SCIENCE: Why dream jobs disappoint
Stated preferences, revealed preferences, and the arrival fallacy
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Want to know why what you actually want and what you say you want aren’t the same thing?
Read on.
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About one weekend a month, I do a locums shift.
I take a train to Providence and then drive about 90 minutes east to a hospital on Cape Cod. For a four-day stretch, I’m the ENT on call for that hospital, a neighboring hospital, and the clinics that surround them.
It’s like the old-timey traveling preachers, except with an otoscope.
I enjoy those shifts…for the first three days. And then, inevitably, a consult comes in that flips a switch.
There’s never anything extraordinary about the consult itself, no identifiable reason for why that particular phone call teleports me from enjoyment to “Ugh…I can NOT keep doing this.”
Every time I’m teleported, the feeling I land in is very familiar. I felt it constantly when I was a full-time doctor.
But I trained myself to ignore that feeling, because being a full-time doctor was supposed to be a dream job. It provided me with the things I said I wanted: the chance to do good in the world, the chance to impact people, a steady income, social acceptability.
What I said I wanted, and what I actually wanted, however, did not align.
Last week, I bared my soul a bit and told you about not even making it two years at what was supposed to be my dream job.
In doing the research for that story and for this month’s posts, I also realized just how common what I experienced is. You finally accomplish a dream, and, once you get there, you’re surprised at just how miserable life inside that dream actually is.
Doesn’t matter what the dream is. Dream jobs, dream cities, dream cars, dream marriages—none of them is immune to souring.
Why does this happen so often? Are we all just deeply messed up, or is there something else going on?
Short answer: definitely #2. Maybe also #1.
This week, let’s talk about two fascinating decision science phenomena: the difference between revealed and stated preferences, and something called the arrival fallacy.
Photo by Gilbert Ng on Unsplash
Stated vs. Revealed Preferences: You don’t always want what you want
When toy companies consider releasing a new product, they do a whole lot of market research. And that’s because little things matter. It turns out, for example, that the color of a product can massively influence how often people buy it.
(Except, that is, when it has no influence at all).
To figure out what their customers want, marketers can do two things:
They could ask their customers, or
They could observe them
The first is easier to do. Consumer surveys are a dime a dozen, and they’re not hard to put together. Convene a focus group to determine what aspects of the product people care about (is it price? is it color? is it durability?). And then ask about 2000 other people a bunch of questions about those aspects.
Ask enough people, do enough math, voilà, a profile of consumer preferences, ranked from strongest to weakest.
Simple, right?
Well, ish. See, it turns out that when people actually go shopping, they don’t always behave the way they said they would.
In fact, only about 80% of consumers act, in reality, in line with how they answer surveys.
In other, more technical, words, the preferences that they reveal by their actions are not always the preferences that they stated in a survey.
Stated preferences ≠ Revealed preferences
Back in 2015, Mattijs Lambooij and his colleagues from the Dutch National Institute of Health and the Environment wanted to see if people’s acted the way they said they would when it came to vaccines.
They picked two perennially controversial vaccines—for HPV and flu—and asked people about their willingness to take them.
And then, because you can do this in countries with strong healthcare systems, they looked up whether these folks actually got the vaccines.
And here’s what they found: when people said they would get vaccinated, 85% of the time, they actually did.
On the other hand, when people said they wouldn’t get vaccinated, 75% of the time, they still actually did!
Concrete proof that stated preferences are not the same as revealed preferences.
Which is exactly what happened in my dream job. To quote from last week:
I had said I wanted academic advancement, but I despised the politicking, the administrative burden that came with it.
I had said I wanted to be funded, but I didn’t love the fund-raising and the donor strings that came with it.
I had said I wanted to grow a department, but I despised (more than anything!) the HR management, especially the times it felt like nobody cared about bad behavior.
It turns out that running a department requires all of those things, and I wanted nothing to do with a single one of them.
What I said I wanted, and what I actually wanted? Two vastly different things. Because what I said I wanted was deeply influenced by the things that I, as an academic, was supposed to want.
The Arrival Fallacy: The Grass Isn’t Greener
It gets worse.
One reason the dream job might not turn out to be such a dream is because of the stated-revealed mismatch (and stick around; next week we’ll talk aboutsome ways to tell those two apart).
But there’s another bias operating on our brains when it comes to big, consequential choices like jobs, relationships, and cities. It’s called The Arrival Fallacy.
Back when I was training as a doctor, and hating every minute of it, one of the most consistent pieces of advice I received was “stick it out; it gets better.”
And you know what, that advice isn’t wrong. It does get better. Being an attending doctor is way better than being a resident.
The thing is, it wasn’t better enough. Because see, when I finally got to Better, when I finally finished my training, when I finally got my first job as an academic surgeon at a big hospital in a big city, when I finally arrived… all I could think was, “This is it?? This isn’t what I signed up for.”
That’s the Arrival Fallacy.
When life is rough, when we’re living out of line with what we want, when we’re sitting in a relationship that isn’t what we dreamed of, our brains activate their psychological immune system.
Because misery isn’t easily sustainable, our brains calm us with the assurance of a future joy. Stick it out; it gets better. There is good on the other side of this.
The fallacy was given its name by Tal Ben Shahar, a Harvard cognitive psychologist and competitive squash player. As he defined it, the Arrival Fallacy is the “illusion that once we make it, once we attain our goal or reach our destination, we will reach lasting happiness.”
The arrival fallacy is the illusion that once we make it, we will reach lasting happiness
He’d first noticed the fallacy when playing squash. An elite squash player, the game had extracted its toll, physically, mentally, psychically. He justified that toll, though, by telling himself that if he could win the Israeli national championship, it would all be worth it. He would finally achieve enduring happiness.
He did (win the championship).
And he didn’t (achieve enduring happiness).
Can you see how these two cognitive processes combine to turn dream jobs into nightmares?
If your actual preferences aren’t in line with what you say your preferences are, and then, if you layer on top of that a lot of hard work in pursuit of your not-so-aligned preferences, propelled by a promise that once you get there, it’ll all be good—that’s just a recipe for deep, deep dissatisfaction.
The good news is, there are ways to counteract both these fallacies.
But that’s for next week (sorry!). In next week’s post:
How to align your inside with your outside
How to notice and defuse the arrival fallacy
See you there!
And in the meantime, I’d love to hear your stories. Did your dream job turn into a nightmare? Or was it the dream you’d hoped?
Leave your comments below ↓
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