DOES LIVING IN CALIFORNIA MAKE PEOPLE HAPPY? A Focusing Illusion in Judgments of Life Satisfaction

Large samples of students in the Midwest and in Southern California rated satisfaction with life overall as well as with various aspects of life, for either themselves or someone similar to themselves in one of the two regions. Self-reported overall life satisfaction was the same in both regions, but participants who rated a similar other expected Californians to be more satisfied than Midwesterners. Climate-related aspects were rated as more important for someone living in another region than for someone in one’s own region. Mediation analyses showed that satisfaction with climate and with cultural opportunities accounted for the higher overall life satisfaction predicted for Californians. Judgments of life satisfaction in a different location are susceptible to a focusing illusion: Easily observed and distinctive differences between locations are given more weight in such judgments than they will have in reality. The most famous article in the psychological literature on wellbeing (Brickman, Coates, & Janoff-Bulman, 1978) reported only small differences in life satisfaction between paraplegics and normal control subjects, on the one hand, and between lottery winners and normal control subjects, on the other. This provocative finding has been bolstered by much subsequent evidence in many domains (Diener & Diener, 1996). For example, Silver (1982) found that the affective experience of paraplegics was already predominantly positive only a few weeks after their accidents. A more recent study reported that the frequency of positive affect returns to normal levels within a year following the death of a loved one (Suh, Diener, & Fujita, 1996). In general, the correlations between various aspects of subjective well-being and objective life circumstances tend to be surprisingly low. In contrast, stable temperamental factors predict subjective well-being with substantial accuracy, and the correlation between the affective experience of twins reared apart is also quite high (Lykken & Tellegen, 1996). These observations led Headey and Wearing (1992) to propose that individuals are endowed with an affective set point, to which they are drawn to return after any change of circumstances. The fame of the Brickman et al. article is a significant observation in its own right. The article is famous because its results are deeply counterintuitive: An observer would expect paraplegics to be more miserable and lottery winners to be happier than they are in actuality. We propose that this error is a special case of a more general effect that we call a focusing illusion: When a judgment about an entire object or category is made with attention focused on a subset of that category, a focusing illusion is likely to occur, whereby the attended subset is overweighted relative to the unattended subset. In particular, when attention is drawn to the possibility of a change in any significant aspect of life, the perceived effect of this change on well-being is likely to be exaggerated. The idea of a focusing illusion involves hypotheses about two psychological processes, one in the subject whose experience is predicted (the paraplegic or the lottery winner) and the other in the judge who makes the prediction (who could be the same person). The evidence implies that, to a substantial extent, paraplegics and lottery winners do adapt to their new circumstances. A redistribution of attention is likely to be one of the mechanisms that produce this adaptation: Paraplegics and lottery winners have many experiences that do not relate directly to their special status. Once the situation in which they find themselves is no longer novel, people in these circumstances often (perhaps mostly) think of other things, such as the food they eat or the gossip they hear. However, a judge who tries to imagine the life of a paraplegic or of a lottery winner will naturally focus attention on the special circumstances of these cases. This mismatch in the allocation of attention will cause the judge to exaggerate the impact of these circumstances on the subject. It is possible to document a focusing illusion by comparing the predictions of individuals who must imagine the life satisfaction of paraplegics with the predictions of other individuals whose judgments are based on actual observation. To examine whether the focusing illusion operates in perceptions of paraplegics, we asked 119 students to complete a questionnaire about the frequency with which paraplegics would exhibit various happiness-related behaviors in specified situations. We also included a question that asked about the relative frequencies of good and bad moods. The key independent variable was another question, “Have you ever known someone who is a paraplegic?” We predicted that people who knew paraplegics would view them as happier than people who did not. The results were unequivocal. Knowing a paraplegic had a highly significant effect on responses to most questions about a paraplegic’s life (p < .005). For example, respondents who said they had never known a paraplegic estimated a predominance of bad moods over good (43% vs. 32%), whereas those who had known a paraplegic as a friend or relative had the opposite perception (20% vs. 53%). The message is clear: The less you know about paraplegics, the worse off you think they are. Loewenstein and Frederick (1997) found a related effect when they asked one group of subjects to predict how various personal and environmental changes would affect their well-being over the next decade and another group to evaluate how matched changes had affected their well-being over the past decade. Results showed that people expected their overall well-being to be affected much more by future changes than they believed matched changes had affected their well-being in the past. With experience, subjects apparently recognized the limited impact on well-being of specific narrow changes in their circumstances, but they were unable to put such changes into perspective when forecasting the future. Another instance of the focusing illusion has been reported in studies by Schwarz, Strack, and their colleagues (see Schwarz, 1996, for a general summary). In one study, college students were asked two questions: “How happy are you?” and “How many dates did you have last month?” The correlation between these questions depended on the 340 Copyright © 1998 American Psychological Society VOL. 9, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 1998 Address correspondence to David Schkade, Department of Management, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712-1174; e-mail: [email protected]. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE David A. Schkade and Daniel Kahneman order in which they appeared: The correlation was .12 when the happiness question came first, but rose to .66 when the order was reversed. Focusing attention on dating is apparently sufficient to induce the illusion that this aspect of life dominates one’s well-being. Counterfactual thoughts about one’s own happiness play an important role in human lives: People sometimes wonder about what it would be like to be in another job, in another city, or with another spouse. Systematic errors in such thoughts can have significant consequences if individuals are moved to act upon them. Forecasts about the well-being of other people can also have implications for action. The original motivation for this study concerned the accuracy with which people could predict the effect of a specified change in climate on the well-being of future generations. Beliefs about such effects may determine how urgent the problem of global warming appears today, and influence public willingness to take actions intended to influence the course of events. A focusing illusion would lead people to exaggerate the adverse impact of climatic changes by underestimating the ability of future generations to adapt. In this article, we describe an instance of the focusing illusion, which was induced by causing people to focus on the difference between living in California and the Midwest. We used a crosssectional design in which self-reports of life satisfaction made by people who lived in a certain location were compared with predictions of life satisfaction made by people who lived elsewhere. Our hypotheses were (a) that there would be no significant difference between residents of the two regions in reported overall life satisfaction and (b) that judgments made by residents of both regions would reflect a belief that “someone like them” would be more satisfied in California than in the Midwest. The results confirmed both hypotheses.