The Hindu Business Line : Synthetic happiness

Sometime back, I met a person who told me that he missed getting a rank in the chartered accountant exam by 2 marks. He said that he was happier now and was looking forward to doing an MBA. Was he genuinely happy despite missing a rank?

Behavioural psychologists throw some light on this subject. They call such state “synthetic happiness” and distinguish it from real happiness.

You feel happy when you get what you want. Suppose you wanted to buy a large five-bedroom apartment and you fulfill your dreams, your happiness is real.

What if you instead end up buying only a two-bedroom apartment? You will like the apartment after sometime and believe that this was a better choice than the five-bedroom one. That is synthetic happiness — manufacturing happiness with what you get.

The underlying message

Research has shown that we can be happy with what we get. In one experiment, the subjects were shown different paintings and were asked to rank them in the order of preference. They were then told that they could take home either choice three or four. Most picked choice three.

A few days later, they were asked to rank their preference again. And sure enough, there was a change. Choice 3 which most subjects took home was ranked as choice 2. And choice 4 which most subjects rejected moved to choice 7.

This experiment has a message: People like what they have and dislike what they do not have! And they genuinely imbibe this feeling.

To prove this, the researchers conducted the experiment on patients who suffered from certain kind of amnesia. These patients did not remember that they had initially ranked the paintings but nevertheless rearranged their preferences the same way as normal people did!

Popular self-help books teach you how to manufacture synthetic happiness. John Gray’s How to get what you want and want what you have is one such book. The chartered accountant understood the concept very well. So do marketers who peddle products we do not really want.

(The author is an investment strategist.)

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