Old research suggest that depressed people have a more realisticperception of their importance, reputation, locus of control, and abilities. Recent researchsuggests that unskilled performers are inaccurate judges of how their abilities compare to others, but skilled performers are as inaccurate as their unskilled counterparts when confronted with moderately difficult tasks. Unskilled performers are more accurate than their skilled counterparts when confronted with extremely difficult tasks!
I've been on a happiness hiatus. Ironically, the only thing getting in the way of my well-being has been my dissertation on well-being! Let's review what has happened on the happiness front in the past seven weeks.
1) It has been shown that your serotonin levels effect how you play the ultimatum game. Apparently, low serotonin levels probilify the rejection of unfair offers. The researchers concluded that "5-HT plays a critical role in regulating emotionduring social decision-making."
3) Often, when we think about egalitarianism or distributive justice, we think about the distribution of goods, rights or opportunities. In a recent paper, "Happiness Inequality in the United States," Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers discuss...happiness inequality. According to Wolfers, "there is less happiness inequality today than in the 1970’s or 1980’s" even though there have been "large increases in income and consumption inequality."
You can read the trilogy of articles on the topic, here. You can also read a brief summary of these findings, here.
4) Check out this tantalizing tidbit about the well known benefits of smiling.
6) The August issue of Psychological Science contains a fascinating article by Eugene M. Caruso, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson on the phenomenon known as temporal value asymmetry.
7) Randy Newman has remarked that "short people got no reason to live."
Turns out, they're pretty miserable too...
This article suggests that "the main reason why taller people do better is because they have higher incomes, they are better educated, and they work in higher status occupations."
8) According to this article, "Between 1980 and 1985, only 2,125 articles were published on happiness, compared with 10,553 on depression. From 2000 to 2005, the number of articles on happiness increased sixteenfold to 35,069, while articles on depression numbered 80,161. From 2006 to present, just over 2 1/2 years, a search found 27,335 articles on happiness, more than half the 53,092 found on depression."
9) According to recent research the experience of positive emotions was more strongly related to life satisfaction than the absence of negative emotions across nations. However, "negative emotional experiences were more negatively related to life satisfaction in individualistic than in collectivist nations, and positive emotional experiences had a larger positive relationship with life satisfaction in nations that stress self-expression than in nations that value survival. These findings show how emotional aspects of the good life vary with national culture and how this depends on the values that characterize one's society. Although to some degree, positive and negative emotions might be universally viewed as desirable and undesirable, respectively, there appear to be clear cultural differences in how relevant such emotional experiences are to quality of life."
10) According to a recent study in the journal, BMC Cancer, women who suffered two or more traumatic events in their life, such as losing a loved one, had a 62 per cent greater risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer, but optimistic women were 25 per cent less likely to develop the disease. This study definitely deserves a closer look.
11) According to this article, conventional retributivist and utilitarian conceptions of punishment must accommodate our ability to adapt to changed circumstances (including fines and imprisonment) and, somehow, must ameliorate the devastating (unintended) consequences of incarceration (such as unemployment, divorce and disease). These phenomena are obstacles to implementing proportional punishment and creating a marginal deterrent, thus they threaten the foundations of punishment theory.
I take it that a psychological hedonist might claim (I'm not a psychological hedonist, but I have argued this in other places) that Nozick, and those who agree, are hedonists who are making mistakes: they are misinformed or irrational. Thus this data (alone) doesn't show that psychological hedonism is false.
Philosophers, such as Nozick, also argue that the fact that we don't prefer the experience machine or 'immoral' lifestyles is evidence that there is more to well-being than the experiences of welfare subjects. That is, philosophers presuppose desire accounts of well-being.
This is all fine and good, but if you accept a desire account of well-being, you need to explain miswanting. According to mental state accounts of well-being, you miswant when you want something that, unbeknownst to you, is going to make you miserable. According to simple preference satisfaction views, the things that make you miserable are good simply in virtue of the fact that you wanted them. You might attempt to accommodate this concern by invoking an informed preference satisfaction account of well-being.
