Are Experiencers Really Happy? The Debate on Self-Reported Emotional States

Are Experiencers Really Happy?

In the job-rejection studies discussed by the authors, participants who experienced rejection reported being happier than forecast. The question is whether those reports were truthful. It is possible, for example, that participants experienced and recognized their unhappiness (“I can’t believe I didn’t get the job!”) but deliberately concealed it in order to save face (“I’ll never let them see me cry”). For several reasons, we consider “false bravado” to be an unlikely explanation of our results. First, such a face-saving maneuver would have required participants to contradict their own predictions, and admitting that one could not foresee one’s own emotional reactions to failure is surely no less embarrassing than admitting that one feels bad after failure. Second, if participants felt compelled to display false bravado, then why were Forecasters perfectly willing to predict that they would feel bad after failing to get a job? Such predictions hardly smack of machismo. Third, if Experiencers were reluctant to confess their negative affective states, then why did we not observe similar reluctance among participants who reported their affective states immediately after being rejected for a job in the second study? All of this suggests that participants in our studies were indeed telling the truth as they knew it.

But did they know it? One might argue that those participants who claimed to be happy after a negative event were not really happy, even if they believed they were. Arguments such as these bring us face to face with one of philosophy’s enduring conundrums: Can people be wrong about their own internal experiences? On the one hand, psychologists have amassed considerable evidence to suggest that people can be mistaken about how they feel toward an object (e.g., Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Quattrone, 1985; Wilson, 1985), and as such, their overt behaviors often provide better evidence of their internal states than do their verbal reports. As Rorty (1970, p. 400) argues:

If I say that I believe that p, or desire X, or am afraid, or am intending to do A, what I go on to do may lead others to say that I couldn’t really have believed p, or desired X, or been afraid, or intended to do A. Statements about beliefs, desires, emotions, and intentions are implicit predictions of future behavior, predictions which may be falsified.

On the other hand, some theorists have suggested that candid self-reports of subjective experience are, by definition, correct. As Dennett (1981, p. 218) explains:

Suppose someone is given the post-hypnotic suggestion that upon awakening he will have a pain in his wrist. If the hypnosis works, is it a case of pain, hypnotically induced, or merely a case of a person who has been induced to believe he has a pain? If one answers that the hypnosis has induced real pain, suppose the post-hypnotic suggestion had been: “On awakening, you will believe you have a pain in the wrist.” If this suggestion works, is the circumstance just like the previous one? Isn’t believing you are in pain tantamount to being in pain?

Can people be wrong about how they feel? We think it depends on what one means by feel. When a person is asked how she feels about something in particular (“Do you like rutabaga farmers?”), the word feel is being used in a dispositional rather than an occurrent sense (Ryle, 1949), and thus the person’s most candid reply may be inaccurate. For example, the person may have a variety of conflicting beliefs about a single object (e.g., “I often think of myself as a friend to farmers” and “Rutabagas are the cause of our nation’s growing malaise”), and unless all of these are recalled at once, her verbal report of her attitude toward the object may be biased in the direction of those beliefs that come most quickly to mind. However, when a person is asked how he feels, period – and not how he feels about something – then the word feel is being used in an occurrent rather than a dispositional sense, and the person is being asked to say what it is like to be him at that moment. If he is candid and articulate, then one can make the case that his verbal report is unimpeachable.

The take home point is this: Verbal reports of relatively enduring tendencies can be distinguished from verbal reports of subjective experience, and psychologists may question the validity of the former while accepting the integrity of the latter. We believe that our Experiencers believed that they were happier than our Forecasters predicted they would be. Whether the Experiencers’ beliefs were right or wrong is a question to which no one – Experiencer, philosopher, or psychologist – can at present offer a definitive answer.