evaluation of desirability

evaluation of desirability. Morewedge’s experiments point to a mismatch between how delicious something is and how delicious we think it will be, or how delicious we thought it was. It reveals a distortion in our capacity to anticipate — or forecast in the words of the American social psychologist Daniel Gilbert — how we will feel, and in particular, how much we will like the experience. This is a problem for the elements of pleasure that I laid out earlier in this chapter, as we expect the system that links wanting and liking to be well honed, even optimized to make sure that we really want things we really like. Is this distortion something to expect across the board, independently of context, or is it specific to our food? Is the social domain similarly vulnerable to a distorted view of anticipated pleasure? Consider revenge. When someone transgresses over the borders of social norms, either harming us or those we care about, we often seek revenge, motivated to even things up. We often imagine that revenge will make us feel better, providing a honey hit to the brain that will satisfy our desire to redress an imbalance. But is this the outcome we consistently achieve when we follow through on a plot of revenge or, as Sir Frances Bacon noted over three hundred years ago, might “A man that studieth revenge, keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal, and do well.” In more modern and plain English, might our desire for revenge inoculate us against healing, creating an illusion that we will feel better? If so, revenge looks like an addictive process, with wanting unhinged from liking. The American psychologist Kevin Carlsmith set up an experimental game that allowed each subject within a group to contribute money to a public good. At the end of one round, the bank multiplied the total by a pre-determined amount, divided this total by the number of players, and then redistributed this amount to each player. In this game, the best for each player in the group is to contribute to the common pot because this maximized the returns. However, the best strategy for an individual is to defect, holding on to the initial endowment while reaping the rewards of everyone else’s generous contributions. Those who opt out of cooperation in a public good situation stand to benefit, especially in a world with no punishment. Carlsmith created an experimental world of punishment for some players, but not all, and then explored how punishment contributed to a subject’s feelings. Some could pay to punish, some witnessed the consequence of another’s punitive act, and some had no exposure to a game involving punishment. When given the opportunity to punish the defector, most people punished. Everyone, both punishers and non-punishers alike, expected punishment to feel good. They were wrong. Both punishers and those who witnessed punishment felt worse, with the act of punishment compounding the bad feelings. The fact that the witnesses felt worse, as opposed to better, may seem at odds with our experience of schadenfreude, of enjoying another’s misery. Shouldn’t the witnesses have rejoiced upon discovering that the offenders were slapped with a punitive fine? In our own personal experience with Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 68 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012814