Daniel Gilbert, "Immune to Reality "

Historically, the study of human psychology has tended to emphasize the negative. Scholars and practitioners of mental health focused on schizophrenia, depression, and other forms of psychological distress. In recent years, however, an interdisciplinary cohort of psychologists and other researchers have turned their attention to what turns out to be an equally baffling area: human happiness.

Among the leaders of this movement—sometimes called “positive psychology,” or, more informally, “happiness studies”—is Daniel Gilbert, a professor of social psychology at Harvard University. Gilbert pioneered the field of “affective forecasting,” or the study of what people imagine their emotional states to be in the future given their uncertainty about what the future will bring. Having once dropped out of high school to travel and write science fiction, Gilbert is a prime candidate for helping us understand the not-always-accurate emotions with which we bridge the present and the future, as well as the biases through which we then look at the past. While living in Denver, Colorado, Gilbert tried to enroll in a creative writing course at a local community college. Turned away due to oversubscription, he decided to take the only open course: psychology. Realizing that psychology “wasn’t about crazy people,” but “about all of us,” Gilbert stumbled onto the path that brought him to the present.

In his international bestseller Stumbling on Happiness (2006), Gilbert suggests that people suffer from “illusions of prospection” on top of the illusions of perception (such as mirages) and illusions of retrospection (such as inaccurate memories) that psychologists have already covered. Through his experimental research, he discovered the following discrepancy: while few people seriously believe that they can predict the future with much accuracy, many more believe that they can accurately predict how they will feel about that future. Our predictions about future emotional state are often subject to “impact bias,” which leads us to overestimate the intensity and the duration of emotional events both negative and positive.

The chapter from Stumbling on Happiness included here, “Immune to Reality,” offers just some of Gilbert’s counterintuitive discoveries. Here we meet experimental subjects who are unable to predict their level of happiness just minutes into the future. Though we are not surprised by their inability to do so even in a controlled setting, we remain confident that we know ourselves well enough that the same discontinuity would not emerge. Gilbert also details the “psychological immune system” that activates when we suffer substantial emotional setbacks but not minor ones, resulting in surprising complacency in the face of significant blows but disproportionate responses in the face of trivial irritations. Gilbert’s conclusions challenge the conventional ways we understand our mental wellbeing by showing just how poorly these conventions reflect the reality of emotional cognition. Through their work, Gilbert and the other champions of happiness studies are seeking to re-shape how we go about the  “pursuit of happiness.”

Gilbert, Daniel. Stumbling on Happiness. Random House, 2006.

Quotations are drawn from an interview conducted at SXSW and from an interview conducted by Dave Weich of Powell’s books.
Digital image drawn from the Powells Books website.

Link to Explore:

Daniel Gilbert on The Colbert Report: A video of Daniel Gilbert being interviewed on Stephen Colbert's news satire show.

Pop!Cast: Video and audio files of a lecture by Daniel Gilbert on tooth decay, anthrax, and climate change.

Daniel Gilbert's official website.

Question for Connecting:

• In “A Life of its Own,” Michael Specter heralds the emergence of “synthetic biology”—the deliberate engineering of organic life. One champion of the new field, the physicist Freeman Dyson, even looks forward to a time when school children will play “biotech games” and the creation of new varieties of life will be an “art form” on a par with painting or sculpture. This vision of the future can seem quite exciting, but when we turn to Gilbert’s argu- ment, we might begin to have second thoughts. Even if genetic technology can deliver on its bright promises, are the results really likely to be as re- warding as its promoters believe? Might scientists be swayed unconsciously by the “psychological immune system,” which conceals the truth from us by “cooking the facts”? Could our tendency to cook the facts make us unaware of the dangers posed by genetic technology?
  
• What are the connections between the quest for happiness as Gilbert de- scribes it and the cultivation of wisdom that Robert Thurman outlines? Is the Buddhist experience of nothingness a way of freeing people from the hot states in which we overestimate our own capacity to find satisfaction through changes in external conditions? Or is the notion of wisdom itself an example of the kind of unconscious fact cooking Gilbert describes, which generates happiness only if it feels “like a discovery and not like a snow job”? Is there a way to determine, finally, if another person is happy or wise? Can one know oneself with certainty in either of these systems?

For additional connecting suggestions, please go to assignments.

Explore some more:

Search for other links using Google: