Everyday Glory

Hey everyone!

Today I’m going to discuss the book I’ve been reading over the past few weeks! Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, while titled like a self-help book about how to find happiness, instead offers an explanation of what happiness really is and how the human brain attempts (successfully and otherwise) to maintain it. And in the face of that lack of success, Gilbert offers a solution that no one takes.

Gilbert asserts that the maintenance of happiness requires the ability to imagine the potential future. We can’t make decide what would make us happy without being able to think about how our lives would be after the choice. However, Gilbert demonstrates that the very process of imagination we use to make these decisions is very much flawed.

Imagination has three main failings, according to Gilbert. First, we do not recognize that our imagination “works so quickly, quietly, and effectively” that we don’t stop to think whether it is accurate (Gilbert, 2006).  Second, we cannot prevent our imagination from framing in our present situation its projected results. And third, imagination does a terrible job predicting how we will feel after we make a decision.

However, Gilbert doesn’t leave us without a solution to the problem we face when envisioning the results of a decision. All imagination’s faults can be countered by merely asking someone who is currently experiencing what we would be trying to imagine. Unfortunately, people prefer to think of themselves as unique, and consequently discount those people’s feelings (McFarland & Miller, 1990).

Each of these claims has relevant research to support it, and the author himself has led several studies cited in the book during his career in social psychology. Daniel Gilbert is a psychology professor at Harvard University and has received several awards for his research. Furthermore, many of the concepts and theories discussed in this course appear in his explanations, which further demonstrates that he supports his claims with established research.

For example, Gilbert uses the availability heuristic to explain why we always think that we’re in the slowest checkout line. When people have to decide how frequent something is, they tend base their answer on how many examples of it come to mind (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). Gilbert shows that in the case of checkout lines, those examples are generally the unusually slow ones, regardless of how many checkout lines we’ve sped through. Because the slow checkout lines are more memorable for us, we have more slow examples than average examples from which to base our decision about what kind of luck we have at the checkout counter.

I knew that Gilbert was an esteemed social psychologist, which was the first facet to draw my interest to this particular book. I didn’t want a book from an author I hadn’t heard of or that I wasn’t confident would cite research. However, I knew that many books on the list met those criteria. So, after narrowing the pool down somewhat, I selected based on the content. Happiness has always interested me, so I jumped on the opportunity to read a book that would focus on it. (At the time of selection, I expected everyone else to also jump on the opportunity to read this book. Later in the class, I realized this was an example of the false consensus effect. Ross, Greene and House (1977) showed that people typically assume that most people feel the same way that they do. But when I got there, no one I talked to was even interested in Stumbling on Happiness!)

Ultimately, I’m glad that I read this book. Not only was it full of interesting information, it was relayed through a type of dry absurdity that resonates perfectly with my own sense of humor. Psychological concepts would frequently be followed by examples that were either immediately relatable or incredibly outlandish, which aided understanding. However, people more serious than me might find Gilbert’s writing style off-putting.

Aside from stylistic concerns, I believe that both experts and laypeople would enjoy this book. For me, it applied my knowledge of social psychology in a new way to an interesting topic. For laypeople, the book provides the knowledge in an easily understandable way. (Perhaps people with considerably more knowledge than me will not benefit from reading the book, but Gilbert has shown me that I cannot actually assume that how I imagine I would feel in that situation is correct.)

I would have liked it if the author had expanded on the final section, about how to combat our imagination’s faults. Although I’m sure he would have put in more strategies if research had uncovered them, I believe that is part of Gilbert’s point: We can’t easily do it. Even after we learn about these errors, we still can’t do it. We don’t pay attention to the problems, and we don’t recognize how much damage they do, even in hindsight.

And this is as close as I can get to making “Bravado” fit in here, my favorite Rush song. I picked it weeks ago to appear in this blog, because the song is about happiness persisting despite constant setbacks. I expected this book would be about that. Instead, it was about how our imagination does a terrible job of ensuring our happiness, but damn if I’ll let that stop me from shoehorning in a great and uplifting song!

We will pay the price (of our faulty imagination), but we will not count the cost (of how exactly it harms us).

... Close enough.

Now that we’ve had that nice interlude, I’ll provide a personal example for each of Gilbert’s three main errors of imagination: realism, presentism, and rationalization.

