Recently in Morality, Religion & Philosophy Category

Robb Willer argues that telling others about liars is useful gossip and shouldn't be condemned.

We've been doing research for several years about the ways in which reputational concerns encourage people to behave. This led us to get interested in gossip because gossip involves diffusing reputational information about people in groups. More specifically, we were interested in an apparent tension between the bad reputation gossiping and gossipers have, but how there's a lot of ways gossip has useful social functions.

We found people very readily warned the next person, passing on socially useful information to them. But what was more interesting was the emotional register of the behaviour. As people saw a person behave in a untrustworthy way, they became frustrated and their heart rate increased. But when they had the opportunity to pass a warning on, that reduced or eliminated their frustration and also tempered their increased heart rate.

It is a subset of gossip that involves warning other people about untrustworthy others. We think it is pretty common. We find generous people are more likely to engage in it and they report doing so out of a motivation to help others. It is very different from malicious gossip, which might be driven by a desire to tarnish another's reputation or advance oneself.

The Bible certainly condemns liars and lying, but is identifying a person as dishonest a proscribed form of gossip? I'd say no, as long as the revelation itself isn't done for malicious or deceitful purposes.

Proverbs 11:13 says "A gossip betrays a confidence, but a trustworthy person keeps a secret."

(HT: Gizmodo.)

In 2002 Malcolm Gladwell wrote a profile of Nassim Nicholas Taleb (one of my favorite philosophers, if I can categorize him that way). The profile includes this description of how humans view risk, and I think it's important to digest it so that you can evaluate your own risk biases and how they affect your life.

What Empirica has done is to invert the traditional psychology of investing. You and I, if we invest conventionally in the market, have a fairly large chance of making a small amount of money in a given day from dividends or interest or the general upward trend of the market. We have almost no chance of making a large amount of money in one day, and there is a very small, but real, possibility that if the market collapses we could blow up. We accept that distribution of risks because, for fundamental reasons, it feels right. In the book that Pallop was reading by Kahneman and Tversky, for example, there is a description of a simple experiment, where a group of people were told to imagine that they had three hundred dollars. They were then given a choice between (a) receiving another hundred dollars or (b) tossing a coin, where if they won they got two hundred dollars and if they lost they got nothing. Most of us, it turns out, prefer (a) to (b). But then Kahneman and Tversky did a second experiment. They told people to imagine that they had five hundred dollars, and then asked them if they would rather (c) give up a hundred dollars or (d) toss a coin and pay two hundred dollars if they lost and nothing at all if they won. Most of us now prefer (d) to (c). What is interesting about those four choices is that, from a probabilistic standpoint, they are identical. They all yield an expected outcome of four hundred dollars. Nonetheless, we have strong preferences among them. Why? Because we're more willing to gamble when it comes to losses, but are risk averse when it comes to our gains. That's why we like small daily winnings in the stock market, even if that requires that we risk losing everything in a crash.

At Empirica, by contrast, every day brings a small but real possibility that they'll make a huge amount of money in a day; no chance that they'll blow up; and a very large possibility that they'll lose a small amount of money. All those dollar, and fifty-cent, and nickel options that Empirica has accumulated, few of which will ever be used, soon begin to add up. By looking at a particular column on the computer screens showing Empirica's positions, anyone at the firm can tell you precisely how much money Empirica has lost or made so far that day. At 11:30 A.M., for instance, they had recovered just twenty-eight percent of the money they had spent that day on options. By 12:30, they had recovered forty per cent, meaning that the day was not yet half over and Empirica was already in the red to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars. The day before that, it had made back eighty-five per cent of its money; the day before that, forty-eight per cent; the day before that, sixty-five per cent; and the day before that also sixty-five per cent; and, in fact-with a few notable exceptions, like the few days when the market reopened after September 11th -- Empirica has done nothing but lose money since last April. "We cannot blow up, we can only bleed to death," Taleb says, and bleeding to death, absorbing the pain of steady losses, is precisely what human beings are hardwired to avoid. "Say you've got a guy who is long on Russian bonds," Savery says. "He's making money every day. One day, lightning strikes and he loses five times what he made. Still, on three hundred and sixty-four out of three hundred and sixty-five days he was very happily making money. It's much harder to be the other guy, the guy losing money three hundred and sixty-four days out of three hundred and sixty-five, because you start questioning yourself. Am I ever going to make it back? Am I really right? What if it takes ten years? Will I even be sane ten years from now?" What the normal trader gets from his daily winnings is feedback, the pleasing illusion of progress. At Empirica, there is no feedback. "It's like you're playing the piano for ten years and you still can't play chopsticks," Spitznagel say, "and the only thing you have to keep you going is the belief that one day you'll wake up and play like Rachmaninoff."

