The riddle of experience vs. memory | Daniel Kahneman

1,374,389 views ・ 2010-03-01

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00:15
Everybody talks about happiness these days.
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I had somebody count the number of books
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with "happiness" in the title published in the last five years
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and they gave up after about 40, and there were many more.
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There is a huge wave of interest in happiness,
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among researchers.
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There is a lot of happiness coaching.
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Everybody would like to make people happier.
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But in spite of all this flood of work,
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there are several cognitive traps
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that sort of make it almost impossible to think straight
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about happiness.
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And my talk today will be mostly about these cognitive traps.
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This applies to laypeople thinking about their own happiness,
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and it applies to scholars thinking about happiness,
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because it turns out we're just as messed up as anybody else is.
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The first of these traps
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is a reluctance to admit complexity.
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It turns out that the word "happiness"
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is just not a useful word anymore,
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because we apply it to too many different things.
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I think there is one particular meaning to which we might restrict it,
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but by and large,
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this is something that we'll have to give up
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and we'll have to adopt the more complicated view
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of what well-being is.
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The second trap is a confusion between experience and memory;
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basically, it's between being happy in your life,
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and being happy about your life
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or happy with your life.
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And those are two very different concepts,
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and they're both lumped in the notion of happiness.
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And the third is the focusing illusion,
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and it's the unfortunate fact that we can't think about any circumstance
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that affects well-being
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without distorting its importance.
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I mean, this is a real cognitive trap.
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There's just no way of getting it right.
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Now, I'd like to start with an example
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of somebody who had a question-and-answer session
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after one of my lectures reported a story,
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and that was a story --
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He said he'd been listening to a symphony,
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and it was absolutely glorious music
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and at the very end of the recording,
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there was a dreadful screeching sound.
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And then he added, really quite emotionally,
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it ruined the whole experience.
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But it hadn't.
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What it had ruined were the memories of the experience.
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He had had the experience.
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He had had 20 minutes of glorious music.
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They counted for nothing
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because he was left with a memory;
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the memory was ruined,
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and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep.
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What this is telling us, really,
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is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other people
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in terms of two selves.
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There is an experiencing self,
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who lives in the present
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and knows the present,
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is capable of re-living the past,
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but basically it has only the present.
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It's the experiencing self that the doctor approaches --
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you know, when the doctor asks,
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"Does it hurt now when I touch you here?"
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And then there is a remembering self,
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and the remembering self is the one that keeps score,
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and maintains the story of our life,
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and it's the one that the doctor approaches
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in asking the question,
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"How have you been feeling lately?"
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or "How was your trip to Albania?" or something like that.
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Those are two very different entities,
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the experiencing self and the remembering self,
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and getting confused between them is part of the mess
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about the notion of happiness.
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Now, the remembering self
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is a storyteller.
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And that really starts with a basic response of our memories --
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it starts immediately.
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We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories.
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Our memory tells us stories,
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that is, what we get to keep from our experiences
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is a story.
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And let me begin with one example.
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This is an old study.
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Those are actual patients undergoing a painful procedure.
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I won't go into detail. It's no longer painful these days,
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but it was painful when this study was run in the 1990s.
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They were asked to report on their pain every 60 seconds.
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Here are two patients,
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those are their recordings.
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And you are asked, "Who of them suffered more?"
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And it's a very easy question.
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Clearly, Patient B suffered more --
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his colonoscopy was longer,
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and every minute of pain that Patient A had,
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Patient B had, and more.
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But now there is another question:
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"How much did these patients think they suffered?"
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And here is a surprise.
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The surprise is that Patient A
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had a much worse memory of the colonoscopy
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than Patient B.
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The stories of the colonoscopies were different,
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and because a very critical part of the story is how it ends.
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And neither of these stories is very inspiring or great --
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but one of them is this distinct ... (Laughter)
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but one of them is distinctly worse than the other.
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And the one that is worse
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is the one where pain was at its peak at the very end;
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it's a bad story.
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How do we know that?
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Because we asked these people after their colonoscopy,
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and much later, too,
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"How bad was the whole thing, in total?"
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And it was much worse for A than for B, in memory.
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Now this is a direct conflict
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between the experiencing self and the remembering self.
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From the point of view of the experiencing self,
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clearly, B had a worse time.
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Now, what you could do with Patient A,
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and we actually ran clinical experiments,
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and it has been done, and it does work --
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you could actually extend the colonoscopy of Patient A
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by just keeping the tube in without jiggling it too much.
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That will cause the patient
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to suffer, but just a little
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and much less than before.
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And if you do that for a couple of minutes,
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you have made the experiencing self
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of Patient A worse off,
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and you have the remembering self of Patient A
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a lot better off,
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because now you have endowed Patient A
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with a better story
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about his experience.
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What defines a story?
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And that is true of the stories
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that memory delivers for us,
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and it's also true of the stories that we make up.
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What defines a story are changes,
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significant moments and endings.
