Self-reports of well-being: Are they valid even if we can’t remember everything that happens to us?

• Main Author: TOV, William
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2014
• Subjects: Social Psychology
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/1660
• Institution: Singapore Management University

People can complete self-report measures of happiness and satisfaction fairly quickly. This suggests that they are not recalling every event they have experienced during a specific period of time. Previous researchers have thus argued that well-being judgments are made-up on the spot from whichever events happen to be on the person’s mind. I report the results of two studies that measured people’s experiences over a period of three-weeks (Study 1) or two months (Study 2). I evaluate the extent to which our conscious recollection of specific events trumps our actual experiences and conclude that people may be able to (1) summarize their experiences fairly comprehensively; (2) these summaries are based on their actual experiences and are distinct from their conscious memory of specific events; and (3) self-reported well-being is more strongly predicted by summarized experiences than conscious recollection of a few events.