Bret Stephens argues that the religion of global warming is dying as its predictions fail and its followers grow bored.

But religions don't die, and often thrive, when put to the political sidelines. A religion, when not physically extinguished, only dies when it loses faith in itself.

That's where the Climategate emails come in. First released on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit two years ago and recently updated by a fresh batch, the "hide the decline" emails were an endless source of fun and lurid fascination for those of us who had never been convinced by the global-warming thesis in the first place. ...

The reply global warming alarmists have made to these dislosures is that they did nothing to change the underlying science, and only improved it in particulars. So what to make of the U.N.'s latest supposedly authoritative report on extreme weather events, which is tinged with admissions of doubt and uncertainty? Oddly, the report has left climate activists stuttering with rage at what they call its "watered down" predictions. If nothing else, they understand that any belief system, particularly ones as young as global warming, cannot easily survive more than a few ounces of self-doubt.

Our children will look back on fear of "climate change" with wry amusement, like the "overpopulation" fears of past decades.

This piece on overconfident predictions is required reading for everyone in any sort of leadership position.

No one in the firm seemed to be aware of the nature of the game that its stock pickers were playing. The advisers themselves felt they were competent professionals performing a task that was difficult but not impossible, and their superiors agreed. On the evening before the seminar, Richard Thaler and I had dinner with some of the top executives of the firm, the people who decide on the size of bonuses. We asked them to guess the year-to-year correlation in the rankings of individual advisers. They thought they knew what was coming and smiled as they said, "not very high" or "performance certainly fluctuates." It quickly became clear, however, that no one expected the average correlation to be zero.

What we told the directors of the firm was that, at least when it came to building portfolios, the firm was rewarding luck as if it were skill. This should have been shocking news to them, but it was not. There was no sign that they disbelieved us. How could they? After all, we had analyzed their own results, and they were certainly sophisticated enough to appreciate their implications, which we politely refrained from spelling out. We all went on calmly with our dinner, and I am quite sure that both our findings and their implications were quickly swept under the rug and that life in the firm went on just as before. The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the industry. Facts that challenge such basic assumptions -- and thereby threaten people's livelihood and self-esteem -- are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them. This is particularly true of statistical studies of performance, which provide general facts that people will ignore if they conflict with their personal experience.

The next morning, we reported the findings to the advisers, and their response was equally bland. Their personal experience of exercising careful professional judgment on complex problems was far more compelling to them than an obscure statistical result. When we were done, one executive I dined with the previous evening drove me to the airport. He told me, with a trace of defensiveness, "I have done very well for the firm, and no one can take that away from me." I smiled and said nothing. But I thought, privately: Well, I took it away from you this morning. If your success was due mostly to chance, how much credit are you entitled to take for it?

Illusions of validity and skill are certainly not unique to the financial world. I expect that almost any person-versus-person decision-making contest with enough participants will yield essentially random results. (Excluding highly structured games with mathematical constraints and complexity, like chess.)

Lots of international busybodies have their panties in a bunch over the summary execution of Muammar Gaddafi, but let's be adults: justice doesn't always require a courtroom.

Libya's rebel army has been accused of executing both Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and his son Mutassim in cold blood as the United Nations suggested their deaths amounted to war crimes.

Human rights groups and Gaddafi's wife Safia called for an independent investigation into the deaths, which robbed victims' families of the chance to see Gaddafi put on trial for his murderous acts.

Both Gaddafi and his son were filmed or photographed alive and relatively uninjured after their capture on Thursday, before both died of multiple gunshot wounds.

Unless there's doubt about the identities of men, there's absolutely no reason that Gaddafi or his sons need to be tried before their are executed. Their evil is well-known, and they reveled in it for decades. If there were trials, everyone knows that the outcomes would be preordained anyway.

Good riddance to some of the most evil people on earth.

Wow: if this doesn't touch your heart then you have no soul. Mother forgoes cancer treatment to save unborn child.

