Thinking, Fast and Slow

38: Thinking About Life
German Socio-Economic Panel: Andrew E. Clark, Ed Diener, and Yannis
Georgellis, “Lags and Leads in Life Satisfaction: A Test of the Baseline
Hypothesis.” Paper presented at the German Socio-Economic Panel
Conference, Berlin, Germany, 2001.
affective forecasting: Daniel T. Gilbert and Timothy D. Wilson, “Why the
Brain Talks to Itself: Sources of Error in Emotional Prediction,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364 (2009): 1335–41.
only significant fact in their life: Strack, Martin, and Schwarz, “Priming and
Communication.”
questionnaire on life satisfaction: The original study was reported by
Norbert Schwarz in his doctoral thesis (in German) “Mood as Information:
On the Impact of Moods on the Evaluation of One’s Life” (Heidelberg:
Springer Verlag, 1987). It has been described in many places, notably
Norbert Schwarz and Fritz Strack, “Reports of Subjective Well-Being:
Judgmental Processes and Their Methodological Implications,” in
Kahneman, Diener, and Schwarz, 
Well-Being, 61–84.
goals that young people set: The study was described in William G.
Bowen and Derek Curtis Bok, 
The Shape of the River: Long-Term
Consequences of Considering Race in College and University
Admissions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Some of
Bowen and Bok’s findings were reported by Carol Nickerson, Norbert
Schwarz, and Ed Diener, “Financial Aspirations, Financial Success, and
Overall Life Satisfaction: Who? and How?” 
Journal of Happiness Studies
8 (2007): 467–515.
“being very well-off financially”: Alexander Astin, M. R. King, and G. T.
Richardson, “The American Freshman: National Norms for Fall 1976,”
Cooperative Institutional Research Program of the American C {he on,
Rouncil on Education and the University of California at Los Angeles,
Graduate School of Education, Laboratory for Research in Higher
Education, 1976.
money was not important: These results were presented in a talk at the
American Economic Association annual meeting in 2004. Daniel
Kahneman, “Puzzles of Well-Being,” paper presented at the meeting.
happiness of Californians: The question of how well people today can
forecast the feelings of their descendants a hundred years from now is
clearly relevant to the policy response to climate change, but it can be
studied only indirectly, which is what we proposed to do.
aspects of their lives: In posing the question, I was guilty of a confusion that
I now try to avoid: Happiness and life satisfaction are not synonymous. Life

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I now try to avoid: Happiness and life satisfaction are not synonymous. Life
satisfaction refers to your thoughts and feelings when you think about your
life, which happens occasionally—including in surveys of well-being.
Happiness describes the feelings people have as they live their normal life.
I had won the family argument: However, my wife has never conceded.
She claims that only residents of Northern California are happier.
students in California and in the Midwest: Asian students generally
reported lower satisfaction with their lives, and Asian students made up a
much larger proportion of the samples in California than in the Midwest.
Allowing for this difference, life satisfaction in the two regions was
identical.
How much pleasure do you get from your car?: Jing Xu and Norbert
Schwarz have found that the quality of the car (as measured by Blue Book
value) predicts the owners’ answer to a general question about their
enjoyment of the car, and also predicts people’s pleasure during joyrides.
But the quality of the car has no effect on people’s mood during normal
commutes. Norbert Schwarz, Daniel Kahneman, and Jing Xu, “Global and
Episodic Reports of Hedonic Experience,” in R. Belli, D. Alwin, and F.
Stafford (eds.), 
Using Calendar and Diary Methods in Life Events
Research (Newbury Park, CA: Sage), pp. 157–74.
paraplegics spend in a bad mood?: The study is described in more detail
in Kahneman, “Evaluation by Moments.”
think about their situation: Camille Wortman and Roxane C. Silver,
“Coping with Irrevocable Loss, Cataclysms, Crises, and Catastrophes:
Psychology in Action,” American Psychological Association, Master
Lecture Series 6 (1987): 189–235.
studies of colostomy patients: Dylan Smith et al., “Misremembering
Colostomies? Former Patients Give Lower Utility Ratings than Do Current
Patients,” 
Health Psychology 25 (2006): 688–95. George Loewenstein
and Peter A. Ubel, “Hedonic Adaptation and the Role of Decision and
Experience Utility in Public Policy,” 
Journal of Public Economics 92
(2008): 1795–1810.
the word miswanting: Daniel Gilbert and Timothy D. Wilson, “Miswanting:
Some Problems in Affective Forecasting,” in 
Feeling and Thinking: The
Role of Affect in Social Cognition, ed. Joseph P. Forgas (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 178–97.