Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

Do we understand what happiness is? Though this is a simple question to which most people would probably say "yes," it does not really seem to be after reading Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness. Gilbert argues that the main problem in understanding happiness is that people overestimate the impact of future events. For example, some people overestimate the impact of getting a promotion while others overestimate that of having children. Why is this the case? Gilbert says that thinking about the future is pleasurable and even when we imagine the future to be grim, we try to control and change it. While we imagine the future, however, we keep making mistakes since our capacity to predict the future is very limited. Very often, people imagine the future as they wish rather than as they should because the human brain functions in such a way that certain key details in our imaginations are forgotten or sidelined while other details become important and influence our imaginations. Gilbert concludes his book by suggesting that we might predict the future better by learning from the experiences of others who have already experienced similar events rather than trying to understand it based on our subconscious linking of the future to present.

In his book, Gilbert discusses many themes and concepts that are related to social cognition (which deals with the study of how we think about others and ourselves). In Chapter 1, Gilbert explains the power of perception in our minds and why we think about the future in a certain way. As was discussed in class, people are naturally predisposed to like the feeling that they are in control of their social environment. People want to feel more in control. Because of this feeling, people tend to categorize others by using traits and continue such categorizations even if they are incorrect ("Person Perception"). Gilbert argues that such a perceptive attitude exists in our tendency to look at the future. He says that the desire to control is one of the two reasons (the other being the fact that thinking about the future optimistically is pleasurable) why we imagine the future so often (around 12% of the day).

We keep thinking about the future even when we realize that the impact of certain events is not going to be positive and pleasurable. We nevertheless keep imagining this future because we want to manage it and take control of it. As Gilbert puts it, "our brains want to control the experiences we are about to have" (20; italics original). Just like this feeling influences our categorization of other people, it shapes our prediction of the future. Because we want to control our future social world, we imagine it in a certain way and we want to think about the future although our imaginations may be a reason for worry, anxiety, and fear. And our tendency to feel in control of the future makes us err in our predictions. I find Gilbert's explanation of how our desire to control the social world influences our imaginations of the future helpful in understanding "control" in person perception because in both cases our natural characteristic (the desire to control) shapes our perception -- in one case our perception of others and in the other our perception of the future. And in both cases, this human characteristic limits our view of the social world around us.

In Chapter 2, Gilbert discusses an experiment conducted in Canada. An attractive young woman approached a group of young men crossing the bridge made of wooden boards and wire cables 230 feet above the Capilano River in North Vancouver. The woman asked the men to complete a survey and offered to give her telephone number in case they might be interested in learning more about the survey. The researchers found out that those men who were approached by the woman while they were crossing the bridge were more likely to call her afterwards than the men whom the woman approached only after they had crossed the bridge. The reason for this discrepancy in the reactions of men crossing the border and those who had already crossed it was that the former were under an intense physiological arousal, i.e. fear, which at the time of seeing an attractive women they identified as sexual arousal (58).

This example reminds me of the concept of "activated actor" that we discussed in class. This concept suggests that our cognition is guided by unconscious processes. Our social environment can prompt concepts, cognitions, evaluations, emotions, motivations, and behavior -- all without our awareness. In a certain sense, we behave like puppets ("Social Cognition"). The example given by Gilbert perfectly illustrates the power of this concept. The men crossing the bridge were most likely unaware of the fact that their inner fear of falling off the bridge influenced their reactions to seeing an attractive woman. Gilbert says that this example shows how people can be wrong about their feelings. The concept of "activated actor" suggests, however, that the men crossing the bridge may not necessarily be wrong about what they are feeling; rather they are being guided by processes that they are unaware of.

Gilbert begins chapter 4 by telling the fates of two American humanitarians who struggled for the rights of workers in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Adolf Fischer and George Eastman. Fischer was accused of inciting a riot against powerful industrialists and hanged. But he also surprised everyone present at his execution process, by declaring before the gallows "This is the happiest moment of my life." Eastman invented Kodak and revolutionized the management philosophy by offering his employees shorter hours, disability and retirement benefits, life insurance, and profit sharing, among many other things. But he also surprised everyone who knew him by committing suicide in 1932. After telling the stories of these two men, Gilbert asks: "what was wrong with these guys?" Gilbert then suggests that if there is anything wrong in this whole case, it is with us but not with these guys. The problem is in those of us who "make a systematic set of errors when we try to imagine 'what it would feel like if'" (75-76).

