Adaptive Preferences and Capabilities: Some Preliminary Conceptual Explorations

Abstract

The Capability Approach (CA) as developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, has in part been a response to the problem of adaptive preferences. Their argument says that people might adapt to certain unfavorable circumstances and any self-evaluation in terms of satisfaction or happiness will in this case necessarily be distorted. To evaluate people's well-being in terms of functionings and capabilities guarantees a more objective picture of people's life. Next to this strong criticism on subjective measurements of well-being, we observe an increasing interest in Subjective Well-Being (SWB) or Happiness studies that are included in the broader field of Hedonic Psychology. In this paper, we thus revise the original critique of adaptive preferences and compare it with a more detailed analysis of adaptation as it is presented in hedonic psychology. It becomes clear that adaptation can be a positive as well as a negative phenomenon and that the adaptive preference critique had a particular narrow view on adaptation. However, this does not mean SWB-research is not any longer susceptible to this critique. An alternative way to assess people's subjective well-being, but which could be considered to be more in line with the CA, is proposed by Daniel Kahneman's Objective Happiness. These are all relatively new considerations, especially in economics. Therefore much more research needs to be done on the positive and negative aspects of adaptation to understand its consequences on well-being – especially when evaluated within the capability-space.

Keywords:

• functionings
• capabilities
• adaptation
• subjective well-being
• objective happiness

Notes

1 The term “hedonic psychology” is taken from Kahneman et al.'s (1999) Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology which is an edited volume that regroups several articles, written mostly by psychologists who engage in the study of subjective as well as objective happiness.

2 Following Richard A. Easterlin's (1974) article “Does economic growth improve the human lot?: Some empirical evidence”, in which he shows that there is a low relation between income and SWB.

3 Principally developed by Martin E. P. Seligman. See Peterson, Maier, Seligman (1993).

4 Following Leon Festinger (1957)

5 As Olson and Schober (1993) suggest that the theory of cognitive dissonance alone cannot explain resigned adaptation that leads to the “happy poor” in adverse circumstances. However, alone in relation to the processes occurring in cognitive dissonance reduction, Elliot and Devine (1994) state: “A comprehensive understanding of cognitive dissonance theory will only be obtained when dissonance researchers painstakingly explore, reconceptualize, and eventually validate each segment of the dissonance process, from the initial presentation of the dissonance induction to the final alleviation of the dissonance state” (p. 17). How much more must this apply to resigned adaptation!

6 Kahneman writes: “The hypothesis is that, as in the case of income, improved circumstances could cause people to require ever more frequent and more intense pleasures to maintain the same level of satisfaction with their hedonic life” (1999: 14). It seems not quite clear if the satisfaction boundary shifts proportionally or disproportionally with people's circumstances.

7 Kahneman, however, takes the view that an experience to which people have become habituated and thus appears as normal does not necessarily mean that it has become affectively neutral. “Breakfast is almost always pleasant even when thoroughly routinized, and shaving cuts will remain unpleasant even for an inept shaver who cuts himself every morning” (Kahneman 1999: 13).

8 See Ruut Veenhoven, World Database for Happiness at http://www2.eur.nl/fsw/research/happiness/.See also World Value Survey at http://wvs.isr.umich.edu/ques3.shtml

9 Olson and Schober (1993) distinguish between two types of assistances for long-term poor: instrumental help and in-kind help. Whereas the former implies activating personal coping capacities of the individual, which will eliminate their helplessness, the latter reinforces the satisfaction with current circumstances and does not motivate the individual to engage in active changes.