“If Daniel Gilbert is right, then you are wrong. That is to say, if Daniel Gilbert is right, then you are wrong to believe that a new car will make you as happy as you imagine. You are wrong to believe that a new kitchen will make you happy for as long as you imagine. You are wrong to think that you will be more unhappy with a big single setback (a broken wrist, a broken heart) than with a lesser chronic one (a trick knee, a tense marriage). You are wrong to assume that job failure will be crushing. You are wrong to expect that a death in the family will leave you bereft for year upon year, forever and ever. You are even wrong to reckon that a cheeseburger you order in a restaurant — this week, next week, a year from now, it doesn’t really matter when — will definitely hit the spot. That’s because when it comes to predicting exactly how you will feel in the future, you are most likely wrong.
A professor in Harvard’s department of psychology, Gilbert likes to tell people that he studies happiness. But it would be more precise to say that Gilbert — along with the psychologist Tim Wilson of the University of Virginia, the economist George Loewenstein of Carnegie-Mellon and the psychologist (and Nobel laureate in economics) Daniel Kahneman of Princeton — has taken the lead in studying a specific type of emotional and behavioral prediction. In the past few years, these four men have begun to question the decision-making process that shapes our sense of well-being: how do we predict what will make us happy or unhappy — and then how do we feel after the actual experience? For example, how do we suppose we’ll feel if our favorite college football team wins or loses, and then how do we really feel a few days after the game? How do we predict we’ll feel about purchasing jewelry, having children, buying a big house or being rich? And then how do we regard the outcomes? According to this small corps of academics, almost all actions — the decision to buy jewelry, have kids, buy the big house or work exhaustively for a fatter paycheck — are based on our predictions of the emotional consequences of these events.” NY Times Magazine
Is this, essentially, an academic verification of the Buddhist truth of impermanence and the source of unhappiness in attachment (cravings)? To question that we understand what we want and are adept at improving our happiness seems to go profoundly to the heart of things. “On average, bad events proved less intense and more transient than test participants predicted. Good events proved less intense and briefer as well.” [It also might prove the old adage, ‘Be careful what you wish for; you might get it’…] There might be some relationship between the findings and the fact that Gilbert, who has been praised within academic psychology as one of the most gifted social psychologists of the era, was a high school dropout who “caught the tail end of the hippie movement”, a vagabond and, among other occupations, a (seemingly mediocre) science fiction writer.
One of the interesting discoveries Gilbert has made — people’s estimation that bigger, often solitary bad events dwarf more long-lived but minor annoyances as a contributor to unhappiness should be questioned. He measures this within his ‘psychoeconomic’ viewpoint, but it resonates with the thinking of many classical psychodynamic psychologists about the sequelae of trauma, about which I have written here before. Part of the reaction to traumas is a psychological maneuver of self-blame even over events over which we were helpless, which serves to reassure against feeling out of control of the outcome of our life. Even though we did not succeed in warding off the trauma, it is as if we are saying, we could have, and we will the next time. In contrast, the more petty contributions to unhappiness, the chronic dissatisfactions, come to seem so much a part of the fabric of our lives that we do not see ourselves as having potential control over them when we might, in fact, be able to change them. There’s a sort of figure-ground problem here. In psychotherapy about life dissatisfaction, this ‘learned helplessness’ becomes an important issue to grapple with; very often, you find yur patient is focusing on changing the wrong things.
Gilbert and his associates describe a similar phenomenon on the positive side:
”We don’t realize how quickly we will adapt to a pleasurable event and make it the backdrop of our lives. When any event occurs to us, we make it ordinary. And through becoming ordinary, we lose our pleasure.”
And we are unable to accurately predict that we will ‘adapt to happiness’ in this way. As the pleasure diminishes, he says, we go on in quest of the next thing, making the same error over and over again. The Buddhist doctrine of impermanence and the futility of attachment says the same thing.
If it is true that we consistently make costly forecasting errors, what impact could this work have in correcting our aspirations? It is to that interesting question that the article turns at the end, and to the further question of whether institutional or individual judgments would and should be influenced more. For one thing, the influence of this work leans toward liberal thinking that there is little overall benefit to boosting the standard of living of anyone already in middle class comfort. In other words, the misery of the poor is incommensurately more valid than the misery of the well-off unfulfilled by the way they spend their excess resources.
Addendum: It may not be an accident that I noticed the Buddhist significance of Gilbert’s work. Here’s what a Google search on “Daniel Gilbert and Buddhist|Buddhism” reveals. For instance, he is a participant in a monumental impending conference featuring an interchange between the Dalai Lama and western academic researchers in a variety of fields.
