Stumbling on Happiness Page 11

  This tendency transcends mundane predictions about parties, restaurants, and plates of spaghetti. For example, most of us have no doubt that we would enjoy being an Eastman more than we would enjoy being a Fischer—no doubt, that is, unless we pause to consider how quickly and unquestioningly our brains filled in the details of their lives and deaths, and how much all those made-up details mattered. Consider a pair of stories that your brain almost certainly did not invent for you at the beginning of this chapter.

  You are a young German immigrant who lives in the teeming, dirty city that is nineteenth-century Chicago. A few wealthy families—the Armours, McCormicks, Swifts, and Fields—have monopolized their industries and have the right to use you and your family as they would use machines and horses. You devote your time to a small newspaper whose editorials call for social justice, but you are no fool, and you know that these essays will change nothing and that the factories will churn on, producing paper, producing pork, producing tractors, and spitting out the tired workers whose blood and sweat feed the engines of production. You are dispensable and insignificant. Welcome to America. One evening an altercation breaks out between some factory workers and the local police in Haymarket Square, and although you were not present when the bomb was thrown, you are rounded up with other “anarchist leaders” and charged with masterminding a riot. Suddenly your name is on the front page of every major newspaper and you have a national platform for your opinions. When the judge sentences you on the basis of fabricated evidence, you realize that this ignominious moment will be preserved in history books, that you will be known as “the Haymarket Martyr,” and that your execution will pave the way for the reforms you sought but were impotent to establish. A few decades from now, there will be a far better America than this one, and its citizens will honor you for your sacrifice. You are not a religious man, but you cannot help but think for a moment of Jesus on the cross—falsely accused, unjustly convicted, and cruelly executed—giving his life so that a great idea might live in the centuries to come. As you prepare to die you feel nervous, of course. But in some deep sense, this moment is a stroke of luck, the culmination of a dream—perhaps, you might even say, the happiest moment of your life.

  Cut to a second story: Rochester, New York, 1932, the midst of the Great Depression. You are a seventy-seven-year-old man who has spent his life building empires, advancing technology, and using your wealth to endow libraries, symphonies, colleges, and dental clinics that have improved the lives of millions. The happiest moments of your long life were spent tinkering with a camera, touring Europe’s art museums, fishing, hunting, or doing carpentry in your lodge in North Carolina. But spinal disease has made it increasingly difficult for you to lead the active life you’ve always enjoyed, and every day you spend in bed is a sad mockery of the vibrant man you once were. You will never get younger, you will never get better. The good days are over, and more days merely mean more decrepitude. One Monday afternoon you sit down at your desk, uncap your favorite fountain pen, and write these words on a legal pad: “Dear friends: My work is done. Why wait?” Then you light a cigarette and, when you’ve enjoyed the last of it, stub it out and carefully place the nose of your Luger automatic against your chest. Your physician showed you how to locate your heart, and now you can feel it beating rapidly beneath your hand. As you prepare to pull the trigger you feel nervous, of course. But in some deep sense you know that this one well-aimed bullet will allow you to leave a beautiful past and escape a bitter future.

  Okay, lights up. These details about Adolph Fischer’s and George Eastman’s lives are accurate, but that’s not really the point. The point is that just as there are parties and pastas you like and parties and pastas you don’t, there are ways of being rich and ways of being executed that make the former less marvelous and the latter less awful than we might otherwise expect. One reason why you found Fischer’s and Eastman’s reactions so perverse is that you almost certainly misimagined the details of their situations. And yet, without a second thought, you behaved like an unrepentant realist and confidently based your predictions about how you would feel on details that your brain had invented while you weren’t watching. Your mistake was not in imagining things you could not know—that is, after all, what imagination is for. Rather, your mistake was in unthinkingly treating what you imagined as though it were an accurate representation of the facts. You are a very fine person, I’m sure. But you are a very bad wizard.

  Onward

  If you’d been given your choice of brains at the moment of conception, you probably wouldn’t have chosen the tricky one. Good thing no one asked you. Without the filling-in trick you would have sketchy memories, an empty imagination, and a small black hole following you wherever you went. When Kant wrote that “perception without conception is blind,”28 he was suggesting that without the filling-in trick we would have nothing even remotely resembling the subjective experience that all of us take for granted. We see things that aren’t really there and we remember things that didn’t really happen, and while these may sound like symptoms of mercury poisoning, they are actually critical ingredients in the recipe for a seamlessly smooth and blessedly normal reality. But that smoothness and normality come at a price. Even though we are aware in some vaguely academic sense that our brains are doing the filling-in trick, we can’t help but expect the future to unfold with the details we imagine. As we are about to see, the details that the brain puts in are not nearly as troubling as the details it leaves out.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Hound of Silence

  O hateful Error, Melancholy’s child,

  Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of men

  The things that are not?

  Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

  SILVER BLAZE HADN’T BEEN MISSING for long when Inspector Gregory and Colonel Ross identified the stranger who had sneaked into the stable and stolen the prize racehorse. But as usual, Sherlock Holmes was one step ahead of the police. The colonel turned to the great detective:

  “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

  “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

  “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

  “That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.1

  It seems that a dog lived in the stable, that both of the stable hands had slept through the theft, and that these two facts had allowed Holmes to make one of his indubitably shrewd deductions. As he later explained:

  I had grasped the significance of the silence of the dog. . . . A dog was kept in the stables, and yet, though some one had been in and had fetched out a horse, he had not barked enough to arouse the two lads in the loft. Obviously the midnight visitor was some one whom the dog knew well.2

  Although the inspector and the colonel were aware of what had happened, only Holmes was aware of what hadn’t happened: The dog hadn’t barked, which meant that the thief was not the stranger whom the police had identified. By paying careful attention to the absence of an event, Sherlock Holmes further distinguished himself from the rest of humankind. As we are about to see, when the rest of humankind imagines the future, it rarely notices what imagination has missed—and the missing pieces are much more important than we realize.

  The Sailors Not

  If you live in a city with tall buildings, then you already know that pigeons have an uncanny ability to defecate at precisely the moment, speed, and position required to score a direct hit on your most expensive sweater. Given their talent as bombardiers, it seems odd that pigeons can’t learn to do much simpler things. For example, if a pigeon is put in a cage with two levers that can be briefly illuminated, it can easily learn to press the illuminated lever to get a reward of bird seed—but it can never learn to press the unilluminated lever to receive the same reward.3 Pigeons have no trouble figuring out that the presence of a light signals an opportunity for eating, but they cannot learn the same thing about the absence of a light. Research suggest
s that human beings are a bit like pigeons in this regard. For example, volunteers in one study played a deduction game in which they were shown a set of trigrams (i.e., three-letter combinations such as SXY, GTR, BCG, and EVX). The experimenter then pointed to one of the trigrams and told the volunteers that this trigram was special. The volunteers’ job was to figure out what made the trigram special—that is, to figure out which feature of the special trigram distinguished it from the others. Volunteers saw set after set, and each time the experimenter pointed out the special one. How many sets did volunteers have to see before they deduced the distinctive feature of the special trigram? For half the volunteers, the special trigram was distinguished by the fact that it and only it contained the letter T, and these volunteers needed to see about thirty-four sets of trigrams before they figured out that the presence of T is what made a trigram special. For the other half of the volunteers, the special trigram was always distinguished by the fact that it and only it lacked the letter T. The results were astounding. No matter how many sets of trigrams they saw, none of the volunteers ever figured this out.4 It was easy to notice the presence of a letter but, like the barking of a dog, it was impossible to notice its absence.

  Absence in the Present

  If this tendency were restricted to bird seed and trigrams, we wouldn’t care much about it. But as it turns out, the general inability to think about absences is a potent source of error in everyday life. For example, a moment ago I suggested that pigeons have an unusual talent for hitting pedestrians, and if you’ve ever been the victim of a really good splotching, you’ve probably concluded the same thing. But what makes us think that the pigeons are actually taking aim and hitting what they aim for? The answer is that most of us can remember far too many instances in which we momentarily passed beneath a ledge festooned with those obnoxious flying rats and were squarely nailed by a stinky white dollop, despite the fact that from the air a human head constitutes a relatively small and fast-moving target. Fair enough. But if we really want to know whether the pigeons are out to get us and have the requisite skills to do so, we must also consider the times when we walked beneath that ledge and came away clean. The right way to calculate the animosity and marksmanship of the urban pigeon is to consider both the presence and the absence of poop on our jackets. If the pigeons have hit us nine times out of ten, then we should probably give them credit for their accuracy as well as a wide berth, but if they’ve hit us nine times out of nine thousand, then what seems like good aim and bad attitude is probably nothing more than dumb luck. The misses are crucial to determining what kinds of inferences we can legitimately draw from the hits. Indeed, when scientists want to establish the causal relationship between two things—cloud seeding and rain, heart attacks and cholesterol, you name it—they compute a mathematical index that takes into account co-occurrences (how many people who do have high cholesterol do have heart attacks?) and non-co-occurrences (how many people who do have high cholesterol do not have heart attacks, and how many people who do not have high cholesterol do have heart attacks?) and co-absences (how many people who don’t have high cholesterol don’t have heart attacks?). All of these quantities are necessary to assess accurately the likelihood that the two things have a real causal relationship.