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Endings are very, very important
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and, in this case, the ending dominated.
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Now, the experiencing self
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lives its life continuously.
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It has moments of experience, one after the other.
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And you can ask: What happens to these moments?
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And the answer is really straightforward:
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They are lost forever.
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I mean, most of the moments of our life --
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and I calculated, you know, the psychological present
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is said to be about three seconds long;
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that means that, you know,
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in a life there are about 600 million of them;
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in a month, there are about 600,000 --
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most of them don't leave a trace.
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Most of them are completely ignored
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by the remembering self.
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And yet, somehow you get the sense
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that they should count,
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that what happens during these moments of experience
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is our life.
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It's the finite resource that we're spending
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while we're on this earth.
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And how to spend it
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would seem to be relevant,
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but that is not the story
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that the remembering self keeps for us.
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So we have the remembering self
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and the experiencing self,
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and they're really quite distinct.
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The biggest difference between them
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is in the handling of time.
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From the point of view of the experiencing self,
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if you have a vacation,
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and the second week is just as good as the first,
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then the two-week vacation
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is twice as good as the one-week vacation.
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That's not the way it works at all for the remembering self.
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For the remembering self, a two-week vacation
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is barely better than the one-week vacation
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because there are no new memories added.
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You have not changed the story.
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And in this way,
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time is actually the critical variable
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that distinguishes a remembering self
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from an experiencing self;
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time has very little impact on the story.
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Now, the remembering self does more
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than remember and tell stories.
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It is actually the one that makes decisions
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because, if you have a patient who has had, say,
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two colonoscopies with two different surgeons
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and is deciding which of them to choose,
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then the one that chooses
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is the one that has the memory that is less bad,
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and that's the surgeon that will be chosen.
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The experiencing self
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has no voice in this choice.
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We actually don't choose between experiences,
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we choose between memories of experiences.
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And even when we think about the future,
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we don't think of our future normally as experiences.
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We think of our future
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as anticipated memories.
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And basically you can look at this,
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you know, as a tyranny of the remembering self,
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and you can think of the remembering self
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sort of dragging the experiencing self
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through experiences that
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the experiencing self doesn't need.
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I have that sense that
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when we go on vacations
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this is very frequently the case;
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that is, we go on vacations,
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to a very large extent,
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in the service of our remembering self.
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And this is a bit hard to justify I think.
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I mean, how much do we consume our memories?
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That is one of the explanations
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that is given for the dominance
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of the remembering self.
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And when I think about that, I think about a vacation
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we had in Antarctica a few years ago,
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which was clearly the best vacation I've ever had,
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and I think of it relatively often,
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relative to how much I think of other vacations.
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And I probably have consumed
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my memories of that three-week trip, I would say,
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for about 25 minutes in the last four years.
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Now, if I had ever opened the folder
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with the 600 pictures in it,
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I would have spent another hour.
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Now, that is three weeks,
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and that is at most an hour and a half.
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There seems to be a discrepancy.
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Now, I may be a bit extreme, you know,
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in how little appetite I have for consuming memories,
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but even if you do more of this,
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there is a genuine question:
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Why do we put so much weight on memory
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relative to the weight that we put on experiences?
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So I want you to think
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about a thought experiment.
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Imagine that for your next vacation,
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you know that at the end of the vacation
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all your pictures will be destroyed,
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and you'll get an amnesic drug
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so that you won't remember anything.
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Now, would you choose the same vacation? (Laughter)
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And if you would choose a different vacation,
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there is a conflict between your two selves,
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and you need to think about how to adjudicate that conflict,
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and it's actually not at all obvious, because
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if you think in terms of time,
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then you get one answer,
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and if you think in terms of memories,
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you might get another answer.
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Why do we pick the vacations we do
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is a problem that confronts us
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with a choice between the two selves.
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Now, the two selves
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bring up two notions of happiness.
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There are really two concepts of happiness
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that we can apply, one per self.
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So you can ask: How happy is the experiencing self?
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And then you would ask: How happy are the moments
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in the experiencing self's life?
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And they're all -- happiness for moments
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is a fairly complicated process.
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What are the emotions that can be measured?
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And, by the way, now we are capable
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of getting a pretty good idea
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of the happiness of the experiencing self over time.
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If you ask for the happiness of the remembering self,
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it's a completely different thing.
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This is not about how happily a person lives.
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It is about how satisfied or pleased the person is
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when that person thinks about her life.
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Very different notion.
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Anyone who doesn't distinguish those notions
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is going to mess up the study of happiness,
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and I belong to a crowd of students of well-being,
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who've been messing up the study of happiness for a long time
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in precisely this way.
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The distinction between the
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happiness of the experiencing self
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and the satisfaction of the remembering self
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has been recognized in recent years,
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and there are now efforts to measure the two separately.
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The Gallup Organization has a world poll
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where more than half a million people
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have been asked questions
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about what they think of their life
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and about their experiences,
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and there have been other efforts along those lines.
