The Luck Laboratory

Want to be happy? Invest in experiences, not things

How can we maximize our happiness this summer? As Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich have demonstrated in numerous studies, including “To Do or to Have? That Is the Question” (pdf available here), experiences provide people with more happiness than things.

“The things we own deteriorate over time, and we habituate to them quickly,” Van Boven told me last year. Later, we’re not left with the initial rush we get from driving out of the lot of the BMW dealership, but with the reality of its poor mileage, obsessing over its care, getting the transmission replaced, and worrying about it getting stolen. Memories from the end, thanks to a cognitive quirk known as recency effect, are especially prone to standing out.

What makes experiences so much better–or why should you go on vacation instead of getting a new car? For one, memories of static events “age like fine wine,” and are later open to positive reinterpretation.

Large events like trips can change lives; moments are a meaningful part of our identity. We tend to reminisce about our trips in Tahiti, not expensive watches.

Most importantly, experiences contribute to relationships, and quality of our relationships is the number one predictor of happiness. Goods we buy can isolate us. Having a car means you never get to meet anyone on the bus; having your own exercise bike means you never meet anyone at the gym or the park. Special memories are made of moments. A flat screen TV in itself is no good; inviting friends over and having a party for the game is what makes it great. You don’t bond over clothes, you bond over browsing for clothes with a friend, or going to someone’s house to borrow something.

It’s true that there’s gray area; some goods, like a bicycle, you get to have experiences. If the goal is to ride your bike rather than show it off, any bike will do. In the example above, a cheap fishing pole would do just as nicely. The key is getting to the lake in the first place.

Anxious about money this summer? You need a vacation more than ever

Recently, the State Department altered its estimate of how many passports it will be issuing in 2009; in December, fiscal year 2009 seemed poised to grant 17 million passports. Now, it’ll be lucky to hit 12 million. A recent poll conducted by Allstate found that this year, nearly half of all Americans are reducing their travel plans.

In hard times, the first thing to go is actually the most important: a vacation. Though traveling has long been seen as a frivolous venture ripe with classist guilt, it’s been proven to decrease stress levels, act as a buffer against illness, increase sense of self-efficacy, and change perspectives.

A 2007 study from the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology (”The Recovery Experience Questionnaire”) found that of the four classifications that the researchers used to quantify recovery from burn-out—psychological detachment from work, relaxation, mastery, and control—psychological detachment from work “might be the most relevant recovery experience.”

Why is getting away from work so important? Because, as science has proven since 1986, as anecdotes have shown since the advent of the family getaway, and as stated in the very definition, a vacation forces us to spend lots of time with non-work areas of our life. Other life domains such as family and leisure life gain salience; if iPhones can be turned off momentarily, we begin to realize that our cubicles and nameplates may not be everything. And many of the small joys or transcendent experiences of a vacation often revolve around small things experienced anew: walks in nature, lots of unstressed time to play, leisurely card games, going to sleep without setting the alarm. “A Vacation from Work,” by John W. Lounsbury and Linda L. Hoopes (download here), puts it best: “Life satisfaction… showed a significant increase after a vacation.”

Do you seem likeable? Just look at your Facebook page

Via the World of Psychology, I just came across a study published in this month’s Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, “On being liked on the web and in the “real world”: Consistency in first impressions across personal webpages and spontaneous behavior.” (Download here.)

The key finding was that participants rated as more likable in the flesh also tended to be rated as more likable based on their Facebook page. Video-recordings of the face-to-face contacts suggested it was participants who were more non-verbally expressive (through facial expression and tone of voice) who tended to be rated as more likable.

Similarly, participants with more expressive Facebook pages — for example having more photos available to view — tended to be judged as more likable.

Since this test was only conducted on 37 college students, it’s good sense to take the results with a “grain of salt,” according to PsychCentral’s World of Psychology, where I found the study. But there’s good reason for WoP’s apparent defensiveness: the title of their response, Your Facebook Page is a Mirror Reflection of How Well Liked You Are, doesn’t accurately relay one of the study’s main themes of impression management.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who knows someone with a ‘high degree of webpage expressivity’ whose apparent warmth is offset by other personality traits. As I’ve written about before with regards to dating websites, people are experience goods, meaning they’re impossible to judge on something as static as a Facebook page. Your impression of someone is different than how you’d actually get along, since we vary in differing situations, change over time, and other people’s personalities bring out differing aspects of our own.

People who displayed cues to social expressivity on their personal webpages also displayed nonverbal cues to social expressivity during the face-to-face interaction. Likewise, people who disclosed a lot of information about themselves on personal webpages also disclosed a great deal of information about themselves during the face-to-face interaction.

Of the study’s many unanswered questions, I’m most curious about what effect age has to do with this perception about high expressivity. It’s funny how non-digital natives see openness in person as a positive trait, but on the web, call it exhibitionism, obviously related to whether you think the internet is showing an extension of yourself, or that your web presence is something else entirely.