  This is all very sensible, of course. To statisticians. But studies show that when ordinary people want to know whether two things are causally related, they routinely search for, attend to, consider, and remember information about what did happen and fail to search for, attend to, consider, and remember information about what did not.5 Apparently, people have been making this mistake for a very long time. Nearly four centuries ago, the philosopher and scientist Sir Francis Bacon wrote about the ways in which the mind errs, and he considered the failure to consider absences among the most serious:

  By far the greatest impediment and aberration of the human understanding arises from [the fact that] . . . those things which strike the sense outweigh things which, although they may be more important, do not strike it directly. Hence, contemplation usually ceases with seeing, so much so that little or no attention is paid to things invisible.6

  Bacon illustrated his point with a story (which, it turns out, he borrowed from Cicero, who told it seventeen centuries earlier) about a visitor to a Roman temple. To impress the visitor with the power of the gods, the Roman showed him a portrait of several pious sailors whose faith had presumably allowed them to survive a recent shipwreck. When pressed to accept this as evidence of a miracle, the visitor astutely inquired, “But where are the pictures of those who perished after taking their vows?”7 Scientific research suggests that ordinary folks like us rarely ask to see pictures of the missing sailors.8

  Our inability to think about absences can lead us to make some fairly bizarre judgments. For example, in a study done about three decades ago, Americans were asked which countries were most similar to each other—Ceylon and Nepal or West Germany and East Germany. Most picked the latter pair.9 But when they were asked which countries were most dissimilar, most Americans picked the latter pair as well. Now, how can one pair of countries be both more similar and more dissimilar than another pair? They can’t, of course. But when people are asked to judge the similarity of two countries, they tend to look for the presence of similarities (of which East and West Germany had many—for example, their names) and ignore the absence of similarities. When they are asked to judge the dissimilarities of two countries, they tend to look for the presence of dissimilarities (of which East and West Germany had many—for example, their governments) and ignore the absence of dissimilarities.

  The tendency to ignore absences can befuddle more personal decisions as well. For example, imagine that you are preparing to go on a vacation to one of two islands: Moderacia (which has average weather, average beaches, average hotels, and average nightlife) or Extremia (which has beautiful weather and fantastic beaches but crummy hotels and no nightlife). The time has come to make your reservations, so which one would you choose? Most people pick Extremia.10 But now imagine that you are already holding tentative reservations for both destinations and the time has come to cancel one of them before they charge your credit card. Which would you cancel? Most people choose to cancel their reservation on Extremia. Why would people both select and reject Extremia? Because when we are selecting, we consider the positive attributes of our alternatives, and when we are rejecting, we consider the negative attributes. Extremia has the most positive attributes and the most negative attributes, hence people tend to select it when they are looking for something to select and they reject it when they are looking for something to reject. Of course, the logical way to select a vacation is to consider both the presence and the absence of positive and negative attributes, but that’s not what most of us do.

  Absence in the Future

  Our inattention to absences influences the way that we think about the future. Just as we do not remember every detail of a past event (what color socks did you wear to your high school graduation?) or see every detail of a current event (what color socks is the person behind you wearing at this very moment?), so do we fail to imagine every detail of a future event. You could close your eyes right now and spend two full hours imagining yourself driving around in a silver Mercedes-Benz SL600 Roadster with a twin-turbocharged 36-valve 5.5-liter V-12 engine. You could imagine the curve of the front grille, the slant of the windshield, and the newish smell of the black leather upholstery. But no matter how long you spent doing this, if I were then to ask you to inspect the mental image you’d created and read to me the numbers on the license plate, you would be forced to admit that you’d left out that particular detail. No one can imagine everything, of course, and it would be absurd to suggest that they should. But just as we tend to treat the details of future events that we do imagine as though they were actually going to happen, we have an equally troubling tendency to treat the details of future events that we don’t imagine as though they were not going to happen. In other wo
rds, we fail to consider how much imagination fills in, but we also fail to consider how much it leaves out.

  To illustrate this point, I often ask people to tell me how they think they would feel two years after the sudden death of their eldest child. As you can probably guess, this makes me quite popular at parties. I know, I know—this is a gruesome exercise and I’m not asking you to do it. But the fact is that if you did it, you would probably give me the answer that almost everyone gives me, which is some variation on Are you out of your damned mind? I’d be devastated—totally devastated. I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning. I might even kill myself. So who invited you to this party anyway? If at this point I’m not actually wearing the person’s cocktail, I usually probe a bit further and ask how he came to his conclusion. What thoughts or images came to mind, what information did he consider? People typically tell me that they imagined hearing the news, or they imagined attending the funeral, or they imagined opening the door to an empty bedroom. But in my long history of asking this question and thereby excluding myself from every social circle to which I formerly belonged, I have yet to hear a single person tell me that in addition to these heartbreaking, morbid images, they also imagined the other things that would inevitably happen in the two years following the death of their child. Indeed, not one person has ever mentioned attending another child’s school play, or making love with his spouse, or eating a taffy apple on a warm summer evening, or reading a book, or writing a book, or riding a bicycle, or any of the many other activities that we—and that they—would expect to happen in those two years. Now, I am in no way, shape, or form suggesting that a bite of gooey candy compensates for the loss of a child. That isn’t the point. What I am suggesting is that the two-year period following a tragic event has to contain something—that is, it must be filled with episodes and occurrences of some kind—and these episodes and occurrences must have some emotional consequences. Regardless of whether those consequences are large or small, negative or positive, one cannot answer my question accurately without considering them. And yet, not one person I know has ever imagined anything other than the single, awful event suggested by my question. When they imagine the future, there is a whole lot missing, and the things that are missing matter.