Book Review: Stumbling on Happiness
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Dan Gilbert’s book about happiness is an interesting catalog of numerous psychological biases that have important impacts on our view of the world, and consequently the way we feel on a day to day basis.
In the main this book is a well-organized, accessible survey of a wide variety of fascinating experiments in psychology. Some of these experiments are familiar to anyone who has read popular psychology books, or indeed anyone with a passing familiarity with pop culture - for example, Gilbert explores the reason why most people think they’re above average. This book does add a little bit of nuance to these findings - for example, it turns out that most people also think they’re below average when it comes to complex or difficult tasks. He is particularly focused on experiments which ask volunteers to predict how they will feel about some event or another, and then compare those predictions to actual lived experience. But I think the findings here are less than convincing, if only because the sample sizes and populations in most psychology experiments are so small and distorted. On top of that, prediction of the world plays only one part (albeit an important one) in our present happiness.
There is something of a logical structure to this book - the introduction provides a nice overview of the argument and the way that these various experiments tie together. But the structure gets lost in the weeds of experiments, and the conclusion in the book does not really adequately revive it. While Gilbert is insistent that this book isn’t about self-help, he does provide a prescription or two at the end, namely that when we contemplate a future event or decision, we should seek out the opinions of those who have actually experienced that event or made that decision. It’s an interesting idea, although supported by rather thin evidence. It’s not the sort of thing that can be readily done at scale - online comment threads notwithstanding - so it’s probably not really all that practical. But it certainly does support the idea that one should gain as broad an awareness of the world as possible, so I suppose that all told it’s to the good.
The tone of the book is a little annoying. The text is all very jocular and flippant - which is fine in small doses, but I really think it goes a little overboard here. I suppose the idea is that the tone of the text should fit the material, and after all it’s a book about happiness. But at times the comedy is a little too distracting. Even granted that it’s a pop psychology book, I think I still prefer a somewhat more academic tone, something like what you’d find in Thinking Fast and Slow (which is, incidentally, a rather excellent survey of psychological biases.)
Writ large this book is an interesting overview of the psychology of happiness. It’s not substantially new material when compared with other pop psychology books, but it’s certainly an interesting synthesis, and it will certainly make you think about the way you think.