PSYCH/ECON-TED Talks-Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs memory-Video & more

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Transcript: Everybody talks about happiness these days.I had somebody count the number of bookswith "happiness" in the title published in the last five yearsand they gave up after about 40, and there were many more.There is a huge wave of interest in happiness,among researchers.There is a lot of happiness coaching.Everybody would like to make people happier.But in spite of all this flood of work,there are several cognitive trapsthat sort of make it almost impossible to think straightabout happiness. And my talk today will be mostly about these cognitive traps.This applies to laypeople thinking about their own happiness,and it applies to scholars thinking about happiness,because it turns out we're just as messed up as anybody else is.The first of these trapsis a reluctance to admit complexity.It turns out that the word "happiness"is just not a useful word anymore,because we apply it to too many different things.I think there is one particular meaning to which we might restrict it,but by and large,this is something that we'll have to give upand we'll have to adopt the more complicated viewof what well-being is.The second trap is a confusion between experience and memory;basically, it's between being happy in your life,and being happy about your lifeor happy with your life.And those are two very different concepts,and they're both lumped in the notion of happiness.And the third is the focusing illusion,and it's the unfortunate fact that we can't think about any circumstancethat affects well-beingwithout distorting its importance.I mean, this is a real cognitive trap.There's just no way of getting it right. Now, I'd like to start with an exampleof somebody who had a question-and-answer sessionafter one of my lectures reported a story,and that was a story --He said he'd been listening to a symphony,and it was absolutely glorious musicand at the very end of the recording,there was a dreadful screeching sound.And then he added, really quite emotionally,it ruined the whole experience.But it hadn't.What it had ruined were the memories of the experience.He had had the experience.He had had 20 minutes of glorious music.They counted for nothingbecause he was left with a memory;the memory was ruined,and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep. What this is telling us, really,is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other peoplein terms of two selves.There is an experiencing self,who lives in the presentand knows the present,is capable of re-living the past,but basically it has only the present.It's the experiencing self that the doctor approaches --you know, when the doctor asks,"Does it hurt now when I touch you here?"And then there is a remembering self,and the remembering self is the one that keeps score,and maintains the story of our life,and it's the one that the doctor approachesin asking the question,"How have you been feeling lately?"or "How was your trip to Albania?" or something like that.Those are two very different entities,the experiencing self and the remembering self,and getting confused between them is part of the messabout the notion of happiness. Now, the remembering selfis a storyteller.And that really starts with a basic response of our memories --it starts immediately.We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories.Our memory tells us stories,that is, what we get to keep from our experiencesis a story.And let me begin with one example.This is an old study.Those are actual patients undergoing a painful procedure.I won't go into detail. It's no longer painful these days,but it was painful when this study was run in the 1990s.They were asked to report on their pain every 60 seconds.Here are two patients,those are their recordings.And you are asked, "Who of them suffered more?"And it's a very easy question.Clearly, Patient B suffered more --his colonoscopy was longer,and every minute of pain that Patient A had,Patient B had, and more. But now there is another question:"How much did these patients think they suffered?"And here is a surprise.The surprise is that Patient Ahad a much worse memory of the colonoscopythan Patient B.The stories of the colonoscopies were different,and because a very critical part of the story is how it ends.And neither of these stories is very inspiring or great --but one of them is this distinct ... (Laughter)but one of them is distinctly worse than the other.And the one that is worseis the one where pain was at its peak at the very end;it's a bad story.How do we know that?Because we asked these people after their colonoscopy,and much later, too,"How bad was the whole thing, in total?"And it was much worse for A than for B, in memory. Now this is a direct conflictbetween the experiencing self and the remembering self.From the point of view of the experiencing self,clearly, B had a worse time.Now, what you could do with Patient A,and we actually ran clinical experiments,and it has been done, and