Is happiness relative?

This demonstration provides a good accompaniment to

Lecture 12.7 on social comparison processes. Give a copy of Handout 12.2 to each student, and ask the class to take a few minutes to answer the questions provided. Now ask students to pass their answers to the front of the room. For a very simple demonstration, you can probably form two comparison groups by merely sorting students responses according to their answers to question #1: Place all of the students who answered yes in one pile, and all of the students who answered no in the other pile. [If there are too few answers of either type for a reasonable comparison, try again, sorting all students according to their responses to question #2.] Look at the answers to question #3 now, and draw a frequency distribution of ratings for each pile on the chalkboard. If social comparison theory is correct, you should expect to see a greater number of happy ratings from those students who are the first in their family to attend college, or those students whose friends are not especially successful in college. RATIONALE: This is a somewhat crude but often effective demonstration of how social comparison can affect happiness. Ones immediate family is often a convenient source of social comparison. If others in ones family have attended college (and particularly if they have done well), the student may feel that his or her own performance doesnt measure up to the family standard. On the other hand, a student who is the first in the family to attend college is automatically at the top of the heap academically; he or she may be very happy just to be in college, whatever his or her grades. Whether or not the social comparison process is actually supported by your results, this demonstration can also initiate a lively discussion of methodological concerns in doing such research. Ask the students to generate alternative explanations of your results. You might argue, for instance, that the questionnaire asks only whether the parents or siblings attended college, not whether they successfully graduated. Thus, some of the students in the successful social comparison group may actually be comparing themselves with parents or siblings who were unable to complete college--a very different situation than comparing themselves to a parent with a masters degree or a Ph.D. Students might also question the wisdom of drawing causal conclusions from such data. At best, you can say that having a successful comparison group is related to lower happiness ratings. The why? is left unanswered. There is no guarantee that students would spontaneously use family members or friends as a comparison group in

rating their own happiness. The questionnaire itself might influence participants happiness levels. Jane may have been quite contented with her college performance until you asked her about her parents college careers. Joe might have been somewhat unhappy with himself until you made him think about how much worse his friends were doing. Critical Thinking: Is Happiness Relative? Researcher Phil Brickman (1978) has suggested that happiness is relative: The pleasure we derive from "the little things in life" may depend upon our experience of other, larger pleasures such as winning a lottery. Brickman and his associates interviewed 22 people who had won between $50,000 and $1 million in the Illinois State Lottery. They also interviewed 58 other people who lived near the winners; these people formed the control group in this quasi-experiment. All respondents rated seven everyday activities on a 6-point pleasantness scale from "not at all pleasant" to "very pleasant." The lottery winners supplied an average rating of 3.3 for everyday activities such as talking with a friend or hearing a funny joke. In contrast, the control group supplied an average rating of 3.8, which was significantly higher. Compared to winning huge sums of money, the daily pleasures of life seem rather drab. Can winning the lottery cause you to devalue the simpler pleasures of life? Try to think of alternative reasons why the ratings of everyday pleasures would be lower for the lottery-winning group than for the control group.

Good news/Bad news." Give a copy of Handout 12.3 to each of your students, and
ask them to answer the three questions which it poses. Now ask for a show of hands regarding how many students preferred the "same day" and "different day" options for each situation. Linville and Fischer (1991) conducted a very similar study at Duke University, and discovered that people have systematic preferences for separating and combining emotional events. They asked undergraduates whether they preferred to separate or combine instances of good news and bad news in academic, social, and financial domains. When two pieces of "good news" were involved, 78% of subjects elected to receive them on separate days. Likewise, when two pieces of "bad news" were considered, 72% preferred to receive them on separate days. When good and bad news were both going to be received, 80% preferred to receive them on the same day.

Linville and Fischer argued that people like to savor positive emotions, and thus would prefer to stretch out the happiness from receiving two pieces of good news. However, people are very averse to multiple losses; rather than dealing with two pieces of bad news simultaneously, they would prefer to spread out their losses. Finally, when a positive and a negative event are both going to happen, people would prefer to buffer the bad with the good. These preferences held true over all problem domains studied. Did they hold true for your students? RATIONALE: This is a fairly simple demonstration of how emotional events can interact with one another. A piece of good news can counteract bad. However, two pieces of bad news, arriving at the same time, can be more than twice as bad as one.

The experience of regret. Most of us are familiar with the emotional experience of
regret. But what do we regret most in our lives--the things that we do, or the things that we leave undone? Give each of your students a copy of Handout 12.4 and ask them to answer the two questions posed. First consider the responses to question 1, based on a problem first posed by Kahneman and Tversky (1982). Ask for a show of hands from those students who answered that Nancy would feel the most regret, and then from those students who felt that Elaine would feel the most regret. If your students are like Kahneman and Tverskys participants, they will overwhelmingly choose Nancy; 92% of their participants believed that action would be regretted more than inaction. But this result may contradict our intuitions about what experiences people really regret most in their lives. Ask students to examine their responses to question 2, and ask for a show of hands from those who would characterize their strongest regret as a regret of something Ive done. Ask next for a show of hands from those who regret something I didnt do. According to research by Gilovich and Medvec (1995), most people regret things that they failed to do more than things they actually did. This is true for middle-aged and older adults as well as for college students. Why is there such a discrepancy between answers to these two questions? Gilovich and Medvec propose that question 1 involves short-term regret, whereas question 2 examines more long-term regrets. Actions may cause more regret in the short term, but may tend to be forgotten in the long term, for a number of reasons. Consider, for example, the regrets of marrying the wrong person as opposed to letting the right person get away. In the long run, people often take steps to undo the actions they regret; marriage can be undone through divorce. But frequently they have no opportunity to

undo regrets of inaction; that right person who got away is now married happily to someone else. Also, regrettable actions may be associated with silver linings: But look at the two beautiful children I have now. Regrettable inactions rarely have silver linings associated with them. Kahneman (1995) suggests that there are really two kinds of regret: hot regret, which is more intense and more likely to occur when an action you chose has a negative consequence; and wistful regret, which is evoked by inaction--that is, thoughts of opportunities missed over the long term. His research, too, suggests that our experience of regret is a complex emotion triggered by both action and inaction. RATIONALE: This demonstration underscores a prominent theme in the textbook: that human behavior (and human emotion) is complex.