Dave Rogers of Time's Shadow calls our attention to this NY Times article about irrationality and choice. Dr. Daniel Kahneman, psychologist who won the Nobel prize in economics for understanding that people fear loss much more than they value gain, is trying to establish a true measurement of quality of life.

We're attempting to measure it not by asking people, but by actually trying to measure the quality of their daily lives. For example, we are studying one day in the lives of 1,000 working women in Texas. We have people reconstruct the day in successive episodes, as recalled a day later, and we have a technique that recovers the emotions and the feelings. We know who they were with and what they were doing. They also tell us how satisfied they are with various aspects of their lives. We know a lot about these ladies.

Q. What are you finding out?
A. I'll give you a striking finding. Divorced women, compared to married women, are less satisfied with their lives, which is not surprising. But they're actually more cheerful, when you look at the average mood they're in in the course of the day. The other thing is the huge importance of friends. People are really happier with friends than they are with their families or their spouse or their child.

Q. Why would divorced women be more cheerful?
A. So far, I don't understand it, but that's what the data says.

I'm at a loss to see why this is mysterious. Here's the syllogism:

1. People are happier with their friends than with their families.
2. Divorced women spend more time in the company of friends than married women.
Ergo:
3. Divorced women are more cheerful.

They also describe themselves as less satisfied. This doesn't surprise me either. Satisfaction is a very different matter from mood emotions (such as happiness or unhappiness, cheerfulness or gloom). Satisfaction is the sensation of having perceived meets met adequately. If you've been enculturated your entire life to believe that having a successful marriage is important, then of course you're going to be dissatisfied if your marriage fails. But the demise of your marriage might nonetheless significantly improve the quality your life on a day to day basis (even if you have a hard time perceiving it cognitively).

9:39:02 PM    please comment []