of it, even though in hindsight you’ve experienced buying many new things before and realised that their novelty wore off quite quickly. Committing to a regular sports or social club or other ongoing experience would be better for improving your happiness long-term than buying a flashier car or other luxury – both experiences will be novel and exciting at first but thoughts about the car will soon fade whereas you’ll always pay attention to the social interactions (and hopefully look forwards to the social get-togethers every week) for them being regularly in your diary.
Focalism creates a bias in favour of goods and experiences that are initially exciting even though they’ll eventually lose their appeal. Duration is neglected – meaning that experiences that’ll retain their value more durably won’t be sufficiently appreciated from the outset as they deserve to be.
There’s also a form of duration neglect in prospect theory, in which a state is represented by the transition to it, rather than by the total experiential time with it. For instance, winning the lottery yields a new state of wealth that’ll be assumed to endure for some time. But decision utility over-weights the anticipated intensity of one’s reaction to the transition to this new state. The eventual withdrawal of attention, and adaptation effects, are neglected since only that early thin slice of time is considered.
…On the whole, you could say that ‘happiness’ concerns your experiencing self, whereas ‘life satisfaction’ concerns your remembering self. They perceive things differently. One could have a high life satisfaction because one has autonomy over one’s work, yet have a high daily anxiety and therefore low happiness because one’s work is unstable, for instance.
Happiness is how we feel when we live from a present and first-person perspective. It’s how we feel when we don’t consciously think about how we’re feeling. And, whether rich or poor, we can all feel equally happy if our sports team wins, enjoy an excellent meal with superb fluffy company, laugh at a joke, feel equally fuming after a disagreement, miserable if the weather sucks, sleepy when we’re tired, and so on. As long as we’re warm and dry enough, fed enough, and are in good health then having any more won’t make us any experientially happier. So pleasure has a maximum limit – that’s why when we laugh so hard it actually starts to physically hurt!
But life satisfaction concerns how we feel when we consciously consider our achievements and life overall from a third-person perspective. And this can be based on biased recollections and other biases. This is for better or worse thus one can learn to focus on the perspectives that benefit one’s well-being – like consciously paying attention and gratitude to the good things in our life instead of ruminating on past losses; or comparing our lives to the starving children of the world instead of the inheritors of millions. It doesn’t mean we ignore social injustices. We can still fight for greater social and economic justice – but from a more equanimous position. Keep learning and understand that whatever doesn’t kill us can make us mentally stronger as long as we take the right perspectives. One might as well look on the bright side of life!
Who says we must look up to and worship those with money and fame? People who don’t look up to the rich tend not to look down on the poor too. Different things also genuinely make different people happy and content hence we don’t have to follow other people’s ideas of what’s supposed to make us happy.
But good health is one universal that improves both happiness and life satisfaction. So keep fit and healthy. Marriage tends to increase life satisfaction, but children don’t seem to make a difference, on average. Of course everyone and their situation is individual and no one is necessarily ‘the average’.
For the things we can control, take control. For the things we cannot, take a better perspective. Taking the right perspectives is really what it’s all about because whenever we think about ourselves – it is, after all, just a thought.
Woof. The meaning we ascribe to a pain affects how we feel about it, such as the soreness after exercise compared to after trapping a tail. Unemployment feels worse than a gap year, even though in both situations one isn’t working or earning. It’s the different intentions or narratives we give to events. This doesn’t mean there’s no difference between such pains, because one is productive and the other isn’t; or no difference between such life events, because one is part of the plan and the other isn’t – but we can try to reframe how we feel to keep positive for the moment when we cannot change a situation.
Comment on this post by replying to this tweet:
