Absolute vs. Relative Value

We value things both absolutely (does this thing work or not?) and relatively (is this thing better than other things?).

For example, you value your car based on whether it gets you reliably from point A to point B (absolute) but also as compared to other cars (you might wish it had the self-park feature that your friend Gretchen’s car has).

We value pretty much everything we experience or own on these two planes of absolute and relative.

A Fascinating Paper on How We Compare Things

In a highly readable and entertaining paper, two psychologists, Adam Mastrionni and Ethan J. Ludwin-Peery, shed light on how we value things comparitavely, finding that “When you ask people to imagine how things could be different, they imagine how things could be better.”

They ran eight experiments where they asked participants about 51 different things such as “Amazon,” “cars,” “pets,” “coronavirus,” “Google,” “health,” “television,” and “politics,” and how they could be different. For every single item, people imagined how they could be BETTER and rarely ever described how they could be worse.

Here are some examples from the paper:

Us: “How could your phone be different?”
Participants:
● “it could be waterproof”
● “My phone could be bendable and flexible.”
● “Brighter screen”

Us: “How could your life be different?”
Participants:
● “I could be rich”
● “Have more money”
● “I could be more wealthy so I wouldn’t have to worry about finances so
much”

Us: “How could YouTube be different?
Participants:
● “It could stop nagging me about trying their premium service every time I
go to watch a video.”
● “No ads”
● “Fixing the algorithm to not screw over creators”
This

Us: “How could pets be different?”
Participants:
● “Be patient when it comes to food”
● “Healthier/less likely to get sick”
● “It would be cool if they could talk.”

And in the words of one participant, “They could be immortal.” [Amen to that!]

Here’s a chart from one of the studies. Items above the dotted red line were items that people imagined could be better, on average. Every dot is floating above that line, and none of the confidence intervals include zero.

Through the eight studies, the researchers found that it didn’t matter how they worded the question, and demographics didn’t effect the outcome as they got the same results from Polish people and Chinese people answering in Mandarin.

This is Why We’re Rarely Satisfied

The results of this study are fascinating and shed light on why we’re rarely ever totally satisified with anything: It’s because even when things are good (like pets, or our cars, or music, or our phones) we imagine how they can be better. In other words, we’re constantly comparing things to a utopian version where the thing is better than it is. This propensity to think about how things could be better actually makes us less happy. Ugh.

Once we’re moderately happy, it’s hard to get happier (this is known as the “hedonic treadmill”). And it occurs because we get used to good things. The paper authors note that one reason we get used to good things is because people are “always imagining how things could be better. So even if things get better, you might not feel better. When you live in a cramped apartment, you dream of getting a house. When you get a house, you dream of a second house. Or you dream of lower property taxes. Or a hot tub. Or two hot tubs. And so on, forever.”

Why Are We Wired This Way?

Why might we view the world this way — that things could always be better? The researchers posit that “maybe this bias helped our ancestors survive. Hungry, rain-soaked hunter-gatherers imagined food in their bellies and roofs over their heads and invented agriculture and architecture. Once warm and full, they out-reproduced their brethren who were busy imagining how much hungrier and wetter they could be.”

What to do about this?

Since reading this paper months ago, I’ve been trying to appreciate things as they are and force myself to think about how things could be worse. I think about what my car would be like without some of the features I love. And how much worse my job likely would be if I worked somewhere else. And instead of imagining how plane travel could be better, I think about how much worse travel would be if there were no planes!