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Want to Be Happy?
Live and Learn
Research by Rebecca Ratner
What makes you happy now? And what will make you happy in
the future? These are often the questions that determine who
you date, how you spend your time and what you purchase. But
so often we make choices that don’t seem to truly reflect
what makes us happy—information that we should have gained
from past experiences. We live and don’t learn, in other
words.
Rebecca Ratner, associate professor of marketing, thinks
part of the problem may be that we just don’t remember
correctly. Her expertise is in the field of affective
forecasting, which looks at how we predict our emotions, and
whether our predictions match the way we actually feel.
Ratner conducted a study that asked people to predict how
they would feel about an experience, and then, after some
time had passed, asked people to remember their predictions.
A surprising number remembered a different prediction than
the one they’d actually made. “We’re not saying that people
can’t remember their previous predictions and experiences,”
says Ratner. “But they often seem to remember them
inaccurately.”
This inability to remember how we really felt during an
experience—and how we predicted we would feel—may be part of
what keeps us from learning how to more accurately predict
our future feelings, and what causes us to make future
choices that don’t truly satisfy. This tendency to
imperfectly predict future feelings isn’t such a big deal if
you’re choosing what car to buy or an entrée at a
restaurant, but it can have a disastrous effect on your life
if you are choosing a retirement community or a life
partner.
The good news is, these biased memories of past
experiences are eliminated when we focus on our enjoyment
during an experience. So pay attention to how much fun you
are actually having at the time you are having it, and
whether this fits with what you had expected. That should
help you make better choices in the future. Because people
who don’t learn from history—especially their own!—seemed
doomed to repeat it. |
