最近大家都在谈论着快乐。在过去的五年里，我请人数了近年来有多少本书的书名中提到“快乐”，他们数到大约有40本，而且还有更多没数到的。现今越来越多研究者都开始对快乐这个议题产生兴趣,而且还有很多的“快乐教练”授课,让其他人更快乐是他们的宗旨。 虽然此类工作多如牛毛，但现今仍存在几个认知上的陷阱，这些陷阱将会增加使人领悟快乐本质的难度。

我今天将主要谈论这些认知陷阱。这些陷阱既会影响到一般人对自身快乐的观感，而且也会影响到学者对快乐的判断，因为人无完人，我们皆会出错。 第一个陷阱是，不愿意去承认快乐的复杂性。事实证明快乐这个词已不再是常用词汇了，因为我们已用其来诠释太多的事物了，我想我们应该限定它的意思，不过，一般而言，我们得放弃这个想法，并用更复杂的观点来看何谓快乐生活。 第二个陷阱是经验和记忆间的混淆，基本上这是在生活中体验快乐和觉得生活很快乐以及对于你的生活满意之间的差别。这两者的意义相距甚远，且在论及快乐时会混为一谈。 第三个陷阱则是聚焦错觉，令人遗憾的是，任何情况下，当我们想到一些关于快快乐生活的情景时，我们势必会觉得它特别重要。我的意思是，这是一个真正的认知陷阱，它避无可避。

现在，我想以一个例子来开头，有个人上过我的课后，于答问之时向我讲述了一则故事。他说他有次在听交响乐时，觉得音乐真是动听极了，但在演奏快结束之时，却冒出了尖锐刺耳的声音。接着他激动地表示，这个声音把整个体验都毁了。但事实并非如此。所发生的糟糕印象仅仅是对这段经验的记忆。他经历了这段经验，他也经历了20分钟的听觉盛会。但现在都已无足轻重了。因为他仅留下一段记忆，这段记忆很糟糕，而其他20分钟的盛会则被完全遗忘了。

这告诉我们，我们在思考自己和别人时，用了两种自我。第一种是经验自我，这种自我活在当下，洞察当下，同时也能回味过往，但基本上他只属于当下。一般医生接触的皆是经验自我，正如，当医生问你，“我碰你这里时会疼么？” 另一个自我则是记忆自我，它负责记录生活，抒写生活故事，医生要找他时，会这么问，“最近感觉如何？”或”去阿尔巴尼亚好玩么？“等类似的问题。经验自我和记忆自我是截然不同的，两者的混淆是导致我们不懂快乐的部分原因。记忆自我负责讲述故事。故事从记忆中直接撷取，即时上传。并不是我们在讲我们要讲的故事，是我们的记忆在讲故事，它是我们从经验中储存下来的故事。

让我用一个例子开始。这是一个古老的研究，一些真正的病人将会接受一种痛苦的治疗方法。细节不再详述。现今的疗法已不再如此难受，但在研究进行的九十年代，这种方法令人痛不欲生。病人每隔六十秒则必须报告他们的痛苦指数。这边有两位病患，这是他们的记录。我问你：“在他们之中谁最痛苦？”这个问题很简单，显然，是病人B。他的结肠镜检查时间较长，病人A每分钟感觉的疼痛病人B也感觉到了，而且持续更久。但现在还有另一个问题：这些患者认为他们受罪了吗？这里有个小意外：令人惊讶的是病人A，对结肠镜检查的记忆比病人B还糟糕。两段结肠镜检查的故事不同，这关键在于故事的结尾——两个故事都不怎么启迪智慧——但两者是显然不同的。显然其中之一的感受比另一个还差。感受较糟的这一个，是在最后的时期里知晓什么是痛绝人寰。这不是个好故事。我们是怎么知道的？因为我们在检查结束之后问他们，以及在很久之后再问一次他们：“你们对结肠镜检查的整体印象如何？”结果是A的记忆感觉明显要比B更糟糕。现在这是经验自我和记忆自我之间的直接冲突。从经验自我的角度来看，病人B显然是比较难受的，那么病人A的情况该如何解释？我们实际做了一个临床试验，当试验完成时，我们也得到了预期的效果，事实上我们可以延长病人A的检查时间，从而减缓导管的震动程度，虽然病人还是会痛，但已减轻许多了。假如继续这样下去，你将会使病人A的经验自我的感觉更糟，但病人A的记忆自我则会感觉好多了，因为你给了病人A一个好一点的故事，一个好一点记忆他疼痛经历的故事。