According to Gilbert, we immediately judge Fischer, Eastman -- or anyone, for that matter -- based on our understanding of how we would act if we were in their places. In other words, we exercise counterfactual thinking. Counterfactuals are outcomes that are contrary to the actual outcomes of the event. In counterfactual thinking, we generate outcomes of what "could have" or "should have" happened. As discussed in class, counterfactual thinking is determined by norms (expectations about how an event should have happened) and the abnormal (the opposite of normal). While reading about Fischer's fate, we find his feeling of "happiness" abnormal because we imagine that we would not be happy if we stood before the gallows. Likewise, we find it strange that Eastman killed himself because his achievements are what we aspire for. More importantly, people imagine that had they achieved what Eastman achieved, they would have been happy.

Gilbert explains why this is the case: "Our lives may not always turn out as we wish or as we plan, but we are confident that if they had, then our happiness would have been unbounded and our sorrows thin and fleeting" (76). This confidence, however, is misleading. Our imaginations are not necessarily accurate. A related concept that explains this is the "cognitive miser." This concept suggests that our mental capacity is limited. Our brains cannot consider all possible situations. Sometimes, such reasoning may be efficient but not necessarily accurate ("Social Cognition"). The example of Fischer and Eastman and the questions asked by Gilbert are relevant here because both "counterfactual thinking" and "cognitive miser" come into play here. Gilbert emphasizes the limits of counterfactual thinking and our mental capacity to point out that we use these tools to remember the past, understand the present, and imagine the future, and that the limits of which we are not always aware induce us to make mistakes in our cognitions.

Much of Gilbert's argument in Stumbling on Happiness revolves around the "construction of reality." In Chapter 5, Gilbert tells about his experience of asking people how they would feel two years after the sudden death of their child. Gilbert points out that all his respondents usually are outraged by the suggestion and say that they would be completely devastated and even entertain the thought of committing suicide. None of the respondents, Gilbert says, ever told him that in those two years they would also be enjoying other things such as reading a book, attending another child's school play, or making love with a spouse, and do many other pleasurable things. Gilbert tells this story to illustrate how our imaginations are filtered by our brains in a peculiar way. Our brains fail to consider so many things. When we imagine the future, "there is a whole lot missing, and the things that are missing matter," Gilbert points out (101-102).

This example from Gilbert's book better illustrates our discussion of "constructivism" in class. As discussed, constructivism suggests that we actively construe much of our experience. The "reality" is filtered through our minds based on our wishes, expectations, goals, and mood. Also, what we believe to be real is a combination of reality (sensation) and how we interpret that reality (perception) ("Social Cognition"; "Constructing Reality: What is and What was"). When Gilbert's respondents say that they would be devastated two years after the death of their child, they construct the future based on their mood and what they feel presently (Gilbert also refers to this as "presentism"). The thought of the death of their child affects their mood and their mood in turn influences their construction of the future (the "reality"). Their construction of the future is not totally inaccurate but is a combination of reality and their interpretations. As Gilbert suggests, however, "a whole lot is missing" in their imaginations.

In the concluding part of his book, Gilbert says that there is a simple solution to the problem of predicting the future wrongly. Instead of relying on our past and present imaginations, we need to ask those who are right now experiencing the situations we are expecting to experience in the future. For example, while we contemplate about moving to Cincinnati, the odds are there is someone out there who has already moved there and has many things to share. Or, while we imagine taking a job at a company that opened its office in our state recently, we might actually get a better picture of working for the company by talking to people employed by that company. Alas, Gilbert says, most people are likely to ignore this solution because of what we discussed in class as "self-verification." This concept suggests that we tend to rate ourselves as more intelligent than others. We have an inner desire to look for confirmation of our self-perceptions (confirmation bias), and we want to feel that we are correct in our assessments and that our world is predictable ("The Self"). Gilbert here provides a good example of how people make poor judgments because of the desire for constant self-verification.