




Much of your work focuses on the limitations of human intuition. Do you have any advice about when people should be especially hesitant to trust their intuitions?

When the stakes are high.  We have no reason to expect the quality of intuition to improve with the importance of the problem.  Perhaps the contrary: High-stake problems are likely to involve powerful emotions and strong impulses to action. If there is no time to reflect, then intuitively guided action may be better than freezing or paralysis, especially for the experienced decision maker. If there is time to reflect, slowing down is likely to be a good idea. The effort invested in “getting it right” should be commensurate with the importance of the decision.

Are there times when reasoning is suspect and we are wise to rely on our snap judgments?

As Gary Klein has emphasized (Sources of Power is one of my favorite books), true experts—those who have had sufficient practice to detect the regularities of their environment—may do better when they follow their intuition than when they engage in complex analysis. Tim Wilson and his collaborators have demonstrated that people who choose between two decorative objects do better by following their impulse than by protracted analysis of pros and cons. The critical test in that experiment is how much they will like the chosen object after living with it for a while. Affective forecasting based on current feelings appears to be more accurate than systematic analysis that eliminates those feelings.

What is the difference between the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self”?

The experiencing self lives in the moment; it is the one that answers the question “does it hurt?”  or “what were you thinking about just now?”  The remembering self is the one that answers questions about the overall evaluation of episodes or periods of one’s life, such as a stay in the hospital or the years since one left college. It involves both retrieval and temporal integration of diverse experiences. In the context of studies of subjective well-being, the happiness of the experiencing self is assessed by integrating momentary happiness over time (in the 19th century, the economist Francis Edgeworth spoke of “the area under the curve”). Experienced happiness refers to your feelings, to how happy you are as you live your life. In contrast, the satisfaction of the remembering self refers to your feelings when you think about your life.

Isn’t the remembering self just the experiencing self in one of its modes?

Of course. Thinking about your life is an experience that you have. But it is useful to distinguish these relatively rare moments from the routine emotional quality of your life. The distinction is especially important in evaluating an individual’s well-being, because the determinants of experienced happiness and life satisfaction are substantially different.

How should the split between these two points of view affect our understanding of the good life?


Are there ways to get the two selves to converge? If so, would this be normative?


The other possibility is a redefinition of momentary happiness in terms of a more global evaluation. That is the route we took in an article I published in 1997 with Peter Wakker and Rakesh Sarin. We suggested that the first step is to evaluate lives (or segments of life) as profiles of experience, and rank the lives. In the next step one would rescale momentary utility to transform the profiles so as to achieve the same ranking   So, for example, if the frequency and intensity of aesthetic experiences are important to our global evaluation of lives, then the value (or utility) of moments of aesthetic joy would be raised accordingly. The problem, of course, is that we no longer accept the subject’s own judgment of how happy they are at any moment. So this approach is difficult as well.

To what extent to do you think true self-deception (as opposed to simple bias) exists?

I don’t know how you expect to distinguish true self-deception from simple bias. Suppose you like someone very much. Then by a familiar halo effect you will also be prone to believe many good things about that person—you will be biased in their favor. Most of us like ourselves very much, and that suffices to explain self-assessments that are biased in a particular direction. You will believe these biased assessments regardless of whether they are about you or about someone else. We resist evidence that threatens our positive image of people we love. And perhaps we love ourselves more intensely than we love most (or all) others. When does this become self-deception?

November 29, 2011