Stumbling on Happiness

by Daniel Todd Gilbert

However, volunteers who had made their predictions while identifying musical tones were unable to correct their judgments, and as such, their ending point was quite close to their starting point. Because we naturally use our present feelings as a starting point when we attempt to predict our future feelings, we expect our future to feel a bit more like our present than it actually will.

Why would people be willing to reduce their total income in order to avoid experiencing a cut in pay?

The human brain is not particularly sensitive to the absolute magnitude of stimulation, but it is extraordinarily sensitive to differences and changes—that is, to the relative magnitude of stimulation.

Our sensitivity to relative rather than absolute magnitudes is not limited to physical properties such as weight, brightness, or volume. It extends to subjective properties, such as value, goodness, and worth as well.

But these economic arguments fall on deaf ears because human beings don’t think in absolute dollars. They think in relative dollars, and fifty is or isn’t a lot of dollars depending on what it is relative to (which is why people who don’t worry about whether their mutual-fund manager is keeping 0.5 or 0.6 percent of their investment will nonetheless spend hours scouring the Sunday paper for a coupon that gives them 40 percent off a tube of toothpaste). Marketers, politicians, and other agents of influence know about our obsession with relative magnitudes and routinely turn it to their own advantage.

Studies show that people are much more likely to agree to pay the small cost after having first contemplated the large one, in part because doing so makes the small cost seems so . . . er, bearable.21

For instance, people are more likely to purchase a vacation package that has been marked down from $600 to $500 than an identical package that costs $400 but that was on sale the previous day for $300.23 Because it is easier to compare a vacation package’s price with its former price than with the price of other things one might buy, we end up preferring bad deals that have become decent deals to great deals that were once amazing deals.

We make mistakes when we compare with the past instead of the possible.

These nice folks helped you overcome your natural tendency to compare with the past (“Is this television really that much better than my old one?”) by making it extremely easy for you to compare with the possible (“When you see them side by side here in the store, the Panasonic has a much sharper picture than the Sony”). Alas, we are all too easily fooled by such side-by-side comparisons, which is why retailers work so hard to ensure that we make them.

For example, people generally don’t like to buy the most expensive item in a category, hence retailers can improve their sales by stocking a few very expensive items that no one actually buys (“Oh my God, the 1982 Château Haut-Brion Pessac-Léognan sells for five hundred dollars a bottle!”) but that make less expensive items seem like a bargain by comparison (“I’ll just stick with the sixty-dollar zinfandel”).25 Unscrupulous real estate agents bring buyers to dilapidated dumps that are conveniently located between a massage parlor and a crack house before bringing them to the ordinary homes that they actually hope to sell, because the dumps make the ordinary homes seem extraordinary (“Oh, look, honey, no needles on the lawn!”).

Our side-by-side comparisons can be influenced by extreme possibilities such as extravagant wines and dilapidated houses, but they can also be influenced by the addition of extra possibilities that are identical to those we are already considering. For example, in one study, physicians read about Medication X and were then asked whether they would prescribe the medication for a patient with osteoarthritis.27 The physicians clearly considered the medication worthwhile, because only 28 percent chose not to prescribe it. But when another group of physicians was asked whethe...

just as the person you might have been making love with is largely irrelevant when you are in the middle of making love with someone else.

Our mistake was not in touring Paris with a couple of dull homies but in failing to realize that the comparison we were making in the present (“Lisa and Walter are so much nicer than the waiter at Le Grand Colbert”) is not the comparison we would be making in the future (“Lisa and Walter aren’t nearly as nice as Toni and Dan”). The

For instance, economists and psychologists have shown that people expect losing a dollar to have more impact than gaining a dollar, which is why most of us would refuse a bet that gives us an 85 percent chance of doubling our life savings and a 15 percent chance of losing it.

Because you would be thinking about the transaction as a potential gain (“Compared with how I feel now, how happy will I be if I get this car?”) and I would be thinking about it as a potential loss (“Compared with how I feel now, how happy will I be if I lose this car?”).35 I would want to be compensated for what I expected to be a powerful loss, but you would not want to compensate me because you would be expecting a less powerful gain.

What I would be failing to realize is that once I didn’t own the car, my frame of reference would shift, I would be making the same comparison that you’re making now, and that I’d be delighted with the deal because, after all, I’d never pay $2,000 for a car that was identical to the one I just sold you. The reason why we disagree on the price and quietly question each other’s integrity and parenthood is that neither of us realizes that the kinds of comparisons we are naturally making as buyers and sellers are not the kinds of comparisons we will naturally make once we become owners and former owners.

comparisons we make have a profound impact on our feelings, and when we fail to recognize that the comparisons we are making today are not the comparisons we will make tomorrow, we predictably underestimate how differently we will feel in the future.

