Daniel Gilbert. Stumbling on Happiness. (2006)

In a paragraph

We use imagination to simulate our futures but make systematic errors in forecasting our happiness. 

Key points

• Using imagination to simulate the future is a great human ability. But we make systematic errors in our affective forecasting, as we do in perception and in remembering.

• ‘We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy.’ But much of our steering is in vain because our affective future is fundamentally different from what we project.

• Happiness is a feeling, an experience, a subjective state. This emotional happiness should not be confused with moral happiness or judgemental happiness. It is best measured from multiple self-reports.

• If conjoined twins say they are happy, is this because they have squished language or because they have expanded experience?

• Realism errors. Do not notice filling in and leaving out.

• Presentism errors. ‘When brains plug holes in their conceptualizations of yesterday and tomorrow, they tend to use a material called today.’

• Rationalization errors. Preferences influence interpretations and experiences are ambiguous.  Our experience of the world is a delicate balance between stark reality and comforting illusions. Psychological defences.

• Corrigibility errors. Focus on the peak, the end and the unusual. Deluded into believing that wealth and children will make us happy. 

• ‘The best way to predict our feelings tomorrow is to see how others are feeling today.’ ‘Our mythical belief in the variability and uniqueness of individuals is the main reason why we refuse to use others as surrogates.’

Comments

A lively and enjoyable book that sets out the errors that arise in our use of imagination to project our future happiness. This is an important subject, treated well with extensive use of material from psychological studies and thorough referencing. The style is humorous and there are many attractive phrases.  

Links

Daniel Gilbert. The Surprising Science of Happiness (2014) Ted Talk

Matthew Coleman.  Affective Forecasting.  (2022).  Happier Lives Institute Report

NOTES

Foreword

We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy.  Rather than indulging in whatever strikes our momentary fancy, we take responsibility for the welfare of our future selves.

An optical illusion is interesting because it causes everyone to make the same mistake. The mistakes we make when we try to imagine our personal futures are also lawful, regular and systematic.

Part I – Prospection

The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future. We think about the future in a way that no other animal can.

To see is to experience the world as it is, to remember is to experience the world as it was, but to imagine – ah, to imagine is to experience the world as it isn’t.  The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future. Anticipation machine. Making future.

Machines and invertebrates prove that it doesn’t take a smart, self-aware, conscious brain to make simple predictions about the future. Rather than saying that such simple brains are predicting let’s say that they are nexting.

Damage to the frontal lobe impairs planning and anxiety. A permanent present.  Two or three million years ago our ancestors began a great escape from the here and now.

We want to know what is likely to happen so that we can do something about it. Passion for control.  The feeling of control – whether real or illusory – is one of the wellsprings of mental health.

We are the apes that learned to look forward because doing so enables us to shop among the many fates that might befall us and select the best one. Other animals must experience an event in order to learn about its pleasures and pains, but our powers of foresight allow us to imagine that which has not yet happened and hence spare ourselves the hard lessons of experience.

We insist on steering our boats because we think we have a pretty good idea of where we should go, but the truth is that much of our steering is in vain – because the future is fundamentally different than it appears through the prospectiscope. Illusions of foresight. Insufficiently sceptical.

Part II – Subjectivity

Happiness. People seem pleased to use this one word to indicate a host of different things, which has created a tremendous terminological mess on which several fine scholarly careers have been based.

Emotional happiness, moral happiness, and judgmental happiness. Emotional happiness: a feeling, an experience, a subjective state. Reserve the word happiness to refer to that class of subjective emotional experiences that are vaguely described as enjoyable or pleasurable, and don’t use that same word to indicate the morality of the actions one might take to induce those experiences or to indicate our judgments about the merits of those experiences.

The only way to measure precisely the similarity of two things is for the person who is doing the measuring to compare them side by side – that is, to experience them side by side. The smell of the rose is unresurrectable, but if we know it was good and we know it was sweet, then we know to stop and smell the next one.

People fail to notice a wide range of these ‘visual discontinuities’, all without ever waking the audience.  Failed to notice that the person to whom they were talking had suddenly been transformed into an entirely new individual. While I had seen the first group of six cards, I had only remembered my verbal label for the card I had chosen, and hence had failed to notice that all the other cards had changed as well.

When the conjoined twins say they are ecstatic, they are actually feeling what we feel when we say we are pleased? Language-squishing hypothesis. Our experiences instantly become part of the lens through which we view our entire past, present and future, and like any lens, they shape and distort what we see.  Experience-stretching hypothesis. Not knowing what we’re missing can mean that we are truly happy. The Hawaiian sunset was an eight until the Hawaiian sunset a la stogie took its place and reduced the cigarless sunset to a mere seven.

So which hypothesis is correct?  We can’t say. What we can say is that all claims of happiness are claims from someone’s point of view – from the perspective of a single human being whose unique collection of past experiences serves as a context, a lens, a background for her evaluation of her current experience. In some ways, the cigar-smoking, guitar-playing, pate-eating people we become have no more authority to speak on behalf of the people we used to be than do outside observers.

