CNN: Do most people know when they’re happy?
[Harvard psychology professor Daniel] Gilbert: We know people are very bad at remembering how happy they were. They’re very poor at predicting how happy they’ll be. They aren’t even good at saying how happy they are in general. One thing people can tell you is how happy they are at the moment you ask them that question.CNN: Why are we so bad at predicting whether we’ll be happy in a certain situation?
Gilbert: We’re very poor at predicting our future happiness for two sets of reasons. The first is, we have a lot of bad theories about happiness. Our culture and our genes give us disinformation about the sources of happiness. Even if you try to set these aside, it turns out just using our imaginations to project ourselves into the future — close your eyes and say what would it be like to win a gold medal, to move to Cleveland, to be an architect — imagination fails us in some very predictable and systematic ways.
CNN: How do culture and genes lead us astray?
Gilbert: You know all human behaviors are the product of two things: Genes and culture. The interplay between these two, genes and culture, are both self-perpetuating systems. They are systems that want to survive, and the way they survive is getting us to do things for them. For example, our genes require that we reproduce. Our culture requires that we consume goods and services. So both our genes and culture conspire to lead us to believe that things like, oh, having children or getting rich will make us very happy. But the data from economics and psychology are abundantly clear. Having children tends to create a small negative effect on people’s happiness and having money has a very little relationship to people’s happiness, so both of these are bad theories about the kinds of things that will bring us happiness in the future.
There’s a little bit more at CNN.com.
Key point for the gift-giving season: “One mistake that people seem to make is if they invest in durable goods when some studies suggest they’d be happier if they invested money in experiences.”