Some food for thought

From the conclusion of the book review I am going to post below: this quote:

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.

And the whole review:

STUMBLING ON HAPPINESS

By Daniel Gilbert.

Review by SCOTT STOSSEL

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.)

Which raises another question: If people who we think should be unhappy are not, is it also possible that some people are happy and don’t know it? (Clinically speaking, yes. There is a syndrome called alexithymia in which a person experiences the same physiological response associated with an emotion as a normal person, as recorded by an M.R.I. scan, but is unaware of having the emotion.)

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.

Happiness is a subjective emotional state, so when you and I say that we are “extremely happy” we may mean completely different things. Most people would find the idea of being a conjoined twin to be a horrible fate. You couldn’t possibly be happy in that condition, right? Then how come conjoined twins rate themselves as happy as nonconjoined people, Gilbert asks. Is that because they don’t know what “real” happiness is? Or are you wrong to think that you couldn’t be happy as a conjoined twin?

Not knowing what makes other people happy is one thing. But shouldn’t we be able to figure out what will make ourselves happy? No, Gilbert argues, for the same reasons we can’t imagine accurately how happy we would be as a conjoined twin. For one thing, we change across time; the person you are when you are imagining what it would be like to have that fancy new car is not the person you will be when you actually have that fancy new car.

“Teenagers get tattoos because they are confident that DEATH ROCKS will always be an appealing motto,” he writes. “Smokers who have just finished a cigarette are confident for at least five minutes that they can quit and that their resolve will not diminish with the nicotine in their bloodstreams.” For another, as Gilbert shows through a series of logic games and diagrams meant to dupe the reader (they worked on me), we misperceive reality — as philosophers since Kant have recognized — and then use those misperceptions to build a mistaken view of the future.

Events that we anticipate will give us joy make us less happy than we think; things that fill us with dread will make us less unhappy, for less long, than we anticipate. As evidence, Gilbert cites studies showing that a large majority of people who endure major trauma (wars, car accidents, rapes) in their lives will return successfully to their pre-trauma emotional state — and that many of them will report that they ended up happier than they were before the trauma. It’s as though we’re equipped with a hedonic thermostat that is constantly resetting us back to our emotional baseline.

The book is studded with research supporting this notion: Gore voters in the drawn-out 2000 election who wrongly predicted how unhappy they would be, and for how long, if Bush were declared the victor; college students who mistakenly predict how miserable they would feel if their football team lost; and people who overestimated how long they’d feel blue over a lost love or a lost job.

We even “mispredict” how things that we have already experienced will feel when they happen again. The classic example here is childbirth, which women seem to misremember as not being all that bad. We “expect the next car, the next house or the next promotion to make us happy even though the last ones didn’t and even though others keep telling us that the next ones won’t.”

Gilbert argues that what he calls the “psychological immune system” kicks into gear in response to big negative events (the death of a spouse, the loss of a job) but not in response to small negative events (your car breaking down). Which means that our day-to-day happiness may be predicated more strongly on little events than on big ones. On its face, this sounds preposterous, but Gilbert cites study after study suggesting that it’s true.

In an important sense, “Stumbling on Happiness” is a paean to delusion. “How do we manage to think of ourselves as great drivers, talented lovers and brilliant chefs when the facts of our lives include a pathetic parade of dented cars, disappointed partners and deflated soufflés?” Gilbert asks. “The answer is simple: We cook the facts.”

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.”

Can awareness of these cognitive mechanisms make us happier, or at least less deluded? Alas, not really. In fact, that’s sort of Gilbert’s point: imagination (or projecting ourselves into the future) ought to be the key to predicting what will make us happy, but we’re incapable of imagining accurately.

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.

Well, if you got this far I just want to say that I believe we can be realists and content. Screw happiness. I’ve never thought that was the point to life anyway.