Stumbling on Happiness

by Daniel Todd Gilbert

without also imagining how our psychological immune systems will transform its meaning

This trio of studies suggests that when people are deprived of the information that imagination requires and are thus forced to use others as surrogates, they make remarkably accurate predictions about their future feelings,

that the best way to predict our feelings tomorrow is to see how others are feeling today.

Because if you are like most people, then like most people, you don’t know you’re like most people.

Most students see themselves as more intelligent than the average student,26 most business managers see themselves as more competent than the average business manager,27 and most football players see themselves as having better “football sense” than their teammates.28 Ninety percent of motorists consider themselves to be safer-than-average drivers,29 and 94 percent of college professors consider themselves to be better-than-average teachers.

confused”), but fail to recognize that others’ decisions were similarly influenced

we tend to think of people as more different from one another than they actually

If you spent all day sorting grapes into different shapes, colors, and kinds, you’d become one of those annoying grapeophiles who talks endlessly about the

nuances of flavor and the permutations of texture. You’d come to think of grapes as infinitely varied, and you’d forget that almost all of the really important information about a grape can be deduced from the simple fact of its grapehood.