Someone once asked me, "If you could live anywhere in the United States, where would you choose?" The individual was completely assuming that close proximity to friends, family, and current job wasn't a factor. I thought it over for a minute and responded, "San Diego, California." I get it, the cost of living in California is extremely high. And there's always that fear that the entire state will break off and fall into the Pacific Ocean. Beyond all that, though, it's a pretty great place to call home!
Does living in California make people happy? As it turns out, a couple of investigators researched this exact question in the late 1990's (one of the investigators happens to be the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Daniel Kahneman, who wrote a best-selling book, Thinking Fast and Slow in 2011 that summarized decades of his research in the fields of cognitive psychology and behavioral economics). The results were published in the journal, Psychological Science, under the title, "Does Living in California Make People Happy?" The results might surprise you. There appears to be a cultural stereotype that people are happier in California, and individuals in the study rated overall life satisfaction for their peers as higher in California than in the Midwest. However, self-reported overall life satisfaction was the same between people living in California and people living in the Midwest. In other words, everyone believes that people who live in California are happier, mostly due to the fact that the climate is far better in sunny California compared to the gloomy Midwest. But when you ask individuals to rate their own satisfaction with life in general, people in California aren't any better than those of us who live in the Midwest!
Kahneman believed that we fall prey to something that he called a focusing illusion. As he wrote, "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 other words, if we want to look at the degree of happiness of everyone living in the United States, we will overweight the degree of happiness higher if we focus on just one region, i.e. California.
Let me provide a different example, which may help explain the concept of a focusing illusion further. In a 1996 study by Schwarz and colleagues, college students were asked two questions: "How happy are you?" and "How many dates did you have last month?" The correlation between these two questions depended upon the order in which they were asked. Ask the first question ("How happy are you?") first, the correlation was 0.12 (which is low - perfect correlation would be 1.0), suggesting that the number of dates a college student had in the last month had no bearing on his or her overall happiness. However, ask the second question first ("How many dates did you have last month?" and the correlation between the two increased to 0.66 (which is actually pretty high). Focus on the number of dates a college student had in the last month and you overweight the impact of dating on overall happiness.
There is another famous study ("Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative?") that found very little difference in overall life satisfaction between paraplegic accident victims and otherwise healthy control subjects - again, the implication here is that a focusing illusion has occurred that causes us to believe that paraplegics are not happy. Similarly, there was no difference in overall life satisfaction between people who win the lottery and those who do not (the focusing illusion would cause us to believe that lottery winners are happier than the rest of us).
The bottom line lesson here? The grass is certainly not always greener on the other side. We tend to look at other people and think that their lives are better. "People who work at that job are happier than me, so if I could only have that job, I would be happier." Or, "people in California are happier than me, so if I could just move to California, I would be happier too." It's just not true, folks. It's a focusing illusion. Be careful that you don't fall prey to it, lest you think that the grass is actually greener on the other side of the fence.
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