“My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it.”
Why are lovers quicker to forgive their partners for infidelity than for leaving dirty dishes in the sink?
Why will sighted people pay more to avoid going blind than blind people will pay to regain their sight?
Why do dining companions insist on ordering different meals instead of getting what they really want?
Why do pigeons seem to have such excellent aim; why can’t we remember one song while listening to another; and why does the line at the grocery store always slow down the moment we join it?
Most of us spend our lives steering ourselves toward the best of all possible futures, only to find that tomorrow rarely turns out as we had presumed. Why? As Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains, when people try to imagine what the future will hold, they make some basic and consistent mistakes. Just as memory plays tricks on us when we try to look backward in time, so does imagination play tricks when we try to look forward.
Using cutting-edge research, much of it original, Gilbert shakes, cajoles, persuades, tricks, and jokes us into accepting the fact that happiness is not really what or where we thought it was.
Smart, witty, accessible, and laugh-out-loud funny, Stumbling on Happiness brilliantly describes all that science has to tell us about the uniquely human endeavor to envision the future, and how likely we are to enjoy it when we get there. [From: Randomhouse.com]
“The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.”
Gilbert’s central thesis is that, through perception and cognitive biases, people imagine the future poorly, in particular what will make them happy. He argues that imagination fails in three ways:
- Imagination tends to add and remove details, but people do not realize that key details may be fabricated or missing from the imagined scenario.
- Imagined futures (and pasts) are more like the present than they actually will be (or were).
- Imagination fails to realize that things will feel different once they actually happen—most notably, the psychological immune system will make bad things feel not so bad as they are imagined to feel.
The advice Gilbert offers is to use other people’s experiences to predict the future, instead of imagining it. It is surprising how similar people are in much of their experiences, he says. He does not expect too many people to heed this advice, as our culture, accompanied by various thinking tendencies, is against this method of decision making.
Also, Gilbert covers the topic of ‘filling in’ or the frequent use of patterns, by the mind, to connect events which we do actually recall with other events we expect or anticipate fit into the expected experience. This ‘filling in’ is also used by our eyes and optic nerves to remove our blind spot or scotoma, and instead substitute what our mind expects to be present in the blind spot.
This accessible book is written for the layperson, generally avoiding abstruse terminology and explaining common quirks of reasoning through the simple experiments that exploited them (this excludes the term “super-replicator”). [From: Wikipedia.com]
“Our brain accepts what the eyes see and our eye looks for whatever our brain wants.”
Humans are good at planning, communicating, creating, and building; but we suck at previewing our futures, much less controlling them. Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert has spent a lifetime investigating the powers and limits of foresight. In Stumbling on Happiness, he explains why the grass grows greener until you get there and tells us why unhappiness never lasts as long as we think it will. Brilliantly original, yet solidly grounded in science. [From: Barnesandnoble.com]
Not offering a self-help book, but instead mounting a scientific explanation of the limitations of the human imagination and how it steers us wrong in our search for happiness, Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, draws on psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy and behavioral economics to argue that, just as we err in remembering the past, so we err in imagining the future. “Our desire to control is so powerful, and the feeling of being in control so rewarding, that people often act as though they can control the uncontrollable,” Gilbert writes, as he reveals how ill-equipped we are to properly preview the future, let alone control it. Unfortunately, he claims, neither personal experience nor cultural wisdom compensates for imagination’s shortcomings. In concluding chapters, he discusses the transmission of inaccurate beliefs from one person’s mind to another, providing salient examples of universal assumptions about human happiness such as the joys of money and of having children. He concludes with the provocative recommendation that, rather than imagination, we should rely on others as surrogates for our future experience. Gilbert’s playful tone and use of commonplace examples render a potentially academic topic accessible and educational, even if his approach is at times overly prescriptive. 150,000 announced first printing. [From: Publishersweekly.com]
“Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.”
Gilbert (Psychology/Harvard) examines what science has discovered about how well the human brain can predict future enjoyment. Happiness is a subjective experience for which there is no perfectly reliable measuring instrument, the author asserts. The least flawed instrument we have is “the honest, real-time report of the attentive individual,” and to compensate for its flaws, scientists turn to the law of large numbers-i.e., measuring again and again to get lots of data. We use our imagination to look into the future, Gilbert states, but three principal shortcomings restrict its usefulness in the realm of foresight. He labels these shortcomings “realism,” “presentism” and “rationalization,” considering each in turn. Citing psychological experiments, some of which he conducted himself, the author deftly and humorously demonstrates that when we imagine future circumstances, we leave out some details that will occur and provide others that won’t. Realism ignores these adjustments and assumes that our perceptions simply reflect objective reality. Further, when we imagine future feelings, we find it impossible both to ignore how we are feeling now and to recognize how we will regard what happens later, a difficulty that Gilbert cleverly likens to trying to imagine the taste of marshmallow while chewing liver. Presentism occurs when we project the present onto the future. Rationalization is the failure to recognize that things will look different once they happen, the bad not so terrible and the good less wonderful. How then can we predict how we will feel under future circumstances? Gilbert’s answer is simple: Ask others who are in those circumstances today how they are feeling. To those who would protest that they are unique and that others’ experiences could not be relevant, he responds: No you’re not; you just like to think you are. The ideas may be disconcerting, but they’re backed by solid research and presented with persuasive charm and wit. [From: Kirkusreviews.com]
“Our inability to recall how we really felt is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be poverty of riches.”
WATCH Dan Gilbert’s TED Talk on The Surprising Science of Happiness HERE >
About the author:
Dan has won numerous awards for his teaching and research—from the Guggenheim Fellowship to the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology. However, he says that his greatest accomplishment is that he appears just before Dizzie Gillespie on the list of Most Famous High School Dropouts.
Dan’s research has been covered by The New York Times Magazine, Forbes, Money, CNN, U.S. News & World Report, The New Yorker, Scientific American, Oprah Magazine, Psychology Today, and many others.
He lives in Cambridge Massachusetts with his wife and a lack of pets. [From: Goodreads.com]
“Most of us appear to believe that we are more athletic, intelligent, organized, ethical, logical, interesting, open-minded, and healthy-not to mention more attractive-than the average person.”
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