Oh the science of happiness…

This sounds like a cool book!

 

STUMBLING ON HAPPINESS By Daniel Gilbert.

NYTimes Book Review…here.

What would have happened if, at the end of “Casablanca,” Ingrid Bergman had stayed with Humphrey Bogart in Morocco, rather than boarding the plane to Lisbon with her Nazi-fighting husband? Would she have regretted it? Or did she end up lamenting the decision she did make? According to Daniel Gilbert, odds are that either decision would have made her equally happy in the long run.

If this sounds like an odd question for a professor of psychology at Harvard to ask in a serious book about cognitive science, there are dozens more where that came from. Is it really possible that Christopher Reeve believed himself in some ways better off after he became a quadriplegic, or that Lance Armstrong is glad to have had cancer, or that cancer patients in general tend to be more optimistic about the future than healthy people? (Answers: yes, yes and yes.)

Gilbert is an influential researcher in happiness studies, an interdisciplinary field that has attracted psychologists, economists and other empirically minded researchers, not to mention a lot of interested students. (As The Boston Globe recently reported, a course on “positive psychology” taught by one of Gilbert’s colleagues is the most popular course at Harvard.) But from the acknowledgments page forward, it’s clear Gilbert also fancies himself a comedian. Uh-oh, cringe alert: an academic who cracks wise. But Gilbert’s elbow-in-the-ribs social-science humor is actually funny, at least some of the time. “When we have an experience . . . on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time,” he writes. “Psychologists calls this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.”

But underneath the goofball brilliance, Gilbert has a serious argument to make about why human beings are forever wrongly predicting what will make them happy. Because of logic-processing errors our brains tend to make, we don’t want the things that would make us happy — and the things that we want (more money, say, or a bigger house or a fancier car) won’t make us happy.

At least since Freud, one of the abiding strains in psychological thought has been the idea that our behavior is often motivated by impulses beyond conscious awareness. Gilbert’s argument is the cognitive scientist’s version of Freudian delusion, with faulty logic — rather than the hidden longings of the unconscious — causing us to misperceive reality, and make decisions that are not in our rational, happiness-maximizing interest. What gets us through life, evidently, is just the right amount of delusion — enough to fool us into feeling relatively good about ourselves (as in Lake Wobegon, we all believe ourselves to be above average; 90 percent of drivers certainly do), but not so much as to exceed our own credulity. “If we were to experience the world exactly as it is, we’d be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning,” Gilbert writes. “But if we were to experience the world exactly as we want it to be, we’d be too deluded to find our slippers.”

Interestingly, the clinically depressed seem less susceptible to these basic cognitive errors. For instance, healthy people can be deluded into greater happiness when granted the mere illusion of control over their environment; the clinically depressed recognize the illusion for what it is. All in all, it’s yet more evidence that unhappy people have the more accurate view of reality — and that learning how to kid ourselves may be a key to mental health.