She sent 159 text messages about her pregnancy to her brother in the months that followed. Many were joyful but then the bone-chilling messages came in during the predawn hours. She said severe headaches and double vision tortured her while tremors wracked her entire body.

"I'm worried about this baby," she texted.

"I hope I live long enough to have this baby," said another message. "Bubba, if anything happens to me, you take this child." ...

At her family's encouragement, she visited a number of doctors. In July, a CT scan revealed that she had head and neck cancer.

Now she had to choose between her life and her baby's life. Phillips said she agonized only for a while before deciding against taking potentially lifesaving chemotherapy in hopes that she would soon hold a healthy baby in her arms.

Read the rest.

(HT: Townhall.)

The city of San Juan Capistrano is requiring a home Bible study to get a permit to keep meeting, and fining them meanwhile for their lack thereof.

An Orange County couple has been ordered to stop holding a Bible study in their home on the grounds that the meeting violates a city ordinance as a "church" and not as a private gathering.

Homeowners Chuck and Stephanie Fromm, of San Juan Capistrano, were fined $300 earlier this month for holding what city officials called "a regular gathering of more than three people".

That type of meeting would require a conditional use permit as defined by the city, according to Pacific Justice Institute (PJI), the couple's legal representation.

The Fromms also reportedly face subsequent fines of $500 per meeting for any further "religious gatherings" in their home, according to PJI.

Of course the city's permit requirement and fines are atrocious, unconstitutional, and immoral... but what's the proper Biblical response to such persecution?

1. Civil disobedience. Continue to meet, refuse to pay fines.

2. Legal challenge. Take the city to court and try to use the law against them.

3. Compliance. Get the permit, pay the fines, and keep quiet.

If you're pregnant with twins and you kill one of the babies, is that just half an abortion?

As Jenny lay on the obstetrician's examination table, she was grateful that the ultrasound tech had turned off the overhead screen. She didn't want to see the two shadows floating inside her. Since making her decision, she had tried hard not to think about them, though she could often think of little else. She was 45 and pregnant after six years of fertility bills, ovulation injections, donor eggs and disappointment -- and yet here she was, 14 weeks into her pregnancy, choosing to extinguish one of two healthy fetuses, almost as if having half an abortion. As the doctor inserted the needle into Jenny's abdomen, aiming at one of the fetuses, Jenny tried not to flinch, caught between intense relief and intense guilt.

Almost as if? So... killing one baby isn't even half an abortion. If abortions aren't bad at all anyway, why hesitate to call killing one unborn baby an abortion, much less half an abortion?

Jenny's decision to reduce twins to a single fetus was never really in doubt. The idea of managing two infants at this point in her life terrified her. She and her husband already had grade-school-age children, and she took pride in being a good mother. She felt that twins would soak up everything she had to give, leaving nothing for her older children. Even the twins would be robbed, because, at best, she could give each one only half of her attention and, she feared, only half of her love. Jenny desperately wanted another child, but not at the risk of becoming a second-rate parent. "This is bad, but it's not anywhere as bad as neglecting your child or not giving everything you can to the children you have," she told me, referring to the reduction. She and her husband worked out this moral calculation on their own, and they intend to never tell anyone about it. Jenny is certain that no one, not even her closest friends, would understand, and she doesn't want to be the object of their curiosity or feel the sting of their judgment.

If I were killing babies I'd keep it secret too.

What is it about terminating half a twin pregnancy that seems more controversial than reducing triplets to twins or aborting a single fetus? After all, the math's the same either way: one fewer fetus. Perhaps it's because twin reduction (unlike abortion) involves selecting one fetus over another, when either one is equally wanted. Perhaps it's our culture's idealized notion of twins as lifelong soul mates, two halves of one whole. Or perhaps it's because the desire for more choices conflicts with our discomfort about meddling with ever more aspects of reproduction.

Is killing one of two really more controversial? I was surprised to hear that opinion. To me, killing a baby is no more or less acceptable if that baby has a sibling or a twin.

The justification for eliminating some fetuses in a multiple pregnancy was always to increase a woman's chance of bringing home a healthy baby, because medical risks rise with every fetus she carries. The procedure, which is usually performed around Week 12 of a pregnancy, involves a fatal injection of potassium chloride into the fetal chest. The dead fetus shrivels over time and remains in the womb until delivery. Some physicians found reduction unnerving, particularly because the procedure is viewed under ultrasound, making it quite visually explicit, which is not the case with abortion.

Yes, I can see why it would be especially unnerving to actually watch a baby be killed. That's because killing a healthy baby for the sake of convenience is evil.

If you're so inclined.

Abortion, the great bastion of women's rights, has led to the slaughter 163 million baby girls. What an incomprehensible tragedy and a terrible stain on humanity.

In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is biologically ironclad. Between 104 and 106 is the normal range, and that's as far as the natural window goes. Any other number is the result of unnatural events.

Yet today in India there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls. In China, the number is 121—though plenty of Chinese towns are over the 150 mark. China's and India's populations are mammoth enough that their outlying sex ratios have skewed the global average to a biologically impossible 107. But the imbalance is not only in Asia. Azerbaijan stands at 115, Georgia at 118 and Armenia at 120.

What is causing the skewed ratio: abortion. If the male number in the sex ratio is above 106, it means that couples are having abortions when they find out the mother is carrying a girl. By Ms. Hvistendahl's counting, there have been so many sex-selective abortions in the past three decades that 163 million girls, who by biological averages should have been born, are missing from the world.

All of humanity should be ashamed and horrified.

I was listening to the Diane Rehm Show on the way to work and there was a guest hostess moderating a ridiculous discussion ostensibly about the recent attempt to cut Planned Parenthood off from federal funding. According to the hostess and the guests (all women*) there were two sides to this debate: A) people who support "women's health issues" and B) people who don't really understand what Planned Parenthood does.

The purpose of the show seemed to be to explain Planned Parenthood to Group B. To this end, the hostess and two of the three guests spent the first 15 minutes of the show repeating that abortion was only a tiny sliver of what Planned Parenthood is about; the third guest pointed out that Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in the country, and that a substantial portion of their budget goes towards performing abortions (one-third, she said?). The other guests promptly ganged up on her and argued that if someone was really against abortions then she would support Planned Parenthood because of all the contraception etc. they distribute to prevent unintended pregnancies.

At this point, the hostess brought on the president of Planned Parenthood and threw softball questions at her for a while. I could only take this for so long before I had to get out of my car into the fresh air.

The group never approached the real motivations behind the group pushing for the defunding of Planned Parenthood. This group consists of two subsets: B1) thinks that abortion should be legal but that taxpayer money shouldn't be used to pay for it, and B2) thinks that abortion is basically murder and should be entirely illegal.

Neither B1 nor B2 cares that Planned Parenthood does lots of stuff besides abortions, and both groups would (mostly) get along just fine with Planned Parenthood if they kept doing everything else but performed zero abortions. Group B1 might prefer that none of Planned Parenthood's activities be federally funded, but they'd be a lot less vociferous if abortion weren't in the mix. Group B2 mostly doesn't care about the other activities or the funding, but they view people that perform any abortions as having dirty hands -- killing even a single baby is very bad, even if you do lots of other good things.

An actual discussion of these perspectives and how they affect modern politics would have been very interesting to hear. Too bad such a discussion is almost unthinkable on National Public Radio.

* Why does it matter that all the guests were women? Because it was certainly on purpose and due to the prevailing view that only women are allowed to have opinions about abortion. The idea that possessing ovaries gives anyone's opinions greater moral weight is offensive. Women aren't banished from discussions of e.g., war and finance just because these domains are dominated by men. Besides, it's a uterus, not a uteryou.

Paul Hsieh describes the moral bankruptcy of the Social Security Ponzi scheme.

But more fundamentally, not only is Social Security economically bankrupt, it is also morally bankrupt. Contrary to popular belief, Social Security is not a savings plan where people deposit their money during their working years then withdraw it once they retire. Rather, as Robert Samuelson recently described, it is a “pay as you go” scheme. Current workers are taxed to pay current retirees. When these workers retire, they’ll then receive money taken forcibly from future workers. Hence, Social Security is no different than any other Ponzi scheme, except that Americans are compelled to join whether they wish to or not.

Individuals are legitimately entitled to retire with their own savings or from money contractually owed them via insurance, private pensions, or other voluntary retirement plans. Individuals have both the right — and the responsibility — to plan for their retirements according to their own best judgment. This includes saving money as well as purchasing insurance (or entering into voluntary mutual assistance agreements with others) to protect themselves against unforeseen adverse circumstances that might prevent them from saving for the future.

But they do not have the right to confiscate other workers’ earnings to fund their retirements. The fact that current workers have already been taxed to pay earlier retirees does not give them the right to confiscate future workers’ incomes, just as someone who had been physically abused by his parents does not somehow gain the “right” to abuse his children in turn.

Social Security should be eliminated as quickly as possible. Present generations should not be allowed to vote to themselves the wealth that will be created by their children and grandchildren.

Maybe President Obama should have shown this video during his recent speech about bullying: the right way to deal with a bully. (Can't find an embeddable version, unfortunately.)

(HT: NC.)

David French has written a great column that looks at expenditures of money and effort by Christians and Christian groups and concludes that Christians are more concerned with helping the weak than with fighting the culture war. As we should be.

First, you'll notice that Christians do give lots of money to what I'd call "pure" culture war organizations, but not as much as the Left. The largest (by budget) include my employer, the Alliance Defense Fund, and the Family Research Council. Of the pro-life organizations, two of the largest are National Right to Life and Americans United for Life. These organizations raise quite a bit of money—almost $60 million combined. But it's not as much as the leading legal organization on the Left. The ACLU Foundation (which does not include the various state ACLUs) took in $98 million with the national ACLU itself raking in an additional $33 million.

But what about organizations like Focus on the Family? Focus is big, no doubt, with gross receipts exceeding $135 million. But anyone with even a passing familiarity with that organization knows that the vast majority of its efforts are thoroughly divorced from the "gays and abortion" side of the culture wars. Its website and radio show are primarily dedicated to such topics as enriching your marriage, dealing with unruly teens, and reviewing TV shows and movies for their family-friendliness.

How do those numbers stack up with leading Christian anti-poverty charities? Let's look at just three: World Vision, Compassion International, and Samaritan's Purse. Their total annual gross receipts (again, according to most recently available Form 990s) exceed $2.1 billion. The smallest of the three organizations (Samaritan's Purse) has larger gross receipts than every major "pro-family" culture war organization in the United States combined. World Vision, the largest, not only takes in more than $1 billion per year, it also has more than 1,400 employees and 43,000 volunteers.

As a Christian, I was glad to read this perspective. Even I sometimes get concerned that we Christians spend more time fighting against unbelievers than fighting for them.

President Obama says spousal abuse is a "private family matter" and the government should stay out of it.

Today marks the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that protects women's health and reproductive freedom, and affirms a fundamental principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters.

Sorry, I meant baby-killing. Beating your wife is obviously wrong. Killing babies is obviously acceptable.

And on this anniversary, I hope that we will recommit ourselves more broadly to ensuring that our daughters have the same rights, the same freedoms, and the same opportunities as our sons to fulfill their dreams.

Once they're out of the womb, anyway. Our sons and daughters that are still in the womb are just things to be disposed of at our convenience.

Oh wait, I'm wrong again! It's ok to murder your kids as long as you meant to do it before they left the womb.

Just go read Gateway Pundit's summary of Obama's history of support for killing babies who survive "botched" abortions.

Here's a video from a few years ago created to pressure then-Senator Obama on the issue.

Here's audio from 2002 in which Obama explains that it would create too much hassle for doctors to legally require them to care for babies who survive abortions.

Obama voted four times against a legal requirement that doctors be required to care for newborns who survive abortions. That means he's just fine with with the actions of Dr. Kermit Gosnel who is charged with delivering seven babies alive and then murdering them with scissors.

In a typical late-term abortion, the fetus is dismembered in the uterus and then removed in pieces. That is more common than the procedure opponents call "partial-birth abortion," in which the fetus is partially extracted before being destroyed. Prosecutors said Gosnell instead delivered many of the babies alive.

He "induced labor, forced the live birth of viable babies in the sixth, seventh, eighth month of pregnancy and then killed those babies by cutting into the back of the neck with scissors and severing their spinal cord," District Attorney Seth Williams said. Gosnell referred to it as "snipping," prosecutors said.

Prosecutors estimated Gosnell ended hundreds of pregnancies by cutting the spinal cords, but they said they couldn't prosecute more cases because he destroyed files.

"These killings became so routine that no one could put an exact number on them," the grand jury report said. "They were considered 'standard procedure."'

All acceptable to Barack Obama.