怎样给故事定义好坏？并且记忆告诉我们的故事是真实的，我们讲述的故事也是真的。故事的好坏取决于高潮时分及结尾时刻。结尾是非常重要的，上面的这个故事就是由结尾所主导的。 现在，经验自我延续这个生活经验，他也拥有片刻的经验，一个接一个。你会问：“这些片刻怎么了？”答案很简单，他们永远消失了。我们生活中的大多片刻——我算了算——从心理学角度来说仅仅只是三秒长。这意味着，人一生中大约有六亿个片刻。一个月里则大约有六十万个片刻。他们大多不留痕迹。大多数皆被记忆自我全然忽视了。然而，你现在亦应发现一些感觉被储存，因为我们经验中的每分每秒合在一起就构成了我们的人生。只要我们活着，我们就会消耗这些有限的资源，该如何使用它们，似乎是很重要的，但这不是记忆自我所留给我们的故事。因此，记忆自我和经验自我是很好区别的。他们之间的最大不同是在于处理时间的方式。

 就经验自我而言，如果你有一个假期，第二周和第一周同等快乐，那么两周下来，快乐的份量是一周假期的两倍多。然而记忆自我则不是这样算的。对记忆自我来说，两周假期并不比一周假期多多少，因为期间没有任何新记忆的加入。故事的剧情依然如旧。因此，时间是区分记忆自我和经验自我的关键因素。时间对这个故事的影响不大。记忆自我所做的，不仅是记忆和讲述故事，它也是真正做决定的因素，因为，假若你的病人已经历过两位不同的外科医生来说胃肠镜检查，而现在决定从他们中选一位来再做检查时，病人选的将会是记忆中感觉比较好的那位，这就是我们是如何选定医生的。经验自我在做选择时则无从置喙——事实上，我们不会在两段经验中做选择。我们是在两种不同经验的记忆中做出选择。而且当我们设想未来时，一般我们不会以经验的形式去思考，我们把未来以预想的记忆形式呈现。 大体上你可以看到，记忆自我是专制的，你可以想象记忆自我在拽着经验自我，他是通过经验自我不要的经验来拽着经验自我的。我有个想法，当我们放假时，往往，之所以放假，有很大一部分是为了记忆自我。我想这有点难来辩证。我们使用了多少的记忆？这可以解释记忆自我为何能成为主导的自我。这让我想起一次假期，几年前在南极度过的假期，这可以说是我最棒的一个假期，与其它假期相比，我常常会想起这个假期。这趟旅程大概让我用掉了三周的记忆量，大概仅在过去四年中占了约25分钟。现在，如果我打开资料夹，里面大概有600张相片，我可能要花一个小时来回忆，三周的旅程最多只用一个半小时来回忆，这似乎不成比例啊！这让我有点不满，因为我记得真是太少了。不过就算你记得再多，这里也会有个实际的问题，为什么我们用来记忆比依赖经验还多？所以我希望你能思考一个有关思考的实验。假使你的下一个假期，当你知道假期结束后，假期中所有的相片将被销毁时，而你也会吞下一颗遗忘药以使你遗忘一切，这样，你还会想过同样的假期么？如果你选了个不同的假期，你的两个自我之间将会产生冲突，你得想法来裁决这场冲突，这并不怎么容易，因为假若你仅考虑时间，你会得到一个答案，但若仅考虑记忆，你会得到另外一个答案。我们为什么要选此而非彼，这个困扰我们的问题是需要在两个自我之间作出选择。 现在，两个自我带来对快乐的两种不同见解，这两种见解分别对应了两个自我。因此你会问：“经验自我是有多快乐？”接着你会问：“经验自我的每一刻有多快乐？”这些快乐时刻的组成过程是异常复杂的。情感该如何测量？顺带一提，我们现在对于经验自我会随着时间而感受快乐已经有了一个粗浅的概念了。而记忆自我所指的快乐则是完全两码事。这并不是一个人生活多快乐的问题，而是他对自己的人生有多满意和多喜欢的问题。迥然不同的见解。若不能分辨这两种见解，就无法参透快乐这门学问。我和其他活的好的学生一样，一直以来都研究不透快乐，就是因为这个原因。