There are times when people seem not to know their own hearts. How are you? Are there really people out there who can’t accurately answer the world’s most familiar question? Yes, and you’ll find one in the mirror.

We are wired to answer the ‘What should I do?’ question before the ‘What is it?’ question.  If we adhere to the standard of perfection in all our endeavours, we are left with nothing but mathematics and the White Album.

Of all the flawed measures of subjective experience that we can take, the honest, real-time report of the attentive individual is the least flawed. The average answer will be a roughly accurate index of the average experience.

Feelings don’t just matter – they are what mattering means.

Part III – Realism

Realism. The belief that things are in reality as they appear to be in the mind.

The best way to understand this particular shortcoming of imagination (the faculty that allows us to see the future) is to understand the shortcomings of memory (the faculty that allows us to see the past) and perception (the faculty that allows us to see the present).

Compressed for storage. First, the act of remembering involves ‘filling in’ details that were not actually stored; and second, we generally cannot tell when we are doing this because filling in happens quickly and unconsciously.  The gist would serve as an instruction that enabled your brain to re-weave the tapestry of your experience.

Kant’s point:  The world as we know it is a construction. Perceptions are portraits, not photographs.  Like philosophers, ordinary people start out as realists but get over it.  We believe what we see, and then unbelieve it when we have to.  We do not realize that we are seeing an interpretation. Our brains are talented forgers, weaving a tapestry of memory and perception whose detail is so compelling that its inauthenticity is rarely detected.  Without a second thought, you behaved like an unrepentant realist and confidently based your predictions about how you would feel on details that your brain had invented while you weren’t watching.

Without the filling-in trick you would have sketchy memories, an empty imagination and a small black hole following you wherever you went.  Leaving-out trick.

Part IV – Presentism

Presentism.  The tendency for current experience to influence one’s views of the past and the future.

Future predictions. What makes these drawings so charming is that they are utterly, fabulously and ridiculously wrong. Some hybrid of Forbidden Planet and Father Knows Best.

When brains plug holes in their conceptualizations of yesterday and tomorrow, they tend to use a material called today.

Prefeeling often allows us to predict our emotions better than logical thinking does.

Reality First policy.  When depressed people think about future events, they cannot imagine liking them very much. Imagination cannot easily transcend the boundaries of the present, and one reason for this is that it must borrow machinery that is owned by perception. Extraordinary talent for creating mental images of concrete objects. Reasoning by metaphor.

Among life’s cruellest truths is this one: wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderfulness wanes. That time and variety are two ways to avoid habituation, and if you have one, then you don’t need the other.  Starting points matter because we often end up close to where we started.  We make mistakes when we compare with the past instead of the possible. Presentism occurs because we fail to recognize that our future selves won’t see the world the way we see it now. Fundamental inability to take the perspective of the person to whom the rest of our lives will happen.

Part V – Rationalization

Resilient. Meanings matter for even the most basic psychological processes. Disambiguate.

Context, frequency and recency. Your preferences influence your interpretations.  Complexity creates loads of ambiguity that just begs to be exploited. It doesn’t have to beg hard.

Our experience of the world – how we see it, remember it and imagine it – is a mixture of stark reality and comforting illusion. We cannot do without reality and we cannot do without illusion. A psychological immune system that defends the mind against unhappiness.  Feel good enough to cope with our situation but bad enough to do something about it.  The delicate balance between reality and illusion.

We derive support for our preferred conclusions by listening to the words that we put in the mouths of people who have already been preselected for their willingness to say what we want to hear. The brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants. We ask whether facts allow us to believe our favoured conclusions and whether they compel us to believe our disfavoured conclusions.

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. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion. Defences are more likely to be triggered by intense than mild suffering. Positive view of the things we’re stuck with.

Unlike a mere association, an explanation allows us to identify particular aspects.

Part VI – Corrigibility

If practice and coaching can teach us to keep our pants dry, then why can’t they teach us to predict our emotional futures?

The least likely experience is often the most likely memory. We tend to remember the best of times and the worst of times instead of the most likely of times.  Apparently, the way an experience ends is more important to us than the total amount of pleasure we receive – until we think about it.

Economies can blossom and grow only if people are deluded into believing that the production of wealth will make them happy.

Couples generally start out quite happy in their marriages and then become progressively less satisfied over the course of their lives together, getting close to their original levels of satisfaction only when their children leave home. Although parenting has many rewarding moments, the vast majority of its moments involve dull and selfless service to people who will take decades to become even begrudgingly grateful for what we are doing.

One way to make predictions about our own emotional futures is to find someone who is having the experience we are contemplating and ask them how they feel.  The best way to predict our feelings tomorrow is to see how others are feeling today.

If you are like most people, then like most people, you don’t know you’re like most people.  The self considers itself to be a very special person. Our mythical belief in the variability and uniqueness of individuals is the main reason why we refuse to use others as surrogates.

Afterword

Explosion of personal liberty has created a bewildering array of options.  For the very first time, our happiness is in our hands.

Wealth may be measured by counting dollars, but utility must be measured by counting how much goodness those dollars buy.

So, what’s a chooser to do?  Without a formula for predicting utility, we tend to do what only our species does: imagine.