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Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.com Review
Do you know what makes you happy? Daniel Gilbert would bet that you think you do, but you are most likely wrong. In his witty and engaging new book, Harvard professor Gilbert reveals his take on how our minds work, and how the limitations of our imaginations may be getting in the way of our ability to know what happiness is. Sound quirky and interesting? It is! But just to be sure, we asked bestselling author (and master of the quirky and interesting) Malcolm Gladwell to read Stumbling on Happiness, and give us his take. Check out his review below. --Daphne Durham

Guest Reviewer: Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of bestselling books Blink and The Tipping Point, and is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

Several years ago, on a flight from New York to California, I had the good fortune to sit next to a psychologist named Dan Gilbert. He had a shiny bald head, an irrepressible good humor, and we talked (or, more accurately, he talked) from at least the Hudson to the Rockies--and I was completely charmed. He had the wonderful quality many academics have--which is that he was interested in the kinds of questions that all of us care about but never have the time or opportunity to explore. He had also had a quality that is rare among academics. He had the ability to translate his work for people who were outside his world.

Now Gilbert has written a book about his psychological research. It is called Stumbling on Happiness, and reading it reminded me of that plane ride long ago. It is a delight to read. Gilbert is charming and funny and has a rare gift for making very complicated ideas come alive.

Stumbling on Happiness is a book about a very simple but powerful idea. What distinguishes us as human beings from other animals is our ability to predict the future--or rather, our interest in predicting the future. We spend a great deal of our waking life imagining what it would be like to be this way or that way, or to do this or that, or taste or buy or experience some state or feeling or thing. We do that for good reasons: it is what allows us to shape our life. And it is by trying to exert some control over our futures that we attempt to be happy. But by any objective measure, we are really bad at that predictive function. We're terrible at knowing how we will feel a day or a month or year from now, and even worse at knowing what will and will not bring us that cherished happiness. Gilbert sets out to figure what that's so: why we are so terrible at something that would seem to be so extraordinarily important?

In making his case, Gilbert walks us through a series of fascinating--and in some ways troubling--facts about the way our minds work. In particular, Gilbert is interested in delineating the shortcomings of imagination. We're far too accepting of the conclusions of our imaginations. Our imaginations aren't particularly imaginative. Our imaginations are really bad at telling us how we will think when the future finally comes. And our personal experiences aren't nearly as good at correcting these errors as we might think.

I suppose that I really should go on at this point, and talk in more detail about what Gilbert means by that--and how his argument unfolds. But I feel like that might ruin the experience of reading Stumbling on Happiness. This is a psychological detective story about one of the great mysteries of our lives. If you have even the slightest curiosity about the human condition, you ought to read it. Trust me. --Malcolm Gladwell

Product Description
• Why are lovers quicker to forgive their partners for infidelity than for leaving dirty dishes in the sink?

• Why will sighted people pay more to avoid going blind than blind people will pay to regain their sight?

• Why do dining companions insist on ordering different meals instead of getting what they really want?

• Why do pigeons seem to have such excellent aim; why can’t we remember one song while listening to another; and why does the line at the grocery store always slow down the moment we join it?

In this brilliant, witty, and accessible book, renowned Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert describes the foibles of imagination and illusions of foresight that cause each of us to misconceive our tomorrows and misestimate our satisfactions. Vividly bringing to life the latest scientific research in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, and behavioral economics, Gilbert reveals what scientists have discovered about the uniquely human ability to imagine the future, and about our capacity to predict how much we will like it when we get there. With penetrating insight and sparkling prose, Gilbert explains why we seem to know so little about the hearts and minds of the people we are about to become.

Customer Reviews: Read 212 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

A pretty happy read- but not as happy as you think it is going to be May 6, 2006
629 out of 673 found this review helpful

Here are some of the most important points of this book:
1) We often exaggerate in imagining the long- term emotional effects certain events will have on us.
2) Most of us tend to have a basic level of happiness which we revert to eventually.
3) People generally err in imagining what will make them happy.
4) People tend to find ways of rationalizing unhappy outcomes so as to make them more acceptable to themselves.
5) People tend to repeat the same errors in imagining what will make them happy.
6) Events and outcomes which we dread may when they come about turn into new opportunities for happiness.
7) Many of the most productive and creative people are those who are continually unhappy with the world- and thus strive to change it.
8) Happiness is rarely as good as we imagine it to be, and rarely lasts as long as we think it will. The same mistaken expectations apply to unhappiness.

Gilbert makes these points and others with much anecdotal evidence and humor.

A pretty happy read, but not as happy as you think it is going to be.

5 out of 5 stars

This Too Will Pass May 6, 2006
214 out of 243 found this review helpful

Mr. Gilbert has written a lively academic approach on the subjective subject of happiness. The reader looking for advice on how to manage their own lives will not find it here. Rather the author looks at the way people manage their own expectations of impending events and how they cope with anxiety. Many persons re-evaluate both stressful events in a more positive light (childbirth) and achieved goals in a less satisfactory fashion (buying that new car does not buy happiness). Ironically, clinically depressed persons see how how difficult life can be and have an inability to re-evaluate stressful situations. They lack this coping mechanism that other persons have : that both happiness and unhappiness will have their season and move on. For the reader desiring further reading on this topic, Dan McMahon's "Happiness: a History" takes a longer and more historical approach to how happiness has changed over the ages.

4 out of 5 stars

Interesting with flaws June 17, 2006
194 out of 204 found this review helpful

Like many, many books, this one is better at describing the problem than it is in proposing solutions. Gilbert contends that our powers of predicting what will make us happy in the future are seriously flawed, and then proposes a simple solution which he correctly predicts that no one will use.

His description of the reasons that our predictive powers are flawed is both fascinating and convincing. However, even in this part (which is the bulk of the book), he makes an unspoken (and apparently unrecognized) assumption: That is, he assumes that "real" happiness or unhappiness is defined by the emotional state that a person feels immediately after, or concurrently with, the event in question.

To use an example: a couple of other reviewers have already mentioned Gilbert's story of a victory in an important college football game. Students predict in advance that they will be ecstatic if their team wins, and a different study suggests that a few months after the fact they will contend that they WERE ecstatic. However, close monitoring of their feelings at the actual time of the victory, or shortly thereafter, suggests that they weren't as happy as they expected to be, or as they later recalled being. On a less trivial topic, he makes the same claim regarding the experience of having and raising children: It isn't as much fun as the parents expect it to be. And while the child-rearing was going on, it wasn't as happy an experience as they later remembered it to be. But Gilbert is ignoring a vital point here: The anticipation of happiness, and the recollection of happiness, ARE happiness! Gilbert writes the entire book with the unexamined assumption that happy anticipations and happy memories can be discarded as mere illusions - the fabrications of irrational minds. I think he's wrong.

At the end, Gilbert provides a prescription for making decisions: ask the advice of someone who has chosen each of your alternatives, and see how (s)he likes the results. The suggestion is obviously far too facile, but it does give Gilbert the opportunity to discuss the interesting fact that each of us tends to exaggerate his or her own uniqueness. He's almost certainly right about that, but it isn't enough to rescue his advice. Regardless of what the "average" person thinks, I am certain that watching "American Idol" would be an excruciatingly boring experience for me, and that I would much prefer living in Eugene, Oregon, to living in Las Vegas where I live now (and where tens of thousands of people are flooding in every year, all of them optimistic that they will be happier here than wherever they live now). I don't need to talk to another person to be confident that I would prefer a Whopper to anything served in a Thai restaurant, and that I would rather take a course in classical guitar than art history.

So read this with a skeptical mind. But read it. There's lots of good stuff in it.

1 out of 5 stars

Stumbling, Fumbling, & Bumbling. June 13, 2006
105 out of 142 found this review helpful

This book is a mixture of interesting examples of the ways in which our imagination is imperfect, and an imperfect defence of Gilbert's professional world view. The examples are clearly described, and prove engaging and surprising. The world view is presented piecemeal and tendentiously, and when finally extracted from the frothy prose it is less than appealing.
*
Gilbert's world view can be roughly labelled formal hedonism. He upholds the contention that humans are ultimately motivated by the maximization of their own happiness, where happiness is best considered in terms of a felt experience of brief duration - a sensation within a moment. Following from this, a person's happiness over a longer period of time is simply the sum total of the amounts of happiness contained in the moments. In this world view, a person behaves `rationally' when they act to maximize this sum total of happy moments, and they make a `mistake' when they fail to do so. Note that the place of each moment is irrelevant - it is only the total that counts - so to prefer a particular shape to the distribution of one's happiness, in preference to maximizing the overall `amount' of happiness, is irrational. His view is extreme, but it and more sophisticated variants are accepted within academic psychology and economic theory, to the detriment of both. Gilbert slips ambiguously between implying that his is a descriptive theory, that is, he is reporting what humans do in fact want, and implying that it is a normative theory, telling us that this is what we should want (on pain of being irrational).
*
It is in the light of the above world view, and only in this light, that Gilbert sees humans as making `mistakes'. His examples entertainingly show that people are bad at anticipating the amount of momentary happiness they will experience in an anticipated future moment and, for that matter, bad at remembering how happy they felt in a particular moment from the past. Given his presumption that humans are aiming to maximize the sum of their momentary happiness, he laments at our failure.
*
On his account, our failures are systematic, and by uncovering the regularities he hopes to give us a chance to circumvent our mistaken inclinations. The regularties are seen as stemming from various forms of the same basic human limitation, this being our inability to detect the defects in our imagination when envisaging ourselves in the future, or the past, or when trying to step into another person's shoes, be this present, past or future. The defects in turn stem from our imaginations inventing only a small fraction of the novel situations and using our present experience to `fill in' the remaining fraction. Such `filling in' leads to errors, and these errors become nefarious because we fail to detect them. His examples make all of this vivid and humorous.
*
Reading the book is a frustrating experience. Time and again he begins a discussion without telling you why he has chosen to discuss the matter, and, having finished the discussion, he fails to situate it within a broader argumentative structure. The result is that you feel he is waffling, and you anxiously await the next example drawn from psychological studies, since here you will have something solid to consider. Having completed the book, one sees that the unmotivated sections combine to form a haphazard explication of his world view.
*
Thus, at first one can be baffled by his prolonged rumination on whether there is anything substantive to measure when one studies happiness. But he allies measurement with hard science, and the history of psychology can, in part, be seen as a struggle for legitimacy within the sciences. This desire to be considered a scientist also motivates his views regarding happiness being `basically' a momentary felt experience - a more complex view of happiness would render it even more difficult to measure. If his topic is not amenable to experimental method, then he would stand defeated - defeated at least as a scientist.
*
A more general criticism of the book is that Gilbert's thinking is neither clear nor rigorous. At times, it is utterly wrongheaded. Two of a wealth of instances follow.
*
In Chapter 2, The View from in Here, he overtly discusses the fact that happiness might be taken to mean more than a momentary feeling, and mentions two of the many thinkers who explored a more complicated view, namely J.S.Mill and Robert Nozick - here he dismisses their arguments with a wave of his rhetorical hand, and summarizes their `mistake' in the claim, "...philosophers have muddled the moral and emotional meanings of the word `happiness'" - Nozick's argument, in his experience-machine paper, is a powerful attack on the very view which Gilbert espouses - to brand Nozick's thought `muddled' is the height of irony. Relatedly, in this section Gilbert blurs the distinction between happiness being one of the goods in a worthwhile life, and it being the only good. Bear in mind that the latter is his professed position - it is, however, intuitively unattractive, so he blurs the distinction to suit himself, hoping that some of the plausibility of the milder claim will rub off on his. Thus, the thinkers Gilbert cites would have no problem with the former contention, but would reject the latter; likewise, his hyperbolic claim, "...every thinker in every century has recognized that people seek emotional happiness" is utterly false if taken to mean that every thinker supports Gilbert's world view, but plausible if taken as the weaker claim that being happy is one of the many things people seek and reasonably hope to attain. Gilbert's entire discussion is very confused.
*
Chapter 4 has an unfortunate discussion of `realism'. Gilbert notices that this term occurs in Locke (and subsequent analytic philosophy), and also appears in Piaget - reading Gilbert one would assume the term has the same meaning in both contexts, when in fact the word refers to widely differing concepts. Locke's point is that there exists an external world, independent of our perception of it, with logical room for us to perceive it correctly and incorrectly; Piaget leaves no such room, as his entire thrust has the infant child unaware of the distinction between its own self and the world, and hence incapable of establishing the concept of an independent external world, and, a fortiori, the concept of perceiving - Piaget's `The Child's Conception of the World' makes all this very clear. Gilbert's error is grotesque, but it is no accident, as he labours the false analogy painfully. He strains the analogy further by bringing in a dubious one paragraph summary of Immanuel Kant's metaphysics, and likens the child's development to philosophy's alleged development from Locke to Kant. This is not just unhelpful, it is a misunderstanding of the thought of all the thinkers cited, and a misrepresentation of the history of philosophy.
*
While his examples are in themselves interesting, his interpretation of them is often simplistic and dogmatic. To again mention just one of many instances: in Chapter 5, p.100, he cites a 1970s study where Americans were given a list of four countries, East Germany, West Germany, Nepal and Ceylon; they were asked to pick the two countries most similar to each other, and they chose the two Germanies; when asked to pick the two most dissimilar, again they chose the two Germanies. He interprets this paradoxical result as showing that people `ignore absences', that is to say, when focused on similarities, they ignore dissimilarities, and vice versa. Yet alternate interpretations are viable, such as that people simply chose the two countries which were most familiar and hence which they knew most about. Here, as elsewhere, the reader is lead to believe that only one interpretation of the study is available
*
Perhaps the most unintended consequence of Gilbert's discussion is that his cited examples can be seen as contradicting the basic contention of his world view. If, after all, humans are systematically incapable of accurately predicting their future momentary happiness, and yet evolution has seen the development of frontal lobes uniquely capable of forward planning, it might be that we are not planning for our future momentary happiness but for something else - something more complicated, such a genuinely satisfying human life.

