From the Mamas and the Papas’ “Monday, Monday” to the Carpenters’ “Rainy Days and Mondays” to the Boomtown Rats’ supremely creepy “I Don’t Like Mondays,” the first day of the work and school week has been vilified as a day of depression.
But new research shows that people’s moods don’t really change that much over the course of a week: people are not, in fact, noticeably happier on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings than they are on Mondays.
Yet they both expect to be, and believe they were, and so the myth persists.
That’s according to Charles Areni, a marketing professor at the University of Sidney in Australia, in a paper published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.
Areni and colleague Mitchell Burger of the NTF Group (a marketing consulting firm) asked 202 people what they imagined their typical mood was on each day of the week. Not surprisingly, people though their worst moods were experienced on Monday morning and evenings and their best moods on Friday and Saturday mornings and evenings.
But when Areni and Burger actually tested another 351 people’s moods by asking them how they felt each day, on that day, they found that in fact most people’s mood remained about the same throughout the week: Mondays weren’t as depressing, nor Fridays and Saturdays as exciting, as expected.
There are probably a couple of reasons for this. One is something called memory bias.
When we draw on our memories to make predictions about our future happiness–or decisions aimed at achieving future happiness–we tend to give more weight to extreme examples, both positive and negative, which colour our perceptions.
A 2005 study by Dr. Carey Morwedge from Harvard University demonstrated this very neatly. Morwedge randomly divided 62 subway passengers into three groups and asked them to describe an occasion when they had missed the train.
However, each group was asked the question a little bit differently. Members of one group (“free recallers”) were asked to describe any time they had missed the train. “Biased recallers” were asked to describe the worst time they missed the train, and “varied recallers” were asked to describe any three instances. Each participant then indicated how happy or unhappy they were each time.
Both the “biased recallers” and the “free recallers” came up with equally depressing accounts, while the “varied recallers” usually recalled at least one positive experience among their three examples.
That suggests that when you’re trying to recall some previous time an event occurred, you’re likely to recall the worst instance, not the best; but if you think about it some more, you’re more likely to come up with a positive example.
The study didn’t end there. The participants were next asked how they unhappy they would be if they were to miss the train today. The free recallers predicted they’d be the unhappiest, while the biased recallers, even though they’d also recalled times in the past when missing the train had been an unhappy experience, weren’t nearly as likely to predict they’d be that unhappy at missing the train again.
The reason, according to Morwedge, was that the biased recallers had consciously focused on selecting a bad memory from the past. The free recallers hadn’t. As a result, they didn’t realize their memory was biased (even though it was), and so they gave more weight to it in predicting their reaction if the same thing happened again.
Another reason we think Mondays are going to be worse than they actually are is the conflict between memory and meaning. We have trouble remembering mixed emotions, and so the meaning we assign to an event helps guide our recollections.
For example, if we think of weddings as happy occasions, then we’re more likely to remember being happy at a particular wedding (including our own) even if we spent quite a bit of the event grumpy or annoyed.
All of this means that even though the research indicates we aren’t any unhappier on Mondays than on other days of the week, many of us will continue to claim we hate Mondays…simply because we expect to.
(Personally, I like Mondays. But I’m weird.)
