Understanding happiness: the distinction between living - and thinking about it

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman discusses happiness as an indicator of social progress.

Maps of Bounded Rationality

The work cited by the Nobel committee was done jointly with the late Amos Tversky (1937-1996) during a long and unusually close collaboration. Together, we explored the psychology of intuitive beliefs and choices and examined their bounded rationality. This essay presents a current perspective on the three major topics of our joint work: heuristics of judgment, risky choice, and framing effects. In all three domains we studied intuitions - thoughts and preferences that come to mind quickly and without much reflection. I review the older research and some recent developments in light of two ideas that have become central to social-cognitive psychology in the intervening decades: the notion that thoughts differ in a dimension of accessibility - some come to mind much more easily than others - and the distinction between intuitive and deliberate thought processes.behavioral economics; experimental economics

Indignation: Psychology, Politics, Law

Moral intuitions operate in much the same way as other intuitions do; what makes the moral domain is distinctive is its foundations in the emotions, beliefs, and response tendencies that define indignation. The intuitive system of cognition, System I, is typically responsible for indignation; the more reflective system, System II, may or may not provide an override. Moral dumbfounding and moral numbness are often a product of moral intuitions that people are unable to justify. An understanding of indignation helps to explain the operation of the many phenomena of interest to law and politics: the outrage heuristic, the centrality of harm, the role of reference states, moral framing, and the act-omission distinction. Because of the operation of indignation, it is extremely difficult for people to achieve coherence in their moral intuitions. Legal and political institutions usually aspire to be deliberative, and to pay close attention to System II; but even in deliberative institutions, System I can make some compelling demands

Living, and Thinking about It: Two Perspectives on Life

Introduction It is a common assumption of everyday conversation that people can provide accurate answers to questions about their feelings, both past (e.g. \u27How was your vacation?\u27) and current (e.g. \u27Does this hurt?\u27). Although the distinction is mostly ignored, the two kinds of questions are vastly different. Introspective evaluations of past episodes depend on two achievements that are not required for reports of immediate experience: accurate retrieval of feelings and reasonable integration of experiences that are spread over time. The starting point for this chapter is that the retrieval and the temporal integration of emotional experiences are both prone to error, and that retrospective evaluations are therefore less authoritative than reports of current feelings. We first consider the dichotomy between introspection and retrospection from several perspectives, before discussing its implications for a particular question: how would we determine who is happier, the French or the Americans

"So, Tell Me What Users Want, What They Really, Really Want!"

Equating users' true needs and desires with behavioural measures of 'engagement' is problematic. However, good metrics of 'true preferences' are difficult to define, as cognitive biases make people's preferences change with context and exhibit inconsistencies over time. Yet, HCI research often glosses over the philosophical and theoretical depth of what it means to infer what users really want. In this paper, we present an alternative yet very real discussion of this issue, via a fictive dialogue between senior executives in a tech company aimed at helping people live the life they `really' want to live. How will the designers settle on a metric for their product to optimise

Indignation: Psychology, Politics, Law

Moral intuitions operate in much the same way as other intuitions do; what makes the moral domain is distinctive is its foundations in the emotions, beliefs, and response tendencies that define indignation. The intuitive system of cognition, System I, is typically responsible for indignation; the more reflective system, System II, may or may not provide an override. Moral dumbfounding and moral numbness are often a product of moral intuitions that people are unable to justify. An understanding of indignation helps to explain the operation of the many phenomena of interest to law and politics: the outrage heuristic, the centrality of harm, the role of reference states, moral framing, and the act-omission distinction. Because of the operation of indignation, it is extremely difficult for people to achieve coherence in their moral intuitions. Legal and political institutions usually aspire to be deliberative, and to pay close attention to System II; but even in deliberative institutions, System I can make some compelling demands

National Time Accounting: The Currency of Life

This monograph proposes a new approach for measuring features of society’s subjective well-being, based on time allocation and affective experience. We call this approach National Time Accounting (NTA). National Time Accounting is a set of methods for measuring, comparing and analyzing how people spend and experience their time -- across countries, over historical time, or between groups of people within a country at a given time. The approach is based on evaluated time use, or the flow of emotional experience during daily activities. After reviewing evidence on the validity of subjective well-being measures, we present and evaluate diary-based survey techniques designed to measure individuals’ emotional experiences and time use. We illustrate NTA with: (1) a new cross-sectional survey on time use and emotional experience for a representative sample of 4,000 Americans; (2) historical data on the amount of time devoted to various activities in the United States since 1965; and (3) a comparison of time use and wellbeing in the United States and France. In our applications, we focus mainly on the Uindex, a measure of the percentage of time that people spend in an unpleasant state, defined as an instance in which the most intense emotion is a negative one. The U-index helps to overcome some of the limitations of interpersonal comparisons of subjective well-being. National Time Accounting strikes us as a fertile area for future research because of advances in subjective measurement and because time use data are now regularly collected in many countries.

Do People Want Optimal Deterrence?

This paper tests the question whether people favor optimal deterrence policies. More particularly, it asks whether people are willing to increase penalties when the probability of detection is low, or to decrease penalties when the probability of detection is high. Two experiments are reported, suggesting that people do not spontaneously think in terms of optimal deterrence, and that people would have objections to policies based on the goal of optimal deterrence. Institutional implications are briefly discussed