近年来，经验自我的快乐和记忆自我的满足的差异性已能分清，目前正努力来分别测度两者，盖洛普公司最近在全世界举行了一场民意调查，其中逾五十万人都被问及一个类似的问题，那就是他们如何看待他们的生活和如何看待他们的经验。除了这个问题，这个公司还做了其它的调查。近年来，我们逐渐得知关于两种快乐见解的信息。我认为我们主要学到的便是，两者是天壤之别的。虽然你可以得知一个人对生活是否满意，但却无法告诉你他们平常活的有多快乐，而反之亦然。只是为了让你对其中的关联性有个基本概念，它们之间大概只有5%关联，意思是当你见到某个人时，你被告知他的爸爸有六尺高，你能知道这个人有多高么？好吧，你可能有个基本概念，但非常不确定，你无法下判断。若我说有人给自己的生活质量打分，他打8分（10分为满分），你也不能把握他的经验自我有多快乐。所以关联性很低。我们知道什么能够让人的快乐得到满足。我们知道钱是很重要的，目标也非常重要。我们知道要快乐是需要通过我们所喜爱的人来满足、是需要花时间和他们待在一起来满足的。虽然还有其它因素，但这是主要因素。所以假若你想让两个自我都快乐，你必须抛弃旧习，且要做些与众不同的事。 我说的是，我们至少不应把快乐当成活得好的代名词，这两者是天壤之别的。

现在，很快地讨论下，另一个我们不能理解快乐本质的原因，那就是我们怎么看生活和我们怎么过生活是不一样的。所以，当你问加州的人有多快乐时，你将无法得到正确答案。因为你这样问时，你认为加州人一定过得比较快乐，而你则住在俄亥俄州。当你在想住在加州有多快乐时，你会想到加州和其他州域之间的差异，譬如，气候。事实证明气候条件对经验自我并非很重要，而且对于思考自我衡量自己有多快乐也不太重要。不过，既然现实由思考自我主导，一些人可能会得到这样一种结论，那就是搬到加州，搬到加州是为了过上更快乐的生活，而追踪观看他们的后续发展，将会是一件相当有趣的事，他们的经验自我是不会变的更快乐，这我们都知道，不过当一件事发生后，他们会觉得自己快乐多了。因为在他们思考时，他们会回想起俄亥俄州的坏天气，他们也因此觉得他们做出了正确的决定。要理解快乐生活实在很难，我希望我已经让你们对此有个基本概念，并且明白这个过程到底有多难。

 Q&A：

 Q：您提到您从盖洛普的调查中发现了一个有趣的现象，可以跟我们分享一下吗？

 A：我从盖洛普的调查中发现了一个极有趣的数字，能发现它实属意外。我们发现一个经验自我的快乐的现象。那就是人的感觉会随收入的多少而变化。结果表明，对于年收入低于六万美元的美国人而言，这占了样本中的很大一部分，将近有六十万人，这些人是相当具有指标性的，这些年收入低于六万美元的人是不快乐的，而且收入越低，他们则越不快乐。而当收入逾六万时，我们则得到一条标准水平线，难得看到这么平坦的线，很显然，金钱是无法买到经验自我的快乐，但没钱却的确能给你带来悲郁的境况，而且我们清楚地测到痛苦的程度，非常清楚。对于另一个自我，记忆自我而言，你则有了一个大相径庭的故事，你赚的越多，你就越满意。这跟情感没有任何关联。

 Q：可是，生命、自由和追求快乐是所有美国人奋斗的目标，假若大家都认真对待这一发现，那么这将颠覆我们的固有观念，例如，课税政策等。这个国家的政治任务有没有可能会正视这样的发现并依此施政？