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So in recent years, we have begun to learn
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about the happiness of the two selves.
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And the main lesson I think that we have learned
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is they are really different.
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You can know how satisfied somebody is with their life,
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and that really doesn't teach you much
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about how happily they're living their life,
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and vice versa.
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Just to give you a sense of the correlation,
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the correlation is about .5.
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What that means is if you met somebody,
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and you were told, "Oh his father is six feet tall,"
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how much would you know about his height?
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Well, you would know something about his height,
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but there's a lot of uncertainty.
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You have that much uncertainty.
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If I tell you that somebody ranked their life eight on a scale of ten,
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you have a lot of uncertainty
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about how happy they are
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with their experiencing self.
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So the correlation is low.
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We know something about what controls
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satisfaction of the happiness self.
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We know that money is very important,
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goals are very important.
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We know that happiness is mainly
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being satisfied with people that we like,
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spending time with people that we like.
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There are other pleasures, but this is dominant.
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So if you want to maximize the happiness of the two selves,
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you are going to end up
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doing very different things.
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The bottom line of what I've said here
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is that we really should not think of happiness
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as a substitute for well-being.
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It is a completely different notion.
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Now, very quickly,
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another reason we cannot think straight about happiness
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is that we do not attend to the same things
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when we think about life, and we actually live.
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So, if you ask the simple question of how happy people are in California,
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you are not going to get to the correct answer.
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When you ask that question,
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you think people must be happier in California
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if, say, you live in Ohio.
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(Laughter)
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And what happens is
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when you think about living in California,
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you are thinking of the contrast
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between California and other places,
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and that contrast, say, is in climate.
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Well, it turns out that climate
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is not very important to the experiencing self
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and it's not even very important to the reflective self
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that decides how happy people are.
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But now, because the reflective self is in charge,
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you may end up -- some people may end up
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moving to California.
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And it's sort of interesting to trace what is going to happen
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to people who move to California in the hope of getting happier.
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Well, their experiencing self
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is not going to get happier.
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We know that.
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But one thing will happen: They will think they are happier,
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because, when they think about it,
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they'll be reminded of how horrible the weather was in Ohio,
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and they will feel they made the right decision.
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It is very difficult
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to think straight about well-being,
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and I hope I have given you a sense
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of how difficult it is.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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Chris Anderson: Thank you. I've got a question for you.
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Thank you so much.
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Now, when we were on the phone a few weeks ago,
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you mentioned to me that there was quite an interesting result
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came out of that Gallup survey.
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Is that something you can share
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since you do have a few moments left now?
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Daniel Kahneman: Sure.
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I think the most interesting result that we found in the Gallup survey
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is a number, which we absolutely did not expect to find.
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We found that with respect to the happiness
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of the experiencing self.
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When we looked at how feelings,
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vary with income.
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And it turns out that, below an income
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of 60,000 dollars a year, for Americans --
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and that's a very large sample of Americans, like 600,000,
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so it's a large representative sample --
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below an income of 600,000 dollars a year...
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CA: 60,000.
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DK: 60,000.
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(Laughter)
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60,000 dollars a year, people are unhappy,
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and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get.
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Above that, we get an absolutely flat line.
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I mean I've rarely seen lines so flat.
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Clearly, what is happening is
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money does not buy you experiential happiness,
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but lack of money certainly buys you misery,
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and we can measure that misery
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very, very clearly.
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18:18
In terms of the other self, the remembering self,
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you get a different story.
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18:23
The more money you earn, the more satisfied you are.
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18:26
That does not hold for emotions.
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18:28
CA: But Danny, the whole American endeavor is about
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life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.
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If people took seriously that finding,
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I mean, it seems to turn upside down
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everything we believe about, like for example,
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taxation policy and so forth.
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Is there any chance that politicians, that the country generally,
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would take a finding like that seriously
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and run public policy based on it?
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18:53
DK: You know I think that there is recognition
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of the role of happiness research in public policy.
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The recognition is going to be slow in the United States,
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no question about that,
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but in the U.K., it is happening,
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19:04
and in other countries it is happening.
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People are recognizing that they ought
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to be thinking of happiness
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19:11
when they think of public policy.
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19:13
It's going to take a while,
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19:15
and people are going to debate
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whether they want to study experience happiness,
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or whether they want to study life evaluation,
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so we need to have that debate fairly soon.
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How to enhance happiness
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goes very different ways depending on how you think,
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and whether you think of the remembering self
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or you think of the experiencing self.
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This is going to influence policy, I think, in years to come.
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In the United States, efforts are being made
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to measure the experience happiness of the population.
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19:43
This is going to be, I think, within the next decade or two,
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part of national statistics.
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CA: Well, it seems to me that this issue will -- or at least should be --
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the most interesting policy discussion to track
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over the next few years.
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Thank you so much for inventing behavioral economics.
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19:58
Thank you, Danny Kahneman.
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