it does work --you could actually extend the colonoscopy of Patient Aby just keeping the tube in without jiggling it too much.That will cause the patientto suffer, but just a littleand much less than before.And if you do that for a couple of minutes,you have made the experiencing selfof Patient A worse off,and you have the remembering self of Patient Aa lot better off,because now you have endowed Patient Awith a better storyabout his experience.What defines a story?And that is true of the storiesthat memory delivers for us,and it's also true of the stories that we make up.What defines a story are changes,significant moments and endings.Endings are very, very importantand, in this case, the ending dominated. Now, the experiencing selflives its life continuously.It has moments of experience, one after the other.And you can ask: What happens to these moments?And the answer is really straightforward:They are lost forever.I mean, most of the moments of our life --and I calculated, you know, the psychological presentis said to be about three seconds long;that means that, you know,in a life there are about 600 million of them;in a month, there are about 600,000 --most of them don't leave a trace.Most of them are completely ignoredby the remembering self.And yet, somehow you get the sensethat they should count,that what happens during these moments of experienceis our life.It's the finite resource that we're spendingwhile we're on this earth.And how to spend itwould seem to be relevant,but that is not the storythat the remembering self keeps for us. So we have the remembering selfand the experiencing self,and they're really quite distinct.The biggest difference between themis in the handling of time.From the point of view of the experiencing self,if you have a vacation,and the second week is just as good as the first,then the two-week vacationis twice as good as the one-week vacation.That's not the way it works at all for the remembering self.For the remembering self, a two-week vacationis barely better than the one-week vacationbecause there are no new memories added.You have not changed the story.And in this way,time is actually the critical variablethat distinguishes a remembering selffrom an experiencing self;time has very little impact on the story. Now, the remembering self does morethan remember and tell stories.It is actually the one that makes decisionsbecause, if you have a patient who has had, say,two colonoscopies with two different surgeonsand is deciding which of them to choose,then the one that choosesis the one that has the memory that is less bad,and that's the surgeon that will be chosen.The experiencing selfhas no voice in this choice.We actually don't choose between experiences,we choose between memories of experiences.And even when we think about the future,we don't think of our future normally as experiences.We think of our futureas anticipated memories.And basically you can look at this,you know, as a tyranny of the remembering self,and you can think of the remembering selfsort of dragging the experiencing selfthrough experiences thatthe experiencing self doesn't need. I have that sense thatwhen we go on vacationsthis is very frequently the case;that is, we go on vacations,to a very large extent,in the service of our remembering self.And this is a bit hard to justify I think.I mean, how much do we consume our memories?That is one of the explanationsthat is given for the dominanceof the remembering self.And when I think about that, I think about a vacationwe had in Antarctica a few years ago,which was clearly the best vacation I've ever had,and I think of it relatively often,relative to how much I think of other vacations.And I probably have consumedmy memories of that three-week trip, I would say,for about 25 minutes in the last four years.Now, if I had ever opened the folderwith the 600 pictures in it,I would have spent another hour.Now, that is three weeks,and that is at most an hour and a half.There seems to be a discrepancy.Now, I may be a bit extreme, you know,in how little appetite I have for consuming memories,but even if you do more of this,there is a genuine question:Why do we put so much weight on memoryrelative to the weight that we put on experiences? So I want you to thinkabout a thought experiment.Imagine that for your next vacation,you know that at the end of the vacationall your pictures will be destroyed,and you'll get an amnesic drugso that you won't remember anything.Now, would you choose the same vacation? (Laughter)And if you would choose a different vacation,there is a conflict between your two selves,and you need to think about how to adjudicate that conflict,and it's actually not at all obvious, becauseif you think in terms of time,then you get one answer,and if you think in terms of memories,you might get another answer.Why do we pick the vacations we dois a problem that confronts uswith a choice between the two selves. Now, the two selvesbring up two notions of happiness.There are really two concepts of happinessthat we can apply, one per self.So you can ask: How happy