Gilbert ascribed the error of realism to flaws in memory and perception. We both add details that we might expect to have been there, and ignore details that we might not expect. What’s worse, we don’t realize that we’ve done so, causing us to blindly accept our imagined future at face value. Most of his examples resonated with me. Except for one.

Gilbert describes a situation where you happily agree to babysit your friend’s children and look forward to having a fun time with the kids, until the time arrives and you realize that there’s a lot of work involved. In other words, you imagine an idealized version of the situation that doesn’t include any of the gritty details that you would ultimately find unpleasant (Eyal et. al, 2004).  

I spent a long time thinking about it, but could not think of a single instance when I’ve done that. Whenever I’ve agreed to do a task I’m familiar with, I’m aware of everything it entails from the start. I can’t recall a time I’ve felt surprised by the unpleasant details of an experience if I’d ever done it before. All of the other heuristics brought fairly uninteresting examples to mind, ones that didn’t seem unique enough to share. In contrast, I thought it was very interesting that I don’t experience this “universal” imagination heuristic. Maybe I’m more rational than the average person, but I think it’s more likely I simply haven’t had the opportunity to experience it since I started paying attention. Hopefully I’ll be cognizant of this error in the future. I could say I’d imagine I would, but then I’d be committing the error of presentism.

When people imagine the future, they do not properly disentangle it from their present state, hence “presentism” (Gilbert, 2006). So because I’m currently dwelling on the previous example, I would imagine I would still be thinking about it months from now. But according to Gilbert, I would be wrong.

Presentism affects large decisions, too. When I first came to Southwestern, I had not really decided my major. I enjoyed Economics and Psychology most in high school, so I pursued those here. Upon reflection, those were the most “scientific” courses I had taken in that they included both models for predicting behavior and also clear, relatable examples as evidence. Sure, Rutherfold’s gold foil experiment was interesting, but also too esoteric to prompt rational thought at the age of 14.

Unfortunately, in an upper level economics class we learned about a particular theory, the quantity theory of money. It was a simple theory, MV = PQ. The amount of money times the number of times that money changes hands is equal to the price of the average widget/employee times the total output. It seems logical enough (actually, I think I understand the concept better now than I did at the time), but it required a set of assumptions longer than the set of variables in the equation! And it turned out that none of those assumptions was ever true. I recall thinking in class, “what good is this theory, then, if it’s unusable outside of the classroom?”

That day, my perspective shifted involuntarily, and I lost my ability to perceive economics as predictive rather than descriptive. I changed that major to business (which may have ended up being even less useful, but that is beside the point). This may have been an extreme reaction, but the belief I held in the present when I decided to take economics was shattered in the future. Had I been able to predict that I would feel so strongly about that, I would have not gotten involved in the first place. But instead, my imagination committed the error of rationalization (Gilbert, 2006).

We think we know why we feel the way we do, so we think we can predict how we will feel in the future (Gilbert, 2006). The example he provided was one of the stock market. You expect feel considerably sadder if you make a bad decision that costs you a thousand dollars than if you sit idly by and simply fail to make the decision that would realize the gain. But in fact, you feel sadder from the results of inaction, despite what people predicted (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982).

For me, the greatest source of regret through inaction is my failure to practice a musical instrument diligently enough in my youth (aka before college). I could be so much more capable of expressing myself if I had put in so much as an hour a day back then. The last time I said this, someone laughed at the thought of my “youth” being over at 21. And they’re right, I have plenty of time, especially after graduation when I don’t have overloaded semesters. But I would prefer to enjoy the benefits now, in the present.

Overall, I feel that Gilbert’s goal was to bring people’s attention to the fact that their imagination works against their own happiness, and to provide tools to counteract that. However, he also recognizes the futility of challenging the millions of years of evolution that have produced a mind that actively resists using those new tools instead of the tricks it already knows. The moment of glory (for his recommendations) was over before it begun. But just because you might imagine no one will take the advice to heart, doesn’t mean they won’t.

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Eyal, T., et. al. (2004). The pros and cons of temporally near and distant action. Jouranl of Personality and Social Psychology, 86, 781–95.

Gilbert, D. (2006). Stumbling on happiness. New York, NY: Knopf.

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1982). The psychology of preferences. Scientific American, 246, (160–74).

McFarland, C., & Miller, D.T. (1990). Judgments of self-other similarity: Just like other people, only more so. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 16, 475–84.

Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The false consensus phenomenon: An attributional bias in self-perception and social-perception processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13, 279–301.

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5, 207–232.