If we are to look at biases that affect our decision-making in a negative way and that create serious problems for anyone wanting happiness, then we need to look at the WANTING versus LIKING bias. Most people believe that if they want something, when they have it, they will like it. However, there is a distinction between wanting something and liking it. Wanting is an appetite and is associated with one region of the brain whereas enjoying or liking is associated with a separate and different part of the brain.
When we want something, we crave it, we desire it, and it is often times physically arousing because we really want that thing badly. Once we achieve and obtain that object, however, a change occurs. We like it, of course, but the intensity is not as high as the wanting. Think of wanting a pet dog. The desire to own a dog may be quite strong, but many people find that liking owning a dog is a different matter altogether. Conflating these two experiences, wanting and liking, leads us to make serious and destructive decisions in our lives.
Go back to the example of wanting a pet dog. Most people don't think carefully about the
long-term effects of owning a dog. Likewise, people who decide to move out into the country in order to have a bigger house, bigger yard, more space, all at at lower costs, do not factor in the long drive into work and back home.They don't consider that the extra time in the commute may make for a considerably less positive experience. Once they attain the goal of the big house, they will encounter the long term effects, which very likely were not considered.
What that means is that we often spend money on things that we desperately want and think will make us happy, but once we have those things, our liking plummets. The two experiences of wanting and liking are fundamentally different in how they are perceived and encoded at the neurological level. The brain lights up in different areas when we
want something and when we
like something.
Robert Wright in his book
The Moral Animal, uses evolutionary psychology to explain why there should be such a difference in wanting and liking from a survival of the species perspective. Evolutionary psychology has one and only one goal and that is and the survival of the organism and reproductive success. The design for passing on the genes of the organism is to deliver
some pleasure, but not too much. This pleasure should also NOT last forever. If it did, we would stop pursuing other goals, or stop wanting to improve our situation. We would be completely satisfied with what we had attained. Finally, evolutionary psychology has selected for the animal to
focus on the pleasure – – not on the evaporation of that pleasure, not on the fleeting nature of pleasure. Otherwise, the organism would wise up and realize that it wasn't worth pursuing any immediate pleasure. Evolutionary psychology is designed to keep us MOTIVATED because that will help us to survive and pass on our genes.
For more on this read:
The Upside of Your Dark Side, (2014) Tom Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener
The Moral Animal (1994) Robert Wright
