In one of his Ted Talks, Dr. Dan Gilbert tells us:
“The prefrontal cortex does lots of things, but one of the most important things it does is it’s an experience simulator. Let’s see how your experience simulators are working. Let’s just run a quick diagnostic before I proceed with the rest of the talk. Here’s two different futures that I invite you to contemplate. You can try to simulate them and tell me which one you think you might prefer. One of them is winning the lottery. This is about 314 million dollars. And the other is becoming paraplegic. Just give it a moment of thought. You probably don’t feel like you need a moment of thought. Interestingly, there are data on these two groups of people, data on how happy they are. Happiness 1 year later. Lottery winners 50%ish. Paraplegics 50%ish. The fact is that a year after losing the use of their legs and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives. The research that my laboratory has been doing, that economists and psychologists around the country have been doing, has revealed something really quite startling to us, something we call the ‘impact bias,’ which is the tendency for the simulator to work badly, for the simulator to make you believe that different outcomes are more different than, in fact, they really are. From field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have. A recent study — this almost floors me — a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness. Human beings have something that we might think of as a ‘psychological immune system,’ a system of cognitive processes, largely nonconscious cognitive processes, that help them change their views of the world, so that they can feel better about the worlds in which they find themselves.”
Wow! “…a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness.”
Our simulator of the future tends to work poorly. Fortunately, we have what scientists call a psychological immune system that helps us cope with adversity.
“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.” – Daniel Kahneman