It's hard for me to think of something more disgusting than a TV show about the joys of abortion. I think this is slightly worse than if the Nazis had made "Survivor: Auschwitz".

In July of this year, leftist Feminists were openly, and proudly, rooting for an abortion to be portrayed on prime-time television. And in April of this year, leftist Feminists like Jessica Valenti of Feministing were grossly bemoaning the fact that Mtv’s show, 16 and Pregnant, did not portray any teenage girls having abortions. They wanted sixteen year old girls to have abortions. On television. Way to be pro-woman and For The Children ™, faux feminists! By For The Children, I of course mean totally not at all for the children – unless they can be used and exploited to further an agenda, natch. You see, it’s never actually about women nor children to them; it’s always about an agenda and an ideology that treats motherhood as a yoke around a woman’s neck. Motherhood is so old school and oppressive and stuff! What with those pesky children wanting to be nurtured and loved, while providing a joy that fills one’s heart so full that it cannot be adequately put into words. Well, and wanting to, you know, live. Who do they think they are?

On Tuesday night, they got their wish. Mtv ran a special called “No Easy Decision”, in which Markai, a girl who had previously appeared on 16 and Pregnant, learned that she was pregnant again.

And she terminated the pregnancy baby’s life.

These poor girls and their babies were sacrificed for use as political pawns. So-called "feminists" should be ashamed and disgusted by the results of their decades of activism.

Tyler Cowen asks if we should subsidize or tax research into time travel. Here's my favorite comment, by "dirk":

If time-travel were possible and humans discover how to do it, the odds are greater that it has already been discovered, so to speak, in the future than that we'd discover it in the near-term present, regardless of subsidies. Therefore, the time-travelers are already here if they are going to ever be here. So instead of subsidies we should offer a huge prize for a time-traveler to tell us how it works. Even if some *future* time-traveler isn't in the present now to hear about the prize directly, if we make the prize big enough it will be discovered in the historical record and someone will claim it.

The question then is: what do you get the time-traveler who has everything? Perhaps Obama should hold a press conference and say: "Time-travelers, tell me what you want." Imagine how stupid other countries will feel if that works!

So... what could we use to temp a time traveling?

Nick Bostrum has posted a fun paper about existential risks which contains a description of "good-story bias" and how it may affect our predictions for the future.

Suppose our intuitions about which future scenarios are “plausible and realistic” are shaped by what we see on TV and in movies and what we read in novels. (After all, a large part of the discourse about the future that people encounter is in the form of fiction and other recreational contexts.) We should then, when thinking critically, suspect our intuitions of being biased in the direction of overestimating the probability of those scenarios that make for a good story, since such scenarios will seem much more familiar and more “real”. This Good-story bias could be quite powerful. When was the last time you saw a movie about humankind suddenly going extinct (without warning and without being replaced by some other civilization)? While this scenario may be much more probable than a scenario in which human heroes successfully repel an invasion of monsters or robot warriors, it wouldn’t be much fun to watch. So we don’t see many stories of that kind. If we are not careful, we can be mislead into believing that the boring scenario is too farfetched to be worth taking seriously. In general, if we think there is a Good-story bias, we may upon reflection want to increase our credence in boring hypotheses and decrease our credence in interesting, dramatic hypotheses. The net effect would be to redistribute probability among existential risks in favor of those that seem to harder to fit into a selling narrative, and possibly to increase the probability of the existential risks as a group.

The rest of the paper is also worth reading.

From "It's a wonderful life: Mentally subtracting positive events improves people's affective states, contrary to their affective forecasts." in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology we learn that one of the best ways to make yourself happier is to visualize what your life would be like if certain positive things hadn't happened.

The authors hypothesized that thinking about the absence of a positive event from one's life would improve affective states more than thinking about the presence of a positive event but that people would not predict this when making affective forecasts. In Studies 1 and 2, college students wrote about the ways in which a positive event might never have happened and was surprising or how it became part of their life and was unsurprising. As predicted, people in the former condition reported more positive affective states. In Study 3, college student forecasters failed to anticipate this effect. In Study 4, Internet respondents and university staff members who wrote about how they might never have met their romantic partner were more satisfied with their relationship than were those who wrote about how they did meet their partner. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for the literatures on gratitude induction and counterfactual reasoning.

Also known as: count your blessings. Compare:

1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 -- "Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus."

Philippians 4:6-7 -- "Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."

See also: Psalm 77.