The Four Annoying Features of The Mind
Introduction
The human mind is one of the most complicated and mysterious things in the world, it controls everything we do and without it we can’t live. Meanwhile, our minds trick us to feel and do some annoying stuff. In this article, we’re going to discuss some “featured” of the mind that seem to make our lives more complicated rather than solve its difficulties. So let’s get started!
1- Our mind’s strongest intuitions are often totally wrong
During the previous article, we gave examples of some things we think are gonna make us happy but probably not and this is actually generalized in our lives, not only about happiness, but we didn’t really explain why is that happening. If we ask this question to people, we’ll get basically two answers:
Answer 1: “Happiness is just set genetically so can’t really be changed”
Answer 2: “Stuff happens and messes things up”. For example you actually had a nice job but after that, the company closed.
But the reality shows that both answers are somehow wrong. In fact, The studies of the psychology professor at the university of California Sonja Lyubomirsky show that 50% of our happiness is related to our genes ( some of us are glass full people and some are glass empty ), 10% is related to life circumstances, and the other 40% is related to our actions and thoughts which means under our control.
Now you can say “Ok, that science might be true for everybody else , but I would really be happy if I have a perfect job /salary/body…” But what if I tell you that most of our strongest intuitions are often totally wrong. Let’s see some examples!
Example 1: which one of these tables is longer?
Your answer is probably the one on the left and you’re kind of sure of that, but in fact, they both have the same length and you can check with a ruler or whatever.
Example 2: Try to solve this puzzle as quickly as possible “A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”
Your answer is probably 10 cents but it’s actually 5 cents.
These of course are only simple examples, but it happens a LOT with very important matters. Believe me, science works on you too.
2- Our minds don’t think in terms of absolutes, our minds judge relative to reference points
First, let’s define what is a reference point: it’s a salient (but often irrelevant) standard against which all subsequent information is compared. For example, if you take a look at the pic on the bottom and focus with the two orange circles, you’d think that the one on the right is bigger than the other one, but they actually have the same size and the reason why you thought that way is because the one on the right is surrounded by small gray circles while the one on the left is surrounded by big gray circles. So your mind judged based on how big each circle compared with its surroundings (= the reference point).
There are a lot of studies focusing on this feature, one of them is done by Medvec et al (1995) revealing that bronze medal winners are happier than the silver medal winners because the bronze medal reference point is no medal at all while the silver medal winners reference point is the gold medal. If they were thinking in terms of absolute, they all should have the same amount of happiness because after all, they all won medals. So we can see that the brain compares our situation to other ones first then it decides how happy it will be.
Let’s now talk about the different types of reference points:
a- Our own (what’s happening to us in the past VS what’s happening to us right now)
For example, the income you wanna make will go higher each time you reach it, since you’ll be comparing the amount you make right now to a higher one.
b- Other people
Solnick & Hemenway (1998) asked Harvard students “Which salary would you prefer?” and they gave two options: You get 50k but others get 25k or You get 100k and others 250k. They found out that more than 56% of the people went for the first option so they chose to get less money if it means others will get less than them.
Another study by O’guinn & Schrum (1997) reveals that the more you watch TV, the more you aren’t happy about your income because obviously when watching TV, you’ll probably be looking at Kim Kardashian and those famous rich people and then comparing your life to theirs.
3- Our minds are built to get used to stuff
Let’s say you’re in a dark room then you go out to a bright place, you’ll probably be like “ omg, it’s so bright!” while it’s actually not. It’s just your brain got used to the dark so it assumes that the dark will be there. This happens in the context of light, also happens in cool ways in the context of color…
The same thing applies to getting used to a positive or negative stimulus to the point that the great isn’t as great as it used to be and what used to make us happy, now doesn’t.
There was some work done to measure the average life satisfaction for a sample of German women before and after marriage. The chart represents the results, the X axis represents the year of marriage:
These women thought that getting married will change their lives to be happier but we can see that their life satisfaction went back to usual after about 2 years.
4- We don’t realize that our minds are built to get used to stuff
What we mean by this is that we tend to overestimate the emotional impact of a future event both in terms of intensity and duration and that’s for both good and bad emotions.
There is a study by SIEFF ET AL (1999) about how much distress people would predict they’d feel after positive or negative HIV test results. The results were like so:
Now, maybe you think that we don’t predict well because those events don’t happen all the time or maybe because we don’t have much experience with it, like you won’t do HIV test each week for example. And so Ayton and colleagues found this case where bad things happen and they might repeat happening to try to see if people get better at predicting over time, so they docused during the study on teens facing driving exam. Because, as you know, you may fail multiple times in a row before you get your driving license. The question was “How happy you’re going to be if you pass?”, and the results were like so:
So what we can see here is that the difference between the predicted and the actual happiness is always large even if we fail the test multiple times.
Conclusion:
As we get to understand a little about how the mind works, it makes us wonder more about this matter and try to benefit from it in some ways. In all cases, I find it fascinating and so interesting. What about you? Let me know about what you think with a comment and seeya soon 😄
References:
Pr. Sonja Lyubomirsky study: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_much_of_your_happiness_is_under_your_control
Medvec ET AL (1995): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15726123_When_Less_Is_More_Counterfactual_Thinking_and_Satisfaction_Among_Olympic_Medalists
O’guinn & Schrum (1997): https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1997-03928-002
SIEFF ET AL (1999): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10696276/
AYTON ET AL (2007): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247515723_Affective_forecasting_Why_can't_people_predict_their_emotions
