The focusing illusion

Why we overestimate the importance of our next success for our happiness

In his best-selling book Stumbling on Happiness, psychologist Dan Gilbert notes:

Everyone who has observed human behavior for more than thirty continuous seconds seems to have noticed that people are strongly, perhaps even primarily, perhaps even single-mindedly, motivated to feel happy. - Gilbert (2009)

Paradoxically, he observes that we are often mistaken about what will make us happy in the future. Among other things, we tend to overestimate both the magnitude and duration of our emotional reactions to significant life changes such as marriage, job occupation, and income. This bias has been labelled “affective forecasting error” by Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert (2003).

A particular instance of this error is the focusing illusion, the idea that what we focus on to achieve happiness often does not make us as happy as we expect. For instance, people might believe that moving to a sunny place like California will make them happier, but they tend to overestimate the impact this change will have on their well-being (Schkade and Kahneman, 1998).

In this post, I show how the focusing illusion is likely not a bug, but a feature of our cognition designed to motivate us to strive to improve our circumstances.

The conflict between habituation and motivation

In previous posts, I explained how our hedonic system—which produces our pleasures and pains—has been designed by the long process of evolution to help us make good decisions. The subjective values we assign to different options guide us towards those that enhance our fitness.¹ Due to perceptual constraints, our subjective satisfaction for different outcomes is bounded and follows an S-shaped curve, with a steeper slope in the range of outcomes we are most likely to face.

These characteristics of our subjective satisfaction help us better distinguish between options we frequently encounter (and therefore avoid making mistakes). Whenever the frequency of options we face changes, our subjective satisfaction habituates to it. This explains why, if we become richer, things that were previously experienced as exceptional, like having a luxury dinner, progressively become usual and less exciting.

Subjective satisfaction adaptation (from a previous post): Left: when making decisions where the stakes tend to be low, Jordan is able to carefully discriminate between small variations in wealth; Centre: after becoming rich quickly, everything looks great and Jordan is not able to discriminate between variations in wealth; Right: after experiencing a high level of wealth for some time, Jordan’s subjective satisfaction habituates to it and he is able to perceive (and care about) variations in high levels of wealth.

This habituation creates a motivation problem. If you know that you will eventually habituate to any success you achieve, why put in the effort now? What’s the point if it all leads to feeling the same in the end?

Naïve Ambitions: A Path to Motivation

Economists Robson and Samuelson (2011) demonstrated theoretically how the focusing illusion might arise as a solution to this motivational problem. They modelled a person whose overall success depends on decisions made at different times.²

Imagine, for instance, Alice, an intern at a fast-food restaurant. At the end of her internship, her performance could earn her one of three positions: cashier (lowest salary), cook (medium salary), or kitchen manager (highest salary). Her overall income once hired will depend on her position’s salary and on bonuses that are a function of how hard she works in that position.

A hedonic system that maximally motivates Alice during her internship would be such that her expected subjective satisfaction discriminates strongly between the income levels associated with the different positions. This is illustrated in the figure below. In short, she believes that securing the highest-paid position is crucial for her happiness.

However, if Alice’s subjective satisfaction does not adapt after securing a position, she might lack the motivation to work hard. Without habituation, if she lands the highest-paid position, the various income levels she could achieve will all seem highly satisfying, reducing her incentive to strive for a higher bonus. Conversely, if she gets the lowest-paid position, she might feel equally dissatisfied across income levels, leading her to see little reason to exert effort.

On the other hand, if Alice’s satisfaction adapts to her new context, she will perceive small income variations as significant, motivating her to work harder after her appointment. Habituation ensures that we remain motivated regardless of our current success level, preventing us from resting on our laurels or dwelling on setbacks.

The figure below compares how Alice’s satisfaction would react to variations in income after the appointment, if she does not habituate and if she does.

For habituation to be effective, however, Alice must remain unaware of it. If she knew she would habituate to a higher income after securing the highest-paid position, she might be less motivated to pursue it.

It is important to remember that we are not designed to be happy. As stated by Kahneman, Wakker and Sarin:

The effect of natural selection is to increase overall fitness, not necessarily to produce organisms that maximize pleasure and minimize pain over time. - Kahneman, Wakker, Sarin (1997)

Similarly, there is no inherent reason to expect that we should know what will make us happy. Instead, our beliefs about future happiness are meant to guide us toward making the best decisions now. It should, therefore, be unsurprising that a gap can exist between what we expect will make us happy and what actually does. This gap exists because the belief that motivates us today may differ from the belief that will motivate us tomorrow.

