Interesting, annoying book
28 Jan 2007 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
firecatI saw a bunch of recommendations, I don't remember where, for Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness, so I got it out of the library. Gilbert is a professor of psychology, and the premise of the book is that people can't accurately predict what will make them happy.
I am very interested in the psychology of happiness and other positive emotions. It's a field that began taking shape in the early 1980s - before that, psychologists almost always focused on negative emotions. If it had begun just a little bit earlier, before I graduated from college, I might just have continued on studying psychology.
I found Gilbert's book an interesting read but I was annoyed for several reasons.
1. He uses the first person plural all the time. I know that to non-persnickety people, the first person plural doesn't mean "everybody" but "many" or "most". But after over a decade of reading Usenet I can't read it that way, so I kept having this "It's not true that everybody reacts that way!" reaction to things the author said.
2. (This part both annoyed me and made me feel smug.) He uses various thought experiments in the book "Now suppose X...what will your reaction be? Would it be A or B?" Then he says, "Of course your reaction was A; most people react A because yada yada." But my reaction was more often B. I don't know if this is because
a. he got it wrong,
b. the studies he reported were lame,
c. the studies he reported were had non-representative samples (many psych studies use college students, and some subset of those use only male college students...I'd like to think I've learned a thing or two since college),
d. i'm more knowledgeable about psychology than most people because i have a degree in it,
e. i'm more knowledgeable about myself than most people,
f. something else
3. I finally got totally fed up when toward the end of the book I encountered these two statements on back to back pages:
a. "The six billion interconnected people who cover the surface of our planet constitute a leviathin with twelve billion eyes..." (there are several irritating things about that statement; a no-prize to anyone who guesses which one annoyed me the most)
b. "The average American moves more than six times, changes jobs more than ten times, and marries more than once, which suggests that most of us are making more than a few poor choices." (I assume I don't need to go into all the reasons that conclusion from the statistics given is ridiculous.)
What I did get out of the book is the notion that people often make decisions based on something other than maximizing their happiness. Gilbert spins it this way: this is is a failure; people are trying to maximize their happiness and failing because of lack of self-knowledge. But how I spin it is this: People understand that happiness isn't always the most important thing. I'm glad to know many people work this way, because I don't think it's the most important thing at all. I guess I kind of think it's like air, something you need a certain amount of and suffer if you don't have enough but you don't need to maximize.
I couldn't relate to many of the experiments he described and used to back up his theory, because they focus on people rating how happy they are and how happy they predict they will be over some small outcome. I've never been asked to participate in such an experiment, but thinking about it annoys me because I can't imagine being asked to rate my happiness. Unless something completely amazing or completely awful has happened, my happiness is more or less on neutral; I can usually identify happiness about one or two things happening in my life right at the moment but I can also identify several irritants; how do I rate that?
I am very interested in the psychology of happiness and other positive emotions. It's a field that began taking shape in the early 1980s - before that, psychologists almost always focused on negative emotions. If it had begun just a little bit earlier, before I graduated from college, I might just have continued on studying psychology.
I found Gilbert's book an interesting read but I was annoyed for several reasons.
1. He uses the first person plural all the time. I know that to non-persnickety people, the first person plural doesn't mean "everybody" but "many" or "most". But after over a decade of reading Usenet I can't read it that way, so I kept having this "It's not true that everybody reacts that way!" reaction to things the author said.
2. (This part both annoyed me and made me feel smug.) He uses various thought experiments in the book "Now suppose X...what will your reaction be? Would it be A or B?" Then he says, "Of course your reaction was A; most people react A because yada yada." But my reaction was more often B. I don't know if this is because
a. he got it wrong,
b. the studies he reported were lame,
c. the studies he reported were had non-representative samples (many psych studies use college students, and some subset of those use only male college students...I'd like to think I've learned a thing or two since college),
d. i'm more knowledgeable about psychology than most people because i have a degree in it,
e. i'm more knowledgeable about myself than most people,
f. something else
3. I finally got totally fed up when toward the end of the book I encountered these two statements on back to back pages:
a. "The six billion interconnected people who cover the surface of our planet constitute a leviathin with twelve billion eyes..." (there are several irritating things about that statement; a no-prize to anyone who guesses which one annoyed me the most)
b. "The average American moves more than six times, changes jobs more than ten times, and marries more than once, which suggests that most of us are making more than a few poor choices." (I assume I don't need to go into all the reasons that conclusion from the statistics given is ridiculous.)
