2009
Important Points from Stumbling on Happiness
These are my notes from reading Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. I’ve recounted mostly just the conclusions, so if you’ve never read the book, I urge you to do that before reading this; it’s kind of a spoiler. Plus, I find that hearing conclusions before I hear the evidence or argument sometimes increases my defensiveness, thus decreasing my ability to extract value from something.
Regardless, it’s a great book, and although there are a few things I disagree with, it is an amazingly insightful look at the human condition and the mind. If you have any interest in hacking your own mind (or life), knowing its shortcomings is essential, and you’ll find this book invaluable. Daniel Gilbert also has a great sense of humor; I found myself laughing out loud while reading this more than any other book I’ve ever read.
Notes and Excerpts
Chapter 1 talks about the imagination and how we are different from apes.
Chapter 2 p31-59 first says what he means by happiness and breaks down different kinds of happiness (emotional, moral, and judgmental). It then discusses issues of subjectivity and making inferences about happiness based on the reports of happiness by others.
Chapter 3 p60-79 Gilbert basically motivates his assumption that people can and do accurately report how happy they feel in the present, and uses this as a basis for the rest of the book.
Realism
p94 “the psychologist Jean Piaget noticed that the young child often fails to distinguish between her perception of an object and the object’s actual properties, hence she tends to believe that things really are as they appear to be—and that others must therefore see them as she does.”
p97 “we do not outgrow realism so much as we learn to outfox it, and that even as adults our perceptions are characterized by an initial moment of realism.” … “we automatically assume that our subjective experience of a thing is a faithful representation of the thing’s properties. Only later—if we have the time, energy, and ability—do we rapidly repudiate that assumption and consider the possibility that the real world may not actually be as it appears to us.” … “We believe what we see, and then we unbelieve it when we have to.”
p109 “when ordinary people want to know whether two things are causally related, they routinely search for, attend to, consider, and remember information about what did happen and fail to search for, attend to, consider, and remember information about what did not.
Presentism
The Future Is Now
p125 “when brains plug holes in their conceptualizations of yesterday and tomorrow, they tend to use material called today.” p126 “Memory uses the filling-in trick, but imagination is the filling-in trick, and if the present lightly colors our remembered pasts, it thoroughly infuses our imagined futures. More simply said, most of us have a tough time imagining a tomorrow that is terribly different from today, and we find it particularly difficult to imagine that we will ever think, want, or feel differently than we do now.”
Comparing: p148 “we tend to imagine how we would feel if those things happened now, and then we make some allowance for the fact that now and later are not exactly the same thing.” p149 “The problem with this method of making judgments is that start points have a profound impact on ending points.”
Comparing: p158 “(a) value is determined by the comparison of one thing with another; (b) there is more than one kind of comparison we can make in any given instance; and (c) we may value something more highly when we make one kind of comparison than when we make a different kind of comparison.” … “because we make comparisons without even thinking about them (‘Man, that coffee has gotten expensive!’ or ‘I’m not paying double to see this concert [after losing my ticket]’), we rarely consider the fact that the comparisons we are making now may not be the ones we will be making later.” p159 “the person you might have been making love with is largely irrelevant when you are in the middle of making love with someone else” even though beforehand, you imagine that it will matter a great deal.
Disambiguating Experience: p165 People claim that seemingly terrible experiences were the best experiences of their life. p170 “… we respond to the meanings of such stimuli and not to the stimuli themselves.” p175 Like a Necker cube which is fundamentally ambiguous, the subconscious part of the mind actively finds ways of appreciating our experience which is also inherently ambiguous.
Finding Facts: p180 After buying a Honda instead of a Toyota, you find yourself pouring over all the Honda ads which talk up Hondas, reinforcing your decision. p181 You spend a lot of time finding friends who have similar beliefs as you.
Challenging Facts: p187 “We ask whether facts allow us to believe our favored conclusions and whether they compel us to believe our disfavored conclusions.”
Psychological Immune System
Looking Forward Vs. Looking Backward: p195 “Why didn’t volunteers realize that they would have more success blaming a judge than a jury? Because when volunteers were asked to predict their emotional reactions to rejection, they imagined its sharp sting. Period. They did not go on to imagine how their brains might try to relieve that sting.”
Intensity Trigger: Like a security system that must balance between responding to threats and not being overkill, p199 “… it is sometimes more difficult to achieve a positive view of a bad experience than of a very bad experience.”
Inescapability Trigger: p202 “We just can’t make the best of a fate until it is inescapably, inevitably, and irrevocably ours.” p204 “We have no trouble anticipating the advantages that freedom may provide, but we seem blind to the joys it can undermine.”
Improving
p218 “Are there more four-letter words in the English language that begin with k (k-1’s) or that have k as their third letter (k-3’s)? … You probably answered this question by briefly checking your memory (‘Hmmm, there’s kite, kilt, kale…’), and because you found it easier to recall k-1’s than k-3’s, you assumed there must be more of the former than the latter. This would normally be a very fine deduction … [but] our mental dictionaries are organized more or less alphabetically, like Webster’s itself, hence we can’t easily ‘look up’ a word in our memories by any letter except the first one.” p219 “The k-word puzzle works because we naturally (but incorrectly) assume that things that come easily to mind are things we have frequently encountered.” “the frequency with which we’ve had an experience is not the only determinant of the ease with which we remember it.” “infrequent or unusual experiences are often among the most memorable”
p232 “Our memory for emotional episodes is overly influenced by unusual instances, closing moments, and theories about how we must have felt way back then, all of which gravely compromise our ability to learn from our own experience.”
