Stumbling on Happiness

by Daniel Todd Gilbert

It seems that our theories about how people of our gender usually feel can influence our memory of how we actually felt. Gender is but one of many theories that have this power to alter our memories. For instance, Asian culture does not emphasize the importance of personal happiness as much as European culture does, and thus Asian Americans believe that they are generally less happy than their European American counterparts. In one study, volunteers carried handheld computers everywhere they went for a week and recorded how they were feeling when the computer beeped at random intervals throughout the day.22 These reports showed that the Asian American volunteers were slightly happier than the European American volunteers. But when the volunteers were asked to remember how they had felt that week, the Asian American volunteers reported that they had felt less happy and not more. In a study using similar methodology, Hispanic Americans and European Americans reported feeling pretty much the same during a particular week, but the Hispanic Americans remembered feeling happier than the European Americans did.23 Not all theories involve some immutable characteristic of persons, such as gender or culture. For example, which students tend to score highest