Читать книгу Stumbling on Happiness - Daniel Gilbert - Страница 27

Reba and Lori Schappell claim to be happy, and that disturbs us. We are rock-solid certain that it just can’t be true, and yet, it looks as though there is no foolproof method for comparing their happiness with our own. If they say they are happy, then on what basis can we conclude that they are wrong? Well, we might try the more lawyerly tactic of questioning their ability to know, evaluate or describe their own experience. ‘They may think they’re happy’, we could say, ‘but that’s only because they don’t know what happiness really is.’ In other words, because Lori and Reba have never had many of the experiences that we singletons have had–spinning cartwheels in a meadow, snorkeling along the Great Barrier Reef, strolling down the avenue without drawing a crowd–we suspect they may have an impoverished background of happy experiences that leads them to evaluate their lives differently than the rest of us would. If, for instance, we were to give the twins a birthday cake, hand them an eight-point rating scale (which can be thought of as an artificial language with eight words for different intensities of happiness), and ask them to report on their subjective experience, they might tell us they felt a joyful eight. But isn’t it likely that their eight and our eight represent fundamentally different levels of joy, and that their use of the eight-word language is distorted by their unenviable situation, which has never allowed them to discover how happy a person can really be? Lori and Reba may be using the eight-word language differently than we do because for them, birthday cake is as good as it gets. They label their happiest experience with the happiest word in the eight-word language, naturally, but this should not cause us to overlook the fact that the experience they call eight is an experience that we might call four and a half. In short, they don’t mean happy the way we mean happy. Figure 6 shows how an impoverished experiential background can cause language to be squished so that the full range of verbal labels is used to describe a restricted range of experiences. By this account, when the twins say they are ecstatic, they are actually feeling what we feel when we say we are pleased.

Fig. 6. The language-squishing hypothesis suggests that when given a birthday cake, Lori and Reba feel exactly as you feel but talk about it differently.