Managing Long Term Happiness

Most theories of motivation have championed the pleasure principle, where our choices of daily activities aim to minimise the negative effects and maximise the positive effects. However, it is currently not clear to researchers how to reconcile this idea with the fact that we all have to engage routinely in unpleasant, yet necessary activities.

To address this question, a team of researchers, led by Maxime Taquet, a research fellow at the Boston Children's Hospital, developed a smartphone application to monitor in real-time the activities and moods of over 28,000 people.

The team found that, rather than following the pleasure or hedonic principle, people's choices of activities instead consistently followed a hedonic flexibility principle. Specifically, the model shows that people were more likely to engage in mood-increasing activities such as playing sport when they felt bad, and engage in useful, but mood-decreasing activities such as doing housework when they felt good.

These findings from large-scale data clarify how hedonic considerations shape human behavior. They may also explain how humans overcome the allure of short-term gains in happiness to maximize their long-term welfare.

Dr. Taquet said: "The decisions we make every day about how to invest our time have important personal and societal consequences. Most theories of motivation propose that our daily choices of activities aim to maximise our positive state of mind, but have so far failed to explain when people decide to engage in unpleasant yet necessary activities. Using large-scale data, we showed how our emotions shape our behavior and explain the trade-offs us humans make in our daily lives to secure our long-term happiness."