policymakers demonstrate

530 Alain Trannoy
it may explain the distinctive choice of the US political system regarding the
degree of powerfulness of the welfare state.
12.3.4 Psychology
Psychology helps to understand how to design experiments to assess the fairness
of a situation and the different feelings like happiness induced by a given
situation or a change in situation. Psychologists are particularly useful to help
us understand the traps that the scientist has to bypass to get an adequate answer
to some questionnaire.
There is a huge wave of studies about happiness, but the work of psychologists,
such as Daniel Kahneman (Kahneman and Riis, 2005), shows that individuals
approach this concept in various ways. They cannot think straight about
well-being. People are confused about how they feel in their life and how happy
they are about their life. The former view corresponds to emotional states,
whereas the latter view is closer to what people think of their life. Depending on
what you are asking, the emotional-self or the cognitive-self, the answers will
be different and the correlation is not higher than 0.4–0.5. To illustrate, when
people are asked about how their feelings vary with income, the emotional-self
(Gallup polls for the US in a study conducted by Kahneman and Deaton, 2010)
reports a completely flat curve beyond an annual income of $75,000, whereas
the remembering-self reports a life evaluation which rises steadily (approximately
linearly with the log of income). These authors conclude that money
buys life satisfaction but not happiness, whereas a lack of money exacerbates
the bad feeling associated with ill health, divorce and being alone. At this stage,
it is still not clear how we can use these figures to design public policies, but
this issue represents a clear challenge for the future years.
A second distinction refers to the emotional quality of an individual. The
experienced-self knows about the present, while the remembering-self keeps
records and maintains the story of his/her life. The remembering-self is a
storyteller. What we keep in memories helps us to build a story. Discrepancies
can occur between the experiencing-self and the remembering-self. When
a colonoscopy experience ending with a pain peak is extended with some
moments of further lower pain, the patient keeps in mind a lower pain although
the pain experienced by the patient lasts longer and is at least as great in the
extending clinical test as in the initial test. 9 Any social scientist who fails to
make the distinction between these two notions is going to mess up the study
of emotional happiness.
12.3.5 Neurosciences: Happiness in the Twenty-First Century
And what if Jeremy Bentham was right with his invention of happiness? I
am referring here to the famous quote ‘Nature has placed mankind under the