Even if you accept an informed preference satisfaction account of well-being, you need to explain what makes good fortune good (this is, after all, the' hap' in happiness and the 'daimon' in eudaimonia). Often, we don't want this or that, and we don't know it is good for us, but it still turns out to be good for us insofar as we are ultimately glad this or that happened. One might claim the best way to explain this phenomenon is by appealing to a mental state account of well-being (you might also think of this in terms of post facto or retrospective desire satisfaction).
You might also claim that we might want stuff that is bad for us even when we are perfectly informed, in which case we ought to want other stuff (even if we don't want to). If it turns out that some informed people sometimes still prefer reality to the experience machine, we still might say they want wrong (or they're irrational) even though they got all the facts straight, so to speak. Here, I imagine you would need posit some sort of non-instrumental, substantiveview of rationality (a la Kant).*
From a purely dialectical point of view, I take it that if you subscribe to a mental state account of well-being, such as hedonism (personally, I preferenjoyment accounts), you will argue Nozick is begging the question: if you don't already accept desire accounts of well-being you won't be persuaded by the experience machine intuition pump.
In the end, it might turn out the folk implicitly or explicitly accept non-hedonic accounts of well-being, in which case I am tempted to say they have something besides well-being in mind. At this point, it might be a good idea to simply distinguish hedonistic, subjective accounts of well-being, from non-hedonistic, 'objective' accounts of well-being instead of Chisholming endlessly about whether well-being is essentially one or the other according to the folk or philosophers. In other words, operationalize, baby!
Excelsior!
C.L.Sosis
*You might even believe that rational norms are determined by what is in fact (statistically) normal, thus, you can use the results of experimental philosophy to determine what the norms are (by determining what is normal) and what you should do, from a rational point of view, in these hypothetical scenarios (according to the norms).
"I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts."
Hello Fellow Hedonists,
Children who watch alot of television are unhappy.It has been hypothesized that television makes people who have better things to do (such as graduate students) unhappy because it is percieved as an opportunity cost. Busy people feel guilty for watching T.V. Television also seems to provoke materialistic anxiety (men's magazines have a similar effect).
Now, Daniel Kahneman, Alan Krueger, David Schkade, Norbert Schwarz and Arthur Stone have shown that we spend too much time engaged in 'neutral downtime' when we could be engaged in more gratifying activites. Interestingly, it has also been shown that people who have televisions in their homes report greater well-being than do those who do not have televisions in their homes. I wonder why...
Drawing on a range of empirical evidence, this essayargues that the failure to include, and to give sufficient weight to, fairness preferences undermines legal economists' policy recommendations. The authors argue that given the growing body of research revealing that individuals value fairness over their own rational self-interests, it is incumbent on legal economists to take preferences for fairness into account. This claim is problematic from the get go. After all, what we value (or what we prefer) isn't necessarily good for us. I think the authors are on to something, nonetheless.
Often, when simple utilitarians calculate the happiness/welfare/well-being of an individual or group, they pretend that people don't care about things such as fairness. When utilitarians, such as Peter Singer, recommend a counterintuitive social policy, they pretend that ignoring our intuitions (of the deontic variety) doesn't have a negative influence on our subjective well-being, but it wouldn't be entirely surprising if people were upset by non-utilitarian considerations even if they shouldn't be. If utilitarians were to take the influence our ineliminable (moral) judgments of right and wrong have on our subjective well-being into account, they might be forced to concede that non-utilitarian concerns (such as justice and fairness) must be respected.
Shouldn't utilitarians simply attempt to accommodate deontic considerations? I don't think so. My deontic judgments are the evolutionary by-product of morally irrelevant processes that were conducive to my fitness. Fitness, from my point of view, is morally irrelevant. Thus, it seems to me that I should ignore my deontic judgments when I try to figure out what I ought to do. However, whether or not I should ignore these judgments depends on whether or not I can. On one hand, it might turn out that I can simply dismiss my own judgments and values as systematic biases that undermine my well-being and be done with it.
On the other hand, it might turn out I can't ignore these judgments, even if I am able to recognize they are biases upon reflection. Ignoring these biases could make me miserable, even if I don't identify with them. If this turns out to be the case, it might be a good idea to chemically or surgically alter my brain to relieve myself of these harmful biases. It might also be a good (and less difficult) idea to trick myself by creating situations in which acting in accordance with these illusions doesn't undermine my well-being (intentionally damaging my brain might not work). Either way, reasoning away my conscience might not be a viable option.
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