What I did get out of the book is the notion that people often make decisions based on something other than maximizing their happiness. Gilbert spins it this way: this is is a failure; people are trying to maximize their happiness and failing because of lack of self-knowledge. But how I spin it is this: People understand that happiness isn't always the most important thing. I'm glad to know many people work this way, because I don't think it's the most important thing at all. I guess I kind of think it's like air, something you need a certain amount of and suffer if you don't have enough but you don't need to maximize.
I couldn't relate to many of the experiments he described and used to back up his theory, because they focus on people rating how happy they are and how happy they predict they will be over some small outcome. I've never been asked to participate in such an experiment, but thinking about it annoys me because I can't imagine being asked to rate my happiness. Unless something completely amazing or completely awful has happened, my happiness is more or less on neutral; I can usually identify happiness about one or two things happening in my life right at the moment but I can also identify several irritants; how do I rate that?
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Date: 28 Jan 2007 11:03 pm (UTC)3b. All else aside—all the reasons that a person might move for reasons beyond their control, from job transfers to natural disasters to family health issues—does he really believe that what would make me happy at 18 is necessarily what would make me happy at 37 or 64?
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Date: 28 Jan 2007 11:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 28 Jan 2007 11:08 pm (UTC)But ultimately, what motivates behavior, if not a desire to feel better by doing what one does? Even if you live a completely altruistic, self-sacrificing life, maybe that's because that's what you NEED to do. You feel too miserable about other people's suffering to do otherwise, so you are compelled to sacrifice your own desires for other people's needs. Yes, that means you don't get to have many things you want, and perhaps that's difficult, but there is a stronger desire to give to others, and that is the desire that wins out, that is honored. Perhaps the pain that this person would experience by not living altruistically would be greater than the pain that might come from not having more immediate desires fulfilled.
I just don't see how else it could work, unless someone does things in a totally random way, without any sense of motivation for any particular act. This could happen with someone who has certain kinds of mental illness, I guess, where they don't even have a grasp on "doing the best I can to take care of myself" - where their actions don't reflect any concious state of mind. Or maybe someone who has a particular kind of brain damage which cuts their decision-making mind off from their emotions, might also do things without motivation, and therefore, without a goal of feeling better.
But for people whose minds and emotions are functioning properly, I believe that the need to go toward feeling better - happier, in less pain - is the only way our behaviors can be motivated. Otherwise we wouldn't do them.
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Date: 28 Jan 2007 11:51 pm (UTC)Here's an example. When I am thirsty I sometimes want to drink a diet cola. I like diet cola better when it has lemon in it. If I strategized to maximize my happiness, I would always add lemon. But sometimes I don't bother. It's not like adding the lemon would be a major increase in my effort or stress level, but it's like my mind is on something else and I don't think about adding it.
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Date: 29 Jan 2007 12:22 am (UTC)"If I strategized to maximize my happiness, I would always add lemon."
I don't think that's necessarily true. There are many variables that work together to produce happiness. For example, maybe you're busy with something else and don't want to stop, so it would make you more unhappy to stop what you're doing than it would to drink lemonless cola. Or maybe you don't have easy access to lemon at the moment, and you don't feel like expending the energy to go and get it, because that might stress you and thus take away from your happiness. Or maybe your stomach's bothering you and, while you love the taste of lemon in cola, the acid might upset your stomach and that would probably take away some happiness! And so on.
I think we're always weighing options and choices according to combinations of conditions. So the best choice at any given moment, to maximize happiness, would not necessarily be the same one you'd make at another time under different conditions.
Point taken, though, about the difference between wanting to be happy/making that a goal, and seeking to always maximize happiness. I'm not even sure what that means! Guess I'd have to read the book to learn more about that. :)
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Date: 29 Jan 2007 01:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2007 02:23 am (UTC)"Happiness", being used as a translation of "εὐδαιμονία", "eudaimonia" -- that's much higher on my list.
If you're saying that "happiness", meaning "eudaimonia", rather than "a transitory state of pleaure" is the most important thing to you, well, I'd say that's a very sane and reasonable state to be in.
Aristotle described eudaimonia as a state of life in which you live your life according to virtues, with good health, enough food and shelter, good friendships which are mutually beneficial (they're not mooching off of you; you're getting something out of it, too), respect and a good reputation from your community, and learning of scientific knowlege.
