WHY DID THIS past experience with pain alter participants’ responses to such a degree? Two people in our study offered a hint. Unlike the rest of our participants, these individuals suffered not from traumatic injuries but rather from diseases. One had cancer; the other had a terrible intestinal disease. Sadly, both were terminal cases. On the signs we had posted requesting study participants, we’d neglected to state any prerequisites, so when these two people, who didn’t have the types of injuries we were looking for, offered to help, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want them to suffer more pain for no reason, nor did I want them to feel unappreciated or unwelcome. So I decided to be polite and let them participate in the study but not to use their data in the analysis.
After the study was complete, I looked at their data and found something quite intriguing. Not only was their pain tolerance lower than that of the severely injured people (meaning that they kept their hands in the hot water for a shorter time), but it was also lower than that of the mildly injured ones. Though it is impossible to conclude anything based on data from only two participants, I wondered if the contrast between their types of ailments and the types of injuries that the other participants (and I) had suffered could offer a clue as to why severe injuries would lead people to care less about pain.
WHEN I WAS in the hospital, much of the pain I endured was associated with getting better. The operations, physical therapy, and bath treatments were all agonizing. Yet I endured them, expecting that they would lead to improvement. Even when the treatments were frustrating or didn’t work, I understood that they were designed to aid my recovery.
For instance, one of the most difficult experiences I dealt with for the first few years after my injury was overstretching my skin. Every time I sat with my elbows or knees bent, even for an hour, the scars would shrink by just a bit and the tightening of my healing skin would eliminate my ability to completely straighten my arms or legs. To fight this, I would have to stretch my skin by myself and with the help of physical therapy—pushing hard against the taut skin, not quite tearing the scars, though it felt as if I were. If I didn’t stretch the shrinking scars many times a day, the tightening would worsen until I could no longer achieve a full range of motion. When this happened, the physicians would perform another skin-transplant operation to add skin to my shrinking scars, and the whole skin-stretching process would start again.
A particularly unpleasant fight with my tightening skin had to do with the scars on the front of my neck. Every time I looked down or relaxed my shoulders, the tightness in this skin would be reduced and the scars would start to shrink. To stretch the scars, the physical therapists made me spend the night lying flat on my back with my head dropping over the edge of the mattress. In that way, the front of my neck stretched to its limit (the neck pain I still endure is a daily reminder of that uncomfortable posture).
The point is that even those very unpleasant treatments were directed at improving my limitations and increasing my range of movement. I suspect that people with injuries like mine learn to associate pain with hope for a good outcome—and this link between suffering and hope eliminates some of the fear inherent in painful experiences. On the other hand, the two chronically ill individuals who took part in our pain study could not make any connection between their pain and a hope for improvement. They most likely associated pain with getting worse and the proximity of death. In the absence of any positive association, pain must have felt more frightening and more intense for them.
THESE IDEAS DOVETAIL with one of the most interesting studies ever conducted on pain. During World War II, a physician named Henry Beecher was stationed on Italy’s Anzio beachhead, where he treated 201 wounded soldiers. In recording his treatments, he observed that only three-quarters of the hurt soldiers requested pain medication, despite having suffered serious injuries ranging from penetrating wounds to extensive soft tissue wounds. Beecher compared these observations to treatments of his civilian patients who had been hurt in all kinds of accidents, and he found that people with civilian injuries requested more medication than the soldiers injured in battle did.
Beecher’s observations showed that the experience of pain is rather complex. The amount of pain we end up experiencing is not only a function of the intensity of the wound, he concluded, but it also depends on the context in which we experience the pain and the interpretation and meaning we ascribe to it. As Beecher would have predicted, I came away from my injury caring less about my own pain. I don’t enjoy pain or feel it less than other people. Rather, I’m suggesting that adaptation, and the positive associations I’ve made between hurt and healing, help me to mute some of the negative emotions that usually accompany pain.
Hedonic Adaptation
Now that you, dear reader, have a general understanding of how physical adaptation works (as in your visual system) and how adaptation to pain operates, let’s examine more general cases of hedonic adaptation—the process of getting used to the places we live, our homes, our romantic partners, and almost everything else.
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BURNS VERSUS CHILDBIRTH
Back at the university, Professor Ina Weiner, who taught a course on the psychology of learning, told us that women have a higher pain threshold and tolerance than men because they have to deal with childbirth. Though the theory sounded perfectly plausible, it did not fit with my personal experience in the burn department. There I had met Dalia, a woman of about fifty who had been hospitalized after fainting while cooking. She had landed on a hot stove and had an extensive burn on her left arm, requiring skin grafting on about 2 percent of her body (which was relatively minor compared to many of the other patients). Dalia hated the bath treatment and bandage removal as much as the rest of us and she told me that in her mind, the pain of childbirth was nothing compared to the pain of her burn and treatments.
I told Professor Weiner this, but she was unimpressed with the anecdote. So I set up my water-heating equipment in a computer lab where I had a part-time job programming experiments and conducted a little test. I invited passing students to put a hand into hot water and keep it there until they could not stand it any longer in order to measure their pain tolerance. I also recorded their gender. The results were very clear. The men kept their hands in the tub much longer than the women.
At the start of the next class I eagerly raised my hand and told Professor Weiner and the whole class about my results. Unfazed and without losing a beat, she told me that all I’d proven was that men were idiots. “Why would anybody,” she sneered, “keep their hand in hot water for your study? If there was a real goal to the pain, you would see what women are truly capable of.”
I learned some important lessons that day about science, and also about women. I also learned that if someone believes something strongly, it is very difficult to convince him or her otherwise.*
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When we move into a new house, we may be delighted with the gleaming hardwood floors or upset about the garish lime green kitchen cabinets. After a few weeks, those factors fade into the background. A few months later we aren’t as annoyed by the color of the cabinets, but at the same time, we don’t derive as much pleasure from the handsome floors. This type of emotional leveling out—when initial positive and negative perceptions fade—is a process we call hedonic adaptation.
Just as our eyes adjust to changes in light and environment, we can adapt to changes in expectation and experience. For example, Andrew Clark showed that job satisfaction among British workers was strongly correlated with changes in workers’ pay rather than the level of pay itself. In other words, people generally grow accustomed to their current pay level, however low or high. A raise is great and a pay cut is very upsetting, regardless of the actual amount of the base salary.
In one of the earliest studies on hedonic adaptation, Philip Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman compared the overall life happiness among three groups: paraplegics, lottery winners, and normal people who were neither disa
bled nor particularly lucky. Had the data collection taken place immediately following the event that led to the disability or the day after the lottery win, one would expect the paraplegics to be far more miserable than the normal people and the lottery winners much happier. However, the data were collected a year after the event. It turned out that although there were differences in happiness levels among the groups, they were not as pronounced as you might expect. While the paraplegics were not as satisfied with life as the normal people and the lottery winners were more satisfied, both paraplegics and lottery winners were surprisingly close to normal levels of life satisfaction. In other words, though a life-altering event such as a bad injury or winning a lottery can have a huge initial impact on happiness, this effect can, to a large degree, wear off over time.
A SUBSTANTIAL AMOUNT of research over the past decade has reinforced the idea that although internal happiness can deviate from its “resting state” in reaction to life events, it usually returns toward its baseline over time. Though we don’t hedonically adapt to every new situation, we do adapt to many of them, and to a large degree—whether we’re getting used to a new home or car, new relationships, new injuries, new jobs, or even incarceration.
Overall, adaptation seems to be a rather handy human quality. But hedonic adaptation can be a problem for effective decision making because we often cannot accurately predict that we will adapt—at least not to the level that we actually do. Think again about the paraplegics and lottery winners. Neither they nor their families and friends could have predicted the extent to which they would adapt to their new situations. Of course, the same applies to many other variations in our circumstance, from romantic breakups to failure to get a promotion at work to having one’s favorite candidate lose an election. In all of these cases, we expect that we will be miserable for a long time if things do not work out the way we hope; we also think that we will be enduringly happy if things go our way. But in general, our predictions are off base.*
In the end, although we can accurately predict what will happen when we walk from a dark movie theater to a sunny parking lot, we do a relatively poor job anticipating either the extent or the speed of hedonic adaptation. We usually get it wrong on both counts. In the long term, we don’t end up being as happy as we thought we’d be when good things happen to us, and we are not as sad as we expect when bad things occur.
ONE REASON FOR our difficulty in predicting the extent of our hedonic adaptation is that when making predictions, we usually forget to take into account the fact that life goes on and that, in time, other events (both positive and negative) will influence our sense of well-being. Imagine, for example, that you are a professional cellist who lives to play Bach. Your music is both your livelihood and your joy. But a car accident crushes your left hand, forever taking away your ability to play cello. Right after your accident, you are likely to be extremely depressed and predict that you will remain miserable for the rest of your life. After all, music has been your life, and now it is gone. But in your unhappiness and grief, you don’t understand how extraordinarily flexible you really are.
BALM FOR BROKEN HEARTS
When Romeo suffered over his breakup with his first girlfriend, Rosaline, you would have thought it was the end of the world. He stayed up all night and shut himself in his room. His parents were worried. When his cousin asked how he was faring, Romeo sounded as if he would die of hopeless love for the girl who’d rejected him. “She hath forsworn to love,” he complained, “and in that vow / Do I live dead that live to tell it now.” That night he met Juliet and forgot all about Rosaline.