As much as we all despise racism and sexism, these isms have only recently been considered moral turpitudes, and thus condemning Thomas Jefferson for keeping slaves or Sigmund Freud for patronizing women is a bit like arresting someone today for having driven without a seat belt in 1923.

For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

The moral of the story? If you want to be happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise, then skip the vitamin pills and the plastic surgeries and try public humiliation, unjust incarceration, or quadriplegia instead.

For at least a century, psychologists have assumed that terrible events—such as having a loved one die or becoming the victim of a violent crime—must have a powerful, devastating, and enduring impact on those who experience them.1 This assumption has been so deeply embedded in our conventional wisdom that people who don’t have dire reactions to events such as these are sometimes diagnosed as having a pathological condition known as “absent grief.” But recent research suggests that the conventional wisdom is wrong, that the absence of grief is quite normal, and that rather than being the fragile flowers that a century of psychologists have made us out to be, most people are surprisingly resilient in the face of trauma. The loss of a parent or spouse is usually sad and often tragic, and it would be perverse to suggest otherwise. But the fact is that while most bereaved people are quite sad for a while, very few become chronically depressed and most experience relatively low levels of relatively short-lived distress.2 Although more than half the people in the United States will experience a trauma such as rape, physical assault, or natural disaster in their lifetimes, only a small fraction will ever develop any post-traumatic pathology or require any professional assistance.

As one group of researchers noted, “Resilience is often the most commonly observed outcome trajectory following exposure to a potentially traumatic event.”4 Indeed, studies of those who survive major traumas suggest that the vast majority do quite well, and that a significant portion claim that their lives were enhanced by the experience.

The fact is that negative events do affect us, but they generally don’t affect us as much or for as long as we expect them to.11 When people are asked to predict how they’ll feel if they lose a job or a romantic partner, if their candidate loses an important election or their team loses an important game, if they flub an interview, flunk an exam, or fail a contest, they consistently overestimate how awful they’ll feel and how long they’ll feel awful.

Able-bodied people are willing to pay far more to avoid becoming disabled than disabled people are willing to pay to become able-bodied again because able-bodied people underestimate how happy disabled people are.13 As one group of researchers

But if we were preparing to eat one of them, our brains would automatically exploit the ambiguity of that food’s identity and allow us to think of it in a way that pleased us (delicious dessert or nutritious veggie) rather than a way that did not (fattening dessert or bitter veggie). As soon as our potential experience becomes our actual experience—as soon as we have a stake in its goodness—our brains get busy looking for ways to think about the experience that will allow us to appreciate it.

Because experiences are inherently ambiguous, finding a “positive view” of an experience is often as simple as finding the “below-you view” of a Necker cube, and research shows that most people do this well and often. Consumers evaluate kitchen appliances more positively after they buy them,20 job seekers evaluate jobs more positively after they accept them,21 and high school students evaluate colleges more positively after they get into them.22 Racetrack gamblers evaluate their horses more positively when they are leaving the betting window than when they are approaching it,23 and voters evaluate their candidates more positively when they are exiting the voting booth than when they are entering it.24

The world is this way, we wish the world were that way, and our experience of the world—how we see it, remember it, and imagine it—is a mixture of stark reality and comforting illusion. We can’t spare either. If we were to experience the world exactly as it is, we’d be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning, but if we were to experience the world exactly as we want it to be, we’d be too deluded to find our slippers.

But they can’t be clear because we need their rosy tint to motivate us to design the helicopters (“I’m sure this thing will fly”), plant the corn (“This year will be a banner crop”), and tolerate the babies (“What a bundle of joy!”). We cannot do without reality and we cannot do without illusion. Each serves a purpose, each imposes a limit on the influence of the other, and our experience of the world is the artful compromise that these tough competitors negotiate.

Rather than thinking of people as hopelessly Panglossian, then, we might think of them as having a psychological immune system that defends the mind against unhappiness in much the same way that the physical immune system defends the body against illness.

That’s why people seek opportunities to think about themselves in positive ways but routinely reject opportunities to think about themselves in unrealistically positive ways.28 For example, college students request new dorm assignments when their current roommates do not think well of them, but they also request new dorm assignments when their current roommates think too well of them.

ever since the empiricists trumped the dogmatists and became the kings of ancient Greek medicine, westerners have had a special reverence for conclusions that are based on things they can see.

