Stumbling on Happiness
| File:Stumbling on Happiness.jpg
Softcover edition
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| Author | Daniel Gilbert |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Psychology |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Knopf |
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Publication date
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2006 |
| Media type | Print, e-book, audiobook |
| ISBN | 1-4000-4266-6 |
| OCLC | 61362165 |
| 158 22 | |
| LC Class | BF575.H27 G55 2006 |
Stumbling on Happiness is a non-fiction book by Daniel Gilbert. It was published in the United States and Canada in 2006 by Knopf, and has been translated into 25 languages. It is a New York Times bestseller.
Summary
Gilbert's central thesis is that, through perception and cognitive biases, people imagine the future poorly, in particular what will make them happy. He argues that imagination fails in three ways:[1]
- Imagination tends to add and remove details, but people do not realize that key details may be fabricated or missing from the imagined scenario.
- Imagined futures (and pasts) are more like the present than they actually will be (or were).
- Imagination fails to realize that things will feel different once they actually happen—most notably, the psychological immune system will make bad things feel not so bad as they are imagined to feel.
The advice Gilbert offers is to use other people's experiences to predict the future, instead of imagining it. It is surprising how similar people are in much of their experiences, he says. He does not expect too many people to heed this advice, as our culture, accompanied by various thinking tendencies, is against this method of decision making.
Also, Gilbert covers the topic of 'filling in' or the frequent use of patterns, by the mind, to connect events which we do actually recall with other events we expect or anticipate fit into the expected experience. This 'filling in' is also used by our eyes and optic nerves to remove our blind spot or scotoma, and instead substitute what our mind expects to be present in the blind spot.
This accessible book is written for the layperson, generally avoiding abstruse terminology and explaining common quirks of reasoning through the simple experiments that exploited them (this excludes the term "super-replicator").[citation needed]
Recognition
In 2007, the book was awarded the Royal Society Prizes for Science Books general prize for the best science writing for a non-specialist audience.
See also
Notes
- ↑ (Gilbert 2006, pp. 224–228)
References
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External links
- Stumbling on Happiness web site. includes a blog
- Reviews of Stumbling on Happiness
- Publisher's website for Stumbling on Happiness
- Short interview about the book from SXSWi 2006
- Comprehensive interview on the book
- Video of Gilbert discussing humans' failure to predict what makes us happy. Presented July 2005 at the TED Conference in Oxford, UK. Duration: 22:02
- Gilbert's Profile Page on UK publisher's blog, fifthestate.co.uk
- Top concepts from Stumbling on Happiness