is the experiencing self?And then you would ask: How happy are the momentsin the experiencing self's life?And they're all -- happiness for momentsis a fairly complicated process.What are the emotions that can be measured?And, by the way, now we are capableof getting a pretty good ideaof the happiness of the experiencing self over time.If you ask for the happiness of the remembering self,it's a completely different thing.This is not about how happily a person lives.It is about how satisfied or pleased the person iswhen that person thinks about her life.Very different notion.Anyone who doesn't distinguish those notionsis going to mess up the study of happiness,and I belong to a crowd of students of well-being,who've been messing up the study of happiness for a long timein precisely this way. The distinction between thehappiness of the experiencing selfand the satisfaction of the remembering selfhas been recognized in recent years,and there are now efforts to measure the two separately.The Gallup Organization has a world pollwhere more than half a million peoplehave been asked questionsabout what they think of their lifeand about their experiences,and there have been other efforts along those lines.So in recent years, we have begun to learnabout the happiness of the two selves.And the main lesson I think that we have learnedis they are really different.You can know how satisfied somebody is with their life,and that really doesn't teach you muchabout how happily they're living their life,and vice versa.Just to give you a sense of the correlation,the correlation is about .5.What that means is if you met somebody,and you were told, "Oh his father is six feet tall,"how much would you know about his height?Well, you would know something about his height,but there's a lot of uncertainty.You have that much uncertainty.If I tell you that somebody ranked their life eight on a scale of ten,you have a lot of uncertaintyabout how happy they arewith their experiencing self.So the correlation is low. We know something about what controlssatisfaction of the happiness self.We know that money is very important,goals are very important.We know that happiness is mainlybeing satisfied with people that we like,spending time with people that we like.There are other pleasures, but this is dominant.So if you want to maximize the happiness of the two selves,you are going to end updoing very different things.The bottom line of what I've said hereis that we really should not think of happinessas a substitute for well-being.It is a completely different notion. Now, very quickly,another reason we cannot think straight about happinessis that we do not attend to the same thingswhen we think about life, and we actually live.So, if you ask the simple question of how happy people are in California,you are not going to get to the correct answer.When you ask that question,you think people must be happier in Californiaif, say, you live in Ohio. (Laughter) And what happens iswhen you think about living in California,you are thinking of the contrastbetween California and other places,and that contrast, say, is in climate.Well, it turns out that climateis not very important to the experiencing selfand it's not even very important to the reflective selfthat decides how happy people are.But now, because the reflective self is in charge,you may end up -- some people may end upmoving to California.And it's sort of interesting to trace what is going to happento people who move to California in the hope of getting happier.Well, their experiencing selfis not going to get happier.We know that.But one thing will happen: They will think they are happier,because, when they think about it,they'll be reminded of how horrible the weather was in Ohio,and they will feel they made the right decision. It is very difficultto think straight about well-being,and I hope I have given you a senseof how difficult it is. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. I've got a question for you.Thank you so much.Now, when we were on the phone a few weeks ago,you mentioned to me that there was quite an interesting resultcame out of that Gallup survey.Is that something you can sharesince you do have a few moments left now? Daniel Kahneman: Sure.I think the most interesting result that we found in the Gallup surveyis a number, which we absolutely did not expect to find.We found that with respect to the happinessof the experiencing self.When we looked at how feelings,vary with income.And it turns out that, below an incomeof 60,000 dollars a year, for Americans --and that's a very large sample of Americans, like 600,000,so it's a large representative sample --below an income of 600,000 dollars a year... CA: 60,000. DK: 60,000. (Laughter) 60,000 dollars a year, people are unhappy,and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get.Above that, we get an absolutely flat line.I mean I've rarely seen lines so flat.Clearly, what is happening ismoney does not buy you experiential happiness,but lack of money certainly buys you misery,and we can measure that miseryvery, very