Daniel Gilbert , "Immune to Reality "

Questions for Making Connections within the Reading:

1. Throughout “Immune to Reality,” Gilbert describes mental operations in quotidian terms:  the brain is “one smart shopper”; our brains are “conspirators”; once we come up with an explanation “we can fold it up like freshly washed laundry, put it away in memory’s drawer, and move on to the next one.” Obviously, Gilbert is seeking to make his thoughts about human psychology readily accessible, but what exactly is he trying to convey with these descriptions? As you reread the essay, generate a list of the most significant images and analogies Gilbert uses to describe mental operations. What does this list tell you about Gilbert’s theory of mind?

2.  On the basis of the experiments and studies Gilbert presents, would you say that happiness is fundamentally an illusion? Or is it the pursuit of happiness that deserves to be reconsidered? If happiness is not something that we can pursue consciously, then how do we go about becoming happy? Should we be pursuing something other than happiness?

3. What is meaning of  “reality” at the end of Gilbert’s discussion of our “psychological immune system”? What exactly is it that this system is designed to protect us from? Is the psychological immune system analogous to our immune system or does it operate according to a different logic? Is the reality that this system protects us from ultimately an illusion? Or are psychological realities fundamentally different from material realities?

Questions for Writing:  

1. The Declaration of Independence proclaims “all men” are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” among them “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” What are the political implications of the research indicating that the pursuit of happiness is often misdirected because people typically fail to recognize the conditions that will really make them happy? Does Gilbert’s work suggest that Thomas Jefferson’s proclamation was based on a false assumption? Is the pursuit of happiness properly understood as in the same category as the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution—namely, the right of free speech and assembly, trail by jury, and so on? Or is the idea that the pursuit of happiness is an unalienable right itself an expression of a mistaken understanding of the necessary conditions for bringing about happiness?

2. What are the economic implications of Gilbert’s argument? If people began to choose “action over inaction, pain over annoyance, and commitment over freedom,” would the consumer economy survive? That is, is consumerism dependent upon our collective ignorance about the path to happiness or is the hope that one’s life will be improved by increased purchasing power itself a path to happiness? Is trying to be happy with what one has a form of action or inaction?  If Gilbert is right that “explanation robs events of their emotional impact,” what roll does explanation play in consumer economy? Is a healthy economy dependent upon consumers who are well-informed, consumers who are “immune to reality”?

Questions for Making Connections Between Readings:  

1. What are the connections between the quest for happiness as Gilbert describes it and the cultivation of “wisdom” as Robert Thurman describes it? Is the Buddhist experience of “nothingness” a way of freeing people from the hot states in which they overestimate their 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 belief by feeling “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?