It’s Friday: time to think about YOUR Happiness Project. This week: Examine your heuristics.

I’m working on my Happiness Project, and you should have one, too! Everyone’s project will look different, but it’s the rare person who can’t benefit. Join in -- no need to catch up, just jump in right now. Each Friday’s post will help you think about your own happiness project.

I spent a month of my Happiness Project testing possible psychological short-cuts to happiness, and this led me to the concept of heuristics.

Heuristics are “rules of thumb,” the quick, common-sense principles people apply to solve a problem or make a decision. They aren’t “rules for living” that you consciously try to apply; rather, they are deeply imbedded, often unconscious, rules that you use to come to a decision to answer a question or decide a course of action.

Usually heuristics are useful, though sometimes they lead to cognitive bias. Take the availability heuristic: people predict the likelihood of an event based on how easily they can come up with an example. This is often helpful (is a tornado likely to hit Manhattan?), but sometimes people’s judgment is skewed because the vividness of examples makes an event seem more likely than it actually is. People become very worried about child abduction, say, when in fact, it’s a very rare occurrence.
I realized that I have my own idiosyncratic collection of “heuristics” for making decisions and setting priorities. Well, maybe these don’t fit the precise definition of “heuristics”—but they are rules of thumb that I applied when deciding what to think or how to act, mostly without quite realizing that I was using them. They flickered through my brain so quickly that I had to make a real effort to detect them, but I identified a handful:

My children are my most important priority.
Try to exercise every day.
People don’t notice my mistakes and flaws as much as I think.
The Big Man is my top priority.
“Yes” comes right away; “no” never comes.
Get some work done every day.
Whenever possible, choose vegetables.
I know as much as most people.
Try to attend any party or event to which I’m invited.
My parents are almost always right.
Ubiquity is the new exclusivity.
If I’m not sure whether to include some text in my writing, cut it out.
When making a choice about what to do, choose work.

Looking at these rules showed me something. Several of them were difficult to balance. How could my kids, the Big Man, and work all be top priorities? Also, I was pretty sure that the Big Man operated under the heuristic of “Try to skip practically any event to which I’m invited.” That explained certain ongoing marital debates.

Some of my heuristics were unhelpful. “I don’t have time” ran through my head dozens of times each day. I worked to change that heuristic to “I have plenty of time for the things that are important to me.”

I asked my friends if they had any personal heuristics, and I collected quite a few:
There’s no wrong decision.
Always say hello.
People in business, small or large, will take advantage of you if they can.
What would my mother do?
Actually, this is good news.
Say yes.
This is the fun part.
Do nothing, go nowhere.
Do everything all at once.

What heuristics are shaping your behavior? Though I may be mis-using the term. I mean – what are the rules of thumb that you apply to figure out what to think or do? Not what you WISH you thought (“Always take a moment to appreciate the sunshine”) but what you actually think (“Any parent who misses a school function has bad values”).

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On Friday afternoons I usually find myself spending a little time reading all the fun articles that during the week I'm too disciplined to pursue, and I got a kick out of reading this story about the invention of the flying car.

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Comments

[Abby]

also:
it's not the outer circumstances that are the problem, but my temporary inability to let go of the illusion that things should always be as I wish they were.

you can't change the people you love, you can only love them for who they are, or move on.

[prophet]

hmmm. I think you ARE mis-using the term. . . . Heuristic - the adjective - is "enabling a person to discover or learn something for themselves" - and/or a trial and error proceeding.

You seem to be looking for the unspoken [and even unconscious] assumptions we use to conduct our lives, and which inform our decisions. I think we can discover those assumptions by heuristic means, and we may have formed those assumptions heuristically, but the assumptions THEMSELVES are no longer heuristic, nor are they "heuristics" - they are judgments; rules; convictions; assumptions; biases; preferences; taste; even law. . . . assumptions.

Very interesting - and helpful - post.

[TasterSpoon]

What a fun exercise! Some of these I think I'd stand by consciously, some of these I think are WRONG, and several contradict one another - but I use them anyway!

If I'm not having fun, I'm "building character."

Extra sleep is money in the bank.

Most people are really only thinking about themselves.

If I can't exercise for at least 45 minutes, it's not worth it to exercise at all.

Taking an aspirin is admitting to weakness.

Everybody likes to be touched.

Don't make choices based on fear.

Will doing this build my C.V.? (A mythical resume I keep in my head.)

5 a Day for Better Health.

I'd rather regret doing something than regret *not* doing something.

[TasterSpoon]

Also:

Don't keep score.

[MJ]

"- the people you love will only love you if you are good, and right, and perfect, and make them proud, every single moment. One slip and it's all gone forever.

Posted by: M"

M: Just a guess--were your parents divorced when you were very young? If so, you might get a lot out of a book called "The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce," by Judith Wallerstein. She followed whole families of divorce for 25 years and examined the persistent ideas that many of the children had. This is one of them (some of your others are too, but this is the one I recognized the most clearly).

I found the book incredibly helpful because until I read it (in my late 30s) I thought I was the only one who had a lot of these specific "rules" going around in my head, such as "Every man I'm in a relationship is going to leave sooner or later, so I'd best be prepared for it" and "One slip and it's all over" (you put that one perfectly). In fact, most of Wallerstein's female subjects had similar ingrained ideas about relationships. The book really, really helped me to see that and to get rid of some of those automatic thoughts that I had been carrying around since childhood.

[kadavy]

Looking up "availability heuristic" in my old college Social Psych book, I found an interesting study that may be of interest (from David G. Myers' "Social Psychology"):

"In Olympic competition, two cutoff points separate (a) the event-winning gold medalist from the non-winners, and (b) the medal-winning bronze medalist from the nonmedalists. Thus, during the 1992 Olympics bronze medalists (for whom an easily imagined alternative was finishing without a medal) exhibited more joy than silver medalists (who could more easily imagine having won the gold) (Medvec & others, 1995)"

I'm unclear about whether you're using "heuristic" correctly. I would think that rather than influencing our behavior, they would influence our perception of stimuli in our lives. So maybe the *principle* of "[trying] to exercise every day" makes more prominent examples *available* in your brain picturing what your ideal behavior should be like (going jogging in the morning, hitting the gym after work). When your behavior fails to satisfy those examples (you sleep in, you go out for drinks after work), that causes you to "discover" that you're unhappy with your current behavior.

[Adrian]

Some of these statements are more proverbs than heuristics - not to say that they aren't interesting, but I suspect that you are perhaps keener to see what "shortcuts" people use to make decisions, instead of weighing up pros and cons rationally and explicitly every time.

Heuristics are a big issue in my work - they can help because they save time (not having to mull over similar cases repeatedly), but equally they can be a real problem (mistaking a case for something that seems superficially similar).

Very interesting to think how they might apply in my non-work life.