Think back to that study of undergraduates who answered the question 'How happy are you?' after first recounting their recent dating history. We're no different from them. Asking people about their overall happiness just after inquiring into the state of their marriage or their health has a similar effect. These studies tell us that people often don't really know how happy they are. Our subjective sense of happiness is, like so many of our beliefs, fluid, and greatly dependent on context.
Perhaps for that reason, the more we think about how we happy we are, the less happy we become. People who ruminate less upon their own circumstances tend to be happier than those who think about them more, just as Woody Allen implied in
Our lack of self-understanding may seem startling at first, but in hindsight it should scarcely seem surprising. Evolution doesn't 'care' whether we understand our own internal operations, or even whether we are happy. Happiness, or more properly, the opportunity to pursue it, is little more than a motor that moves us. The happiness treadmill keeps us going: alive, reproducing, taking care of children, surviving for another day. Evolution didn't evolve us to
In the battle between us and our genes, the kicker is this: to the extent that we see pleasure as a compass (albeit a flawed one) that tells us where we should be headed, and to the extent that we see happiness as a thermometer that tells us how we are doing, those instruments should, by rights,
Take, for example, your average undergraduate around the time I hand out grades. Students who get As are thrilled, they're happy, and they accept their grades with pleasure, even glee. People with C's are, as you might imagine, less enthusiastic, dwelling for the most part not on what
Freud would have seen all this self-deception as an illustration of what he called 'defense mechanisms'; I see it as motivated reasoning. Either way, examples like these exemplify our habit of trying to fool the thermometer. Why feel bad that we've done something wrong when we can so easily jiggle the thermometer? As Jeff Goldblum's character put it in
We do our best to succeed, but if at first we don't succeed, we can always lie, dissemble, or rationalize. In keeping with this idea, most Westerners believe themselves to be smarter, fairer, more considerate, more dependable, and more creative than average. And — shades of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, where 'the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all the children are above average' — we also convince ourselves that we are better-than-average drivers and have better-than-average health prospects. But you do the math: we can't
Classic studies of a phenomenon called 'cognitive dissonance' make the point in a different way.* Back in the late 1950s, Leon Festinger did a famous series of experiments in which he asked subjects (undergraduate students) to do tedious menial tasks (such as sticking a set of plain pegs into an plain board). Here's the rub: some subjects were paid well ($20, a lot of money in 1959), but others, poorly ($1). Afterward, all were asked how much they liked the task. People who were paid well typically confessed to being bored, but people who were paid only a dollar tended to delude themselves into thinking that putting all those pegs into little holes was fun. Evidently they didn't want to admit to themselves that they'd wasted their time. Once again, who's directing whom? Is happiness guiding
*The term
us, or are we micromanaging our own guide? It's as if we paid a sherpa to guide us up a mountain — only to ignore him whenever he told us we were going in the wrong direction. In short, we do everything in our power to make ourselves happy and comfortable with the world, but we stand perfectly ready to lie to ourselves if the truth doesn't cooperate.
Our tendency toward self-deception can lead us to lie not just about ourselves but about others. The psychologist Melvyn Lerner, for example, identified what he called a 'Belief in a Just World'; it feels better to live in a world that seems just than one that seems unjust. Taken to its extreme, that belief can lead people to do things that are downright deplorable, such as blaming innocent victims. Rape victims, for example, are sometimes perceived as if they are to blame, or 'had it coming.' Perhaps the apotheosis of this sort of behavior occurred during the Irish potato famine, when a rather objectionable English politician said that 'the great evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse, and turbulent character of the people.' Blaming victims may allow us to cling to the happy notion that the world is just, but its moral costs are often considerable.
A robot that was more sensibly engineered might retain the capacity for deliberative reason but dispense with all the rationalization and self-deception. Such a robot would be aware of its present state but prepared, Buddha- like, to accept it, good or bad, with equanimity rather than agony, and thus choose to take actions based on reality rather than delusion.
In biological terms, the neurotransmitters that underlie emotion, such as dopamine and serotonin, are ancient, tracing their history at least to the first vertebrates and playing a pivotal role in the reflexive systems of animals including fish, birds, and even mammals. Humans, with our massive prefrontal cortex, add substantial reflective reasoning on top, and thus we find ourselves with an instrument-fooling kluge. Virtually every study of reasoned decision making locates this capacity in the prefrontal cortex; emotion is attributed to the limbic system (and oribitofrontal cortex). A spot known as the anterior cingulate, souped up in human beings and other great apes, seems to mediate between the two. Deliberative prefrontal thought is piled