Which, frankly, all sounds pretty damn good to me.
Epicurius disagreed and said that eudaimonia had to do with simple pleasure. However, he also said that a thinking being should make choices to maximize his pleasure over his lifetime, and so, really, in practice, a life lived by Epicurius's principles would probably not look THAT much different from Aristotle's. And that also sounds like it could be pretty similar to what you're saying.
But, me, I'm more in Aristotle's camp on this one. And, for that matter, the camp of the Stoics.
For me, I make my choices first on what is honorable, ethical, moral, and right. My second area of choice is what is best for people and causes important to me (don't get me wrong: I am one of those people and causes important to me; just not the only one). My third area of choice is if I believe it will bring me pleasure.
Now, naturally, the vast majority of choices I make have no real honor, ethics, moral, or "best interest" factors. None of those things are going to determine whether I have coffee ice cream or vanilla ice cream -- those decisions are going to be based simply on which I believe will bring me more pleasure.
But, to me, the word "happiness" seems to correlate to "pleasure", and, while that's a good thing, it's not the most important thing to me.
"Right living" is more important to me, which correlates to eudaimonia -- and correlates to "joy", more than "pleasure" or "happiness".
no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2007 04:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2007 04:53 am (UTC)Now, some do, and I think the majority of the really good psychologists I've known have a solid background in philosophy, or literature, or both -- maybe academic, maybe self-taught.
The problem is that a lot of psychologists are trying to deal with philosophical issues without having the background. A psychologist who DOES have the philosophy background can be extremely effective -- and literature also helps, since that's another field that really attempts to study people.
I hope it's clear that I'm not trying to denegrate psychology as a useful healing profession. Just that I think that some psychologists are attempting to deal with questions which wise people have already been dealing with for a long time, and they hamstring themselves by not studying the existing literature. Even if that literature was written in ancient Greek, or Sanskrit, or ancient Chinese, or Latin, or Hebrew, or Aramaic. (Aristotle, Epicurius, Solon, Maritus, the Buddha, Confucius, and Lao Tse Tung all have really useful and pragmatic things to teach. And I just think that people attempting to give advice on what life should consist of should at least have some familiarity with what other people have come up with. Agree or disagree with it, the existing body of work gives a foundation that it is foolish to ignore.)
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Date: 29 Jan 2007 05:43 am (UTC)Training in philosophy/lit
Date: 29 Jan 2007 08:23 pm (UTC)Hear, hear.
(I did a philosophy major, as well as a computer science major)
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Date: 29 Jan 2007 12:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2007 08:58 pm (UTC)I don't equate happiness with momentary pleasure at all. I think of it as a more general state, and in fact, a state that can include periods of unhappiness - anger, anxiety, grief, etc. If I were to ask someone if they were happy and they said yes, I wouldn't assume that meant they never cried or had a fight with someone. Life throws crap at you. But to me, happiness - at least the kind of happiness I want in my life - comes from feeling more or less content with what I have, and comfortable with who I am. The absence of either these things seriously impinges on my ability to be happy.
I would consider a life that consisted of nothing but a bunch of disconnected, momentary pleasures to be a very empty and unsatisfying life. (Speaking strictly for myself, here.) If all I had in life were momentary pleasures, I think I'd be pretty horrified. I would see life as a string of meaningless diversions, which perhaps would be the only thing standing between me and some terrible void.
Actually, I've been there before, many years ago - a time when getting stoned, eating junk food, and playing the same songs over and over were my only pleasures. Sure, I felt momentarily happy while indulging in those pleasures, but it didn't last, and then I was once again confronted with the terror of not having a clue who I was or what I wanted to do with myself. All I could do was slavishly grasp onto those pleasures - it didn't feel like a healthy *choosing* of joy at all.
I'm also an ethical person, but I'm not at all formal about it. Concepts such as "right living" feel too abstract for me to grab onto. I don't aspire to "virtue" *for its own sake*. I'm more comfortable feeling my way around moral choices - I know what feels right in a given situation. Or, perhaps I don't always know what feels right, because the choices are complex, so I agonize over the dilemma. But I'm not sure I'd trust a person whose morality was so sure and unbending that they always knew what was right in every situation. :)
Ever since I was old enough to seriously reflect on myself, I've known that my goal in life was happiness. But when I tell people this, they seem almost disapproving, as though I'm saying that all I want is my own pleasure. Maybe that word triggers certain associations in others that I, for whatever reason, don't have.
