Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness
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Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness
by Rebecca Sanborn Stone
Within the first few minutes of waking up this morning, you likely made a dozen quick decisions: how many times to hit the snooze button; how long to stay in the shower; which clothes to try on, which to take back off, and which to eventually wear. Over the course of our lives we each make perhaps millions of choices ranging from miniscule to monumental, intelligent to inane, slapdash to scrupulous, calculated to chance.
According to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, nearly all of these decisions and the corresponding actions that follow are designed to improve how happy we think we will be in the future – whether a minute, a day, a year, or a decade from now. “We go easy on the lard and tobacco, smile dutifully at yet another of our supervisor’s witless jokes, read books like this one when we could be wearing paper hats and eating pistachio macaroons in the bathtub, and we do each of these things in the charitable service of the people we will soon become,” he writes.
Unfortunately, we seem to be downright terrible at predicting what will make us happy (or healthy, safe, successful, popular, and satisfied) in the future, and our future selves know it. “We toil and sweat to give them what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they’d like that,” bemoans Gilbert. To make matters worse, thinking that we know what will make us happy seems to be a detriment to eventual happiness itself. Gilbert’s new book, Stumbling on Happiness (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), is an attempt to explain the mental blunders in our collective pursuit of happiness, as well as to provide strategies for arresting them.
Müller-Lyer Lines
Most of us have marveled at optical illusions such as the Müller-Lyer lines (left), which somehow force our eyes to believe things we logically know to be incorrect; as we make decisions about our experiences and the world around us, we are subject just as surely to illusions of memory, perception, and imagination. Illusions are fascinating in that we all make the same mistakes in seeing them – everyone viewing the Müller-Lyer lines incorrectly perceives the top line to be longer than the bottom one – and many judgmental errors about future happiness are the same. “The mistakes we make when we try to imagine our personal futures are also lawful, regular, and systematic,” Gilbert writes, “They too have a pattern that tells us about the powers and limits of foresight in much the same way that optical illusions tell us about the powers and limits of eyesight.”
When we imagine what life will be like in the future or recall memories from the past, we conveniently forget unpleasant details and imagine things will work out well even when they probably won’t, which are both behaviors with deep-rooted evolutionary purposes. We allow our current feelings to color our decisions for the future, which is why it is never wise to go grocery shopping on an empty stomach. We misunderstand the laws of probability and over- or under-estimate the likelihood that certain events will occur. We assume that free choice brings satisfaction, when in fact we are often happiest with pre-determined outcomes.
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Gilbert’s logic applies to community decision-making as well as to our personal lives. Citizens at town meeting or voting on Election Day make decisions based on the same errors of logic and omission as do our elected officials and municipal boards. Like meta-populations, institutions operate through the collective means of individuals: planning commissions, city councils, state legislatures, and even presidential cabinets presumably meet and debate in an effort to ensure their constituencies’ future happiness, and presumably fail just as surely as we each do in our own lives.
Study after study shows that decisions based on the thinking errors Gilbert points out leave us unhappy or at least less satisfied than we could be, and they morph from simple annoyances into real threats because we don’t even know we are making them. Examples pop up every day in our communities and in our lives: we fear flying because we remember horrific scenes of plane crashes, even though we know that it is statistically safer to fly than to get in the car. We spend a day’s paycheck on a concert and a handful of new CDs because retirement is so far off, even though we know it is necessary to begin saving now. We decide against installing windmills on our ridgelines because degraded mountainsides and noisy towers are easier and more unpleasant to conjure than the vague, distant, and dispersed threat of climate change.
The good news is that there are ways to improve personal decision-making, which can improve community decision-making as well. Getting the opinion of a disinterested party almost always ensures that a decision is based on a more complete picture of reality than any one of us holds alone. Communities already do this when they hire consultants for transportation or waste management systems, but even smaller and more “personal” decisions could benefit from outside perspectives. Using data and analysis to test our understanding of probability can also help to boost the accuracy of expectations. On a more individual basis, Gilbert points to studies suggesting that we are better at accurately and fairly predicting future happiness when we are asked to describe a future scenario, rather than just to predict how satisfied we will be. Whether it is imagining life in a town with a wind turbine or life without one more Bob Dylan concert, the act of describing tends to put decisions in perspective and help us realize that happiness is a much bigger picture than we often lead ourselves to believe.
The next time you are faced with a big decision (Boxers of briefs? Supersize fries or garden salad? Hillary or Barack? One sugar or two?), you may come closer to imagining your true happiness, but beware that you will still likely fall victim to at least one of the brain’s sleights of mind. “If our great big brains do not allow us to go surefootedly into our futures, they at least allow us to understand what makes us stumble,” Gilbert writes.
Perhaps that is what makes them great after all.