The Cognitive Dissonance of Happiness and Belief at TED

attended the TED first morning screening in London this evening. David Cameron gave his talk live and we patched into Long Beach for the rest of the session. I will cover Cameron's talk separately as it has Government 2.0/Social Media implications. Two of the other three talks were on behavioural economics & happiness (which also featured heavily in Cameron's talk), these are my notes:

Daniel Kahneman

Happiness is the new black, but it has a number of cognitive traps:

- failure to admit complexity, happiness covers too many areas
- confuse experience and memory (happiness about vs happiness in life)
- focus delusion - exagerrate importance of anything thought about

There are two types of self - the rembering and experiencing self - that have different happiness optima
- experiencing self has very short lived units of memory, 3 seconds or so, happiness is now.
- the remembering self stores memories of happiness which drives choices
- thoughts of the future are an anticipation of memories

Thought Expereriment - if your memory afterwards was destroyed, would you go on the same vacation vs if your memory stayed?

Because of the 2 selves, there are 2 happiness states - different optima - can't reconcile

- Can measure happiness of experiencing self physiologically
- Much harder to measure satisfaction of the measuring self eg about your life

Satisfaction differs between the 2 selves so optimizing them differs
- money (doesn't impact experiencing self, does impact remembering self)
- goals
- spending time with people you like

0.5 correlation between the two statistically for any one "happiness" vector, for example:

- climate is not important to experiencing self but is to memory self
- Gallup survey - feelings vary with income - above $60k pa flatlines experienced happiness, but remembering self likes reflecting on wealth

My Thought - So what will be optimized by policy wonks? David Cameron started to lay out his stall, but I will deal with it separately

Michael Shermer Global Sceptic

Belief is the natural state of things, science/scepticism is uncomfortable - we have evolved this way by natural selection. We have two cognitively dissonanent traits:

1. Patternicity

- We find patterns with random rewards
- Lion in the long grass evolutionary choice

- false positive (rustle in grass, assume since as Lion is unlikely, that there is no lion until evidence)
- false negative (every rustle in grass is a Lion - run).

We are designed to opt for Type 2 ie all patterns are real until proven false

Some behavioural psychology:

- Studies show that people who are more disposed to believe in ESP, UFOs etc are more likely to see patterns where there are none.

- Corporate environments study - people who feel they are out of control are more likely to see patterns in things

- More significant patterns seen by RH side of brain

2. Agenticity - the tendency to assume that its not chance or inanimate objects that do things

- We infuse patterns we see but don't understand with active agents eg angels, conspiracy theories, etc.

It is literally all in the mind - for example if you stimulate temporal lobe and you get Oot Of Body Experiences

Anyway, those are the notes.