Why Sunshine Is (totally) Overrated

Sunshine is great. I love sunshine. I've recently moved to Spain, where I get to enjoy more of it than I normally would in my home country of Germany. And it's healthy too, providing the body with the important Vitamin D, which keeps our bones healthy (among other things). But as humans, we tend to overrate the importance of sunshine (and climate in general) in our lives when it comes to rating our own happiness.

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman relates an argument he had with his wife, in which she claimed that people in California are happier than those who live on the East Coast. He tried in vain to convince her that her intuitions about the importance of climate when considering someone's happiness were wrong, citing the Scandinavian countries as an example for some of the happiest people in the world. So what does a psychologist like him do when his wife won't listen to him? Of course, he sets up an experiment so he can prove it to her.

When Memory Trumps Experience

Ok, tell me this: have you ever shared an experience with someone (a friend, a family member, etc.) and afterwards had different memories of it? It was the exact same thing, but one of you thought it was amazing while the other still liked it, but maybe not as much. Why does that happen? I'm sure there are several reasons for it, but I'm only going to talk about one of them here: The truth of the two selves.

Now before you jump up and yell: "Hey, but I'm not schizophrenic!" (of course you're not), allow me to explain what that means... or you know what? I'll let someone do it who actually knows what he's talking about. Daniel Kahneman, author of the bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow talks about these two selves in the context of experiencing pain:

Would You Like A Frame With That?

I remember a time as a child (probably not more than a few months) when I used to enjoy playing marbles. What I did not realize at the time was that researchers apparently like to use marbles for their experiments as well. At least sometimes...

In one such experiment the participants were asked to draw a marble from one of two urns. If they drew a red one, they would win a prize:

Urn A contained 10 marbles, of which 1 is red.

Urn B contained 100 marbles, of which 8 are red.

Which urn would you have chosen? About 30% to 40% of the participants went with the urn that had the larger number of winning marbles (Urn B), instead of picking the one that gave them a better chance of winning (10% in Urn A, 8% in Urn B). Psychologist Paul Slovic calls this the denominator neglect. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman explains why some people are susceptible to choosing Urn B:

Of Bottles and Mugs

Have you ever noticed how much some of the things you own mean to you? That old watch you inherited from your grandpa, those Nike sneakers you just bought last week, or maybe that beat-up car you've been driving around with for years now. For how much would you be willing to sell these items? Or maybe you wouldn't sell them at all?

When the now famous American economist Richard Thaler was just a graduate student, he noticed some very irrational and "un-economic" behavior in one of his professors.

Beware The Anchor!

I'm going to assume that we all know what an anchor is. Nope, not the guy on TV, the original one. But just in case someone doesn't, I've added a picture below. An anchor makes sure that the ship it is attached to doesn't go floating off into the great, vast ocean. But anchoring doesn't just happen in naval contexts.

As Daniel Kahneman notes in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, the brain can easily be influenced by giving it an anchor:

"It is an anchoring effect. It occurs when people consider a particular value for an unknown quantity before estimating that quantity. What happens is one of the most reliable and robust results of experimental psychology: the estimates stay close to the number that people considered - hence the image of an anchor." (p. 119)

Just A Few Snippets

When I'm reading a book I'll sometimes come across a really interesting paragraph or maybe even just a single sentence. I underline it, but I know I won't be able to produce a full post with it. Nonetheless, I'd like to share some of these interesting bits with you and as always: if you want to know more, you'll have to buy the book ;-) Which one? Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman:

A Pretty Dangerous "Sport"

Take a look at the following picture for a few seconds.

What did you read and what images popped into your head? If you're like most people you read the left part as "ABC", the right part as "121314" and you pictured Ann heading to the building of a financial institution. Now look at it again.

You may just as well have read the first part as "A13C" and thought of Ann floating around in a canoe on a river. How come you didn't?

The Power of a Smile

Most of us like to think that we're pretty independent and rational beings: the decisions we make are not dependent on the people who surround us, nor are they influenced by the things that we're confronted with in our day-to-day lives. But if you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll probably agree with me that nothing could be further from the truth. It seems as if everything has an influence on us...

I've recently started reading a fascinating book by Daniel Kahneman entitled Thinking, Fast and Slow (which you can get here). Generally speaking, it's about the two ways of thinking every human engages in: The more intuitive thinking which happens very fast (what Kahneman calls System 1) and the slower, more in-depth thinking (System 2) with which we try to keep System 1 in check (at least sometimes). The interesting thing is how System 1 can be manipulated, a process called priming. Here's Kahneman's explanation: