Why do you think people who suffer so frequently and deeply rate their life satisfaction relatively highly?
(My best sense is some combination of:
The Cantril Ladder is remembered rather than experiential measurement, and if we did just capture the area under the curve of their hedonic states we would see a much lower value
The Cantril Ladder asks users to anchor on ‘the best life for you’, and users may not see a life for themselves without their suffering
Suicide omitting users who are likely to view their lives as not worth living—thereby selecting for optimists
The Cantril Ladder is on a scale of 1–10, which users perceive as linear, but extreme suffering is exponentially worse than mild suffering
It’s not clear where the ‘life not worth living point’ actually is, and it may genuinely be around 4 points, so these people actually are reporting living awful lives)
Like, I can’t see a reason why wellbeing measures shouldn’t, in theory, capture these extremely negative states.
It seems like life satisfaction (a cognitive evaluation) and affect are simply different things, even if they are related, and have different correlates. It doesn’t strike me as that intuitively surprising that people would often evaluate their lives positively even if they experience a lot of negative affective states, in part because people care a lot about things other than their hedonic state (EAs/hedonic utilitarians may be slightly ununusual in this respect), and partly due to various biases (e.g. self-protective and self-presentation biases) that might inclined people towards positive reports.
That’s a good question. Although it somewhat depends on your purposes, there are multiple reasons why you might want to measure both separately.
Note that often affect is measured at the level of individual experiences or events, not just an overall balance. And there is evidence suggesting that negative and positive affect contribute differently to reported life satifaction. For example, germane to your earlier question, this study finds that “positive affect had strong effects on life satisfaction across the groups, whereas negative affect had weak or nonsignificant effects.”
You might also be interested in measuring negative and positive affect for other reasons. For example, you might just normatively care about negative states more than symmetrical positive states, or you might have concerns about the symmetry of the measures.
Thanks for your answers and links, @David_Moss. The key point, as mentioned in the post and by David, is the distinction between a hedonic experience (affect) and an evaluation. But as to why people would still rate their life satisfaction at ~5/10 when they are regularly experiencing extreme suffering, I would expect that those who have learned to stay positive and look on the bright side of their life are better able to cope – to handle the pain when it happens, and to function well and experience moments of joy the rest of the time. As I mentioned, some people with cluster headaches have a strong support network within the patient community. Someone suffering alone for long periods with a severe mental illness may view their life very differently, and tell themselves a different story, than someone who is supported and encouraged by a community of fellow “warriors”, even if the second person still experiences the suffering as extreme.
In terms of people also caring about other things besides their hedonic states, I would argue that people ultimately care about things because they think these will make them happy, or give their lives meaning and thereby lead to happiness. They value the happy moments they experience and tell themselves that these contribute to their life satisfaction. This doesn’t negate the fact that the suffering may be literally unbearable at times.
A couple of specific responses: -I personally don’t think that “a life worth living” is all that useful as an objective concept. Most importantly, it could suggest that it’s still worthwhile bringing future people and animals into existence who will experience unbearable suffering—who pass involuntarily through bottlenecks of unbearableness. The notion itself is a reflection of our biases. -While I don’t think the Cantril ladder is necessarily perceived as strictly linear, I think you’re right about the distinction in that the midway point may reflect a perceived tipping point between net-positive and net-negative. Again, that’s just the perception of a person evaluating their life, with their inherent biases, not a determination that filling the world with people who experience unbearable pain part of the time is a good thing.
I think the most important takeaway is not to reduce our consideration for suffering because people’s life satisfaction scores could be worse, but the contrary: to treat extreme/unbearable suffering as a matter of urgency, even if people are doing their best to maintain a positive perspective.
I guess I don’t find your conclusion intuitive. I’m sure there are a range of preference questions you could ask these extreme sufferers. For example, whether they, at a 5⁄10 life satisfaction, would trade places with someone in a low-income country with a life satisfaction of 2⁄10 who does not have their condition.
If you believe that they would make this trade, then surely there is something that their life satisfaction score is simply failing to capture
If you believe that they wouldn’t make this trade, then either that preference game isn’t eliciting some true value of suffering, or otherwise, why should we allocate hypothetical marginal dollars to their suffering and not that of those with lower life satisfaction?
My hunch is that the former is true, that there is something you can elicit from these people that isn’t being captured in the Cantril Ladder. (In my work, we’ve found the Cantril Ladder to be unreliable in other ways). But on the other side of this, I do worry about rejecting people’s own accounts of their experiences—it may literally be true that these people are somewhat happy with their lives, and that we should focus our resources on those who report that they aren’t!
I agree it would be interesting to gather specific data on such questions by asking people. A lot depends on the actual life of someone who evaluates their life satisfaction at 2⁄10. Do they experience a great deal of suffering, though not extreme/ unbearable? Or are they reasonably happy much of the time, but see no hope of improving their material wellbeing, especially when they see the kinds of lives people have in richer countries? 2⁄10 may mean different things to different people. The life satisfaction measure is just a momentary cognitive assessment, whereas strong negative affect, experienced over long durations, is in a sense more real. Trying to eliminate the very worst, literally unbearable experiences – in humans and in animals – seems to me very reasonable.
You could also ask the person with 2⁄10 life satisfaction whether they would agree to live in a rich country but have excruciating attacks for several hours a day for at least 2-3 months/year. And for the preferences elicited with such questions to really be meaningful, the respondent would have to know what it’s really like, and to be able to compare stretches of both experiences. Brian Tomasik has referred to different utility functions of people imagining and even consenting to experience extreme suffering, and people actually experiencing it. I doubt many people would choose cluster headaches after experiencing them, regardless of the rest of their life circumstances.
In practice, of course, it isn’t a binary choice anyways, and we can devote resources to improving access to effective treatment for cluster headache while trying to alleviate global poverty.
Why do you think people who suffer so frequently and deeply rate their life satisfaction relatively highly?
(My best sense is some combination of:
The Cantril Ladder is remembered rather than experiential measurement, and if we did just capture the area under the curve of their hedonic states we would see a much lower value
The Cantril Ladder asks users to anchor on ‘the best life for you’, and users may not see a life for themselves without their suffering
Suicide omitting users who are likely to view their lives as not worth living—thereby selecting for optimists
The Cantril Ladder is on a scale of 1–10, which users perceive as linear, but extreme suffering is exponentially worse than mild suffering
It’s not clear where the ‘life not worth living point’ actually is, and it may genuinely be around 4 points, so these people actually are reporting living awful lives)
Like, I can’t see a reason why wellbeing measures shouldn’t, in theory, capture these extremely negative states.
It seems like life satisfaction (a cognitive evaluation) and affect are simply different things, even if they are related, and have different correlates. It doesn’t strike me as that intuitively surprising that people would often evaluate their lives positively even if they experience a lot of negative affective states, in part because people care a lot about things other than their hedonic state (EAs/hedonic utilitarians may be slightly ununusual in this respect), and partly due to various biases (e.g. self-protective and self-presentation biases) that might inclined people towards positive reports.
Do you think it’s valuable to specifically measure negative affect instead of overall affect, in this case? Or would overall affect suffice?
That’s a good question. Although it somewhat depends on your purposes, there are multiple reasons why you might want to measure both separately.
Note that often affect is measured at the level of individual experiences or events, not just an overall balance. And there is evidence suggesting that negative and positive affect contribute differently to reported life satifaction. For example, germane to your earlier question, this study finds that “positive affect had strong effects on life satisfaction across the groups, whereas negative affect had weak or nonsignificant effects.”
You might also be interested in measuring negative and positive affect for other reasons. For example, you might just normatively care about negative states more than symmetrical positive states, or you might have concerns about the symmetry of the measures.
Thank you!
