The Focusing Illusion: How You Fool Yourself Into Happiness
By: Larry G. Maguire
Tags: Self, Wellbeing, Happiness, Psychology, Focus

We can see from the graphs above that reported life satisfaction increases up to the beautiful day, but then declines in the proceeding years. The apparent novelty seems to wear off as the reality of life and all its challenges take hold. Kahneman suggests that perhaps we get married in the hope the future will be better than today, or that we may maintain the blissful status quo. He cites Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson’s research and asks if we have become victim to the “massive error” of affective forecasting [3] which accounts for the error in forecasting our future feelings about life.

For example, we want to be able to predict whether we will get married and have children, because we believe these life events are crucial determinants of happiness. On the marriage study results, Kahneman says that on the day a couple marry, they may know that rates of divorce and separation are high, but don’t apply this apply this to themselves. He says we can, of course, explain this data as representing a normal adjustment to life.

But Kahneman says we instead need to examine “the heuristics of judgement”. Or, how it is we arrive at answers to questions such as; “How satisfied are you with your life? and “How happy are you these days?” He says that these questions are not as straightforward as those such as “what is your telephone number?” but respondents often arrive at answers to all of these questions in only a few seconds. Kahneman says that people tend to have ready-made answers, or answers that recent events influence us. He says that this represents the fast acting System 1 which jumps into gear with little conscious control or deliberation on our part.

The Focusing Illusion: Take Happiness With A Pinch of Salt

Any apparent single event or series of events can influence our perception of life satisfaction and happiness. They are the perceived outcomes of what Kahneman calls The Focusing Illusion. More often, he says, we are not even aware that our minds have taken over. System 1 substitutes our interpretations of simpler life events for global evaluations of life. An illustration of this comes from a study by Norbert Schwarz in his 1988 examination of priming and communication [4].

Schwarz and colleagues ran experiments that examined the way people use information when making global judgments. In particular, they explored the way in which a question about a specific component of life satisfaction influenced a subsequent judgment of overall life satisfaction. Before completing the questionnaire, participants were asked to photocopy a document as a favour. Perceiving it not part of the study, they obliged. Half of the participants found coins on the photocopier planted by Schwarz, and results subsequently showed the lucky ones were higher on life satisfaction.

Of course, chance events of good or bad fortune are not the only influences on our perception of global life happiness. Recent history, as shown in the marriage data above, life tragedies, health, career success, family and financial circumstances, peer group influences and global events all bear heavy on our perception of happiness. However, Kahneman cautions that our evaluation of overall happiness likely comes down to a small sample of available concepts rather than a measured evaluation. Therefore, we might be better served taking these snapshot evaluations with, as he suggests, a pinch of salt.

“Even newly weds who are luck enough to enjoy a state of happy preoccupation with their love will eventually return to earth, and their experienced wellbeing will again depend, as it does for the rest of us, on the environment and activities of the present moment” - Daniel Kahneman | Cognitive Psychologist

Attention: The Key To Happiness

According to Kahneman, attention is the key to the question of life happiness and suggests that it is the events of now that really matter. Where we consider our happiness about life, we are bound to be influenced by recent events, and the marriage graphs reinforce this idea. Kahneman’s studies have shown that by measuring the speed of participant responses, considered evaluation of life happiness is generally absent.

When it comes to the focusing illusion, nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it, Kahneman says. The basis of the focusing illusion, he continues, is “what you see is all there is”. Or, you’re giving too much weight to a single factor as a determinant of wellbeing and happiness.

So what’s the bottom line?

Seems like a roundabout way of saying, if you want happiness, climb down from your head and get into the present moment. It seems to me that in all psychological investigation, we come to the same inevitable answer. That is, happiness is available now. As we allow our minds to drift to fanciful notions of the future, we take our eyes off the ground and miss the holes in the road. Same goes for lamenting the past–we fail to be present.

Where is our attention set? To what are we giving our focus and time?

We seem forever in need of escape from the only moment that life occurs. The car will make me happy, or the wife or husband. The new job will make me happy, the TV or the movies or some gadget or other. New lips or new tits, a rock hard six pack or bronzed skin. Whatever it is that will make me happy, fulfilled and whole, it’s not here and I don’t already have it. It’s somewhere out there.

So we keep looking, meanwhile creating grand illusions to keep us from ourselves.