On the road to happiness, a pleasant surprise beats a sure thing
On the road to happiness, a pleasant surprise beats a
sure thing
By Meeri Kim August 8
Do you remember the last time you were dreading
something, only to have it turn out to be a pleasant surprise? Maybe it was a
bad summer blockbuster you were forced to watch, or a blind date set up by your
parents.
You turn up, grumbling and prepared to hate every second
of it. But then a funny thing happens: You crack a smile–laugh out loud,
even–and before you know it, you’re having a grand old time.
It turns out that the element of surprise has a big
impact on how we feel from moment to moment and that we’re happier when
satisfied unexpectedly instead of certain of a positive outcome in advance,
according to a new mathematical model of happiness. A study of this was
published online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Happiness is not about how well you’re doing in general,
but rather if you’re doing better than expected,” said study author and
neuroscientist Robb Rutledge of the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational
Psychiatry and Ageing.
For instance, say you go to a restaurant where the food
was the best you’ve ever had. According to the happiness equation, you would
actually be happier at the end of the meal if you had expected it to be just
average, as opposed to assuming it would be as delicious as it was.
“Most of our senses are much more tuned to changes in
things than to levels, and the same is true for happiness,” said economist
George Loewenstein at Carnegie Mellon University, who was not involved in the
study. “This ensures that however successful we are, we are always going to be
driving for more.”
But this doesn’t mean that having low expectations is the
path to happiness, because the model also shows that such pessimism leads to
discontentment while you wait for an outcome. So if you make plans with a flaky
friend and assume he’ll cancel, you’ll take a hit on your happiness in the
meantime, even if you experience a boost when he shows up on time.
On the other hand, imagine bubbling with anticipation
about finally securing concert tickets to go see your favorite musician.
“The whole day, you might be a little bit happier as a
result,” Rutledge said, even if the performance eventually disappoints and
causes unhappiness later on. “Before you find out the outcome, you’ll be
happier if your expectation is higher.”
These two factors — degree of surprise and overall
expectation — play a dual role in determining our momentary well-being,
although Rutledge found that surprise matters more. His team is currently
testing people with depression to investigate how their emotions deviate from
the model, with the hope that such knowledge can somehow lead to better
treatment options.
Using an MRI scanner, Rutledge and his colleagues first
measured the brain activity of 26 subjects who played a gambling game. Even
though the players on average earned a net profit, their self-reported
happiness did not increase between the beginning and end of the experiment. In
fact, there wasn’t any significant relationship between monetary earnings and
happiness. What did contribute to happiness was having a good chance of earning
money or getting an unexpected reward.
“We’re happy when we have a rosy view of the future, but
we’re also happy that the present exceeds what our expectations were,”
Loewenstein said.
Also, quite unsurprisingly, the model found that past
rewards had less of an impact on contentment as time passed.
Using the MRI data, the researchers determined that
signals from a region of the brain called the striatum could be used to predict
how happy people would be at any given time during the experiment. They then
created a smartphone app to test their model on a much wider audience – a total
of 18,420 online participants.
The app featured the same decision-making game as the MRI
experiment. Although the subjects were remote and anonymous, the results were
still consistent with the model.
“All models are simplifications of reality,” said
Loewenstein. “But their central insight that happiness depends on how reality pans
out relative to expectation is a correct one, in my view.”
He noted that, while the idea behind the happiness
equation isn’t new, the study is a “strong and interesting” piece of supportive
evidence. But can we use this knowledge to boost our own well-being? Lowering
expectations as a tactic has already been ruled out, but the study does hint at
why you might not feel as elated after reaching an expected goal as you might
think.
“People are always pursuing goals, and when they reach
the goal, they don’t end up being as satisfied as they perceive they’d be–as if
happiness is held out in front of us, and we never quite achieve it,”
Loewenstein said.
On the other hand, he suggests that there might be some
consolation in realizing that we are all hard-wired this way in order to keep
us moving forward.
Kim is a freelance science journalist based in
Philadelphia.
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