The (misguided) pursuit of happiness

TEDTalks, Dan Gilbert

Highlights:

• In 2 million years the human brain tripled in mass, and not just 3 times bigger in size: it gained new structure, namely the pre-frontal cortex.
  
• The pre-frontal cortex is our experience simulator: we can simulate things in our heads without the need to try them out in the world; thus, we can make predictions about the emotional impact of future events based on past experiences.
• Degree of 'happiness' is reportedly the same for both lottery winners and paraplegics.
• Research on Impact Bias shows events have far less impact, intensity, and duration than what people expect or anticipate.
  
• Synthesis of happiness: we change our views of the world to help feel better about the world. "The one I own is far better than I thought it would be; the one I didn't get sucks."
• Research with Anterograde Amnesiac patients replicate these findings (synthetic happiness): even though they don't remember they own it, they like it better.
• We like best what we are stuck with.
• We are rubbish at making predictions about the emotional impact of future events (there is plenty of evidence of how remembering the past biases forecasts of the future in the finance world too).
  
• Bottom line is we don't really know what makes us happy.
  

Closing words:
"We have the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we choose experience"

Daniel Gilbert is at least as good a speaker as Barry Schwartz. I'm looking forward to read the book.

References:
Dilbert


Wilson, T. D., Meyers, J., & Gilbert, D. T. (2003). "How happy was I, anyway?" A retrospective impact bias.

"People do not learn from experience that positive events are often less impactful than they anticipated, because they recall them as more impactful than they were. One reason for this, we suggest, is that both affective forecasts and affective recollections are subject to the focalism bias, whereby people think about the emotional event in isolation and neglect to consider that other events were influencing their feelings and thoughts."

Lieberman, M. D., Ochsner, K. N., Gilbert, D. T., & Schacter, D. L. (2001). Do amnesics exhibit cognitive dissonance reduction? The role of explicit memory and attention in attitude change.

"The amnesic patients in this experiment showed just as much behavior-induced attitude change as did matched control participants despite the fact that they had no explicit memory for which prints they had chosen and no explicit memory for which prints were involved in the choice."
(Behavior-induced attitude change = 'changing minds': revising attitudes to fit with current circumstances, which is conventionally thought of as self-deception or rationalization.)

Gilbert, D. T., Pinel, E. C., Wilson, T. D., Blumberg, S. J., & Wheatley, T. (1998). Immune neglect: A source of durability bias in affective forecasting.

Affective forecasting is "the ability to predict one's hedonic reactions to future events."

Wilson, T. D., Wheatley, T. P., Meyers, J. M., Gilbert, D. T., & Axsom, D. (2000). Focalism: A source of durability bias in affective forecasting.

"When we're trying to predict how happy we will be in a future that contains Event X, we tend to focus on Event X and forget about all the other events that also populate that future—events that tend to dilute the hedonic impact of Event X."

Wilson, T. D., Meyers, J., & Gilbert, D. T. (2001). Lessons from the past: Do people learn from experience that emotional reactions are short lived?

"People who received positive or negative feedback on a test were not as happy or unhappy as they would have predicted. People in the positive feedback condition did not learn from this experience when making predictions about their reactions to future positive events (Impact bias & Focalism). People in the negative feedback condition moderated their predictions about their reactions to future negative events (Immune neglect), but this may not have been a result of learning. Rather, participants denigrated the test as a way of making themselves feel better and, when predicting future reactions, brought to mind this reconstrual of the test and inferred that doing poorly on it again would not make them very unhappy."

Dunn, E. W., Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2003). Location, location, location: The misprediction of satisfaction in housing lotteries.

"People tend to overestimate the emotional consequences of future life events, exhibiting an impact bias. The authors replicated the impact bias in a real-life context in which undergraduates were randomly assigned to dormitories (or “houses”). Participants appeared to focus on the wrong factors when imagining their future happiness in the houses. They placed far greater weight on highly variable physical features than on less variable social features in predicting their future happiness in each house, despite accurately recognizing that social features were more important than physical features when asked explicitly about the determinants of happiness."