Proposition of the focusing illusion: Schkade and Kahneman (1998) first proposed the focusing illusion and confirmed the existence of this concept in their seminal paper.

Proposition of focus illusion: Schkade and Kahneman (1998) first proposed the focus illusion and confirmed the existence of this concept in their seminal paper. They recruited some college students in the Midwest and Southern California and asked some students to report their own life satisfaction, and others to estimate how people living in another area who shared their interests and values ​​would report it. own life satisfaction. The results found that students in the Midwestern United States and California reported similar life satisfaction, indicating that people in the two regions showed the same satisfaction with their lives. However, participants who rated life satisfaction in another region generally expected Californians to report higher life satisfaction than Midwesterners. Schkade and Kahneman believe that participants exaggerated the impact of California's pleasant climate on life satisfaction, resulting in a focusing illusion, that is, they gave too much weight to the obvious differences between the two regions in their predictions.

The so-called focus illusion means that when we focus on where we focus, we exaggerate the importance of this part.

​

In the field of individual consumption, consumers may make wrong purchasing behaviors due to focusing illusion. For example, Xu and Schwarz (2007) found that people generally believe that buying a higher-priced car will lead to more pleasurable experiences than a lower-priced car. However, their further research results showed that the happiness experience of subjects when driving a car is usually not related to the economic value of the car. That is, the actual driving experience reported by subjects who drove high-priced cars and low-priced cars was the same, while Only when the car is the object of focus (e.g., taking a car for a spin) does the economic value of the car relate to the actual driving experience.

​In the area of ​​life decision-making, people may tend to focus on rare and meaningful events (such as a newborn's first smile) and ignore smaller but frequent negative events (such as changing a child's baby's baby's mouth). dirty diapers), thereby overestimating the happiness that having a child will bring (Powdthavee, 2009).

is like The famous psychologist Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, said that the most important moment for something is the moment you think about it.

To reveal this illusion, psychologist Strack surveyed 180 freshman and sophomore students at the University of Illinois and asked them two questions. Let’s try to answer these two questions below.

If I ask you: How happy do you think you are?

​After you answer, I will ask you again: How many dates did you go on last month?

When I ask you this, there is not much correlation between how many dates you go on and how happy you are. It seems that whether you date or not doesn't affect your happiness.

But if I ask you first: How many dates did you go on last month?

I will ask you again after you answer: How happy do you think you are?

In this way, your happiness depends largely on the number of dates you went on last month. This is the focusing illusion.

I use the first question to focus your attention on the number of dates. When you answer the question about happiness, you will judge whether you are happy based on the number of dates. Therefore, the "focus illusion" causes us to overestimate the importance of an event.

Think about it, if the family and social environment of an older single young man makes him focus on his marriage every day, then when he asks himself whether he is happy, he will naturally feel that his happiness is related to his marriage. Great relationship. If you focus on marriage, you will think that your happiness depends on marriage.

In addition, if the whole society is paying attention to and discussing housing prices, houses will be the focus of attention. If a happiness survey is conducted at this time and people are asked to judge whether they are happy, then people will naturally judge whether they are happy based on whether they own a house.

Although happiness may have nothing to do with houses, focusing on houses will make people feel that having a house is the decisive factor in happiness.

The same goes for money. Money is an important focus in our daily lives. We often talk about money, often think about money, and often see money-related news. Money is inseparable from work and life.

In this way, when we ask ourselves whether we are happy, we will think that money is an important factor affecting happiness - whether I am happy or not depends on whether I have money.

What we are paying attention to will be important to us. If the focus is on money, then we feel that money is necessary for happiness.

If you don’t have money, you have to pay attention to money, and if you don’t have a house, you still have to pay attention to the house. This is bound to bring a lot of unhappiness.

If you want to become happier, you can adjust your focus and focus on the things you have. In this way, your happiness can be greatly improved.