Though most of us aren’t as fickle as Romeo, we are much more resilient than we think we are when it comes to getting over a broken heart. In a study of college students that lasted thirty-eight weeks, Paul Eastwick, Eli Finkel, Tamar Krishnamurti, and George Loewenstein contrasted romantic intuitions and reality. The researchers first asked students who were in romantic relationships how they expected to feel after a breakup (they thought they’d feel like Romeo, post-Rosaline), and then they waited. Over the duration of the long study, some of the students inevitably experienced romantic breakups, which gave the researchers an opportunity to find out how they actually felt after having fallen off a romantic cliff. Then the researchers compared the participants’ predictions to their actual feelings.
It turned out that the breakups were not as earth-shattering as the students had expected and the emotional grieving was much shorter-lived than they had originally assumed. This is not to say that romantic breakups are not distressful, only that they are generally far less intense than we expect them to be.
Granted, college undergrads are pretty fickle (particularly when it comes to romance), but there is a good chance that these findings apply to people of all ages. In general, we’re not that good at predicting our own happiness. Ask a happily married couple how they might feel about divorcing, and they will forecast extreme devastation. And though such a dark prediction is largely accurate, a divorce is often less devastating to a married couple than either member might anticipate. I am not sure if acting on this conclusion would lead to a good social outcome, but it does mean that we should not worry as much about breaking up. We’ll end up adapting to some degree, and there is a good chance that we will go on to live and love another day.
Consider the story of Andrew Potok, a blind writer who lives in Vermont. Potok was a gifted painter who gradually began losing his sight to an inherited eye disease, retinitis pigmentosa. Even as his sight failed, something else happened: he began to realize that he could paint with words just as well as he could paint with colors, and he wrote a book about his experience of going blind.16 He said, “I thought I’d go down and hit rock bottom and get stuck in the mud, but liberation came in a magical way. One night I had a dream where words came spewing out of my mouth, like those unfurling, whistling party favors that you blow on. The words were all beautiful colors. I awoke from the dream and realized something new was possible. I felt this lightness in my heart as pleasing words came out of me. To my surprise, they turned out to be pleasing to others. And when they were published, I saw myself as a newly empowered person.”
“One of the big problems with blindness is a slowing of everything,” Potok added. “You’re so busy figuring out where you are in your travels that you have to pay strict attention all the time. It seems that everyone is whizzing by you. And then, one day, you realize that slowness isn’t so bad, that paying more attention has its rewards, and you want to write a book called In Praise of Slowness.” Of course, Potok still regrets his blindness, which poses a thousand daily challenges. But it has been a passport to a new country that he could never previously have imagined visiting.
So imagine again that you are a cellist. Eventually, you would probably change your lifestyle and become involved with new things. You might form new relationships, spend more time with the people you love, pursue a profession in music history, or take a trip to Tahiti. Any of these things is likely to have a large influence on your state of mind and grab your emotional attention. You will always regret the accident—both physically and as a reminder of how life could have been—but its influence will not be as vivid or as incessant as you originally thought it would be. “Time heals all wounds” precisely because, over time, you will partially adapt to the state of your world.
The Hedonic Treadmill
By failing to anticipate the extent of our hedonic adaptation, as consumers we routinely escalate our purchases, hoping that new stuff will make us happier. Indeed, a new car feels wonderful, but sadly, the feeling lasts for only a few months. We get used to driving the car, and the buzz wears off. So we look for something else to make us happy: maybe new sunglasses, a computer, or another new car. This cycle, which is what drives us to keep up with the Joneses, is also known as the hedonic treadmill. We look forward to the things that will make us happy, but we don’t realize how short-lived this happiness will be, and when adaptation hits we look for
the next new thing. “This time,” we tell ourselves, “this thing will really make me happy for a long time.” The folly of the hedonic treadmill is illustrated in the following cartoon. The woman in the cartoon may have a lovely car and she might get a new kitchen, but in the long run her level of happiness will not change much. As the saying goes, “Wherever you go, there you are.”
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“Dan, when we got this car last year I was ecstatic, but now it no longer makes me happy. What do you think about renovating the kitchen?”
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An illustrative study of this principle was conducted by David Schkade and Danny Kahneman. They decided to inspect the general belief that Californians are happier—after all, they live in California, where the weather is usually wonderful.* Somewhat unsurprisingly, they found that midwesterners think that fair-weather Californians are, overall, considerably more satisfied with their lives, while Californians think that midwesterners are considerably less satisfied overall with life because the latter have to suffer through long, subzero winters. Consequently, people from both states expect that a Chicagoan moving to sunny California will see a dramatic improvement in lifestyle, while the Angeleno moving to the Midwest will get a dramatic reduction in happiness.
How accurate are these predictions? It turns out that they are somewhat accurate. New transplants do indeed experience the expected boost or reduction in quality of life due to the weather. But, much like everything else, once adaptation hits and they get used to the new city, their quality of life drifts back toward its premoving level. The bottom line: even if you feel strongly about something in the short term, in the long term things will probably not leave you as ecstatic or as miserable as you expect.