 A：我认为已有人认知到研究快乐于谋划政策中的地位。但这项认知于美国的传播速度颇慢，这是毋庸置疑的，但在英国，它正持续发酵，其他国家亦然。一般人也开始认知到，在谋划政策时亦应将快乐纳入考量指标。虽然这会花些时间，但人们也将开始思考，他们要的是经验的快乐抑或是为生活打分，因此很快，我们将要理解这个问题，如何增进快乐有好几种方式，但事关你是怎么想的，你想的是记忆自我还是在想经验自我。我想于几年之内，这将影响政策的实施，美国已经付出巨大的努力来衡量大众的经验的快乐。我想在十年或二十年内，这将会成为国家统计数据的一部分。

 Everybody talks about happiness these days。I had somebody count the number of books with “happiness” in the published in the last five years. And they gave up after about 40,and there were many more. There is a huge wave of interest in happiness among researchers.There is a lot of happiness coaching. Everybody would like to make people happier. But in spite of all this flood of work, there are several cognitive traps that sort of make it almost impossible to think straight about happiness. 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 traps is 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 up and we’ll have to adopt the more complicated view of what well being is . The second trap is confusion between experience and memory,basically, it’s between being happy in your life and being happy about your life or 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 circumstance that affects well being without distorting its importance. I mean, this is a real cognitive trap. There just no way of getting it right. Now, I’d like to start with an example of somebody who had a question and answer session after one of my lectures reported a story, he said he’d been listening to a symphony, and it was absolutely glorious music, and at the very end of the recording, there was a dreadful screeching sound. And then he added really quite emotionally, it ruined the whole experience, but it hadn’t. What it had ruined were the memories of the experience. He had had the experience. He had had 20minutes of glorious music. They counted for nothing. Because he was left with a memory, the memory was ruined and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep. What this is telling us,really, is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other people in terms of two selves. There is an experiencing self , who lives in the present and 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 stroy of our life, and it’s the one that the doctor approaches in 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 mess about the notion of happiness. Now the remembering self is a storyteller, and that really stars 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 experiences is a story. And let me begin with one example. This is an old study, those are actual patients undergoing a painful producer. 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 report on their pain every 60seconds, there 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 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 A had a much more memory of the colonoscopy than patient B. The stories of the colonoscopies were different. And because a very critical part of the story is how it’s ends. And neither of these stories is very inspiring or great, but one of them is this distinct...but one of them is distinctly worse than the other. And the one that is worse is 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 conflict between the experiencing self and the remembering self. From the point of view of the experiencing self, clearly ,B had worse time, now what you could do with patient A and we actually ran clinical experiments and it has been done, and it dose work. You could actually extend the colonoscopy of patient A but just keeping the tube in without jiggling it too much. That will cause the patient to suffer, but just a little and much less than before, and if you do that for a couple of minutes, you have made the experiencing self of patient A worse off, and you have the remembering self of patient A a lot better off, because now you have endowed patient A with a better story about his experience. What defines a story? And that is true of stories that 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 a very very important,and, in this case, the ending dominated. Now, the experiencing self lives 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 present is 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 60,000,most of them don’t leave a trace, most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self. And yet,somehow you get the sense that they should count, that what happens during these moments of experience is our life.it’s the finite resource that we’re spending while we’re on this earth, and how to spend it would seem to be relevant. But that is not the story that the remembering self keeps for us, so we have the remembering self and experiencing self, and they’re really quite distinct. The biggest difference between them is in the handing 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 vacation is 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 vacation is barely better than the one-week vacation because there are no new memories added, you have not changed the story. And in this way, time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes a remembering self from an experiencing self. Time has very little impact on the story, Now, the remembering self does more than remember and tell stories, it is actually one that makes decisions. Because, if you have a patient who has had, say, two colonoscopies with two different surgeons and is deciding which of them to choose, then the one that chooses is the one that has the memory that is less bad,and that’s the surgeon that,will be chosen. The experiencing self has no voice in this choice, we actually don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. And even when think about the future, we don’t think of our future normally as experiences, we think of our future as 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 self sort of dragging the experiencing self through experiences that the experiencing self doesn’t need,I have that sense that when we go on vacations this 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 do we consume our memories? That is one of the explanations that is given for the dominance of the remembering self, and when i think about that, i think about a vacation we 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 consumed my memories of that three-week trip, i would say for about 25minutes in the last four years. Now, if i had ever opened the folder with 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 memory relative to the weight that we put on experiences? So I want you to think about a thought experiment. Imagine that for your next vacation, you know that at the end of the vacation all your pictures will be destroyed, and you ‘ll get an amnesic drug so that you won’t remember anything. Now, would you choose the same vacation? 