Stumbling on Happiness

by Daniel Todd Gilbert

advice and opinions, they tend to confirm our favored conclusions—either because they share them or because they don’t want to hurt our feelings by telling us otherwise.

For example, studies reveal that people have a penchant for asking questions that are subtly engineered to manipulate the answers they receive.

Studies show that people intuitively lean toward asking the questions that are most likely to elicit the answers they want to hear.

In short, we derive support for our preferred conclusions by listening to the words that we put in the mouths of people who have already been preselected for their willingness to say what we want to hear.

The brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.

facts are actually nothing more than conjectures that have met a certain standard of proof.

Precisely the same thing happens when we want or don’t want to believe something about ourselves.

No, the problem was that round bowls deform the visual experience of their inhabitants, and goldfish have the fundamental right to see the world as it really is.

but the process by which we discover those facts must feel like a discovery and not like a snow job.

they must be based on facts that we believe we have come upon honestly.

Like so many things, getting jilted is more painful in prospect and more rosy in retrospect.

We do this quickly because our psychological immune systems have no trouble finding ways to exploit the ambiguity of this experience and soften its sting: “The guy wasn’t paying attention to my extraordinary pivot”

Being rejected by a large and diverse group of people is a demoralizing experience because it is so thoroughly unambiguous, and hence it is difficult for the psychological immune system to find a way to think about it that is both positive and credible.

they imagined its sharp sting. Period. They did not go on to imagine how their brains might try to relieve that sting.

people of every age and in every walk of life seem to regret not having done things much more than they regret things they did,

The irony is that you may ultimately feel better when you are the victim of an insult than when you are a bystander to it.

Apparently, people are not aware of the fact that their defenses are more likely to be triggered by intense than mild suffering, thus they mispredict their own emotional reactions to misfortunes of different sizes.

It is only when we cannot change the experience that we look for ways to change our view of the experience,

Apparently, inescapable circumstances trigger the psychological defenses that enable us to achieve positive views of those circumstances,

For example, simply writing about a trauma—such as the

death of a loved one or a physical assault—can lead to surprising improvements in both subjective well-being and physical health

Explanations allow us to understand how and why an event happened, which immediately allows us to see how and why it might happen again.

Unexplained events seem rare, and rare events naturally have a greater emotional impact than common events do.

Once we explain an event, we can fold it up like freshly washed laundry, put it away in memory’s drawer, and move on to the next one; but if an event defies explanation, it becomes a mystery or a conundrum

Explanation robs events of their emotional impact because it makes them seem likely and allows us to stop thinking about them.

mystery—despite the fact that in both cases clarity and certainty had been shown to diminish happiness.

we do not realize that we have generated a positive view of our current experience, we do not realize that we will do so again in the future.

Because babies lack both firsthand knowledge and secondhand knowledge of proper potty protocol, we expect them to make a stinky mess—but we also expect that within a few years, practice and coaching will begin to have their remedial effects, innocence will yield to experience and education, and pooping errors will disappear altogether.

memory does have a few quirks that cause it to misrepresent the past and hence causes us to misimagine the future.

frequently you encounter them, and the frequency of your encounters determines how easily you

when commuters thought about train-missing, the single most inconvenient and frustrating episodes tended to come to their minds

Most instances of train missing are ordinary and forgettable, hence when we think about train missing, we tend to remember the most extraordinary instances.

because we don’t recognize the real reasons why these awful episodes come quickly to mind, we mistakenly conclude that they are more common than they actually are.

As such, when we look back on the entire series, our impression is strongly influenced by its final items.

Memory’s fetish for endings explains why women often remember childbirth as less painful than it actually was,

We remember feeling as we believe we must have felt. The problem with this error of retrospection is that it can keep us from discovering our errors of prospection.

The theories that lead us to predict that an event will make us happy (“If Bush wins, I’ll be elated”) also lead us to remember that it did

One of the benefits of being a social and linguistic animal is that we can capitalize on the experience of others rather than trying to figure everything out for ourselves.

The six billion interconnected people who cover the surface of our planet constitute a leviathan with twelve billion eyes, and anything that is seen by one pair of eyes can potentially be known to the entire beast in a matter of months, days, or even minutes.

Almost any time we tell anyone anything, we are attempting to change the way their brains operate—attempting to change the way they see the world so that their view of it more closely resembles our own.

Genes tend to be transmitted when they make us do the things that transmit genes.

they have generally concluded that wealth increases human happiness when it lifts people out of abject poverty and into the middle class but that it does little to increase happiness thereafter.

If food and money both stop pleasing us once we’ve had enough of them, then why do we continue to stuff our pockets when we would not continue to stuff our faces?

Smith believed that people want just one thing—happiness—hence economies can blossom and grow only if people are deluded into believing that the production of wealth will make them happy.

But it is also true that when people tell us about their current experiences (“How am I feeling right now? I feel like pulling my arm out of this freezing bucket and sticking my teenager’s head in it instead!”), they are providing us with the kind of report about their subjective state that is considered the gold standard of happiness measures.

Instead of remembering our past experience in order to simulate our future experience, perhaps we should simply ask other people to introspect on their inner states.

First let me prove to you that the experience of a single randomly selected individual can sometimes provide a better basis for predicting your future experience than your own imagination can.

imagination’s first shortcoming is its tendency to fill in and leave out without telling us

Imagination’s second shortcoming is its tendency to project the present onto the future

Anyone who has ever shopped on an empty stomach,