clearly.In terms of the other self, the remembering self,you get a different story.The more money you earn, the more satisfied you are.That does not hold for emotions. CA: But Danny, the whole American endeavor is aboutlife, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.If people took seriously that finding,I mean, it seems to turn upside downeverything we believe about, like for example,taxation policy and so forth.Is there any chance that politicians, that the country generally,would take a finding like that seriouslyand run public policy based on it? DK: You know I think that there is recognitionof the role of happiness research in public policy.The recognition is going to be slow in the United States,no question about that,but in the U.K., it is happening,and in other countries it is happening.People are recognizing that they oughtto be thinking of happinesswhen they think of public policy.It's going to take a while,and people are going to debatewhether they want to study experience happiness,or whether they want to study life evaluation,so we need to have that debate fairly soon.How to enhance happinessgoes very different ways depending on how you think,and whether you think of the remembering selfor you think of the experiencing self.This is going to influence policy, I think, in years to come.In the United States, efforts are being madeto measure the experience happiness of the population.This is going to be, I think, within the next decade or two,part of national statistics. CA: Well, it seems to me that this issue will -- or at least should be --the most interesting policy discussion to trackover the next few years.Thank you so much for inventing behavioral economics.Thank you, Danny Kahneman. Daniel Kahnenman´s Profile: Daniel Kahneman: Behavioral economics founder Widely regarded as the world's most influential living psychologist, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel in Economics for his pioneering work in behavioral economics -- exploring the irrational ways we make decisions about risk. Why you should listen to him: Daniel Kahneman is an eminence grise for the Freakonomics crowd. In the mid-1970s, with his collaborator Amos Tversky, he was among the first academics to pick apart exactly why we make "wrong" decisions. In their 1979 paper on prospect theory, Kahneman and Tversky examined a simple problem of economic risk. And rather than stating the optimal, rational answer, as an economist of the time might have, they quantified how most real people, consistently, make a less-rational choice. Their work treated economics not as a perfect or self-correcting machine, but as a system prey to quirks of human perception. The field of behavioral economics was born. Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Memorial prize in 2002 for his work with Tversky, who died before the award was bestowed. In a lovely passage in his Nobel biography, Kahneman looks back on his deep collaboration with Tversky and calls for a new form of academic cooperation, marked not by turf battles but by "adversarial collaboration," a good-faith effort by unlike minds to conduct joint research, critiquing each other in the service of an ideal of truth to which both can contribute. "Amos and I shared the wonder of together owning a goose that could lay golden eggs -- a joint mind that was better than our separate minds." Daniel Kahneman. Quotes by Daniel Kahneman. “Below an income of … $60,000 a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. … Money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.” Watch this talk » “We don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. Even when we think about the future, we don’t think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories. 05/25/2012 SPIEGEL Interview with Daniel Kahneman Debunking the Myth of Intuition Can doctors and investment advisers be trusted? And do we live more for experiences or memories? In a SPIEGEL interview, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman discusses the innate weakness of human thought, deceptive memories and the misleading power of intuition. SPIEGEL: Professor Kahneman, you've spent your entire professional life studying the snares in which human thought can become entrapped. For example, in your book, you describe how easy it is to increase a person's willingness to contribute money to the coffee fund. Kahneman: You just have to make sure that the right picture is hanging above the cash box. If a pair of eyes is looking back at them from the wall, people will contribute twice as much as they do when the picture shows flowers. People who feel observed behave more morally. SPIEGEL: And this also works if we don't even pay attention to the photo on the wall? Kahneman: All the more if you don't notice it. The phenomenon is called "priming": We aren't aware that we have perceived a certain stimulus, but it can be proved that we still respond to it. SPIEGEL: People in advertising will like that. Kahneman: Of course, that's where priming is in widespread use. An attractive woman in an ad