And my talk today will be mostly about these cognitive traps.This applies to laypeople thinking about their own happiness,and it applies to scholars thinking about happiness,because it turns out we're just as messed up as anybody else is.The first of these trapsis a reluctance to admit complexity.It turns out that the word "happiness"is just not a useful word anymore,because we apply it to too many different things.I think there is one particular meaning to which we might restrict it,but by and large,this is something that we'll have to give upand we'll have to adopt the more complicated viewof what well-being is.The second trap is a confusion between experience and memory;basically, it's between being happy in your life,and being happy about your lifeor happy with your life.And those are two very different concepts,and they're both lumped in the notion of happiness.And the third is the focusing illusion,and it's the unfortunate fact that we can't think about any circumstancethat affects well-beingwithout distorting its importance.I mean, this is a real cognitive trap.There's just no way of getting it right.

What this is telling us, really,is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other peoplein terms of two selves.There is an experiencing self,who lives in the presentand knows the present,is capable of re-living the past,but basically it has only the present.It's the experiencing self that the doctor approaches --you know, when the doctor asks,"Does it hurt now when I touch you here?"And then there is a remembering self,and the remembering self is the one that keeps score,and maintains the story of our life,and it's the one that the doctor approachesin asking the question,"How have you been feeling lately?"or "How was your trip to Albania?" or something like that.Those are two very different entities,the experiencing self and the remembering self,and getting confused between them is part of the messabout the notion of happiness.

Now, the remembering selfis a storyteller.And that really starts with a basic response of our memories --it starts immediately.We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories.Our memory tells us stories,that is, what we get to keep from our experiencesis a story.And let me begin with one example.This is an old study.Those are actual patients undergoing a painful procedure.I won't go into detail. It's no longer painful these days,but it was painful when this study was run in the 1990s.They were asked to report on their pain every 60 seconds.Here are two patients,those are their recordings.And you are asked, "Who of them suffered more?"And it's a very easy question.Clearly, Patient B suffered more --his colonoscopy was longer,and every minute of pain that Patient A had,Patient B had, and more.

But now there is another question:"How much did these patients think they suffered?"And here is a surprise.The surprise is that Patient Ahad a much worse memory of the colonoscopythan Patient B.The stories of the colonoscopies were different,and because a very critical part of the story is how it ends.And neither of these stories is very inspiring or great --but one of them is this distinct ... (Laughter)but one of them is distinctly worse than the other.And the one that is worseis the one where pain was at its peak at the very end;it's a bad story.How do we know that?Because we asked these people after their colonoscopy,and much later, too,"How bad was the whole thing, in total?"And it was much worse for A than for B, in memory.

Now this is a direct conflictbetween the experiencing self and the remembering self.From the point of view of the experiencing self,clearly, B had a worse time.Now, what you could do with Patient A,and we actually ran clinical experiments,and it has been done, and it does work --you could actually extend the colonoscopy of Patient Aby just keeping the tube in without jiggling it too much.That will cause the patientto suffer, but just a littleand much less than before.And if you do that for a couple of minutes,you have made the experiencing selfof Patient A worse off,and you have the remembering self of Patient Aa lot better off,because now you have endowed Patient Awith a better storyabout his experience.What defines a story?And that is true of the storiesthat memory delivers for us,and it's also true of the stories that we make up.What defines a story are changes,significant moments and endings.Endings are very, very importantand, in this case, the ending dominated.

Now, the experiencing selflives its life continuously.It has moments of experience, one after the other.And you can ask: What happens to these moments?And the answer is really straightforward:They are lost forever.I mean, most of the moments of our life --and I calculated, you know, the psychological presentis said to be about three seconds long;that means that, you know,in a life there are about 600 million of them;in a month, there are about 600,000 --most of them don't leave a trace.Most of them are completely ignoredby the remembering self.And yet, somehow you get the sensethat they should count,that what happens during these moments of experienceis our life.It's the finite resource that we're spendingwhile we're on this earth.And how to spend itwould seem to be relevant,but that is not the storythat the remembering self keeps for us.

So we have the remembering selfand the experiencing self,and they're really quite distinct.The biggest difference between themis in the handling of time.From the point of view of the experiencing self,if you have a vacation,and the second week is just as good as the first,then the two-week vacationis twice as good as the one-week vacation.That's not the way it works at all for the remembering self.For the remembering self, a two-week vacationis barely better than the one-week vacationbecause there are no new memories added.You have not changed the story.And in this way,time is actually the critical variablethat distinguishes a remembering selffrom an experiencing self;time has very little impact on the story.

Now, the remembering self does morethan remember and tell stories.It is actually the one that makes decisionsbecause, if you have a patient who has had, say,two colonoscopies with two different surgeonsand is deciding which of them to choose,then the one that choosesis the one that has the memory that is less bad,and that's the surgeon that will be chosen.The experiencing selfhas no voice in this choice.We actually don't choose between experiences,we choose between memories of experiences.And even when we think about the future,we don't think of our future normally as experiences.We think of our futureas anticipated memories.And basically you can look at this,you know, as a tyranny of the remembering self,and you can think of the remembering selfsort of dragging the experiencing selfthrough experiences thatthe experiencing self doesn't need.

