reading notes

by Daniel Gilbert
ISBN: 9781400077427

Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard, has written an engaging and offbeat examination of our perception of happiness — or more accurately, how we misperceive it. Think you know how happy an event will make you? You’re probably wrong. At least, that is what Gilbert believes, and he builds a convincing case using myriad examples small (choosing a poster for our wall, saying we’ll babysit) and large (becoming parents, or not).

I was most intrigued when Gilbert called attention to our faulty mechanisms of perception and memory. We fail to accurately imagine future states because we are overly influenced by present circumstances, and we don’t have an accurate view of the past because what we’re really remembering most of the time are our memories of past events, and not the events themselves. Our brains seamlessly stitch things together for us, and don’t even tell us that is what they are doing. It’s a neat trick, really, only sometimes the joke is on us.

So what’s the secret? This isn’t a self help book — as close as Gilbert gets to that territory is explaining the ways in which we go wrong. He doesn’t really tell us how to get it right, though he does point out that the best indicators of how we’ll feel in the future are the people who are now in the place we think we’ll be. We should ask them, but we probably won’t, and if we do, we probably won’t believe them. We are unique (just ask our brains) so we aren’t necessarily going to believe what we hear anyway. In other words, there is no secret. Even though we think we’d be happy if there was a secret and somebody told us what it was — well, no. Not so much.

If you enjoyed The Tipping Point or Freakonomics, this is probably your cup of tea, too. (Gladwell and Levitt even blurbed him.) Gilbert’s funny and his ideas, while not exactly earth-shattering, did make me stop and think. Because part of what I do for work is customer research, it reinforced the importance of asking people about what they are actually doing now, today, and how that makes them feel — because we are both likely to get it wrong when we start talking about how some new app or feature or idea will make them feel later. Highly recommended.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 30th, 2007 at 11:26 pm and is filed under nonfiction.