Thanks for your answers and links, @David_Moss. The key point, as mentioned in the post and by David, is the distinction between a hedonic experience (affect) and an evaluation. But as to why people would still rate their life satisfaction at ~5/10 when they are regularly experiencing extreme suffering, I would expect that those who have learned to stay positive and look on the bright side of their life are better able to cope – to handle the pain when it happens, and to function well and experience moments of joy the rest of the time. As I mentioned, some people with cluster headaches have a strong support network within the patient community. Someone suffering alone for long periods with a severe mental illness may view their life very differently, and tell themselves a different story, than someone who is supported and encouraged by a community of fellow “warriors”, even if the second person still experiences the suffering as extreme.
In terms of people also caring about other things besides their hedonic states, I would argue that people ultimately care about things because they think these will make them happy, or give their lives meaning and thereby lead to happiness. They value the happy moments they experience and tell themselves that these contribute to their life satisfaction. This doesn’t negate the fact that the suffering may be literally unbearable at times.
A couple of specific responses:
-I personally don’t think that “a life worth living” is all that useful as an objective concept. Most importantly, it could suggest that it’s still worthwhile bringing future people and animals into existence who will experience unbearable suffering—who pass involuntarily through bottlenecks of unbearableness. The notion itself is a reflection of our biases.
-While I don’t think the Cantril ladder is necessarily perceived as strictly linear, I think you’re right about the distinction in that the midway point may reflect a perceived tipping point between net-positive and net-negative. Again, that’s just the perception of a person evaluating their life, with their inherent biases, not a determination that filling the world with people who experience unbearable pain part of the time is a good thing.
I think the most important takeaway is not to reduce our consideration for suffering because people’s life satisfaction scores could be worse, but the contrary: to treat extreme/unbearable suffering as a matter of urgency, even if people are doing their best to maintain a positive perspective.
I guess I don’t find your conclusion intuitive. I’m sure there are a range of preference questions you could ask these extreme sufferers. For example, whether they, at a 5⁄10 life satisfaction, would trade places with someone in a low-income country with a life satisfaction of 2⁄10 who does not have their condition.
If you believe that they would make this trade, then surely there is something that their life satisfaction score is simply failing to capture
If you believe that they wouldn’t make this trade, then either that preference game isn’t eliciting some true value of suffering, or otherwise, why should we allocate hypothetical marginal dollars to their suffering and not that of those with lower life satisfaction?
My hunch is that the former is true, that there is something you can elicit from these people that isn’t being captured in the Cantril Ladder. (In my work, we’ve found the Cantril Ladder to be unreliable in other ways). But on the other side of this, I do worry about rejecting people’s own accounts of their experiences—it may literally be true that these people are somewhat happy with their lives, and that we should focus our resources on those who report that they aren’t!
I agree it would be interesting to gather specific data on such questions by asking people. A lot depends on the actual life of someone who evaluates their life satisfaction at 2⁄10. Do they experience a great deal of suffering, though not extreme/ unbearable? Or are they reasonably happy much of the time, but see no hope of improving their material wellbeing, especially when they see the kinds of lives people have in richer countries? 2⁄10 may mean different things to different people. The life satisfaction measure is just a momentary cognitive assessment, whereas strong negative affect, experienced over long durations, is in a sense more real. Trying to eliminate the very worst, literally unbearable experiences – in humans and in animals – seems to me very reasonable.
You could also ask the person with 2⁄10 life satisfaction whether they would agree to live in a rich country but have excruciating attacks for several hours a day for at least 2-3 months/year. And for the preferences elicited with such questions to really be meaningful, the respondent would have to know what it’s really like, and to be able to compare stretches of both experiences. Brian Tomasik has referred to different utility functions of people imagining and even consenting to experience extreme suffering, and people actually experiencing it. I doubt many people would choose cluster headaches after experiencing them, regardless of the rest of their life circumstances.
In practice, of course, it isn’t a binary choice anyways, and we can devote resources to improving access to effective treatment for cluster headache while trying to alleviate global poverty.
(Yep, I’m not having a go at the mission here, more at the nuances of measurement)