In Dan Gilbert’s hilarious book Stumbling on Happiness, recommended to me by my friend James, Gilbert presents a bold thesis: we are horrible predictors of what will actually make us happy. When we remember happy events from the past, we often misrepresent how happy they actually made us, and when we project to the future, we take our present emotional state into account far more than is appropriate. Finally, we fail to consider the big picture, often considering false dichotomies when evaluating possible decisions: more on this later.

But first, a quick nerdy note about memory. When we remember something, we don’t remember the whole thing; instead, we encode the salient features, and reinvent the rest when it’s time to recall, using our imagination. For example, if you see the Oakland Athletics play the San Francisco Giants, you might encode that it rained and that it was an interleague game.

Another important property of memory is primacy and recency effects: we are most likely to encode features at the beginning of an event and features at the end. If we had a horrible experience camping, uncomfortable for the entire week of our wilderness trip, but on the last day there was beautiful sunshine, fish jumping out of the lake, and all the birds broke out into beautiful song, then we might remember the trip as wonderful, even though it was only fun for 1/7 of the time.

So if we want to predict what experiences we will enjoy in the future, we will remember experiences that we enjoyed in the past. Unfortunately, due to primacy and recency effects, we have a skewed perception!

When predicting our future emotional state, we tend to go on our present emotional state: for example, after eating chips, we estimate that tomorrow at the same time, we won’t be craving chips; that’s not true, though, we would crave chips equally as much as we did before we just ate them. Or when experiencing a horrible breakup, students polled estimated that they would take much longer to get over it than follow-up studies proved to be the case.

When evaluating future potential outcomes, we also use selective representation and create false dichotomies. When thinking about how happy we’ll be if our team wins the big game, we get confused: sure, we take into consideration our enjoyment after the match, but we neglect to consider how we’ll feel when later that night we have to study for the big chemistry test. Another famous example is the savings paradox: we would drive 20 extra minutes to save $50 on a radio, but we wouldn’t make the same long drive to save $50 on the purchase of a new car, even though the change to our total net worth ($50 saved) is the same.

Gilbert also tours us through some other fun psychological idiosyncrasies. One especially interesting thing I noted is that we quickly recover from personal offenses through rationalization; we rationalize bad things that happen to us. But if something negative happens to someone else, we are less likely to recover. For example, if Joe insults me, I might think, “Ha ha, Joe is such a kidder.”? But if Joe insults my retarded sister, I might “Although he has a point, that was mean!”? So if you want to really affect someone, the best way to do it might be to insult someone close to them.

See, explaining events dulls their emotional impact. This affects positive as well as negative emotional spikes. It also explains why “Stumbling on Happiness”? is such an apt title; we are happy when we don’t think about it.

Though I think Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational does a much better of inventorying our psychological quirks, I appreciate Gilbert’s decision to include them: our quirks affect our decision-making; decision-making is based on emotions, seeking happiness and averting pain.

So what is the best way to determine what makes us happy? Two things. The first is to poll ourselves at random intervals, recording our activity and our mood, and then doing more of the activities that truly make us happy (but with some variation: too much of a good thing will lead to habituation, dulling our enjoyment). The second is to ask other people what they enjoyed. Believe it or not, we may even predict our own satisfaction at worse-than-random. Playing on an important theme that has held continuous throughout my studies, we are not the unique and beautiful snowflakes that we like to think we are; humans are more similar than they are different. So if someone else reports a good experience, if it is vaguely contextually similar to our situation, we should listen to them, no matter how personally “different”? from us they are.

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