[MUSIC] So in the last video we were talking about one of the reasons we get happiness so wrong. And that was reason number one, which is that we kind of suck at affective forecasting. Were really bad when it comes to making predictions, we suffer from this impact bias where we think the impact of any event emotionally is going to be much bigger than it is. But there's a particular reason why we show this impact bias, why we suck so badly affective forecasting. And it's that we succumb to getting used to stuff over time, this is a particular feature of human nature, we just get used to stuff. And the psychological term that we use for this is what's known as hedonic adaptation, we adapt to all the hedonic or kind of interesting rewarding things out there. So just to get the definition down, hedonic adaptation is this process of getting used to stuff both positive stimuli but also negative stimuli, the bad things in life. And hedonic adaptation means that the emotional effects of these different stimuli, these different things that happen, they're going to attenuate over time. So the more we get, the less we're going to enjoy them. And that explains why a lot of the things that we think are going to make us happy, don't make us really as happy as we think, right. Let's take a thing that we talked about high school students predicting that will make them happy, getting perfect grades, right. You've got this wonderful A plus on your first exam of the semester, your first test in a class of the semester. But soon there's going to be another, test if you get another A plus, it's probably not going to feel as good as that first A plus. In fact, it might come with a little bit of anxiety because like, now I have a streak of A pluses and I got to keep holding these up right? Like the grades you got before the first time you get a great, it might feel really fantastic, but then over time you don't get the same emotional in Impact, right? One of the reasons good grades don't make us happy, this is another big reason why getting lots of money doesn't make us really happy, right? When you first get lots of money, this lady who wins $1 million, it feels great at first, but two weeks later when she's woken up, she's still just a millionaire. She was a millionaire yesterday, she's kind of just gotten used to all the things that money buys, right? It's like not giving her the same impact over time. So even this thing we want, once you get used to it, it's not really as good. This is also the reason why awesome stuff doesn't make us as happy as we think. If you get the fantastic car that Beyonce got or Beyonce gets her lovely car here, when you first get it, it's awesome, it's like a new stereo system. But then like weeks later it's just your car and it's a pain, you have to figure out where to park it and like it's no longer giving you the happiness, hit that you first got when you got it. My favorite quote explaining this comes from the positive psychologist Daniel Gilbert, who's a professor at Harvard. And he's this lovely book stumbling on happiness where he talks about this, he talks about the, awesome stuff not being so awesome. He says, part of us believes the new car is better because it lasts longer, right, you want a car that's going to last. But then he says, but in fact that is the worst thing about the new car, it's going to stick around to disappoint you. And this is sadly the same kind of thing that happens with all material goods, whether it's a new car, a playstation, what kind of shoes you want. Like they're just going to stick around to disappoint you. So, hedonic adaptation explains why the good stuff in life feels less good as time goes on. This is the dark side of hedonic adaptation, but there's a very bright side of hedonic adaptation two. Which is that we also hedonic lee adapt to the bad stuff, the bad stuff in life that feels really bad at first, it's not going to keep feeling as bad as time goes on and this is true for grade, right? If you get a bad grade in class, when you first get that test handed back to you that might feel really bad. But then you're going to go to gym, then you're going to hang out with your friends, it's not going to have the same emotional impact that it had and the duration of it is going to go down really quickly. This is also true for other bad things that we talked about in other lectures, right, like failing your driver's exam, why is it not as bad as you predict? because like if you do it once, it's not going to be that bad or soon you're going to just get over the fact that you went through this negative thing. And what we know is that this is true for all different bad events, there's some lovely data on breakup showing that if you have people forecast, how long they're going to be sad after a breakup. They almost inevitably are like twice as worried about it as the duration of the negative event is going to feel. And all of you who have friends that break up and they think it's the end of the world, you're just going to get over this in like a week and a half, that's hedonic adaptation and actually. We know it for other people, but it's hard to know it for ourselves. And again, this is true for even the worst things we can possibly imagine. One of the striking findings I find in positive psychology is that if you look at, terminal patients who are dying. The amount of negative words they express in their journals and things, is less than the amount of positive words they express. And the positivity goes up the closer they get to actually dying, right. Like the one of the worst things we can imagine, like dying young, it's actually not as bad as we think it's filled with more positivity than we expect, right? This is hedonic adaptation when you're used to something, you kind of get over it over time, it gets better than you think. And the reason I brought up the negative stuff at the end, is that it turns out that there's something extra special that's messing up our affective forecasting when it comes to negative events. That impact bias, if you recall from the other videos, that's the extent to which we mess up the impact. We think the impact is going to be really big when it's not, we have an even bigger impact bias when it comes to negative events. Like we're even more often our predictions of them. Why, because we don't take into account the action of a process that's trying to help us get over negative events. And that process is what researchers like Daniel Gilbert call the psychological immune system. What is the psychological immune