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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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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.)
no subject
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.)
no subject
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!
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Date: 29 Jan 2007 06:30 pm (UTC)