How happy are you these days?

[rifat28dddd]

In the bestselling book, Thinking Fast and Slow, author and Nobel Prize winner, Daniel Kahneman recounts a survey of German students where each respondent was asked two questions:

How happy are you these days?

How many dates did you have last month?

The hypothesis of the experimenters was that there would finland telegram data be a correlation between the two answers. After all, it’s reasonable to assume that students with an active dating life would be happier overall than those struggling in that department. Surprisingly, the correlation between the two answers was just about zero! As it turns out, the activeness of ones dating life was not what immediately came to mind when the students were asked about their level of happiness.

However, a different group of students saw the questions in reverse order:

How many dates did you have last month?


In this case, the degree of correlation was off the charts! So why the difference in results between the two approaches? The secret lies in a principle Kahneman refers to as a substitution heuristic.

The Power of the Substitution Heuristic
The idea behind the substitution heuristic is simple. When your brain encounters a question it finds hard to answer it naturally looks for a question based on the original but that’s easier to answer. This is called a heuristic question. For example, if I asked you what 17 x 24 was you might be challenged to compute the total in your head. However, if I pushed you to try, your brain might consider multiplying 20 x 20 as a “close enough” shortcut. The heuristic question yields an easy answer of 400 whereas the original question yields a more difficult, but not far off (2% to be precise), answer of 408.