Summary Can people remember their past happiness? We analyzed data from four longitudinal surveys from the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany spanning the 1970s to the present, in which more than 60,000 adults were asked questions about their current and past life satisfaction. We discovered systematic biases in remembered happiness: on average, people tended to exaggerate the improvement in their well-being over time and underestimate their past happiness. But this aggregate figure hides a deep asymmetry: while happy people remember that the evolution of their lives was better than it was, unhappy people tend to exaggerate the negative evolution of their lives.
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Research suggests that one reason happiness can seem so elusive is that our current feelings can interfere with memories of our past well-being. An analysis of data from four longitudinal surveys to investigate how our current feelings influence our memories of past happiness.
“Happy people tend to exaggerate the improvement in their life satisfaction over time, while unhappy people tend to exaggerate the deterioration in their level of happiness. This indicates a certain confusion between feeling happy and feeling better,” explain the authors Alberto Prati (University College London and the University of Oxford) and Claudia Senik (Sorbonne University) in an interview.
Prati and Senik analyzed data from four longitudinal surveys to investigate how our current feelings influence our memories of past happiness First, Prati and Senik analyzed existing data from the German Socioeconomic Panel’s ongoing survey on the well-being of German citizens, focusing on responses from 11,056 participants between 2006 and 2016. Each year, participants reported how satisfied they were with their life on a scale of 1 to 10. In 2016, respondents were also asked to select one of nine line graphs that best it reflected the trajectory of their life satisfaction over the past decade.
Participants’ graph selections generally reflected their previous responses, Prati and Senik wrote in the paper. People who reported higher satisfaction with current life were more likely to select a graph that illustrated continuous improvement. People with average satisfaction were more likely to select a graph that illustrated slight improvement, and people who reported lower satisfaction with current life were more likely to select a graph that illustrated drops in their well-being.
"People can remember how they used to feel about their life, but they also tend to conflate this memory with how they currently feel," Prati and Senik said.
The researchers further investigated this trend using data from 20,269 participants in the British Household Panel Survey from 1997 to 2009. As part of the survey, respondents reported their current life satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 7, as well as if they felt more, less or just as satisfied as the previous year.
About half of respondents accurately recalled how their current life satisfaction compared to their report from the previous year. But, as with the German data, inaccurate memories seemed to be influenced by current satisfaction.
These results also held at the aggregate level. When Prati and Senik analyzed 18,589 quarterly responses to a survey by the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies, they found that French participants recalled, on average, being less happy a year ago than they had actually reported in the survey.
American respondents to the Gallup Poll Social Series of 1971, 1976, 2001, and 2006 demonstrated the same tendency to underestimate their past happiness , with average responses from 4,000 participants suggesting that Americans recalled being less happy 5 years ago than they had. reported at that time.
“It seems that feeling happy today means feeling better than yesterday ,” wrote Prati and Senik. "This memory structure has implications for motivated memory and learning and could explain why happy people are more optimistic, perceive risks as lower, and are more open to new experiences."
In their future work, Prati and Senik plan to investigate how biased memories influence behavior, including people’s willingness to take risks, pursue entrepreneurship, and have new experiences.
