Princeton University's Daniel Kahneman, a psychology professor and the 2002 Nobel Prize winner for economics, delivered the second annual Snyder Presidential Lecture series to a full house in Cabot Auditorium yesterday afternoon.
Kahneman has spent the past decade researching the elements of well-being, attempting to understand what makes people happy and satisfied. In doing so, his studies have raised new questions about moods, pleasure and pain.
The lecture, entitled "Towards a Science of Well-Being," began with Kahneman introducing the concept of two selves, an "experiencing self" and a "remembering self."
For 12 years, Kahneman studied the discrepancies between how people feel about an experience in the moment and how they recall those same feelings later.
Kahneman discussed his finding that people rate their feelings about an event differently while they are experiencing it than when they attempt to recall it.
"The overall impression [of an event] is determined as an average of [how people felt] at the peak and at the end," he said.
This leads to "duration neglect" and memories tend not to encompass everything that happened.
"People seem to produce representative moments [of an event]," he said. "By collapsing experience into moments, they seem to lose almost all impact of duration... There is a discrepancy and the remembering self is missing out on something."
Kahneman said there are several experiments to back up this claim.
In one experiment, subjects were asked to rate their feelings at regular intervals as they watched pleasant and unpleasant films. In another, patients undergoing painful medical procedures rated their pain level every 60 seconds.
These self-ratings were then compared to how people rated their overall experience after some time had passed, and lead to the conclusion that the "remembering self" reduces memories to mere moments and proceeds to make judgments based on these shortened memories.
Kahneman applied this idea to a larger concept, comparing general, overall well-being and satisfaction with moods and immediate emotions.
The findings thus far indicate, to Kahneman's initial surprise, that even major setbacks and advances do not drastically alter long-term happiness.
"The distortions in memory are primarily distortions in global evaluation," he said. He reported that in studies of lottery winners, paraplegics, and widows, there are not drastic long-term differences in well-being despite extreme positive and negative experiences.
"General life circumstances have small effects," he said. "This is a big puzzle. We need to understand what is happening here. We need to understand it because it violates our intuitions."
The larger effects on mood came from momentary circumstances, Kahneman said. "We find a lot of variability in day-in-the-life studies," he said.
Part of the research included attempts to understand what makes people feel the most pleasure. Some results were obvious, he said, but others were surprising to researchers.
"You don't need a lot of research to know that sex is better than commuting," he said.
Among the things found to have a low correlation with happiness was income, whereas socializing with people, especially friends, brings the most satisfaction.
"The only thing worse than being alone is being with a boss," Kahneman said of the findings.
Kahneman acknowledged the studies were preliminary and new, saying that researchers have just "scratched the surface" of learning about well-being. But, he said, this is why he was invited in the first place.
The Snyder Presidential Lecture Series is "intended to bring to campus people who have revolutionized their fields, taken on conventional wisdom and championed new ways of thinking," Dean of Undergraduate Education James Glaser said.
As a psychologist, Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on intuitions and the roles they play in judgment and decision-making.
