A review of "Stumbling on Happiness", part 6 and conclusion

CORRIGIBILITY

This section starts tying the whole book together. For example, he notes that sometimes a single good (or bad) memory can completely overwhelm all other memories of an event and cause us to misapply that memory as representative of future events of the same type:

This tendency to recall and rely on unusual instances is one of the reasons why we so often repeat mistakes. When we think about last year's family vacation we do not recruit a fair and representative sample of instances from our two-week tour of Idaho. Instead, the memory that comes most naturally and quickly to mind is of that first Saturday afternoon when we took the kids horseback riding, crested the ridge on our palominos, and found ourselves looking down into a magnificent valley, the river wending its way to the horizon like a mirrored ribbon as the sun played on its surface. The air was crisp, the woods were quiet. The kids suddenly stopped arguing and sat transfixed on their horses, someone said "Wow" in a very soft voice, everyone smiled at everyone else, and the moment was forever crystallized as the high point of the vacation. Which is why it instantly springs to mind. But if we rely on this memory as we plan our next vacation while overlooking the fact that the rest of the trip was generally disappointing, we risk finding ourselves at the same overcrowded campground the next year, eating the same stale sandwiches, being bitten by the same surly ants, and wondering how we managed to learn so little from our previous visit. Because we tend to remember the best of times and the worst of times instead of the most likely of times, the wealth of experience that young people admire does not always pay clear dividends.

He describes the concept of super-replicators, beliefs (he doesn't use the word meme, but it is a similar idea) that aren't necessarily true, but somehow get propagated over the truth. One of the prime examples in the book is the belief that "children are a source of happiness", when in fact at least while you are raising them, study after study (he references four of them in the book, I just saw this piece stating more than 25 different studies concur) has shown that the happiness of a couple decreases with kids, reaching a nadir during the spawns' teen years, and then progressively climbs back up, leading to the conclusion that the "empty nest syndrome" is a myth. And yet, we continue to hear, believe and moreover spread the meme that "raising children are a joy". Why? Well for one reason that's obvious when you think about it, because people (and cultures) who don't believe that don't last very long. It is self-perpetuating, even though wrong, precisely because it brings about the thing it is trying to propagate, in this case, another generation to pass along the mistaken belief.

Finally there is a section on how, if we're so bad at predicting the future, one would think we could instead find and ask someone going through the exact experience we want to try (or avoid) and find out what they are experiencing. Studies show that when we do that, our predictions become much more accurate. But in general humans reject that path and try to find more information from different sources than fellow humans. A large part of the reason for that is we all think of ourselves as more unique than we really are, and we always think of others as more average and alike than they really are. So we then discount what others think and are experiencing because while that may be valid "for them", "it has nothing to do with me, because I'm special!" Except, really, you're not.

Because if you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people. Science has given us a lot of facts about the average person, and one of the most reliable of these facts is that the average person doesn't see herself as average. Most students see themselves as more intelligent than the average student, most business managers see themselves as more competent than the average business manager, and most football players seem themselves as having better "football sense" than their teammates. Ninety percent of motorists consider themselves to be safer-than-average drivers, and 94 percent of college professors consider themselves to be better-than-average teachers. Ironically, the bias toward seeing ourselves as better than average causes us to see ourselves as less biased than average too. As one research team concluded, "Most of us appear to believe that we are more athletic, intelligent, organized, ethical, logical, interesting, fair-minded, and healthy - not to mention more attractive - than the average person."

...

"We don't always see ourselves as superior, but we almost always see ourselves as unique. Even when we do precisely what others do, we tend to think that we're doing it for unique reasons. For instance, we tend to attribute other people's choices to features of the chooser ("Phil picked this class because he's one of those literary types"), but we tend to attribute our own choices to features of the options ("But I picked it because it was easier than economics"). We recognize that our decisions are influenced by social norms ("I was too embarrassed to raise my hand in class even though I was terribly confused"), but fail to recognize that others' decisions were similarly influenced ("No one else raised a hand because no one else was as confused as I was"). We know that our choices sometimes reflect our aversions ("I voted for Kerry because I couldn't stand Bush"), but we assume that other people's choices reflect their appetites ("If Rebecca voted for Kerry, then she must have liked him"). The list of differences is long but the conclusion to be drawn from it is short: The self considers itself to be a very special person.

And that special person is not very good at making itself happy.

In the end I must say the book was compelling and did a very good job of opening my eyes to a variety of reasons why and how I, and all of us, really do a pretty poor job of making ourselves happy. It doesn't give any answers, but just by raising awareness, I hope I can be a bit more conscious of some of the problems with predicting the future (which is what planning for things that make us happy really is). Whether I can avoid them or not is another story. But the book certainly was like holding up a mirror and seeing not my face but my subconscious reflected back at me. I heartily recommend reading it.