How do we manage to think of ourselves as great drivers, talented lovers, and brilliant chefs when the facts of our lives include a pathetic parade of dented cars, disappointed partners, and deflated soufflés? The answer is simple: We cook the facts.

thus your quest for new knowledge would have the interesting side benefit of ensuring that you would be marinated in those facts—and only those facts—that confirmed the wisdom of your decision.

For example, studies reveal that people have a penchant for asking questions that are subtly engineered to manipulate the answers they receive.36 A question such as “Am I the best lover you’ve ever had?” is dangerous because it has only one answer that can make us truly happy, but a question such as “What do you like best about my lovemaking?” is brilliant because it has only one answer that can make us truly miserable

Studies show that people intuitively lean toward asking the questions that are most likely to elicit the answers they want to hear. And when they hear those answers, they tend to believe what they’ve nudged others to say, which is why “Tell me you love me” remains such a popular request.

Getting a C– isn’t so bad if one compares oneself exclusively to those who got a D.

This tendency to seek information about those who have done more poorly than we have is especially pronounced when the stakes are high.

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.

Alas, the only thing these facts clearly show is that people tend to see what they want to see.

When we want to believe that someone is smart, then a single letter of recommendation may suffice; but when we don’t want to believe that person is smart, we may demand a thick manila folder full of transcripts, tests, and testimony.

In other words, the volunteers gave the test strip plenty of time to prove that they were well but much less time to prove that they were ill. Apparently it doesn’t take much to convince us that we are smart and healthy, but it takes a whole lotta facts to convince us of the opposite. We ask whether facts allow us to believe our favored conclusions and whether they compel us to believe our disfavored conclusions.

In July 2004, the City Council of Monza, Italy, took the unusual step of banning goldfish bowls.

The good counselors of Monza did not suggest that human beings should enjoy the same right, perhaps because they knew that our distorted views of reality are not so easily dispelled, or perhaps because they understood that we suffer less with them than we would without them. Distorted views of reality are made possible by the fact that experiences are ambiguous—that is, they can be credibly viewed in many ways, some of which are more positive than others. To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants.

On the contrary, research suggests that people are typically unaware of the reasons why they are doing what they are doing,1 but when asked for a reason, they readily supply one.2 For example, when volunteers watch a computer screen on which words appear for just a few milliseconds, they are unaware of seeing the words and are unable to guess which words they saw. But they are influenced by them. When the word hostile is flashed, volunteers judge others negatively.3 When the word elderly is flashed, volunteers walk slowly.4 When the word stupid is flashed, volunteers perform poorly on tests.5 When these volunteers are later asked to explain why they judged, walked, or scored the way they did, two things happen: First, they don’t know, and second, they do not say, “I don’t know.” Instead, their brains quickly consider the facts of which they are aware (“I walked slowly”) and draw the same kinds of plausible but mistaken inferences about themselves that an observer would probably draw about them (“I’m tired”).6

When we cook facts, we are similarly unaware of why we are doing it, and this turns out to be a good thing, because deliberate attempts to generate positive views (“There must be something good about bankruptcy, and I’m not leaving this chair until I discover it”) contain the seeds of their own destruction.

To my knowledge, no one has ever done a systematic study of people who’ve been left standing at the altar by a cold-footed fiancé. But I’m willing to bet a good bottle of wine that if you rounded up a healthy sample of almost-brides and nearly grooms and asked them whether they would describe the incident as “the worst thing that ever happened to me” or “the best thing that ever happened to me,” more would endorse the latter description than the former. And I’ll bet an entire case of that wine that if you found a sample of people who’d never been through this experience and asked them to predict which of all their possible future experiences they are most likely to look back on as “the best thing that ever happened to me,” not one of them will list “getting jilted.” Like so many things, getting jilted is more painful in prospect and more rosy in retrospect.

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. It’s easy to blame failure on the eccentricities of a judge, but it’s much more difficult to blame failure on the eccentricities of a unanimous jury.

Our most consequential choices—whether to marry, have children, buy a house, enter a profession, move abroad—are often shaped by how we imagine our future regrets (“Oh no, I forgot to have a baby!”).

Regret is an emotion we feel when we blame ourselves for unfortunate outcomes that might have been prevented had we only behaved differently in the past, and because that emotion is decidedly unpleasant, our behavior in the present is often designed to preclude it.

Studies show that about nine out of ten people expect to feel more regret when they foolishly switch stocks than when they foolishly fail to switch stocks, because most people think they will regret foolish actions more than foolish inactions.19 But studies also show that nine out of ten people are wrong. Indeed, in the long run, 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, which is why the most popular regrets include not going to college, not grasping profitable business opportunities, and not spending enough time with family and friends.20