Daniel gilbert what makes us happy

Modern people take the ability to imagine the future for granted, but it turns out that this is one of our species' most recently acquired abilities—no more than three million years old. The part of our brain that enables us to think about the future is one of nature's newest inventions, so it isn't surprising that when we try to use this new ability to imagine our futures, we make some rookie errors. These errors come in three basic flavors, and that's what the book is about.

The book does end by describing an alternative method for predicting future happiness, but ironically, research shows that while this alternative method produces much more accurate predictions, people generally refuse to use it. You show through the example of the twins how the experience of happiness is different for every individual—but then your research reveals that every individual makes the same misconceptions where happiness is concerned.

Doesn't this seem like a strange paradox? As I explain in the book, defining and measuring happiness is pretty tricky business, and I walk readers through all the problems, paradoxes, and pitfalls that any attempt to define and measure happiness must confront. Some of these are mind-bending, and I illustrate them with everything from sci-fi stories to card tricks. In the end I conclude that while we can't define and measure happiness with great precision, we can define and measure it well enough to do scientific studies that teach us a lot.

The common claim that you can't measure a feeling is just plain wrong. You do it every time you ask your partner "How do you like it when I do this? People generally know how happy they are at the moment they are asked, and if you ask them, they will usually tell you. If you can quantify their answers and we can , you can investigate happiness scientifically and we do.

Being a cynic, as so many of us are these days, I imagine that everything that can go wrong in a situation will. What does your book have to say about the low-level anxiety most of us experience? You probably think it would be good if you could feel perfectly happy at every moment of your life.

But we have a word for animals that cannot feel distress, anxiety, fear, and pain: The word is extinct. Negative thoughts and emotions have important roles to play in our lives because when people think about how terribly wrong things might go, they often take actions to make sure those things go terribly right.

Just as we manipulate our children and our employees by threatening them with dire consequences, so too do we manipulate ourselves by imagining dire consequences. Sure, people can be so anxious that their anxiety is debilitating, but that's the extreme case. For most of us, anxiety serves a purpose.

It is what keeps you from sending your nine-year old to the rough part of town one night for a loaf of bread. If someone could offer you a pill that would make you permanently happy, you would be well advised to run fast and run far.

Emotion is a compass that tells us what to do, and a compass that is perpetually stuck on NORTH is worthless. What are the most common things people think will make them happy that really, at the end of the day, don't? Why do we continue to think these things are the root of happiness? One of the ideas I discuss at some length in my book is that societies have a vested interest in deceiving their member about the sources of happiness. For a society to function, many things must happen.

For example, people must buy each other's goods and services, people must reproduce and raise their children, and so on. Of course, people won't do these things for the good of their societies because people are typically interested in doing things for the good of themselves.

So societies develop essential myths such as "Money will make you happy" and "Children will make you happy," and these myths motivate their members to do what the societies need them to do. But research shows that neither of those things actually makes people particularly happy. Money has only minor and rapidly diminishing effects on happiness, and parents are generally happier watching TV or doing housework than interacting with their children. Sorry, kids, but that's what the data show.

So that's one answer to your question. But there are others. For instance, in my book I describe research showing that people tend to misremember how happy they were in the past. In one study, Democrats predicted they'd be devastated if Bush won the last presidential election, they were not nearly as devastated as they predicted I know because I measured them myself , and yet several months later they remembered being just as devastated as they had expected to be.

It turns out that this is a very common pattern of memory errors. So how can we learn from our mistaken predictions if we don't even remember them?

Until I read your book, I thought variety was the spice of life. Should I really have the glazed doughnut every time I go to the donut shop? I think it's my favorite—but what if I am missing something? Are you crazy? Those chocolate cake ones you can dunk are clearly the best. No wonder you aren't happy!

But seriously, research shows that people do tend to seek more variety than they should. We all think we should try a different donut every time we go to the shop, but the fact is that people are measurably happier when they have their favorite on every visit—provided the visits are sufficiently separated in time.

Those last four words are the important ones. If you had to eat 4 donuts in rapid succession, variety would indeed spice up your experience and you'd be wise to seek it. But if you had to eat 4 donuts on 4 separate days, variety would lower your overall enjoyment. But several months after the election, they remembered being just as devastated as they had expected to be.

It turns out that this is a very common pattern of memory errors. Retrospection and prospection share many of the same biases and hence reinforce each other. You may think that it would be good to feel happy at all times, but we have a word for animals that never feel distress, anxiety, fear, and pain: That word is dinner.

Negative emotions have important roles to play in our lives because when people think about how terribly wrong things might go and find themselves feeling angry or afraid, they take actions to make sure that things go terribly right instead. Just as we manipulate our children and our employees by threatening them with dire consequences, so too do we manipulate ourselves by imagining dire consequences.

People can be so anxious that their anxiety is debilitating, but that's the extreme case. Anxiety and fear are what keep us from touching hot stoves, committing adultery, and sending our children to play on the freeway.

If someone offered you a pill that would make you permanently happy, you would be well advised to run fast and run far. Emotion is a compass that tells us what to do, and a compass that is perpetually stuck on north is worthless.

