26. T. D. Wilson et al., “Preferences as Expectation-Driven Inferences: Effects of Affective Expectations on Affective Experience,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 56: 519–30 (1989).
27. A. A. Stone et al., “Prospective and Cross-Sectional Mood Reports Offer No Evidence of a ‘Blue Monday’ Phenomenon,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 49: 129–34 (1985).
Chapter 11: Reporting Live from Tomorrow
1. J. Livingston and R. Evans, “Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)” (1955).
2. W. V. Quine and J. S. Ullian, The Web of Belief, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1978), 51.
3. Half of all Americans relocated in the five-year period of 1995–2000, which suggests that the average American relocates about every ten years; B. Berkner and C. S. Faber, Geographical Mobility, 1995 to 2000: (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2003).
4. The average baby boomer held roughly ten jobs between the ages of eighteen and thirty-six, which suggests that the average American holds at least this many in a lifetime. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Number of Jobs Held, Labor Market Activity, and Earnings Growth Among Younger Baby Boomers: Results from More Than Two Decades of a Longitudinal Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics news release (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Labor, 2002).
5. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that in the coming years, 10 percent of Americans will never marry, 60 percent will marry just once, and 30 percent will marry at least twice. R. M. Kreider and J. M. Fields, Number, Timing, and Duration of Marriages and Divorces, 1996 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2002).
6. B. Russell, The Analysis of Mind (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 231.
7. The biologist Richard Dawkins refers to these beliefs as memes. See R. J. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). See also S. Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
8. D. C. Dennett, Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: Bradford/MIT Press, 1981), 18.
9. R. Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (New York: Penguin, 2005); E. Diener and M. E. P. Seligman, “Beyond Money: Toward an Economy of Well-Being,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 5: 1–31 (2004); B. S. Frey and A. Stutzer, Happiness and Economics: How the Economy and Institutions Affect Human Well-Being (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002); R. A. Easterlin, “Income and Happiness: Towards a Unified Theory,” Economic Journal 111: 465–84 (2001); and D. G. Blanchflower and A. J. Oswald, “Well-Being over Time in Britain and the USA,” Journal of Public Economics 88: 1359–86 (2004).
10. The effect of declining marginal utility is slowed when we spend our money on the things to which we are least likely to adapt. See T. Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy: The Psychology of Human Satisfaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976); L. Van Boven and T. Gilovich, “To Do or to Have? That Is the Question,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85: 1193–202 (2003); and R. H. Frank, “How Not to Buy Happiness,” Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 133: 69–79 (2004). Not all economists believe in decreasing marginal utility: R. A. Easterlin, “Diminishing Marginal Utility of Income? Caveat Emptor,” Social Indicators Research 70: 243–326 (2005).
11. J. D. Graaf et al., Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic (New York: Berrett-Koehler, 2002); D. Myers, The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); R. H. Frank, Luxury Fever (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); J. B. Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (New York: Perennial, 1999); and P. L. Wachtel, Poverty of Affluence: A Psychological Portrait of the American Way of Life (New York: Free Press, 1983).
12. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), book 1 (New York: Modern Library, 1994).
13. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
14. N. Ashraf, C. Camerer, and G. Loewenstein, “Adam Smith, Behavorial Economist,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19: 131–45 (2005).
15. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
16. Some theorists have argued that societies exhibit a cyclic pattern in which people do come to realize that money doesn’t buy happiness but then forget this lesson a generation later. See A. O. Hirschman, Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982).
17. C. Walker, “Some Variations in Marital Satisfaction,” in Equalities and Inequalities in Family Life, ed. R. Chester and J. Peel (London: Academic Press, 1977), 127–39.
18. D. Myers, The Pursuit of Happiness: Discovering the Pathway to Fulfillment, Well-Being, and Enduring Personal Joy (New York: Avon, 1992), 71.
19. J. A. Feeney, “Attachment Styles, Communication Patterns and Satisfaction Across the Life Cycle of Marriage,” Personal Relationships 1: 333–48 (1994).
20. D. Kahneman et al., “A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day Reconstruction Method,” Science 306: 1776–80 (2004).
21. T. D. Wilson et al., “Focalism: A Source of Durability Bias in Affective Forecasting,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78: 821–36 (2000).
22. R. J. Norwick, D. T. Gilbert, and T. D. Wilson, “Surrogation: An Antidote for Errors in Affective Forecasting” (unpublished manuscript, Harvard University, 2005).
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. This is also the best way to predict our future behavior. For example, people overestimate the likelihood that they will perform a charitable act but correctly estimate the likelihood that others will do the same. This suggests that if we would base predictions of our own behavior on what we see others do, we’d be dead-on. See N. Epley and D. Dunning, “Feeling ‘Holier Than Thou’: Are Self-Serving Assessments Produced by Errors in Self- or Social Prediction?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79: 861–75 (2000).
26. R. C. Wylie, The Self-Concept: Theory and Research on Selected Topics, vol. 2 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979).
27. L. Larwood and W. Whittaker, “Managerial Myopia: Self-Serving Biases in Organizational Planning,” Journal of Applied Psychology 62: 194–98 (1977).
28. R. B. Felson, “Ambiguity and Bias in the Self-Concept,” Social Psychology Quarterly 44: 64–69.
29. D. Walton and J. Bathurst, “An Exploration of the Perceptions of the Average Driver’s Speed Compared to Perceived Driver Safety and Driving Skill,” Accident Analysis and Prevention 30: 821–30 (1998).
30. P. Cross, “Not Can but Will College Teachers Be Improved?” New Directions for Higher Education 17: 1–15 (1977).
31. E. Pronin, D. Y. Lin, and L. Ross, “The Bias Blind Spot: Perceptions of Bias in Self Versus Others,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28: 369–81 (2002).
32. J. Kruger, “Lake Wobegon Be Gone! The ‘Below-Average Effect’ and the Egocentric Nature of Comparative Ability Judgments,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77: 221–32 (1999).
33. J. T. Johnson et al., “The ‘Barnum Effect’ Revisited: Cognitive and Motivational Factors in the Acceptance of Personality Descriptions,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 49: 1378–91 (1985).
34. Kruger, “Lake Wobegon Be Gone!”
35. E. E. Jones and R. E. Nisbett, “The Actor and the Observer: Divergent Perceptions of the Causes of Behavior,” in Attribution: Perceiving the Causes of Behavior, ed. E. E. Jones et al. (Morristown, N.J.: General Learning Press, 1972); and R. E. Nisbett and E. Borgida, “Attribution and the Psychology of Prediction,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32: 932–43 (1975).
36. D. T. Miller and C. McFarland, “Pluralistic Ignorance: When Similarity Is Interpreted as Dissimilarity,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53: 298–305 (1987).
37. D. T. Miller and L. D. Nelson, “Seeing Approach Motivation in the Avoidance Behavior of Others: Im
plications for an Understanding of Pluralistic Ignorance,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83: 1066–75 (2002).
38. C. R. Snyder and H. L. Fromkin, “Abnormality as a Positive Characteristic: The Development and Validation of a Scale Measuring Need for Uniqueness,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 86: 518–27 (1977).
39. M. B. Brewer, “The Social Self: On Being the Same and Different at the Same Time,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 17: 475–82 (1991).
40. H. L. Fromkin, “Effects of Experimentally Aroused Feelings of Undistinctiveness Upon Valuation of Scarce and Novel Experiences,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 16: 521–29 (1970); and H. L. Fromkin, “Feelings of Interpersonal Undistinctiveness: An Unpleasant Affective State,” Journal of Experimental Research in Personality 6: 178–85 (1972).
41. R. Karniol, T. Eylon, and S. Rish, “Predicting Your Own and Others’ Thoughts and Feelings: More Like a Stranger Than a Friend,” European Journal of Social Psychology 27: 301–11 (1997); J. T. Johnson, “The Heart on the Sleeve and the Secret Self: Estimations of Hidden Emotion in Self and Acquaintances,” Journal of Personality 55: 563–82 (1987); and R. Karniol, “Egocentrism Versus Protocentrism: The Status of Self in Social Prediction,” Psychological Review 110: 564–80 (2003).
42. C. L. Barr and R. E. Kleck, “Self-Other Perception of the Intensity of Facial Expressions of Emotion: Do We Know What We Show?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 68: 608–18 (1995).
43. R. Karniol and L. Koren, “How Would You Feel? Children’s Inferences Regarding Their Own and Others’ Affective Reactions,” Cognitive Development 2: 271–78 (1987).
44. C. McFarland and D. T. Miller, “Judgments of Self-Other Similarity: Just Like Other People, Only More So,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 16: 475–84 (1990).