automatically directs your attention to the name of the product. When you encounter it in the shop later on, it will already seem familiar to you. SPIEGEL: Isn't erotic association much more important? Kahneman: Of course, there are other mechanisms of advertising that also act on the subconscious. But the main effect is simply that a name we see in a shop looks familiar -- because, when it looks familiar, it looks good. There is a very good evolutionary explanation for that: If I encounter something many times, and it hasn't eaten me yet, then I'm safe. Familiarity is a safety signal. That's why we like what we know. SPIEGEL: Can these insights also be applied to politics? Kahneman: Of course. For example, one can show that anything that reminds people of their mortality makes them more obedient. SPIEGEL: Like the cross above the altar? Kahneman: Yes, there is even a theory that deals with the fear of death; it's called "Terror Management Theory." You can influence people by just reminding them of something -- it can be death; it can be money. Any symbol that is associated with money, even if it's just dollar signs as a screensaver, ensures that people will pay more attention to their own interests than they will want to help others. SPIEGEL: It seems that priming works primarily in favor of the political right. Kahneman: It would work just as well the other way around. There's an experiment, for example, in which people were playing a game but, in the first group, it was called a "competition game" and, in the other group, it was called a "community game." And, in the latter case, people acted less selfish even though it's exactly the same game. SPIEGEL: Is there no way to escape those powerful suggestions? Kahneman: It isn't easy, at any rate. The problem is that we usually don't notice these influences. SPIEGEL: That's pretty unsettling. Kahneman: Well, it can't be too bad because we live with that all the time. That's just the way it is. SPIEGEL: But we want to know what our decisions are based on! Kahneman: I'm not even sure I want that, to be honest, because it would be too complicated. I don't think we really are very keen to be self-controlled all the time. SPIEGEL: You say in your book that, in such cases, we leave the decisions up to "System 1." Kahneman: Yes. Psychologists distinguish between a "System 1" and a "System 2," which control our actions. System 1 represents what we may call intuition. It tirelessly provides us with quick impressions, intentions and feelings. System 2, on the other hand, represents reason, self-control and intelligence. SPIEGEL: In other words, our conscious self? Kahneman: Yes. System 2 is the one who believes that it's making the decisions. But in reality, most of the time, System 1 is acting on its own, without your being aware of it. It's System 1 that decides whether you like a person, which thoughts or associations come to mind, and what you feel about something. All of this happens automatically. You can't help it, and yet you often base your decisions on it. SPIEGEL: And this System 1 never sleeps? Kahneman: That's right. System 1 can never be switched off. You can't stop it from doing its thing. System 2, on the other hand, is lazy and only becomes active when necessary. Slow, deliberate thinking is hard work. It consumes chemical resources in the brain, and people usually don't like that. It's accompanied by physical arousal, increasing heart rate and blood pressure, activated sweat glands and dilated pupils … SPIEGEL: … which you discovered as a useful tool for your research. Kahneman: Yes. The pupil normally fluctuates in size, mostly depending on incoming light. But, when you give someone a mental task, it widens and remains surprisingly stable -- a strange circumstance that proved to be very useful to us. In fact, the pupils reflect the extent of mental effort in an incredibly precise way. I have never done any work in which the measurement is so precise. The Pitfalls of Intuition SPIEGEL: By studying human intuition, or System 1, you seem to have learned to distrust this intuition… Kahneman: I wouldn't put it that way. Our intuition works very well for the most part. But it's interesting to examine where it fails. SPIEGEL: Experts, for example, have gathered a lot of experience in their respective fields and, for this reason, are convinced that they have very good intuition about their particular field. Shouldn't we be able to rely on that? Kahneman: It depends on the field. In the stock market, for example, the predictions of experts are practically worthless. Anyone who wants to invest money is better off choosing index funds, which simply follow a certain stock index without any intervention of gifted stock pickers. Year after year, they perform better than 80 percent of the investment funds managed by highly paid specialists. Nevertheless, intuitively, we want to invest our money with somebody who appears to understand, even though the statistical evidence is plain that they are very unlikely to do so. Of course, there are fields in which expertise exists. This