| I find a lot of this interesting and plausible, but have to take issue with: > Hedonic Adaptation ... Enjoyment of a television program is actually enhanced by commercial interruptions, despite what viewers say. I haven't read the study cited, so can only imagine the reasoning and data, but I suspect a lot is hanging on the way enjoyment is measured here. One way of measuring it might be to give people a choice between watching with and without commercials. I'd be pretty surprised if more chose "with." (Do people always act to maximise their own perceived enjoyment, all else being equal? Is there an objective measurement of enjoyment, beyond self-reported perceived enjoyment? Deep philosophical issues lurking here.) I don't dispute the principle - my personal struggle with chocolate consumption bears out its applicability to abstinence/pleasure trade-offs there. But this particular datapoint doesn't ring true. Perhaps if the interruptions were furnished by pure radio silence I might be more amenable. An anecdote relayed by my old CS tutor: in one production-line, where the shop floor "enjoyed" pop music via the radio, it was found that a regime of 15 minutes on / 15 minutes off gave the best results. As he put it: "When it's off they can look forward to it coming on; when it's on, they can look forward to it going off." |
There's the standard issue of measuring happiness, sure, since it's hard to find other than a self-reported subjective measurement for it.
But in general, the principle that what matters most to keep us happy is a steady "upwards trajectory" where things keeps getting somewhat better is getting quite decently researched from a lot of angles. According to Haidt, the studies he refers to in his book supports the claim that once basic needs (food, shelter) has been met, happiness deviates from a lot of what we people tend to think:
It is only mildly correlated with wealth, for example, and then largely because being wealthy allows for more opportunity for an upwards trajectory. However, people who suddenly come into wealth (e.g. lottery winners) report a lot of happiness for a short interval after winning, but then quickly return to "base level".
And another example of the "hedonic adaptation" is that while mental illness such as depression can have a long term impact on happiness, but most other illness does not. Amputees, people with long term horrible chronic illnesses, people who are told they have only a few years left to live etc., that we often feel sorry for and assume will be miserable, all tend to return to base level happiness fairly quickly on average with the exception of those with degenerative conditions that put them on an ongoing downward trajectory. In fact, some groups will tend to be more happy than typical: Those who are slowly recovering from a horrible situation, and who thus see steady improvement in their situation.
With respect to the TV example, I find it quite plausible (with the caveat that I've not read the study either), as pacing in story-telling has already follows a pattern where you set up tension, release it and slows down the story, then set up tension again, for pretty much as long as people have been telling dramatic stories.
Pretty much all movies follow a pattern with "tension release" at least once or twice before the climax as well. I remember my English teacher drawing up diagrams of pacing a bunch of movies when I was in school even.
A perfect example of the alternative - to try to maintain an upwards trajectory as much as possible - would be Crank and Crank 2 with Jason Statham (though arguable even those movies cycle through periods with "lulls" in the action, just on a very accelerated schedule), which indeed tries to keep an insane pace throughout. In those movies it's used as a gimmick (Statham needs to keep his heart going with drugs etc. in the first movie, and needs to keep an artificial heart charged in the second, with antics that in no way try to be realistic at any point), but when you contrast the start of the first movie with the latter parts of the second, you see the result: To make it feel like the pressure is "kept up" the pace keeps accelerating to absolutely ridiculous levels. It's almost tiring to watch.
That ad breaks could provide some of the function in TV programs would thus not seem strange to me at all.