In my mind, being happy means, more or less, "having my shit together". It means I'm comfortable with myself, I respect who I am, I accept my limitations, and maybe I even enjoy who I am. It means feeling satisfied with what I have in life - socially, emotionally, materially. It means not feeling deprived, or resentful/envious of what other people have, not putting a large part of my energy into longing for things I don't have.
So to the extent that contentment requires the ability to attain social fulfillment (in terms of intimacy, friendship, and community), my goal is to work on breaking down the barriers I have to getting those things. And to the extent that it also requires making peace with what I can and can't have, my goal is to heal old wounds that keep me longing for things just out of reach, so I can enjoy what is within reach.
From those things, I believe, flow all other joys in life: creativity, love, passion, growth, a positive outlook, generosity, compassion, connection.
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Date: 29 Jan 2007 09:57 pm (UTC)The author seems to be equating it with momentary pleasure, at least based on the majority of the psych experiments he uses to provide evidence for his points. So that's what I meant when I said that happiness is not all that important - I don't care all that much about maximizing my pleasure in the moment in comparison to some other things, and it sounds like a lot of other people don't, either. (Either that, or if you believe the author, they do care and constantly fail at it.)
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Date: 30 Jan 2007 03:31 am (UTC)For instance, feeling your way around situations and not being overly rigid about it would be a virture.
So, as far as I can tell, your philosphy of life and Aristotle's are more-or-less the same.
This gives you word to work with. When you say your goal in life is "happiness", it sounds like you mean "happiness" the way that Thomas Jefferson meant it when he said that "among these [Creator-endowed rights] are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". And "pursuit of happiness" was more-or-less how Jefferson was translating "eudaemonia."
So, if people sound disapproving when you say that "happiness" is your goal, you can use the word "eudaemonia" instead.
Which won't actually help, since they won't know what it means, either, but you'll sound all smart and shit.
no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2007 11:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 30 Jan 2007 12:14 am (UTC)I have never really felt *satisfied* by it, though. I would be interested in hearing more about what is satisfying to you about doing the right thing. Do you relate to the concept of "doing the right thing" in the abstract sense, as an end in itself - something you do for its own sake? And if so, what purpose does that serve? (I'm not asking why you would do specific things - that part does make sense to me. It's the part about doing the right thing *because* it's the right thing, as opposed to doing it so you don't cause Mary Smith a lot of heartache, or whatever, that I don't comprehend.)
In any case, I would categorize "satisfaction" as belonging to a larger category that one might call "happiness" (though YMMV with respect to word choice), in the sense that it's a positive emotion, and positive emotions serve as motivators for behavior.
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Date: 30 Jan 2007 12:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 30 Jan 2007 05:49 am (UTC)If I subscribed to a particular belief system that laid out all the rights and wrongs, then I would know which choices were right and which were wrong. But I don't, exactly. I mean, I have values and beliefs, but they don't really spell out much in detail. It's all very vague. My morality is pretty simple: don't hurt anyone; otherwise do whatever you want. :) It's figuring out what constitutes "hurting anyone" that's the hard part - I don't buy into any belief system that tells hands me a manual with an answer for every situation. And I suspect you don't, either - not that I would know for sure, but I get the feeling you are someone who carefully considers the ethics of any situation you're in, and who doesn't look for facile answers.
But wow - I feel absolutely nothing simply from the *idea* of doing the right thing. That is not a concept that has any emotional meaning for me. And yet, I live my life in an ethical way, so somehow, it works for me anyway.
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Date: 30 Jan 2007 09:01 am (UTC)I haven't gone and looked at your info page, but what you won't know from mine is that I used to work in defense. I'm seriously ill and have been retired on disability for 20.5 years now. I've made many decisions during critical periods of being sick. I'm a rationalist, and I've had a lot of experience being one.
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Date: 30 Jan 2007 08:33 pm (UTC)I wouldn't call myself a "rationalist", and maybe that's the difference in how we approach ethics. If an ethical choice wasn't clear to me, I'd have to see which choice felt better to me - I use emotion more, to make that sort of decision. Which is not to say that I don't also think rationally about the issues, but there are limits to how well that works for me. Sometimes I just go around in circles intellectually, weighing pros and cons, having internal debates, and not really coming any closer to understanding or resolution. Ultimately, it's what feels right that gives me the most clarity. Maybe a combo of the two, but an intellectual approach by itself would be too removed and abstract to have enough substance for me to *know* what's right.