I have that sense thatwhen we go on vacationsthis is very frequently the case;that is, we go on vacations,to a very large extent,in the service of our remembering self.And this is a bit hard to justify I think.I mean, how much do we consume our memories?That is one of the explanationsthat is given for the dominanceof the remembering self.And when I think about that, I think about a vacationwe had in Antarctica a few years ago,which was clearly the best vacation I've ever had,and I think of it relatively often,relative to how much I think of other vacations.And I probably have consumedmy memories of that three-week trip, I would say,for about 25 minutes in the last four years.Now, if I had ever opened the folderwith the 600 pictures in it,I would have spent another hour.Now, that is three weeks,and that is at most an hour and a half.There seems to be a discrepancy.Now, I may be a bit extreme, you know,in how little appetite I have for consuming memories,but even if you do more of this,there is a genuine question:Why do we put so much weight on memoryrelative to the weight that we put on experiences?

So I want you to thinkabout a thought experiment.Imagine that for your next vacation,you know that at the end of the vacationall your pictures will be destroyed,and you'll get an amnesic drugso that you won't remember anything.Now, would you choose the same vacation? (Laughter)And if you would choose a different vacation,there is a conflict between your two selves,and you need to think about how to adjudicate that conflict,and it's actually not at all obvious, becauseif you think in terms of time,then you get one answer,and if you think in terms of memories,you might get another answer.Why do we pick the vacations we dois a problem that confronts uswith a choice between the two selves.

Now, the two selvesbring up two notions of happiness.There are really two concepts of happinessthat we can apply, one per self.So you can ask: How happy is the experiencing self?And then you would ask: How happy are the momentsin the experiencing self's life?And they're all -- happiness for momentsis a fairly complicated process.What are the emotions that can be measured?And, by the way, now we are capableof getting a pretty good ideaof the happiness of the experiencing self over time.If you ask for the happiness of the remembering self,it's a completely different thing.This is not about how happily a person lives.It is about how satisfied or pleased the person iswhen that person thinks about her life.Very different notion.Anyone who doesn't distinguish those notionsis going to mess up the study of happiness,and I belong to a crowd of students of well-being,who've been messing up the study of happiness for a long timein precisely this way.

The distinction between thehappiness of the experiencing selfand the satisfaction of the remembering selfhas been recognized in recent years,and there are now efforts to measure the two separately.The Gallup Organization has a world pollwhere more than half a million peoplehave been asked questionsabout what they think of their lifeand about their experiences,and there have been other efforts along those lines.So in recent years, we have begun to learnabout the happiness of the two selves.And the main lesson I think that we have learnedis they are really different.You can know how satisfied somebody is with their life,and that really doesn't teach you muchabout how happily they're living their life,and vice versa.Just to give you a sense of the correlation,the correlation is about .5.What that means is if you met somebody,and you were told, "Oh his father is six feet tall,"how much would you know about his height?Well, you would know something about his height,but there's a lot of uncertainty.You have that much uncertainty.If I tell you that somebody ranked their life eight on a scale of ten,you have a lot of uncertaintyabout how happy they arewith their experiencing self.So the correlation is low.

Now, very quickly,another reason we cannot think straight about happinessis that we do not attend to the same thingswhen we think about life, and we actually live.So, if you ask the simple question of how happy people are in California,you are not going to get to the correct answer.When you ask that question,you think people must be happier in Californiaif, say, you live in Ohio.(Laughter)And what happens iswhen you think about living in California,you are thinking of the contrastbetween California and other places,and that contrast, say, is in climate.Well, it turns out that climateis not very important to the experiencing selfand it's not even very important to the reflective selfthat decides how happy people are.But now, because the reflective self is in charge,you may end up -- some people may end upmoving to California.And it's sort of interesting to trace what is going to happento people who move to California in the hope of getting happier.Well, their experiencing selfis not going to get happier.We know that.But one thing will happen: They will think they are happier,because, when they think about it,they'll be reminded of how horrible the weather was in Ohio,and they will feel they made the right decision.

DK: You know I think that there is recognitionof the role of happiness research in public policy.The recognition is going to be slow in the United States,no question about that,but in the U.K., it is happening,and in other countries it is happening.People are recognizing that they oughtto be thinking of happinesswhen they think of public policy.It's going to take a while,and people are going to debatewhether they want to study experience happiness,or whether they want to study life evaluation,so we need to have that debate fairly soon.How to enhance happinessgoes very different ways depending on how you think,and whether you think of the remembering selfor you think of the experiencing self.This is going to influence policy, I think, in years to come.In the United States, efforts are being madeto measure the experience happiness of the population.This is going to be, I think, within the next decade or two,part of national statistics.