As Kahneman says, ‘ when planning for the future, we don’t consider that we will stop paying attention to a thing.’
RAPT ATTENTION AND THE FOCUSED LIFE HOW TO
Like focusing too much on the opinions of your remembering self, overlooking the effects of adaptation – the process of becoming used to a situation – can obstruct wise decisions about how to live. Fifteen years on, however, the change that looms so large now will pale next to a more recent event – a career change, perhaps or becoming a grandparent – which will draw your focus and, simply because you’re thinking about it, bias your evaluation of your general well-being. If you regret the move, you’ll be dissatisfied in general. If you’re pleased that you’ve just left the suburbs for the city, say, you’ll decide that life is pretty good. You’ll then think about this novel event, which in turn will increase its import and influence your answer. The question automatically summons your remembering self, which will focus on any recent change in your life – marriage or divorce, new job or home. To test the fortune cookie rule, you have only to ask yourself how happy you are.
This illusion inclines you to accentuate the difference between Place A and Place B, making it seem to matter much more than it really does, which is marginal. If you’re prompted to evaluate it, however, the weather immediately looms large, simply because you’re paying attention to it. The reason is that 99 percent of the stuff of life – relationships, work, home, recreation – is the same no matter where you are, and once you settle in a place, no matter how salubrious, you don’t think about it’s climate very much. When Kahneman actually measured their well-being however, Michiganders and others are just as contented as Californians. For the same reason, even Californians assume they’re happier than people who live elsewhere. Because the climate is often delightful there, most subjects thought so. In one much-cited illustration of the focusing illusion, Kahneman asked some people if they would be happier if they lived in California.
The key to understanding why you pay more attention to your thoughts about living than to life itself is neatly summed up by what Kahneman proudly calls his ‘fortune cookie maxim’ (a.k.a the focusing illusion): ‘ Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.’ Why? ‘Because you’re thinking about it! Where this common scenario is concerned, research shows that we aren’t so much risk-averse as loss-averse, in that we’re generally much more sensitive to what we might have to give up than to what we might gain. If you’re pondering a choice that involves risk, you might focus too much on the threat of possible loss, thereby obscuring an even likelier potential benefit. Our thinking gets befuddled not so much by our emotions as by our ‘cognitive illusions,’ or mistaken intuitions, and other flawed, fragmented mental constructs. There is a lot of great content packed into this chapter but I’ll attempt to highlight a few points.Īccording to the principle of ‘bounded rationality,’ which (Daniel) Kahneman first applied to economic decisions and more recently to choices concerning quality of life, we are reasonable-enough beings but sometimes liable to focus on the wrong things. My favorite chapter in the book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher is called ‘Decisions: Focusing Illusions.’ It’s a really great summary of how focusing on the wrong things affects the weights we use to make decisions.
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