Reporting Live from Tomorrow
p233 “Yes, of course the future is hard to see. But we’re all heading that way anyhow, and as difficult as it may be to envision, we have to make some decisions about which futures to aim for and which to avoid.”
p236-243 Beliefs, like genes, spread when having the belief leads to more spreading of the belief. (Daniel Gilbert calls an instance of these a super-replicator.) This is why so many people believe that having children is a joy when, in actual studies, people’s happiness is inversely correlated with having children at home.
p239 “Some of our cultural wisdom about happiness looks suspiciously like a super-replicating false belief. Consider money. … Economists and psychologists have spent decades studying the relation between wealth and happiness, and they have generally concluded that wealth increases human happiness when it lifts people out of abject poverty and into the middle class but that it does little to increase happiness thereafter.” … “Economists explain that wealth has ‘declining marginal utility,’ which is a fancy way of saying that it hurts to be hungry, cold, sick, tired, and scared, but once you’ve bought your way out of these burdens, the rest of your money is an increasingly useless pile of paper.”
p241 “the production of wealth does not necessarily make individuals happy, but it does serve the needs of an economy, which serves the needs of a stable society, which serves as a network for the propagation of delusional beliefs about happiness and wealth. Economies thrive when individuals strive, but because individuals will only strive for their own happiness, it is essential that they mistakenly believe that producing and consuming are routes to personal well-being.”
p247-250 “Imagination has three shortcomings….” 1) “its tendency to fill in and leave out without telling us”, 2) “its tendency to project the present onto the future” (like shopping on an empty stomach vs. full stomach) and 3) “its failure to recognize that things will look differently once they happen—in particular, that bad things will look a whole lot better”.
p251 “the best way to predict our feelings tomorrow is to see how others are feeling today.”
Rejecting the Solution
p251 “If I offered to pay for your dinner at a restaurant if you could accurately predict how much you were going to enjoy it, would you want to see the restaurant’s menu or some randomly selected diner’s review? If you are like most people, you would prefer to see the menu, and if you are like most people, you would end up buying your own dinner. Why?”
“Because if you are like most people, then like most people, you don’t know you’re like most people.”
p252 “the average person doesn’t see herself as average.”
“This tendency to think of ourselves as better than others … may be an instance of a more general tendency to think of ourselves as different from others—often for better but sometimes for worse. When people are asked about generosity, they claim to perform a greater number of generous acts than others do; but when they are asked about selfishness, they claim to perform a greater number of selfish acts than others do.”
p253 “Even when we do precisely what others do, we tend to think that we’re doing it for unique reasons.”
“What makes us think we’re so darned special?” 1) “even if we aren’t special, the way we know ourselves is.” 2) “we enjoy thinking of ourselves as special. Most of us want to fit in well with our peers, but we don’t want to fit in too well.” Showing up to a party and finding someone else wearing the same shirt “temporarily diminishes your sense of individuality”. 3) “we tend to overestimate everyone’s uniqueness—that is, we tend to think of people as more different from one another than they actually are.” “Individual similarities are vast, but we don’t care much about them because they don’t help us do what we are here on earth to do, namely, distinguish Jack from Jill and Jill from Jennifer.”
p256 “surrogation is a cheap and effective way to predict one’s future emotions, but because we don’t realize just how similar we all are, we reject this reliable method and rely instead on our imaginations, as flawed and fallible as they may be.” p257 “Alas, we think of ourselves as unique entities—minds unlike any others—and thus we often reject the lessons that the emotional experience of others has to teach us.”
Afterword
p259 “Most of us make at lease three important decisions in our lives: where to live, what to do, and with whom to do it. … Making these decisions is such a natural part of adulthood that it is easy to forget that we are among the first human beings to make them. For most of recorded history, people lived where they were born, did what their parents had done, and associated with those who were doing the same. … But the agricultural, industrial, and technological revolutions changed all that, and the resulting explosion of personal liberty has created a bewildering array of options, alternatives, choices, and decisions that our ancestors never faced. For the very first time, our happiness is in our hands.”
p262 “There are many things other than the size of a person’s bank account that influence how much utility they derive from the next dollar. For instance, people often value things more after they own them than before, they often value things more when they are imminent than distant, they are often hurt more by small losses than by large ones, they often imagine that the pain of losing something is greater than the pleasure of getting it, and so on—and on and on and on.”
p262 “The sad fact is that converting wealth to utility—that is predicting how we will feel from knowledge of what we will get—isn’t very much like converting meters to yards or German to Japanese.”
p263 “There is no simple formula for finding happiness. But if our great big brains do not allow us to go surefootedly into our futures, they at least allow us to understand what makes us stumble.”