depends on two things: whether the domain is inherently predictable, and whether the expert has had sufficient experience to learn the regularities. The world of stock is inherently unpredictable. PIEGEL: So, all the experts' complex analyses and calculations are worthless and no better than simply betting on the index? Kahneman: The experts are even worse because they're expensive. SPIEGEL: So it's all about selling snake oil? Kahneman: It's more complicated because the person who sells snake oil knows that there is no magic, whereas many people on Wall Street seem to believe that they understand. That's the illusion of validity … SPIEGEL: … which earns them millions in bonuses. Kahneman: There is no need to be cynical. You may be cynical about the whole banking system, but not about the individuals. Many believe they are building real value. SPIEGEL: How did Wall Street respond to your book? Kahneman: Oh, some people were really mad; others were quite interested and positive. It was on Wall Street, I heard, that somebody gave a thousand copies of my book to investors. But, of course, many professionals still don't believe me. Or, to be more precise, they believe me in general, but they don't apply that to themselves. They feel that they can trust their own judgment, and they feel comfortable with that. SPIEGEL: Do we generally put too much faith in experts? Kahneman: I'm not claiming that the predictions of experts are fundamentally worthless. … Take doctors. They're often excellent when it comes to short-term predictions. But they're often quite poor in predicting how a patient will be doing in five or 10 years. And they don't know the difference. That's the key. SPIEGEL: How can you tell whether a prediction is any good? Kahneman: In the first place, be suspicious if a prediction is presented with great confidence. That says nothing about its accuracy. You should ask whether the environment is sufficiently regular and predictable, and whether the individual has had enough experience to learn this environment. SPIEGEL: According to your most recent book "Thinking, Fast and Slow," when in doubt, it's better to trust a computer algorithm. Kahneman: When it comes to predictions, algorithms often just happen to be better. SPIEGEL: Why should that be the case? Kahneman: Well, the results are unequivocal. Hundreds of studies have shown that wherever we have sufficient information to build a model, it will perform better than most people. SPIEGEL: How can a simple procedure be superior to human reasoning? Kahneman: Well, even models are sometimes useless. A computer will be just as unreliable at predicting stock prices as a human being. And the political situation in 20 years is probably completely unpredictable; the world is simply too complex. However, computer models are good where things are relatively regular. Human judgment is easily influenced by circumstances and moods: Give a radiologist the same X-ray twice, and he'll often interpret it differently the second time. But with an algorithm, if you give it the same information twice, it will turn out the same answer twice. SPIEGEL: IBM has developed a supercomputer called "Watson" that is supposed to quickly supply medical diagnoses by analyzing the description of symptoms and the patient's history. Is this the medicine of the future? Kahneman: I think so. There's no magic involved. SPIEGEL: Some say the next blockbuster movie could be predicted by an algorithm, as well. Kahneman: Why not? The alternative is simply not very convincing. The entertainment industry wastes a lot of money on films that don't work. It shouldn't be that difficult to develop a program that at least doesn't do any worse than the intuitive judgments that govern these decisions now. SPIEGEL: But most people tend to be hostile to formulas and cold calculations, and many patients prefer a doctor who treats them holistically. Kahneman: It's a question of what you're used to. So-called "evidence-based medicine" is making progress, and it's based on clear, replicable algorithms. Or take the oil industry. There are strict procedures on deciding whether or not to drill in a specific location. They have a set of questions that they ask, and then they measure. Relying on intuition would be far too error-prone. After all, the risks are high, and there is a lot of money at stake. Memory, Trauma and Time SPIEGEL: In the second part of your book, you deal with the question of why we can't even rely on our memory. You claim, for example, that when a person has suffered, in retrospect, it doesn't matter to him or her how long the pain lasted. That sounds rather absurd. Kahneman: The findings are clear. We demonstrated this in patients who had had a colonoscopy. In half of the cases, we asked the doctors to wait a while after having finished before removing the tube from the patients. In other words, for them, the unpleasant procedure was prolonged. And that, it turns out, greatly improved the scores that people gave to the experience. The patients clearly based their global assessments of the