This is a linkpost for The heavy-tailed valence hypothesis: the human capacity for vast variation in pleasure/pain and how to test it by Andrés Gómez-Emilsson and Chris Percy, which was published in Frontiers in Psychology on 16 November 2023. The abstract is below. Relatedly, I liked the posts Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain: Rating, Ranking, and Comparing Peak Experiences Suggest the Existence of Long Tails for Bliss and Suffering by Andrés, and Reminding myself just how awful pain can get (plus, an experiment on myself) by Ren Ryba.
Abstract
Introduction:
Wellbeing policy analysis is often criticized for requiring a cardinal interpretation of measurement scales, such as ranking happiness on an integer scale from 0-10. The commonly-used scales also implicitly constrain the human capacity for experience, typically that our most intense experiences can only be at most ten times more intense than our mildest experiences. This paper presents the alternative “heavy-tailed valence” (HTV) hypothesis: the notion that the accessible human capacity for emotional experiences of pleasure and pain spans a minimum of two orders of magnitude.
Methods:
We specify five testable predictions of the HTV hypothesis. A pilot survey of adults aged 21-64 (n = 97) then tested two predictions, asking respondents to comment on the most painful and most pleasurable experiences they can recall, alongside the second most painful and pleasurable experiences.
Results:
The results find tentative support for the hypothesis. For instance, over half of respondents said their most intense experiences were at least twice as intense as the second most intense, implying a wide capacity overall. Simulations further demonstrate that survey responses are more consistent with underlying heavy-tailed distributions of experience than a “constrained valence” psychology.
Discussion:
A synthesis of these results with prior findings suggests a “kinked” scale, such that a wide range of felt experience is compressed in reports at the high end of intensity scales, even if reports at lower intensities behave more cardinally. We present a discussion of three stylized facts that support HTV and six against, lessons for a future survey, practical guidelines for existing analyses, and implications for current policy. We argue for a dramatic increase in societal ambition. Even in high average income countries, the HTV hypothesis suggests we remain far further below our wellbeing potential than a surface reading of the data might suggest.
I think the method proposed in this article would be better suited to measure (individual differences in) the range of positive and negative experiences. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010027725002562
Hi Falk. Thanks for sharing that relevant article. Here is a summary from Gemini. To apply the method proposed there, one could assess the intensity of the Welfare Footprint Institute's (WFI's) pain and pleasure categories based on time trade-offs? I think the categories are still subjective, but more objective than a pain score from 0 to 10.
The Gemini summary is inaccurate. Instead, the key idea is to ask people to rate each experience on an unconstrained scale, with a reference point that is the same for everyone. For instance, one could ask people to place their palm on a desk, then put a jug filled with three gallons of water on top of it, and then ask, "If the intensity of the pain you are feeling now is 20, then what number best represents the intensity of the suffering you felt when X happened?" for different events X.
This is what I understood from Gemini's summary.
The method also works, although less accurately, if people just read about the reference scenario (in the same way that they just read about X in your example)? If so, one could ask people to compare the intensity of different pain categories via time trade-offs? For example, if a person is indifferent between 10 h of annoying pain, and 1 h of hurtful pain, annoying pain would be 10 % (= 1/10) as intense for them as hurtful pain.
The method would probably work less well with an imagined reference scenario unless people have experienced something similar. I also agree that one could pair this method with the time-tradeoff method. It might work better because people are better at making decisions than at making numerical judgments. On the other hand, the subjective decision utility of pain is probably not linear in its duration. By that, I don't mean to claim that the amount of suffering doesn't linearly increase with the duration of pain. Instead, I am claiming that people's decision-making values the duration of pain in ways that may be irrational.