Book Review: Stumbling on Happiness

Happy with your life? If so, that’s as much a function of random chance as anything, according to Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness. Gilbert convincingly debunks the notion that our past emotional states, present experiences, and imagined futures can be accurate predictors of our actual future levels of happiness. As he describes it, most of us wrongly believe that how we felt when we experienced an event in the past can be a telling predictor of how we will feel about that same event in the future. (Last time I drank tequila I felt ill, therefore I will never enjoy a margarita again.)

According to Gilbert, we also incorrectly imagine that how we feel about a situation we are experiencing right now is how we will feel about it in the future. (I will love you 'til the end of time.)  We fail to recognize that things will look different once they actually happen. In specific, potential future events we regard with dread turn out to be not as abominable as previously imagined. (Having my fiancée jilt me at the altar was the best thing that ever happened to me.)

After discrediting these three means most of us use to predict our future happiness (and the tools we use to make decisions about relationships, marriages, careers, and just about everything else, monumental and not-so-monumental), Gilbert argues that the only accurate way to make predictions about our future happiness is to find someone who is having the experience we are contemplating and ask them about it. This argument falls apart, however, when examined from a statistical perspective.

Gilbert cites a number of studies in which volunteers are asked to predict their future happiness based on either (a) their expected future satisfaction, or (b) the reported experience of prior study participants. In each example, participants’ actual happiness more closely matches the happiness levels of past participants than their own predictions of their own satisfaction.

For example, a group of volunteers was fed some potato chips and reported their resulting enjoyment level. Next, a new group of volunteers was fed a large quantity of salty snacks then asked to predict how much they would enjoy potato chips the next day. Other stuffed volunteers were not told what the next day’s snack would be but were instead shown the report of one randomly selected individual who had already reported their potato chip snacking satisfaction. When asked to predict how much they would enjoy the next day’s snack, they had no choice other than to rely on the randomly selected individual’s satisfaction level. It turns out that volunteers in the second group, who had no opportunity to rely on their own tastes or preferences and instead relied on the report of the randomly selected individual, were far more accurate in predicting their actual potato chip enjoyment than volunteers in the first group.

Article Author: Justin McHenry

Justin McHenry is president of Index Credit Cards, a site offering credit card comparisons, research, tips, calculators and a listing of over 1,200 currently-available credit cards.

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