People make errors when they try to forecast their future feelings. I am often asked whether there is some evolutionary advantage to making such errors. Sure, I can make up a story about why an affective forecasting error provides a selective advantage e. But then you can make up a story about how it provides a disadvantage e.

At the end of our story-telling we will have several stories and not a whole lot more. What we need, and what we do not have, is some principled way to calculate and then compare the costs and benefits of these errors. In the meantime and until someone convinces me otherwise, I am inclined to take the obvious positions: Errors are bad; it is better to be able to predict the future than not; knowing what will make us happy increases our ability to attain it; and so on.

These don't seem like particularly controversial claims to me. We have great big brains that can foresee the future in a way that no other animal ever has, and in a way that our own species could not just a few million years ago. Foresight isn't twenty-twenty, and sometimes it seems to be legally blind, but in general it allows us to glimpse the long-term consequences of our actions and to take measures to avoid the bad ones and promote the good ones.

We're all told that variety is the spice of life. But variety is not just over-rated, it may actually have a cost. Research shows that people do tend to seek more variety than they should. We all think we should try a different doughnut every time we go to the shop, but the fact is that people are measurably happier when they have their favorite on every visit — provided the visits are sufficiently separated in time. Those last four words are the important ones.

If you had to eat 4 donuts in rapid succession, variety would indeed spice up your experience and you'd be wise to seek it. But if you had to eat 4 donuts on 4 separate Mondays, variety would lower your overall enjoyment. The human brain has tremendous difficulty reasoning about time, and thus we tend to seek variety whether the doughnuts are separated by minutes or months.

Even in a technologically sophisticated society, some people retain the romantic notion that human unhappiness results from the loss of our primal innocence. I think that's nonsense. Every generation has the illusion that things were easier and better in a simpler past, but the fact is that things are easier and better today than at any time in human history.

Our primal innocence is what keeps us whacking each other over the head with sticks, and it is not what allows us to paint a Mona Lisa or design a space shuttle. It gives rise to obesity and global warming, not Miles Davis or the Magna Carta. If human kind flourishes rather than flounders over the next thousand years, it will be because we embraced learning and reason, and not because we surrendered to some fantasy about returning to an ancient Eden that never really was.

Skip to main content. All Rights Reserved. Conversation : MIND. She uses your reports as data, submits the data to scientific analysis, and designs a lens that will give you perfect vision—all on the basis of your reports of your subjective experience. There are many ways to measure happiness. People with normal temperatures might get readings other than So buggy thermometers are sometimes a problem—but not always.

Some thermometers would underestimate, some would overestimate, but as long as I measured enough people, the inaccuracies would cancel themselves out. Even with poorly calibrated instruments, we can compare large groups of people. A rating scale is like a buggy thermometer. Healthy people are happier than sick people. Rich people are happier than poor people.

And so on. That said, there have been some surprises. Yes, a new house or a new spouse will make you happier, but not much and not for long. As it turns out, people are not very good at predicting what will make them happy and how long that happiness will last. They expect positive events to make them much happier than those events actually do, and they expect negative events to make them unhappier than they actually do. A recent study showed that very few experiences affect us for more than three months.

When good things happen, we celebrate for a while and then sober up. When bad things happen, we weep and whine for a while and then pick ourselves up and get on with it. One reason is that people are good at synthesizing happiness—at finding silver linings. As a result, they usually end up happier than they expect after almost any kind of trauma or tragedy. Remember Jim Wright, who resigned in disgrace as Speaker of the House of Representatives because of a shady book deal?

It was a glorious experience. Speaking of which, Pete Best, the original drummer for the Beatles, was replaced by Ringo Starr in , just before the Beatles got big. What did he have to say about missing out on the chance to belong to the most famous band of the 20 th century? One of the most reliable findings of the happiness studies is that we do not have to go running to a therapist every time our shoelaces break. We have a remarkable ability to make the best of things. Most people are more resilient than they realize.

They have different origins, but they are not necessarily different in terms of how they feel. One is not obviously better than the other. You are looking for things that make your new life better, you are finding them, and they are making you happy. Is being happy always desirable? Look at all the unhappy creative geniuses—Beethoven, van Gogh, Hemingway.

You have to examine all the stories, or at least take a fair sample of them, and see if there are more miserable creatives or happy creatives, more miserable noncreatives or happy noncreatives. By and large, happy people are more creative and more productive. Has there ever been a human being whose misery was the source of his creativity? Of course. But that person is the exception, not the rule.

I know of no data showing that anxious, fearful employees are more creative or productive. Challenge and threat are not the same thing. People blossom when challenged and wither when threatened. But I have full faith and confidence that you can. So challenge makes people happy. What else do we know now about the sources of happiness?

Even ants have nothing on us. The psychologist Ed Diener has a finding I really like. He essentially shows that the frequency of your positive experiences is a much better predictor of your happiness than is the intensity of your positive experiences. When we think about what would make us happy, we tend to think of intense events—going on a date with a movie star, winning a Pulitzer, buying a yacht.