Timothy Thomas sends along an NYT piece on the work of psychologist Daniel Gilbert and his recent book, Stumbling on Happiness. (He was also quoted in the Globe and Mail‘s piece on Bogota last week) “This article was written a few years before his book was published and is in someways even more fascinating. This helps us understand the folly of bad planning- both personal and civic,” says Tim.
Here’s an excerpt:
Gilbert and his collaborator Tim Wilson call the gap between what we predict and what we ultimately experience the ”impact bias” — ”impact” meaning the errors we make in estimating both the intensity and duration of our emotions and ”bias” our tendency to err.
The phrase characterizes how we experience the dimming excitement over not just a BMW but also over any object or event that we presume will make us happy. Would a 20 percent raise or winning the lottery result in a contented life? You may predict it will, but almost surely it won’t turn out that way. And a new plasma television? You may have high hopes, but the impact bias suggests that it will almost certainly be less cool, and in a shorter time, than you imagine.
Worse, Gilbert has noted that these mistakes of expectation can lead directly to mistakes in choosing what we think will give us pleasure. He calls this ”miswanting.”
This is good information to know, but difficult to apply. People don’t seem to like being told that they don’t _really_ want what they think they want. I’m thinking primarily about those who choose to live in a suburb because they think they need a yard, then find themselves unhappy because they don’t have any friends and they spend hours every day in a cars.
This is not surprising. Most of us have been brainwashed by the advertising industry into believing that a prestigious career, an active sex life, the latest fashions, an expensive car or various other objects will make us happy. Is it surprising that the advertising industry neither knows nor cares what makes us happy? Their job is simply to create desire for a product. But as a result, few of us know our own mind.