procedure on how it ended, and they perceived the gradual subsidence of pain as being much more pleasant. Many other experiments arrived at similar results. In some cases, subjects had to tolerate noise and, in others, they had to hold their hand in cold water. The issue is not memory: People know how long they had to endure the pain, so their memory is correct. But their evaluation of the experience is unaffected by duration. SPIEGEL: How can that be? Kahneman: Every experience is given a score in your memory: good, bad, worse. And that's completely independent of its duration. Only two things matter here: the peaks -- that is, the worst or best moments -- and the outcome. How did it end up? SPIEGEL: So, after painful procedures, should doctors simply ask whether they might subject the patient to a few more minutes of moderate torture? Kahneman: No. Because if a doctor says it's over, the episode is finished for the patient -- and that's the point at which a value is assigned. After that, a new episode begins, and no one would ask for additional pain in advance. … But it would probably be useful, mainly for patients who have suffered a trauma. My advice would be: Don't remove them from the site of the trauma to treat them elsewhere. You should try to make them feel better in the same place so that the memory of what happened to them will not be as bad. SPIEGEL: Because this changes the perception they associate with that location? Kahneman: No, because moving away from the location is perceived as the end of an episode, and the evaluation made at that time will be stored in memory. SPIEGEL: But that doesn't prevent us from living through every bad experience again and again, as in a movie. Kahneman: That certainly is the case. But what you evaluate in the end, or what you will fear in the future, that just happens to be this representative, especially intense moment, and not the entire episode. It's similar with animals, by the way. SPIEGEL: How can you know that? Kahneman: It's easy to study -- in rats, for example -- by giving them light electric shocks. You can vary both the intensity and the duration of the shocks. And you can measure how afraid they are. You'll see that it depends on the intensity, not on the duration. SPIEGEL: In other words, our memory also informs what we expect from the future? Kahneman: Exactly. This can be demonstrated with a small thought experiment I sometimes ask people to do: Suppose you go on a vacation and, at the end, you get an amnesia drug. Of course, all your photographs are also destroyed. Would you take the same trip again? Or would you choose one that's less challenging? Some people say they wouldn't even bother to go on the vacation. In other words, they prefer to forsake the pleasure, which, of course, would remain completely unaffected by its being erased afterwards. So they are clearly not doing it for the experience; they are doing it entirely for the memory of it. SPIEGEL: Why is it so important for us to imagine our lives as a collection of stories? Kahneman: Because that's all we keep from life. It's going by, and you are left with stories. That's why people exaggerate the importance of memories. SPIEGEL: But, if I'm planning a vacation, I wouldn't accept being terribly bored most of the time just for the sake of a few highlights. Kahneman: Of course not. And if I ask you whether you would rather tolerate pain for three minutes or five minutes, the answer is just as clear. But, in retrospect, the vacation that left you with the best memories wins out. How long you've been bored between the memorable moments is no longer relevant. SPIEGEL: It was rather exhausting and difficult for you to write the book. You must remember how long it lasted, that is, the duration. Kahneman: That's true. I could very quickly go through a film of four years of pain, but mostly I remember moments -- and most of them are bad. SPIEGEL: Do you re-evaluate this period of time now that the book has become such a big success? Kahneman: There is much less pain associated with the memory now. In my mind, if the book had done less well, I would feel even worse about what happened to me during those years. So, clearly, what happens later changes the story. SPIEGEL: Would we even start such a challenging project a second time if it weren't for the partial amnesia? Kahneman: Well, you don't know how much pain you are going to have. But, later on, we remember the great relief we felt after completing the task. … In childbirth, for example, it's all about the story that ends well, and that offsets what may have been horrible until then. It's as if we were divided into an experiencing self, which has to endure the strain, and a remembering self, which doesn't care at all. Happiness and the Remembering Self SPIEGEL: So, do we have our remembering self to thank for the fact that we courageously go out in search of adventure and memorable moments in life? Would we otherwise simply be content with long, dull periods of moderate well-being? Kahneman: Yes, our lives are governed by the remembering self. Even