3 out of 5 stars

Fun but slight June 16, 2006
80 out of 88 found this review helpful

If you think the predictive powers of adolescents in labs at (mostly elite) universities reveal deep truths about the human imagination, you'll find this book most exciting.

For instance, students full of pretzels and crackers routinely mis-predict how much they'll enjoy potato chips tomorrow. When they think about how happy they'll be after their team wins the big game, they forget to factor in the emotional effects of having to head for the library right after the game to study for an exam coming up on Monday.

Deep, very deep.

Gilbert says the best way to predict how you'll feel about something is to consult the real-time testimony of people having the experience. If you doubt it, that's because you delude yourself about human uniqueness. So if you're living in Marin County producing videos for Spielberg and you get an offer to go work for the county tax assessor in rural Alabama instead, the best way to know whether that's a good idea for you is to ask whether the folks who do that job in that place like it. Similarly, if your friends want to take you out to eat Ethiopian food for your birthday, and you're leery of that, just go ask the folks at the Ethiopian restaurant whether they're having a good time. And if you're really undecided about whether to join that fundamentalist church down the road--or maybe, instead, hook up with the local BDSM group--just go ask people at each place whether they enjoy it. Shoot, you'll probably end up joining both!

Ridiculous, you say? Well, there you go--deluding yourself about human uniqueness.

To be fair, not all of Gilbert's evidence is as trivial as most of it, and not all of his views are as silly as his conclusion.

And reading the book's a lot of fun. Gilbert is a truly extraordinary writer. The writing zings along, punctuated by wit and surprising self-deprecation.

But besides choosing his evidence without really thinking how well it applies to grown-ups who've acquired some experience at thinking through their choices, Gilbert omits to consider many of the things that cognitive psychologists have known for half a century influence our predictions (and our pleasures)--like the roles our social status wishes, our group affiliations, cultural norms we believe without thinking, and anticipated feedback.

And think about this: If we are really as incompetent at predicting our well-being as Gilbert says, how could that have developed? Did natural selection select us for incompetence? (Or if you're religious, did God want us to be really, really bad at anticipating and planning?)

Honestly, if Gilbert is right, either natural selection must be pretty lame (or God quite wicked)--or whether we're happy is irrelevant to fitness. If the latter--if we're just not suited by evolution to choose wisely about our well-being--you gotta wonder how basic human concerns got so far away from our natural aptitudes.

All in all, this book is pretty fluffy. I wouldn't say not to read it, but the book is to psychology what summer beach books are to literature.

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