In both cases, students chose certainty over uncertainty and clarity over mystery—despite the fact that in both cases clarity and certainty had been shown to diminish happiness. The poet John Keats noted that whereas great authors are “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” the rest of us are “incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge.”39 Our relentless desire to explain everything that happens may well distinguish us from fruit flies, but it can also kill our buzz.