when we're planning something, we anticipate the memories we expect to get out of it. The experiencing self, which may have to put up with a lot in return, has no say in the matter. Besides, what the experiencing self has enjoyed can be completely devaluated in retrospect. Someone once told me that he had recently listened to a wonderful symphony but, unfortunately, at the end, there was a terrible screeching sound on the record. He said that ruined the whole experience. But, of course, the only thing it ruined was the memory of the experience, (which was) still a happy experience. SPIEGEL: Does that also apply to an entire life? Is it all about the end? Kahneman: Yes, in a sense. We can't help but look at life retrospectively, and we want it to look good in retrospect. There was once an experiment in which the subjects were supposed to evaluate the life of a fictitious woman who had had a very happy life but then died in an accident. Astonishingly, whether she died at 30 or 60 had no effect whatsoever on their evaluation. But when the subjects were told that the woman had had 30 happy years followed by five that were no so happy, the scores got worse. Or imagine a scientist who has made an important discovery, a happy and successful man, and after his death it turns out that the discovery was false and isn't worth anything. It spoils the entire story even though absolutely nothing about the scientist's life has changed. But now you feel pity for him. SPIEGEL: Would you go so far as to say that it's the remembering self that makes us human? Animals probably don't collect memorable moments. Kahneman: Well, I actually think that animals do because they must score experiences as worth repeating and others as worth avoiding. And, from the evolutionary point of view, that makes sense. The duration of an experience is simply not relevant. What matters for survival is whether it ended well and how bad it got. This also applies to animals. SPIEGEL: In your view, the remembering self is very dominant -- to the point that it seems to have practically enslaved the experiencing self. Kahneman: In fact, I call it a tyranny. It can vary in intensity, depending on culture. Buddhists, for example, emphasize the experience, the present; they try to live in the moment. They put little weight on memories and retrospective evaluation. For devout Christians, it's completely different. For them, the only thing that matters is whether they go to heaven at the end. SPIEGEL: People reading your book will sympathize with the poor experiencing self, which essentially has to do our living. Kahneman: That was my intention. Readers should realize that there is another way of looking at it. I would say it's comforting for me because both my wife and I complain all the time that our memories are terrible. We don't really go to the theater to remember what we've seen later on, but to enjoy the performance. Other people live through life collecting experiences like you collect pictures. SPIEGEL: In other words, they think that only a wealth of memories can make them happy. Kahneman: Here we have to distinguish between satisfaction and happiness. When you ask people whether they're happy, their answers can differ widely depending on their current mood. Let me give you an example: For years, the Gallup institute has been polling about a thousand Americans on various issues, including their well-being. One of the most surprising findings is that, when the first question is about politics, people immediately consider themselves less happy. SPIEGEL: True calamities, on the other hand, seem to have surprisingly little effect on well-being. Paraplegics, for example, hardly differ from healthy individuals in terms of their satisfaction with life. Kahneman: At any rate, the difference is smaller than one would expect. That's because, when we think of paraplegics, we are subject to an illusion that is hard to escape: We automatically focus on all the things that change as a result of the disability, and we overlook what is still the same in everyday life. It's similar with income. Everyone wants to make more money, and yet the salary level -- at least above a certain threshold -- has no influence whatsoever on emotional happiness, although life satisfaction continues to rise with income. SPIEGEL: And where is that threshold? Kahneman: Here in the United States, it's at a household income of about $75,000 (€60,000). Below that, it makes a substantial difference. It's terrible to be poor. No matter if you are sick or going through a divorce, everything is worse if you're poor. SPIEGEL: So, is it harder to get used to illness or disability than poverty? Kahneman: I think we adapt more quickly to improvement than to deterioration. SPIEGEL: Professor Kahneman, we thank you for this interview. Interview conducted by Manfred Dworschak and Johann Grolle. URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/interview-with-daniel-kahneman-on-the-pitfalls-of-intuition-and-memory-a-834407.html Note:The story posted above is a non-edited version of the original.