Abstract
Thoughts, judgements and standards are elements in cognitive happiness. People adopt and apply standards in their appreciation of life, knowingly or unknowingly. They usually adopt standards without being aware of it, for example the standards of their parents, their school and their social environment in general. Cognitive peculiarities imply that they ignore relevant information, or rely on invalid information, in their adoption of standards. Such peculiarities have a negative impact on their pursuit of happiness. This negative impact can be aggravated by social dynamics like positional competition, secondary inflation, social comparison and manipulation. Diversity and instability in standards have a negative impact on the comparability of cognitive happiness, and consequently on the comparability of affective and overall happiness, through the interaction of affect and cognition. There are, on the other hand, also reasons to believe that people apply similar standards and do not change them easily. People usually respect the gratification of general needs as an important standard, and there is convergence due to globalization and commercial advertising. People are free, nevertheless, to adopt or reject standards at will, and this freedom may have a fatal impact on the consistency and comparability of happiness. The actual impact is less substantial, but deserves more attention.
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Notes
- 1.
Dolan, P. (2014). Happiness by Design. Penguin Group, New York.
- 2.
There is also a statistical argument: happiness by purpose, as measured by the British Office of National Statistics (ONS), does not represent a separate factor, but is closely related to one and the same evaluative factor. See Kapteyn, A. et al. Dimensions of subjective well-being. Social Indicators Research. September 2015, Volume 123, nr. 3, pp. 625–660.
- 3.
Frames of reference can be very explicit and developed, like political or religious ideals of a perfect life or a perfect society; some utopia as described by Thomas More. In his book ‘Happiness: a History’ (2005) Darrin M. McMahon presents some examples of the ideals of early utopian socialists like Cabet, Owen, Fourier and Saint Simon. But people may also have less explicit t ideas about how things should be in their own life and in society.
- 4.
Knight, F.H. (1964). Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit. New York, A.M. Kelly.
- 5.
Etzioni, A. (2018) Happiness is the wrong metric; a liberal communitarian response to populism (dedicated to the moral wrestlers). The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA.
- 6.
Kahneman, D. (1999). Objective happiness, in Kahneman, D; Diener, E.; and Schwartz, N. (eds.). Well-being: The foundation of hedonic psychology. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, pp. 3–25.
- 7.
Schkade, D.A. and Kahneman, D. (1998). Does Living in California Make People Happy? A Focusing Illusion in Judgements of Life Satisfaction. Psychological Science, 9; 340–346.
- 8.
Gilbert, D. (2007). Stumbling on happiness. New York, Vintage Books, Random House.
- 9.
This is formulated differently by Brickman and Campbell: people’s expectations are raised by pleasant events and lowered by unpleasant ones. The result is that the gap between one’s expectations and one’s real life remains about the same; so people are on a hedonic- or expectations-treadmill. Brickman, P.D. and Campbell, D.T. (1971). Hedonic relativism and planning the good society. In M.H. Appley (ed.) Adaptation level theory. Academic, New York.
- 10.
Brickman, P. and Campbell, D.T. (1971). Hedonic relativism and planning the good society. In M.H. Appley (ed.) Adaptation level theory: A Symposium (pp. 287–302) New York: Academic Press.
- 11.
Cummins, R.A. (2010). Subjective Wellbeing, Homeostatically Protected Mood and Depression: A Synthesis. Journal of Happiness Studies, Volume 11, issue 1, pp. 1–17.
- 12.
Tversky, A. and Griffin, D. (1991). Endowment and Contrast in Judgements of Well-being; in Strack, F. Argyle, M. and Schwartz, N. (eds.), Subjective Well-being: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, Oxford; Pergamon, pp. 101–118.
- 13.
Some arguments against the set-point-theory are summarized in the World Happiness Report 2017; Measuring and Understanding Happiness: 1: Average life-evaluations differ significantly and systematically among countries, and these differences are substantially explained by life circumstances. 2: There is evidence of long-standing trends in the life evaluations of sub-populations within the same country, demonstrating that life-evaluations can be changed. 3: There is very strong evidence of continuing influence on well-being from major disabilities and unemployment, among other life events. 4: Studies of migration show migrants to have average levels and distributions of life evaluations that resemble those of other residents of their new countries more than of comparable residents in the countries from which they have emigrated.
