Focusing effect Painting

A cognitive error consisting in paying too much attention to one detail, which disturbs the rational assessment of the usefulness of the solution under consideration. This effect is easily observed by examining people's judgments about someone's happiness and satisfaction. People then tend to focus on the most visible premises, ignoring most of the non-obvious ones. For example, in the United States, an opinion poll was conducted on the perceptions of whether California residents are happier than residents of the Midwestern states. Both residents of these states and California residents judged that Californians must be much happier, when in fact no such differences were found. The error resulted from focusing on factors such as sunny weather and the supposed carelessness of living in California, while ignoring other factors such as high crime and the threat of earthquakes. The evaluators did not take into account the fact that people tend to get used to all conditions, which means that the impact of these conditions on our happiness is usually much smaller than we would expect.