In an interview on Happiness at Work

Let’s talk about Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. Why is it on your list?

I liked this book because he went inside my brain. This is me operating against my brain, the inner stuff. He really hammers home the fact that you can’t predict what things are going to feel like in the future, and you’re not a good interpreter of the past. Essentially he writes that we’re prisoners of our minds and brains – and we think we’re so different from everyone else, but we’re not. I love this book because it made me laugh. I recognised so much of my own erroneous, crappy thinking. Yes! I do think like that! Damn!

For example?

He says we think that having kids will make us happy, when, actually, when you look at it, people’s overall life happiness is dented by having kids and goes up when kids leave home. There’s one chapter I really liked, it was about the ‘Blind Spot of the Mind’s Eye’. He shows how your brain puts stuff in and takes stuff out for you, starting with your optic nerve. Where your optic nerve is there’s a blind spot, but you never see a hole in your vision. Even though there is one. So your brain is filling in what actually isn’t there. The brain is putting in detail, at the same time as missing it out, which is why you can almost hit a car. The book is a reminder that happiness is complicated and complex and that our brains are flawed. We interpret things with hindsight, and we continually make bad choices. He goes into all the foibles and misinterpretations and the biases and the mistakes we make – and will continue to make.

In an interview on Happiness

You wanted to talk about Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, and Sonja Lyubomirsky’s The How of Happiness, next.

These are two of the recent books on positive psychology by two of the top researchers. They are very different books and they appeal to very different readers. The Gilbert book is just so much fun to read. He’s one of the funniest people, certainly in psychology – he’s just endlessly witty, and reading it is like strapping yourself into a roller coaster. He’s describing very good research that he’s done along with my colleague here at the University of Virginia, Tim Wilson. It’s a single big idea that is very, very important, which is that we make a lot of errors in our expectations of what will make us happy, and therefore we make a lot of errors in our choices.

What’s a common mistake that people make?

One of the things Gilbert looks at is consumer behaviour – for example, he was involved in a study where they asked people if they would want to be able to return a product or not. And of course most people would like the option of being able to return a television that they had bought. But those who elected for that option actually then enjoyed their product less – they were less committed to it.

This is the idea that you don’t want too many options?

I think Americans in particular think they want a lot of options – but once you get above a small number, it actually cuts down on our enjoyment. That work was done especially by Barry Schwartz, in his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. That is just such a good book…if I’d had six books, I would have included that one. But the main point that Gilbert is making is that in so many of our choices – in work, in love and consumer behaviour – the things we think we want before we make the choice, lead us to choices that make us worse off…