David A. Schkade

A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day Reconstruction Method

The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) assesses how people spend their time and how they experience the various activities and settings of their lives, combining features of time-budget measurement and experience sampling. Participants systematically reconstruct their activities and experiences of the preceding day with procedures designed to reduce recall biases. The DRMs utility is shown by documenting close correspondences between the DRM reports of 909 employed women and established results from experience sampling. An analysis of the hedonic treadmill shows the DRMs potential for well-being research.

Pursuing Happiness: The Architecture of Sustainable Change

The pursuit of happiness is an important goal for many people. However, surprisingly little scientific research has focused on the question of how happiness can be increased and then sustained, probably because of pessimism engendered by the concepts of genetic determinism and hedonic adaptation. Nevertheless, emerging sources of optimism exist regarding the possibility of permanent increases in happiness. Drawing on the past well-being literature, the authors propose that a persons chronic happiness level is governed by 3 major factors: a genetically determined set point for happiness, happiness-relevant circumstantial factors, and happiness-relevant activities and practices. The authors then consider adaptation and dynamic processes to show why the activity category offers the best opportunities for sustainably increasing happiness. Finally, existing research is discussed in support of the model, including 2 preliminary happiness-increasing interventions.

Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion

The belief that high income is associated with good mood is widespread but mostly illusory. People with above-average income are relatively satisfied with their lives but are barely happier than others in moment-to-moment experience, tend to be more tense, and do not spend more time in particularly enjoyable activities. Moreover, the effect of income on life satisfaction seems to be transient. We argue that people exaggerate the contribution of income to happiness because they focus, in part, on conventional achievements when evaluating their life or the lives of others.

Does Living in California Make People Happy? A Focusing Illusion in Judgments of Life Satisfaction

Large samples of students in the Midwest and in Southern California rated satisfaction with life overall as well as with various aspects of life, for either themselves or someone similar to themselves in one of the two regions. Self-reported overall life satisfaction was the same in both regions, but participants who rated a similar other expected Californians to be more satisfied than Midwesterners. Climate-related aspects were rated as more important for someone living in another region than for someone in ones own region. Mediation analyses showed that satisfaction with climate and with cultural opportunities accounted for the higher overall life satisfaction predicted for Californians. Judgments of life satisfaction in a different location are susceptible to a focusing illusion: Easily observed and distinctive differences between locations are given more weight in such judgments than they will have in reality.

Economic Preferences or Attitude Expressions?: An Analysis of Dollar Responses to Public Issues

Participants in contingent valuation surveys and jurors setting punitive damages in civil trials provide answers denominated in dollars. These answers are better understood as expressions of attitudes than as indications of economic preferences. Well-established characteristics of attitudes and of the core process of affective valuation explain several robust features of dollar responses: high correlations with other measures of attractiveness or aversiveness, insensitivity to scope, preference reversals, and the high variability of dollar responses relative to other measures of the same attitude.

Toward National Well-Being Accounts

Economists have traditionally eschewed direct measures of well-being on methodological grounds: the private nature of experience and the discomfort of making interpersonal comparisons. Instead, income is often used as a proxy for opportunities and well-being. If people are not fully rational, however, their choices will not necessarily maximize their experienced utility, and increasing their opportunities will not necessarily make them better off (Kahneman, 1994; Cass R. Sunstein and Richard Thaler, 2004). Direct measures of experienced utility become particularly relevant in a context of bounded rationality. Furthermore, advances in psychology and neuroscience suggest that experienced utility and well-being can be measured with some accuracy (Kahneman et al., 1999). Robust and interpersonally consistent relationships have been observed between subjective measures of experience and both specific measures of brain function and health outcomes. In part because of these findings, economic research using subjective indicators of happiness and life satisfaction has proliferated in recent years (see Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer [2002] for a survey). Most work on well-being uses a question on overall life satisfaction or happiness. We suggest an alternative route based on time budgets and affective ratings of experiences.

Information Displays and Decision Processes

Information displays influence decision processes by facilitating some decision strategies while hindering others. Component characteristics of displays, such as the form, organization, and sequence of information, influence decision processes through an adaptive mechanism whereby a decision maker balances the desire to maximize accuracy against the desire to minimize effort. Variations in the information display lead to changes in the anticipated effort and anticipated accuracy of each available strategy and, therefore, provide an incentive for decision makers to use different decision processes. Research in this area can provide guidance regarding the use of displays and other decision-aiding approaches.

Shared Outrage and Erratic Awards: The Psychology of Punitive Damages

An experimental study of punitive damage awards in personal injury cases was conducted, using jury-eligible respondents. There was substantial consensus on judgments of the outrageousness of a defendants actions and of the appropriate severity of punishment. Judgments of dollar awards made by individuals and synthetic juries were much more erratic. These results are familiar characteristics of judgments made on unbounded magnitude scales. The degree of harm suffered by the plaintiff and the size of the firm had a pronounced effect on awards. Some judgmental tasks are far easier than others for juries to perform, and reform possibilities should exploit this fact.

Cognitive processes in preference reversals

Abstract A preference reversal occurs when revealed preference orderings for the same alternatives differ across response modes. Previous studies have relied primarily on input-output data to infer the presence of particular cognitive mechanisms hypothesized to produce reversals. To obtain more detailed measures of such cognitive mechanisms we used a computer-based experimental methodology to conduct two process tracing experiments, of pricing-choice (Experiment 1) and pricing-rating (Experiment 2) reversals. Results show that in choice (relative to judgment), subjects take much less time, use different patterns of information search, often use strategies that directly compare alternatives (rather than consider them sequentially as in judgments), and allocate their attention differently. In pricing and rating subjects frequently use a strategy of anchoring and adjustment in which the starting point is heavily influenced by those gamble elements most compatible with the response scale. Further, we find that several of these process measures, especially starting points and adjustments, and differential attention to probabilities and payoffs, are strongly related to the frequency of reversals. The degree to which starting points are influenced by the gamble elements that are most compatible with the response scale is particularly important. Results of a third experiment further explore the role of anchors, by showing that a starting point manipulation significantly reduced the rate of pricing-rating reversals. Finally, the results of the three studies are integrated, and implications for theory and future research are discussed.

A population approach to the study of emotion: diurnal rhythms of a working day examined with the Day Reconstruction Method.

To date, diurnal rhythms of emotions have been studied with real-time data collection methods mostly in relatively small samples. The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), a new survey instrument that reconstructs the emotions of a day, is examined as a method for enabling large-scale investigations of rhythms. Diurnal cycles were observed for 12 emotion adjectives in 909 women over a working day. Bimodal patterns with peaks at noon and evenings were detected for positive emotions; peaks in negative emotions were found at mid-morning and mid-afternoon. A V-shaped pattern was found for tired and an inverted U-shaped pattern for competent. Several diurnal patterns from prior studies were replicated. The DRM appears to be a useful tool for the study of emotions.