Using the metaphor of evolution as a designer, Robson and Samuelson argue that evolution enhances our motivation by keeping us unaware of our future habituation to success or failure.³

Evolution capitalizes on the agent’s first-period decisions to set more demanding second-period utility targets. . […] Evolution here has designed the agent to be naive in the sense that the first-period decision is made without anticipating the attendant second-period utility adjustment. - Robson and Samuelson (2011)

In that perspective, the focusing illusion is not a bug; it is a feature designed to maximise our motivation to keep improving our circumstances.

Evolution systematically misleads the agent as to the future implications of his choices. - Robson and Samuelson (2011)

This logic plays out repeatedly in our lives. We constantly believe that the next big achievement will make us happy. Yet, once we attain it, we habituate and move on to the next goal, remaining largely unaware of our naïveté.

Evolution may have conveniently made us incapable of connecting the dots, forgetting that we once believed our latest success would bring lasting happiness, only to find ourselves habituated to it.

“You said you finally achieved that big thing that would make you happy?”

Habituation is a key aspect of our subjective satisfaction. Whenever our situation changes, we tend to adapt, refocusing our attention on new challenges. This phenomenon creates a problem when our long-term success depends on decisions made over time. If we foresee that we will get used to our situation, why would we strive for success? Evolution’s likely solution to this incentive problem has been to make us naive by design, believing that happiness lies just beyond the next achievement, even as the goalposts keep moving ahead whenever we succeed.⁴

This post is part of a series on happiness.

References

Dawkins, R., 1986. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. London: W.W. Norton & Company.

Dhammapada, 3rd-1st century BCE

Epictetus, 2nd century. The Discourses

Gilbert, D., 2009. Stumbling on Happiness. Vintage Canada.

Kahneman, D., Wakker, P.P. and Sarin, R., 1997. Back to Bentham? Explorations of experienced utility. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112(2), pp.375-406.

Lao Tzu, 6th century BC. Tao Te Ching

Montaigne, M., 1580. Essays

Robson, A. and Samuelson, L., 2011. The evolution of decision and experienced utilities. Theoretical Economics, 6(3), pp.311-339.

Rayo, L. and Becker, G.S., 2007. Evolutionary efficiency and happiness. Journal of Political Economy, 115(2), pp.302-337.

Rousseau, J.J., 1763. Emile of On Education.

Schkade, D.A. and Kahneman, D., 1998. Does living in California make people happy? A focusing illusion in judgments of life satisfaction. Psychological Science, 9(5), pp.340-346.

Schopenhauer, A., 1818. The World as Will and Representation.

Wilson, T.D. and Gilbert, D.T., 2003. Affective forecasting. Advances in experimental social psychology, 35(35), pp.345-411.

1. Biological fitness is roughly the number of offspring we have. Our hedonic system is the result of a long process of evolution that selects organisms that enjoy decisions and situations conducive to higher fitness. However, it does not mean humans think about children as such. Instead, subjective satisfaction can be attached to a range of outcomes that are associated with the propensity of successfully rearing children such as being healthy, having supportive connections (friends and family), getting resources (money), acquiring status (e.g. prestige), and finding a mate.

2. For the economist readers interested in looking at their paper: Robson and Samuelson start by proving the focusing illusion with utility functions that jump from 0 to 1 in one step (they extend on Rayo and Becker's 2007 paper). Then they extend this initial result to the case where there is some uncertainty about what the agent can achieve that is only resolved between the two periods. In that setting, the utility functions become smooth, like the ones depicted in this post (Section 5.3).

3. This metaphor makes sense to the extent that evolution, though an impersonal process, produces organisms that appear designed.

Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. - Dawkins (1986)

This metaphor is widely used in the study of the evolutionary foundations of economic preferences.

4. Across time and space, many thinkers have figured out that there is something fishy with our desires always renewing themselves whatever we achieve.

Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching (6th century BCE):

There is no greater sin than desire. No greater curse than discontent. No greater misfortune than wanting something for oneself. Therefore, he who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.

Buddhism - Dhammapada (3rd-1st century BCE):

Craving begets sorrow, craving begets fear. For him who is free from craving there is no sorrow; how can there be fear for him?

Epictetus - The Discourses (2nd century):

Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of men's desires, but by the removal of desire.

Montaigne - Essays (1580):

Ambition is a great and immense passion, always prodding us to go forward, always giving us a craving for more, and never leaving us to rest satisfied.

Rousseau - Emile, or On Education (1762):

The more one has, the more one wants. The only means of diminishing one’s desires is to diminish the hope of satisfying them.

Schopenhauer - The World as Will and Representation (1818):

The goal was only apparent: possession removes the charm; in a new form, the desire, the need, reappears.