Happiness, choice, and Dan Gilbert

Dan Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University

We keep on exploring the notion of happiness with our Tribe documentary project. Our aim is to tell the stories of people who have found happiness in small details, small solutions. We have been very intrigued with Dan Gilbert's views. And he still manages to stun us: he proves in the following talk that we should wish to become paraplegic over winning a $314 million lottery!

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html

Gilbert's lecture is long. So we have asked young journalist graduate Justin Situ to come up with an abstract:

According to Dan Gilbert in his lecture Why are we happy?, happiness comes in two forms: natural and synthetic. Natural happiness is what happens when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don’t get what we wanted. From field studies to lab studies, we see that events such as winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, or passing or failing a test all have far less impact, intensity, and duration than people expect them to have. Human beings have something that can be thought of as a psychological immune system, a system of cognitive processes (largely non-conscious cognitive processes) that helps them change their perceptions of the world so that they can feel better about the circumstances in which they find themselves.

To prove this point, Gilbert introduces an old experimental model called the free choice paradigm. It’s simple: you bring in six objects, six Monet prints, for example, and you ask a subject to rank them from the most to the least liked. After the subject is done ranking them, the subject is told they can take one home for free, giving them a choice between the 3rd ranked picture and the 4th ranked picture. Naturally, most people pick the 3rd ranked picture. Some time later the subject is brought back in and told to re-rank the pictures. Repeatedly the 3rd ranked picture goes up in ranking while the 4th ranked picture goes down. This is an example of how the brain manufactures synthetic happiness to make a given person happier in their circumstances. To further prove this point, the same experiment was conducted in a hospital of amnesia patients. Once again, the patients were told to rank a set of pictures and then told they could keep one. After the pictures were removed and sufficient time for them to forget had passed, they were told to re-rank the pictures. The results came out the same.

According to Gilbert there is one big difference between natural happiness and synthetic happiness, however, and that is the freedom of choice. Gilbert presented another experiment; this time is was a photography course consisting of two control groups. Students were told to go and take 12 photographs of things that were meaningful to them. Afterwards they were told to pick their favorites. One group was told that they could only pick one photograph to keep and that they couldn't go back on that decision. The other group was told that out of two favorite photos, they had to pick one but if they changed their minds within 6 days they could swap for the other. The results showed that the group who could only choose once were completely happy with their choice and their picture while the other group was unhappy not only with their picture, but that they stayed unhappy even after the 6-day window expired. Why is this? Because the reversible condition (i.e. freedom of choice) is not conducive to synthetic happiness. Even though this is a definitive difference between the two types of happiness, Gilbert says one needs to know how to balance what’s important to one’s self. Gilbert closed out the lecture by saying “our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown, because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we choose experience.”

Thanks, Justin, and thanks to Kilian Duggan for bringing to our attention!