Ordinary vs Extraordinary Experiences: What Eight Studies Say About Age

It depends on how much time you feel you have left. In Bhattacharjee and Mogilner (2014, Journal of Consumer Research, 41(1): 1-17), people who saw a long future ahead got more happiness from rare, extraordinary experiences than from ordinary ones. As the felt future shrank, ordinary experiences caught up, until the two produced about the same happiness. The paper pools eight studies, none of which followed one person across decades.

What counts as ordinary and what counts as extraordinary?

The authors define ordinary experiences as “common, frequent, and within the realm of everyday life.” Extraordinary ones are “uncommon, infrequent, and go beyond the realm of everyday life.” The definition is about frequency only. They state it carries no judgment that rare means better.

People handled the split easily. In study 1B, 121 outside raters were shown experiences written by other people with the labels removed and sorted them into the right bin. In study 1C (272 people), the pattern held whether the experience was shared or solitary, so company alone did not explain it.

Which one made people happier?

Overall, extraordinary, but the average hides an interaction with age. In study 1A, 221 people aged 18 to 79 recalled either their most recent extraordinary or most recent ordinary experience that made them happy. Extraordinary experiences scored higher on average, and the advantage shrank as age rose (interaction b = -0.42, p < .03).

Study 1B repeated this with outside raters predicting how happy each experience would make them on a 9-point scale. Younger raters expected 6.98 from extraordinary and 6.20 from ordinary. Older raters expected 6.99 and 6.85, a difference that was not significant. Anticipated happiness from extraordinary experiences had zero correlation with age (r = .00), while ordinary rose with it (r = .26).

Is it age, or the time you think you have left?

The authors argue for time left, and ran three studies to separate the two.

• Study 2A: 230 Facebook users were recruited and 53 excluded, leaving 177 (my subtraction). The longer someone saw their future, the more likely their latest status update described an extraordinary experience.
• Study 2B: 106 undergraduates aged 19 to 24 described a happy experience they had had or planned to have. The same relationship appeared for both. Studies 2A and 2B used a 10-item future time perspective scale, with items such as “Most of my life lies ahead of me” and “My future seems infinite to me.”
• Study 2C: 214 people aged 18 to 34 were told life expectancy was either 80 or 40 years and saw a camera ad with the tagline “Capture life’s everyday moments” or “extraordinary moments.” This one measured purchase intention on a 7-point scale, not happiness. With a long horizon, the extraordinary tagline won (3.30 vs 2.55). With a short one, there was no reliable difference (3.08 vs 3.42).

Two things follow. A felt horizon can be nudged even in the young, and the paper’s evidence on that rests on a purchase rating.

Why would the ordinary Tuesday catch up?

The authors point to self-definition: how much an experience tells you who you are. Extraordinary experiences were self-defining at every age. With time, people increasingly defined themselves by the routines of daily life, such as “reading sci-fi, gardening, or singing in the church choir.” Study 3A tested this statistically and found self-definition accounted for the age pattern, and study 3B manipulated it. The authors note that defining the self through experience “becomes no less important with age.”

How should I decide between the trip and the Tuesday?

The paper does not offer a decision rule, so this is my exercise built on its logic.

1. List your last ten happy experiences and label each by frequency alone, rare or recurring, ignoring how impressive it sounds.
2. Rate yourself on the two scale items quoted above from 1 to 7. High scores mean the paper predicts more payoff from rare experiences. Low scores predict ordinary ones count for as much.
3. For each item, ask whether you would include it if someone asked who you are. Self-definition drove the effect, so the question is a better filter than cost or photo value.
4. Keep both columns funded. Extraordinary happiness stayed flat with age, so a trip never becomes a bad bet. The ordinary column is the one whose value you may be underestimating.

A planned trip also carries its own anticipation effect, covered in Nawijn et al.’s 1,530-person vacation study. The older experiences-versus-things result that Bhattacharjee and Mogilner build on is in Van Boven and Gilovich (2003). For the ordinary column, Quoidbach et al.’s savoring techniques are the tested toolkit.

What can’t this study tell you?

It cannot say your ordinary week will beat a trip. Its happiness ratings come from recalled experiences, predictions and posts, not from tracking people moment to moment. Most participants came from online panels, student pools or a business-school lab. Different ages were compared at one time point, so nobody was watched growing older.

The authors flag a bias too: despite their frequency-based definition, “extraordinary” may still read as “better,” so ordinary experiences may be underrated in the data. If so, the older groups’ tie between ordinary and extraordinary is, in their words, “especially remarkable.”