system will like your physical immune system, the psychological immune system is there, to kind of help you recover from bad stuff. It's a whole host of unconscious psychological processes or mechanism that kick in when something bad happens. Your teacher gives you a bad grade on a test, like that teacher was stupid, I had a lot of stuff to do. Your friends like, nah, don't worry about that let's go out for some ice cream or something, right? Like immediately all these processes kick in, to make you feel better. The whole psychological immune system is there to make us feel good about ourselves. And whenever there's processes that are trying to make us feel bad, it tends to kick in. And the immune system is pretty smart, it's smart enough to kick in when it's needed and oftentimes like only when it's needed. Only when you're like trapped in a bad situation, does the immune system kick in? How do we know this, we know this from clever studies that vary, how trapped people are in a bad situation. This is a study that Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues did. Where he brought students in, he gave them a choice of paintings, you can imagine you're doing this study and I'm like, you get a choice of posters to take to put on your bedroom wall. You could take them on a poster or you could take the renoir like, which do you want, right? And they're both pretty good, so you're like, I'll just take the Monet, right? And then Daniel Gilbert says, well in one condition you can change your mind. If you take this money home and later two weeks from now, you're like actually the renoir would really go with my bedspread better, just email me and I'll ship you the other one. Like this decision is not final, right, you can change your mind, right? Versus a condition where he gives you the Monet, he's like, this is it like renoir, we're going to burn it, like it's going away forever, like you're stuck with the Monet, right? It's an unchangeable decision. So if you made a bad choice, you're kind of stuck with it. And then he just looks at people's happiness about their choice later on how they'd rank that poster later. And the prediction is that, in the unchangeable condition, your psychological immune system has to kick in. If you don't like that poster, like your psychological immune system has to rationalize, it has to decide, no that poster is the best ever. And so the prediction is people in the unchangeable condition should actually like what they got better than those in the changeable condition, and this is exactly what he finds. If you look at how people rank the awesomeness of the poster they got, they like it way better in the unchangeable condition. If anything in the changeable condition where you could change your mind, you're kind of always thinking like, should I change my mind, maybe I don't really like it right? because you're not engaging the psychological immune system, and this is the beauty of this system. Whenever something bad happens, you just kind of get over it really quickly. It's as though the meme works like this, psychological system something bad happens. You're like at first like, no, I don't like the painting and then your brain is like anyway, moving on, just like drop it out, right? And so this is why our affective forecasting is so bad. We have the system of hedonic adaptation that helps us get used to stuff really quickly. And we additionally have a system that deals with bad events that makes us feel good even when bad things have happened to us. The psychological immune system that kicks in, this is how our psychology works, but there's an additional feature that makes us bad at affective forecasting. Which is that we don't know these systems are happening, we don't know that we get used to stuff and we don't know that the psychological immune system is going to kick in. We kind of just don't notice that it's there, and that means that we're often not challenging ourselves in the way that we really could right. You sometimes so scared of the bad thing happening, you avoid it, but in practice, if the bad thing really did go down, you feel okay. If you apply to a college that like is maybe a little bit of an overshoot and you don't get in. You predict like, I don't want to do that because I feel so bad but in practice, like it might not feel as bad as you think. And this is why not noticing our own impact bias, especially in the negative direction is a bit of a big problem. It means we stick around in our comfort zone more than we should, we don't kind of push ourselves because we're scared of the failing, the failing is not going to feel as bad as we think. And we see this in the context of studies too, studies have actually looked at how bad people's decision making is. We go back to that painting study where people were really much happier in the unchangeable condition when they were forced to keep the thing, we can look at what people predict, and that's just what Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues did. He had people forecast, hey how are you going to feel about this painting days from now if you're in the changeable condition. You're still going to like it a lot if you get to change your mind, versus in the unchangeable condition when you're forced to keep it. And which of these would you rather, what if you could or couldn't change your mind, which would you prefer? And so here are the data that I showed you just before, What happens to people in the changeable and unchangeable condition. They like it better in the unchangeable condition, they like it better when they can't change their mind. But what happened, what do people predict? They predict they're going to like it more in the changeable condition. They picked it, they're really not going to like it being not so changeable. We hate the idea that we're stuck in our decisions, because we don't realize that even if the decision was bad, our psychological immune system would kick in and make us feel good about it anyway. And that means that people, I prefer this option to have the ability to change their mind, when that might be the worst thing for what we can do for our happiness with any given decision. What does all this mean? It means as Daniel Gilbert nicely summed up, we don't realize we have this ally of hedonic adaptation and the psychological immune system. And we don't put it to good use, we don't like push ourselves and not worry about the negative consequences. Realizing that we're going to feel okay, because we don't realize the system is in place and helping us