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Date: 30 Jan 2007 10:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 30 Jan 2007 11:05 pm (UTC)LOL, I'll bet they don't! :)
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Date: 28 Jan 2007 11:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 28 Jan 2007 11:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2007 12:39 am (UTC)*hugs no-prize*
I read this book too, and thought it rather facile. For someone who has done no reading at all in the area, it might be eye-opening. But I have, and this didn't add much.
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Date: 29 Jan 2007 12:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2007 01:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2007 01:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2007 02:17 am (UTC)Thanks for this and other warnings! I had only read good stuff about it before.
I think people do make mistakes and make choices that make them unhappy because of a lack of self-knowledge sometimes, but it sounds like the author went way beyond that, based on poor science/experiments/analysis.
"The six billion interconnected people who cover the surface of our planet constitute a leviathin with twelve billion eyes..." (there are several irritating things about that statement; a no-prize to anyone who guesses which one annoyed me the most)
I haven't read comments yet. Here goes: I didn't think we were quite up to 6 billion yet; we're not all interconnected (certainly not everyone to everyone); we don't cover the surface, we don't even *cover* the *land* surface; "interconnected" does not imply "one" (leviathan); misspelled leviathan; if he WAS thinking "land surface" that doesn't go with a sea monster (common meaning of leviathan); "we" do not constitute a monolith (or leviathan); some folks aren't fortunate enough to have two eyes. I'm guessing the one that annoyed you the most was the cover-the-surface thing?
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Date: 29 Jan 2007 02:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2007 04:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2007 09:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2007 03:35 am (UTC)I think 3b is just classically stupid.
People make decisions about their lives for all kinds of reasons, and sometimes people take The Long View. I know several people that have sacrificed a lot for their children, but they don't think of their children as being detrimental to their happiness in the short term, though they were.
I guess I feel that way about Yale. It was deeply satisfying, but didn't make me happy--I expected it to make me happy later, but it never did in the ways that I expected. (I *am* grateful to Yale for making me unafraid of political machinations and shitheads at work.)
Also, this whole idea of predicting how happy you will be over something--that's just bogus. Or maybe I say that because I am particularly bad at predictions, who knows. I can have an idea about how something will make me feel, but I am often wrong about the extent of the actual feeling--sometimes because it's influenced by other things in my environment, like the amount of sunshine that day, or it will trigger my PTSD, or... something.
no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2007 04:32 am (UTC)As a fellow survivor of Yale (although I only worked at the press, didn't study there), I laugh uproariously.
I can have an idea about how something will make me feel, but I am often wrong about the extent of the actual feeling--sometimes because it's influenced by other things in my environment, like the amount of sunshine that day, or it will trigger my PTSD, or... something.
It sounds like you already know a large part of what the author is claiming none of us know.
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Date: 29 Jan 2007 01:20 pm (UTC)That doesn't make sense to me, either. I mean, it's true, the best thing is the surprise you get when something makes you unexpectedly happy. But people do do things they think will make them happy, though they don't exclusively do those things.
I'm changing jobss because I think the new job will make me happier than the current job. That's ultimately the reason, though I don't really talk about it that way.
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Date: 29 Jan 2007 05:13 pm (UTC)That isn't what he's saying; he's saying humans are bad at predicting what will make us happy. (Although what he really means is that humans are bad at predicting which of several options will maximize their happiness as compared to the other options, which is a much more limited claim.)
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Date: 29 Jan 2007 05:38 pm (UTC)But happiness isn't a binary value. Also, I think that the whole happiness set point concept makes it more complicated--I have a high happiness set point, and I know that I can be happy in any number of different ways. But someone who has a lower set point might only be able to trip that threshold one way.
So let me end where I started: thank you very much for reading this book so I don't have to.
(This discussion has actually been quite useful during this time when I was deciding to leave my current job. I am EXTREMELY happy at this job.)
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Date: 29 Jan 2007 05:43 pm (UTC)I don't think I remember him talking about the happiness set point at all. He does talk a bit about how depressed people sometimes behave differently from nondepressed people, though.
I'm glad you are happy with your new job!
no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2007 06:30 pm (UTC)