Managing time and finishing things when you can’t focus

I’ve read a few recent articles on attention and concentration, timed to the release of Winifred Gallagher’s new book, Rapt. The NY Times piece in particular, I feel, does a good job of exploring the difference betwen the urgent (checking your email) and the important (finishing that book). In short, it’s tricky because our brains are hardwired to respond to the urgent; more often than not we’re left scratching our heads at the end of the day, tired and wondering exactly what we accomplished that day that’s making us so tired.

“People get caught up in what happens to grab their attention,” says Leaf Van Boven of Cornell University, whose world-renowned psychology studies examine how our actions affect our happiness. “That is, what happens to call for their consumption in the moment, and they tend not to think very purposefully or mindfully in the decisions that they make. People are very adept at identifying the kind of experiences in line with their overall life goals. The challenge is really to be mindful of making decisions and consuming in a way that reflects underlying values.”

One key for me, I’ve discovered, is to make sure this doesn’t happen by removing all possible distractions. Not just through external means of turning off the internet, blocking addictive websites or turning off your phone, but with internal reinforcers:

• Having a clearly stated goal or task at hand that is to be accomplished in the time you’re sitting down (”finish this chapter” works better on a To Do list than “get my Master’s”)
• Write it down on a piece of paper in front of you alongside the related, overall goal, eg: ’study these words = become fluent in Mandarin’
• Giving yourself a sense of urgency by imposing a deadline
• Rather than waiting for the right time, allotting time in which you are to do nothing else
• Whenever you are tempted to check the score or interrupt yourself, just look on your sheet of paper: remember that every innocent Twitter update can turn into a lost 45 minutes online, which are preventing you from reaching your overall goal

Moving = deciding, which makes me tired

I’m in the process of moving to another apartment in Buenos Aires (I leave tonight!), and getting ready to spend a few weeks in Portland, Ore. (I leave Thursday!) I love these moments when I get to step back and look at everything I’ve collected and minimalize the crap. No matter how you try to control either, time just flies and crap just accumulates. Who would have thought last year, when I left Seattle for Buenos Aires with only an oversized backpack, that I’d now be contemplating things like placemats, speakers, masala spices? Or have enough books to constitute a small library?

It’s not the physical aspect of moving that’s annoying me right now. Just looking at my things and deciding: “keep in Buenos Aires, bring to Portland for the trip, store in Portland, or give away?” has left me feeling a bit depleted. Fortunately, I’m not alone. Or crazy. Simply deciding makes you tired.

If making choices depletes executive resources, then “downstream” decisions might be affected adversely when we are forced to choose with a fatigued brain.

To include the simplification of the century: the more you decide, the more tired you get and the worse your decisions become. Best to do it in small increments, so you don’t wind up in some new neighborhood, wondering why you gave your laptop away but have plenty of spices for cooking Indian food. Best to rest your brain.

More on the Myth of Multitasking

It’s Friday, and for those of you math-savvy enough to do the calculations, it’s late in the afternoon here in Buenos Aires. I haven’t accomplished as much as I’d have liked to this week. Surprise!

Although there’s been a lot written about how much e-mail zaps your attention, I never wanted to think that my activities were included in any of those statistics. I use email for work! For important stuff! So why would it be wasting time or harmful to my productivity at all? I don’t try to write to do research while engaging in any other activity. I do one thing at a time. And yet, my efforts fell short of those of a Zen master. (Or at least someone whose Friday To Do list wasn’t nearly identical to their Monday To Do list.)

Yesterday, I read one study explaining why that makes a lot of sense. I engage in task-switching, not multi-tasking. When given free reign, people who are given two tasks to complete within 10 minutes will spend more time on the easier task, which is done to the detriment of accomplishing the second, more difficult task. So even though you may feel like you’re keeping busy, you’re just doing crap.

This reminds me of a quote by Thomas L. Goodale, in his essay, “Is There Enough Time?”

“Time scarcity or famine and the sense that there is never enough time leaves us anxious if not neurotic. We over focus on the present, press to accomplish an endless series of short-term tasks, and sense a lack of control. We seem to have a whole culture suffering from anxiety disorders… we are obsessive about planning, often in detail, and compulsive about executing the plans, although there is little extension into the future.”

There’s a key distinction between what’s important and what’s urgent. What’s urgent are the things right in front of your face that beep and have reduced us all to Pavlov’s dogs. What’s important are the things that, if you zoom out and can look at what you’re doing with a little detachment and distance, are really going to matter in the long run.

An author I interviewed this week told me that although she cherishes her faith and truly believes it, she still has to remind herself what’s important when she forgets, or when her beliefs are tested. Although I know what activities are important to me right now, they’re the more difficult and demanding ones that are easy to forget or ignore when something easier comes along. It’s easy to have your beliefs or priorities tested when it seems like everyone else in the world is shouting something different in your ear, telling you to pay attention to something else, even if it ultimately doesn’t matter.