- 14.
Diener, E., Lucas R., Scollon, C.N. (2006) Beyond the Hedonic Treadmill: Revisiting the adaptation theory of well-being. American Psychologist 61 (4): 305–314.
- 15.
Lucas , R., Clark, A. E., Georgellis, Y., Diener, E. (2004). Unemployment alters the set-point for life satisfaction. Psychological Science. 15 (1) 8–13.
- 16.
Sen, A. (2010). The idea of justice. Penguin books. Page 283. “The practical merit of such adjustments for people in chronically adverse positions is easy to understand: this is one way of being able to live peacefully with persistent deprivation. But the adjustments also have the consequential effect of distorting the scale of utilities in he form of happiness or desire-fulfilment.”
- 17.
Wilkinson, R.. (2005). The impact of inequality: how to make sick societies healthier. Routledge; London; Stiglitz, J. (2012). The price of inequality. W.W. Norton & Company. New York; Graham, C. (2017). Happiness for all? Princeton University Press. New Jersey.
- 18.
See Samuel, R, and Hadjar, A. (2016). How welfare-state regimes shape subjective well-being across Europe. Social Indicators Research, nr. 129: pp. 565–587.
- 19.
Hochrat, O. and Skopek, N. (2013). The impact of wealth on subjective well-being: A comparison of three welfare-state regimes. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 34: 127–141. Inequality in household wealth has no impact on subjective well-being (happiness) due to efficient social security.
- 20.
Lichtenberg, J. (1996). Consuming because others consume. Social Theory & Practice, 22(3): 273–297.
- 21.
Hirata, J. (2011). Happiness, Ethics and Economics. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, London and New York, page 46. The term ‘secondary inflation’ was first introduced in Hirata, J. (2001): Happiness and Economics: Enriching Economic Theory with Empirical Psychology, Master’s thesis, Maastricht University, page 36. The term was first published in Vendrik, M. and Hirata, J. (2003). Experienced versus Decision Utility of Income: Relative or Absolute Happiness, in Bruni, L. and Porta, P.L. (eds.), Handbook of the Economics of Happiness, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 185–208.
- 22.
Sen, A. (1985). Commodities and Capabilities. Professor Dr. P. Hennipman Lectures in Economics. Amsterdam, North-Holland.
- 23.
Layard, R. (1980). Human satisfaction and public policy. The Economic Journal, 90(360): 737–750.
- 24.
An interesting concept in this context is “psychological freedom” as defined by Christian Bay: the degree of harmony between basic motives and overt behaviour; in Bay, C. (1958). The structure of freedom. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Manipulation has a very negative impact on this type of freedom.
- 25.
Nozick , Robert (1974). Anarchy, State, and Utopia. p. 41. Another ‘thought experiment’ as a critical comment on utilitarianism: if anyone would enjoy unlimited utility from one unit of resources, he or she should get all available resources, because this would create the greatest utility or happiness. We have to keep in mind, however, that only utility can be unlimited; happiness is limited by nature.
- 26.
Ott, J. (2011). How much competition do we need in a civilized society? Journal of Happiness Studies, 12(3), 525–529. Review of the book ‘Winning: Reflections on an American Obsession (2011) by Francesco Duina; Princeton and Oxford. University Press.
- 27.
A negative income tax, as formulated by M. Friedman, is an interesting alternative, but requires more supervision to avoid abuse. See: Friedman, M. Capitalism and Freedom (1962). University of Chicago Press.
- 28.
Rice, C. (2013). Defending the Objective List Theory of Well-Being. Ratio, An international journal of analytic philosophy; Vol. 26, Issue 2, pp. 196–211. Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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Sen, A. (1985). Commodities and capabilities. Professor Dr. P. Hennipman Lectures in Economics. Amsterdam, North Holland.
Sen, A. (2010). The idea of justice. London: Penguin books.
Tversky, A., & Griffin, D. (1991). Endowment and contrast in judgements of well-being. In F. Strack, M. Argyle, & N. Schwartz (Eds.), Subjective well-being: An interdisciplinary perspective (pp. 101–118). Oxford: Pergamon.
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Ott, J. (2020). Cognitive Happiness, or the Cognitive Component of Happiness. In: Beyond Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56600-5_4
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