Framing Happiness
Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution kindly links to us and reminds of us his posts on happiness. This important passage is among them:
The flat-lining of the happiness-wealth relationship may in part reflect a framing effect. The literature usually focuses on aspiration or treadmill effects, whereby the wealthy expect more. Their greater wealth therefore translates into less happiness than might have been expected. But this is not the only adjustment occasioned by growing wealth. The wealthy also recalibrate how they should respond to questions about our happiness. If happiness itself is subject to framing effects, surely talk about happiness is subject to framing effects as well. The wealthy develop higher standards for reporting when they are “happy” or “very happy.”
So let us assume that both framing effects – concerning both happiness and talk about happiness – operate at the same time. This will imply that even a constant measured level of reported happiness implies growing real happiness over time. Life improvements do usually make us happier, while both our expectations and our reporting standards adjust upwardly. This is the most likely interpretation of the aggregate data. Most individuals strive to earn higher incomes, even after they have experienced the strength of “aspiration” and “treadmill” effects. [emphasis added]
Tyler’s point about the effect of framing on questionnaire responses is very important and rather underappreciated. Work based on SWB studies too often reflects a naive assumption that self-reports reliably track or indicate the objective nature of internal states. This view is naive because there is almost no reason whatsoever to believe that we have cognitive access to some fixed or invariant scale against which to compare the quality of the subjective experience. Our experience of temperature, pain, time, color, brightness, and on and on, is contextually variable. So, we can’t just introspect and say “I’m experiencing 32.6 hedons of positive affect,” because there is no external public standard, like the standard meter for a hedon. Instead, a person must go through a fairly complex chain of inferences. The self-report problem is exacerbated by the fact that happiness is quite likely a culturally loaded notion, as opposed to, say, simple sensations of physical pain.
So, I must monitor my own affect, experiential quality, or hedonic tone, make an inference about how the quality of my experience influences my behavior, commit to a generalization about how behavior tends to relate to the quality of subjective experience, observe other people’s behavior, and then, on the basis of my generalization, ascribe to them a certain quality of subjective experience. I must access conventional standards of how it is that a “happy” person feels and behaves, and compare my feeling and behavior to that standard. Then, I conclude that I’m “Very Happy,” “Pretty Happy,” “Not so happy,” etc…
Kahneman, lord of framing, naturally recognizes both sorts of framing effects, and pushes for the study of “objective” happiness, which does not rely so heavily on self-reports. And he pushes for a purer Benthamism in policy. In “Objective Happiness” Kahneman writes:
Policies that improve the frequencies of good experiences and reduce the incidence of bad one should be pursued even if people do not describe themselves as happier or more satisfied. The recognition that aspiration levels adjust and that people will never be fully satisfied does not mean that they cannot be made (objectively) happier. The implication of this analysis is that the goal of policy should be to increase measures of objective well-being, not measures of satisfaction or subjective happiness.
And it is worth pointing out that the unreliability of measures of subjective well-being does not really imply that objective well-being should be the standard for evaluating policy, instead. It may be that neither subjective nor objective well-being is the correct standard for evaluating policy, even if some form of well-being is the correct standard for determining the rationality or desirability for individual action.
In any case, once we take framing effects into account, we ought to conclude, as Tyler does, that the SWB data obscure a probable ongoing positive real relationship between wealth and happiness.
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Fonte: este genial blog. Claudio…
Happiness… I think there is nothing we can say about it.
How does the biological (evolutionary) view of happiness integrate with such effects?
The message I take away, from what I’ve read, is that if we were better informed about our “happiness mechanism” we could relax a bit, and be happy. There isn’t really a NEED for framing problems and runaway treadmills.
Andrew Oswald http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/faculty/oswald/
has an interesting (and commendably short) paper on this sort of thing. See http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/faculty/oswald/concavity2005.pdf
I would be inclined to say that subjective happiness is the metric that should be used, rather than objective happiness. In other words, you’re only as happy as you think you are. Even if you are objectively having many more experiences of well-being than most people, or more such experiences than most people have had historically, if you’re still in a sulk all the time, you’re not happy.
This is quite close to how I see it. As I think of it, happiness is like the indicator gauge on a gas tank. A person’s level of self-reported happiness serves as an indicator of how much life quality or value she believes that she has.
Suppose that someone has a 20-gallon tank and a properly-functioning indicator. The “F” line means 20 gallons, the “1/2″ line means 10 gallons, and so forth. Suppose that she upgrades her vehicle and now has a 30-gallon tank, with the gauge recalibrated accordingly. Now the “F” line indicates 30 gallons, the “1/2″ line 15, and so forth. The same mark on the gauge stands for an actual larger amount of gas.
Now, it is my opinion that people do not merely want a high reading on the gauge — they want to actually have gas in their tanks, and they want the gauge to read accurately. People are quite concerned about having the right standards, judging by the right criteria. The fact that people self-critique their own standards and sometimes raise them even though this causes a drop in reported satisfaction, shows that actual quality does matter to people. Otherwise, people would be content to have very low standards simply because they are easy to satisfy. Yet, a gauge that always reads “full” produces no information.
Thus, even though happiness or satisfaction ratings on a 1-10 scale remain the same when someone has an objective change in life quality, there is still some hidden variable — let’s call it “sense of value” — which has actually changed. (Also, note the possibility that the scale itself is not really linear; that is, the end values may actually represent infinite rather than finite quantities.)
Moreover, even though people with higher objective life quality are often no happier than those with lower, most everyone will prefer higher quality over lower, and will not necessarily use happiness as a justification. Instead of, “it will make me happy,” one will commonly hear, “it’s better.”
I think that the so-called hedonic treadmill could better be called the “Value Ladder” or the “Quality Staircase.” By focusing on the value that remains level rather than the one that rises, the concept is slanted in a negative direction. One might, instead, regard it as a sign of humans’ admirable tendency to seek out better and higher levels of quality, to reevalute their own standards, and to pursue continous improvement.
Also, the major negative critique of the “treadmill”, namely that people must continue compulsively pursuing rising standards in order to maintain the same level of happiness, strikes me as entirely unfounded by evidence. I have never seen any published material which showed that people’s happiness or satisfaction levels decrease when income remains steady. Indeed, the homeostasis model shows that when income decreases, happiness goes down temporarily then returns to the previous level. Why, then, should steady income cause a happiness decrease? It’s far more likely that steady income means level happiness.
In other words, it is likely that nobody is forced to climb the Quality Ladder by threat of hedonic loss, nor are they driven viciously like a kitten being prodded with a machete (a metaphor I saw on some blog, possibly this one.) People seek higher levels of quality because they are motivated to move in a positive direction, whch produces temporary gains in subjective happiness coupled with (hopefully) long-term gains in objective excellence.
In the past, measures of subjective happiness were tossed aside like they were unreliable, unusable measures. But, more recently researchers have found that someone who says they are happy are more likely to be judged ‘happy’ by their peers, less likely to get in conflicts at work, less likely to get a divorce etc. I seems that subjective happiness measurement is gaining a lot of momentum and people are starting to pay attention because isn’t happiness what we are all striving to achieve?