Afterword
1. Actually, it is a bit unclear just what Bernoulli meant by utility because he didn’t define it, and the meaning of this concept has been debated for three and a half centuries. Early users of the term were clearly talking about the ability of commodities to induce positive subjective experiences in those who consumed them. For instance, in 1750 the economist Ferdinando Galiani defined utilità as “the power of a thing to procure us felicity” (F. Galiani, Della moneta [On money] [1750]). In 1789 the philosopher Jeremy Bentham defined it as “that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness” (J. Bentham, in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart [1789; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996]). Most modern economists have distanced themselves from such definitions—not because they have better ones but because they don’t like to talk about subjective experiences. As such, utility has become a hypothetical abstraction of which choices are the measure. If that seems like sleight of mouth to you, then welcome to the club. For more on the history of the concept, see N. Georgescu-Roegen, “Utility and Value in Economic Thought, New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, vol. 4 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004), 450–58; and D. Kahneman, P. P. Wakker, and R. Sarin, “Back to Bentham? Explorations of Experienced Utility,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 112: 375–405 (1997).
2. Most modern economists would disagree with this statement because economics is currently committed to an assumption that psychology abandoned a half-century ago, namely, that a science of human behavior can ignore what people feel and say and rely solely on what people do.
3. D. Bernoulli, “Exposition of a New Theory on the Measurement of Risk,” Econometrica 22: 23–36 (1954) (originally published as “Specimen theoriae novae de mensura sortis” in Commentarii Academiae Scientiarum Imperialis Petropolitanae, vol. 5 [1738], 175–92).
4. Ibid., p. 25.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DANIEL GILBERT is the Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He has won numerous awards for his teaching and research, including the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology.
His scientific research has been covered by The New York Times Magazine, Forbes, Money, CNN, U.S. News & World Report, The New Yorker, Scientific American, Psychology Today, and others. His short stories have appeared in Amazing Stories and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, as well as in other magazines and anthologies.
He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Excerpt from the song lyric “Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera),” words and music by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans. Copyright © 1955 by Jay Livingston Music, Inc. and St. Angelo Music. Copyright renewed. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Jay Livingston Music, Inc. and Universal Music Publishing Group.
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Figures 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, and 24 created by Mapping Specialists, Ltd.
Figure 3 reprinted from J. M. Harlow, “Recovery from the Passage of an Iron Bar Through the Head,” Publications of the Massachusetts Medical Society 2: 327–47 (1868).
Figure 12: Animal Crackers cartoon by Fred Wagner. Copyright © 1983 by Tribune Media Services. Reprinted by permission of Tribune Media Services.
Figure 14 reprinted from C. Walker, “Some Variations in Marital Satisfaction,” in R. Chester and J. Peel, eds., Equalities and Inequalities in Family Life (London: Academic Press, 1977), 127–39. Copyright © 1977. Reprinted by permission of Elsevier.
Figure 19 adapted with permission from the American Psychological Association from D. T. Gilbert, E. C. Pinel, T. D. Wilson, S. J. Blumberg, and T. P. Wheatley, “Immune Neglect: A Source of Durability Bias in Affective Forecasting,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75: 617–38 (1998).
Figure 20 reprinted with permission from the American Psychological Association from T. D. Wilson, D. B. Centerbar, D. A. Kermer, and D. T. Gilbert, “The Pleasures of Uncertainty: Prolonging Positive Moods in Ways People Do Not Anticipate,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 88: 5–21 (2005).
Figure 22 adapted with permission from Guilford Publications, Inc. from T. D. Wilson, J. Meyers, and D. T. Gilbert, “How Happy Was I, Anyway? A Retrospective Impact Bias,” Social Cognition 21: 407–32 (2003).
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2006 by Daniel Gilbert
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Owing to limitations of space, all acknowledgments to reprint previously published material may be found at the end of the volume.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gilbert, Daniel Todd.
Stumbling on happiness / by Daniel Gilbert.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Happiness. I. Title.
BF575.H27G55 2006
158—dc22 2005044459
This title may be purchased for business or promotional use or for special sales. For information, please write to Special Markets Department, Random House, Inc., 1745 Broadway, MD 6-3, New York, NY 10019, or e-mail [email protected].
eISBN: 978-0-307-26530-2
v3.0
grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share
Stumbling on Happiness Page 30