4 ms·
The evidence surrounding hedonic adaptation you're citing is misleading. The twin studies, for example, cite a 50% heritability, which, ignoring their problems,
by o09rdk 7y ago
The evidence surrounding hedonic adaptation you're citing is misleading. The twin studies, for example, cite a 50% heritability, which, ignoring their problems, still suggests far from a preponderance of genetic influence. And those studies are difficult to interpret vis-a-vis their environmental assumptions, as are many other studies. E.g., it's not that impressive to me to show that people return to baseline from some anomalous event, when so much of the environment is structured in a very long-term stable way. The person who gets married still has to return to their same SES background, the same vocational history, the same environment, etc and so forth; conversely, the person who gets divorced still has the same job background, same workplace environment, and so forth and so on.
I also feel like the hedonic adaptation hypothesis leads to this kind of absurd conclusion that people are unaffected by anything regardless of severity. That is, it doesn't matter what we do to others because it's their fault how happy they are.
In any event, I think these hedonic adaptation studies are really misleading in some ways.
This project (the hedonometer project) is somewhat similar. I've done research on similar topics, and one problem you run into fairly quickly is that there's nothing really "attached" to the data you're modeling. The assumption is that the verbal content on Twitter will reflect people's mood on average, which is fairly reasonable, but the content on Twitter is fairly disembodied. That is, someone might tweet about how horrible Alan Rickman's death is, but they themselves are in a fairly good mood. So you see recurring time series patterns with, e.g., Christmas because the positive language is part of what is socially entrained, even though it's disconnected from changes in your mood. You tweeting about having fun with your family this year, when everything is going well, is not the same as tweeting about having fun with you family last year, when everything was going to hell.
It's admittedly a complicated topic, but I think this stuff gets radically oversimplified.
- derefr 7y ago> I also feel like the hedonic adaptation hypothesis leads to this kind of absurd conclusion that people are unaffected by anything regardless of severity. That is, it doesn't matter what we do to others because it's their fault how happy they are. I wouldn't say that this is an absurd conclusion, as long as you divorce "is happy" (as in, "frequently experiences happiness-qualia") from "has utility" or "is functional" or basically any other measure of QALYs. Pretend that instead of talking about "happiness", we were talking about "sneezing." It'd make sense that how often you sneeze isn't a reflection of your long-term emotional state, right? Well, why would you expect "how often you smile" or "how often you experience qualia of contentment" to be a reflection of your long-term emotional state? What privileges those physiological facts as telling you something about yourself, over the fact of how often you sneeze? Consider: people cry while watching sad movies. This is an short-term emotional state evoked by the movie. It doesn't outlast the movie. Would you expect someone who experiences more movie-cry-sessions to have a lower long-term emotional state/utility? > So you see recurring time series patterns with, e.g., Christmas because the positive language is part of what is socially entrained, even though it's disconnected from changes in your mood. You suppose here that mood is a fact about our internal experience, rather than a fact about our linguistic rationalizing self-narrative of that experience. If the "me" that tells you that there's an invisible dragon in my garage, and the "me" that goes into my garage anyway because I don't expect to get eaten, are essentially different people (one living in a land of social narrative; one living in a land of causal prediction and goal-directed action) which one of those selves would you expect to have a "mood"? (It's not a trick question; I'm not really sure either. But it's worth pondering, I think!)
- o09rdk 7y agoI agree about the dissociation between verbal awareness/insight/conscious perception about mood and other things, like quality of life or utility. However, what does quality of life matter if it is unrelated to emotional state? E.g., what does it matter what my quality of life is an economic sense (broadly speaking) if my mood is totally different? Putting that aside, there's also this kind of perception of state versus actual state issue which is maybe deeper or trickier to think through too. I agree with what you're bringing up here, to me I think though it leads to more problems with the hedonic adaptation hypothesis rather than fewer. That is, if all these problems about happiness exist, then what are all those studies measuring? It's a challenging thing to think through, and there's probably ways of addressing the OP's question about whether or not everyone is more miserable lately. I'm just not convinced the hedonometer approach is the best way (although I'm not sure it isn't).