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,because if 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 do is a problem that confronts us with a choice between the two selves. Now, the two selves bring up two notions of happiness, there are really two concepts of happiness that 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 moments in the experiencing self’s life?”And they’re all --happiness for moments is a fairly complicated process. What are the emotions that can be measured? And ,by the way, now we are capable of getting a pretty good idea of 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 satisfied or pleased the person is when that person thinks about her life. Very different notion. Anyone who doesn’t distinguish those notions is going to mess up the study of happiness, and i belong to crowd of students of well-being, who’ve been messing up the study of happiness for a long time in precisely this way. The distinction between the happiness of the experiencing self and the satisfaction of the remembering self has been recognized in recent years, and there are now efforts to measure the two separately. The Gallup Organization has a world poll where more than half a million people have been asked questions about what they think of their life and about their experiences, and there have been other efforts along those lines. So in recent years, we have begun to learn about the happiness of the two selves. And the main lesson i think that we have learned is they are really different, you can know how satisfied somebody is with their life, and that really doesn’t teach you much about how happily they’re living their life,and vice versa. Just to give you a sense of the correlation, the correlation is about point 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 uncertainty about how happy they are with their experiencing self. So the correlation is low. We know something about what controls satisfaction of the happiness self, we know that mony is very important, goals are very important, we know that happiness is mainly being satisfied with people that we like,spending time with people that we like. There are other pleasures, but this is dominant. So if you want to maximize the happiness of the two selves, you are going to end up doing very different things. The bottom line of what i’ve said here is that we really should not think of happiness as a substitute for well-being. It is completely different notion. Now, very quickly, another reason we cannot think straight about happiness is that we do not attend to the same things when 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 California, if , say, you live in Ohio. And what happens is when you think about living in California, you are thinking of the contrast between California and other places, and that contrast, say, is in climate, well, it turns out that climate is not very important to the experiencing self and it’s not even very important to the reflective self that decides how happy people are. But now, because the reflective self is in charge, you may end up-- some people may end up moving to California. And it’s sort of interesting to trace what is going to happen to people who move to California in the hope of getting happier. Well, their experiencing self is 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. It is very difficult to think straight about well-being and i hope i have given you a sense of how difficult it is. Q&A： Q：I’ve got a question for you. Now, when we were on the phone a few weeks ago, you mentioned to me that there was quite an interesting result came out of that Gallup survey. Is that something you can share since you do have a few moments left now? A: Sure. I think the most interesting result that we found in the Gallup survey is a number, which we absolutely did not expect to find. We found that with respect to the happiness of the experiencing self, when we looked at how feelings vary with income. And it turns out that, below an income of 60,000 dollars a year, for Americans--and that’s a very large sample of Americans,like 600,000. So it’s a large representative sample--below an income of 60,000 dollars a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. I mean i’ve rarely seen lines so flat, clearly, what is happening is money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery, and we can measure that misery very very clearly. In terms of the other self, the remembering self, you get a different story, the more money you earn, the more satisfied you are. That does not hold for emotions. Q:The whole American endeavor is about life / liberty /t he pursuit of happiness, if people took seriously that finding, i mean, it seems to turn upside down everything we believe about ,like for example,taxation policy and so forth. Is there any chance that politicians, that the country generally would take a finding like that seriously and run public policy based on it ? A: You know i think that there is recognition of the role of happiness research in public policy. The recognition is going to be slow in the United States, n question about that, but in the U.K, it is happening, and in other countries it is happening. People are recognizing that they ought to be thinking of happiness when they think of public policy. It’s going to take a while, and people are going to debate whether 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 happiness goes very different ways depending on how you think, and whether you think of the remembering self or 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 made to measure the experience happiness of the population. This is going to be, i think, within the next decade or two, port of national statistics.