The surprising science of happiness | Dan Gilbert

[Music] when you have 21 minutes to speak two million years seems like a really long time but evolutionarily two million years is nothing and yet in two million years the human brain has nearly tripled in mass going from the one and a quarter pound brain of our ancestor here habilis to the almost three pound meatloaf that everybody here has between their ears what is it about a big brain that nature was so eager for Everyone us to have one well it turns out when brings triple in size they don't just get three times bigger they

gain new structures and one of the main reasons that our brain got so big is because it got a new part called the frontal lobe and particularly a part called the prefrontal cortex now what does the prefrontal cortex do for you that should justify the entire architectural overhaul of the human skull in the blink of evolutionary time well turns out the prefrontal cortex does lots of things but one of the most important things it does is it is an experience simulator you know flight pilots practice in flight simulators so that they don't make real mistakes

and planes human beings have this marvelous adaptation that they can actually have experiences in their heads before they try them out in real life this is a trick that none of our ancestors could do that no other animal can do quite like we can it's a marvellous adaptation it's up there with opposable thumbs and standing upright and language as one of the things that got our species out of the trees and into the shopping mall now all of you have done this I mean you know Ben and Jerry's doesn't have liver in onion ice cream

and it's not because they whipped some up tried it and went yuck it's because from without leaving your armchair you can simulate that flavor and say yuck before you make it let's see how your experience simulators are working let's just run a quick diagnostic before I proceed with the rest of the talk here's two different futures that I invite you to contemplate and you can try to simulate them and tell me which one you think you might prefer one of them is winning the lottery this is about 314 million dollars and the other is becoming

paraplegic so just given a moment of thought you probably don't feel like you need a moment of thought and interestingly there are data on these two groups of people data on how happy they are and this is exactly what you expected isn't it but these aren't the data I made these up these are the data you failed the pop quiz in your hardly five minutes into the lecture because the fact is that a year after losing the use of their legs and a year after winning the lotto lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with

their lives now don't feel too bad about failing the first pop quiz because everybody fails all of the pop quizzes all of the time the research that my laboratory has been doing that economists and psychologists around the country have been doing have revealed something really quite startling to us something we call the impact bias which is the tendency for the simulator to work badly for the simulator to make you believe that different outcomes are more different than in fact they really are from field studies to laboratory studies we see that winning or losing an election

gaining or losing a romantic partner getting or not getting a promotion passing or not passing a college test on and on have far less impact less intensity and much less duration that people expect them to have effect a recent study this almost fleurs me a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests that if it happened over three months ago with only a few exceptions it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness why because happiness can be synthesized Sir Thomas Brown wrote in 1642 I am the happiest man alive I have that in

me that can convert poverty to riches adversity to prosperity I am more in vulnerable than Achilles fortune hath not one place to hit me kind of remarkable machinery does this guy have in his head well it turns out it's precisely the same remarkable motion that all of us have human beings have something that we might think of as a psychological immune system a system of cognitive processes largely non conscious cognitive processes that help them change their views of the world so that they can feel better about the worlds in which they find themselves like Sir

Thomas you have this machine on like Sir Thomas you seem not to know it we synthesize happiness but we think happiness is a thing to be found now you don't need me to tell you give you too many examples of people synthesizing happiness I suspect though I'm gonna show you some experimental evidence you don't have to look very far for evidence I as a challenge to myself since I say this once in a while in lectures I took a copy of the New York Times and tried to find some instances of people synthesizing happiness and

here are three guys synthesizing happiness I'm so much better off physically financially emotionally in almost every other way mentally almost every other way and I'm a 1 minutes regret it was a glorious experience I believe it turned out for the best who are these characters who are so damn happy well the first one is Jim Wright some of you are old enough to remember he was the chairman of the House of Representatives and he resigned in disgrace when this young Republican named Newt Gingrich found out about a shady book deal he had done he lost

everything most powerful Democrat in the country lost everything lost his money lost his power what does he have to say all these years later about it I am so much better off physically financially mentally in almost every other way what other way would there be to be better off vegetable e minerally animal e he's pretty much covered in there Maurice victim is somebody you've never heard of Maurice victim uttered these words upon being released he was 78 years old he'd spent 37 years in Louisiana State Penitentiary for a crime he didn't commit he was ultimately

exonerated at the age of 78 through DNA evidence and what did he have to say about his experience I don't have one minutes regret it was a glorious experience glorious this guy is not saying why are some nice guys there too Jim its glorious a word we usually reserved for something like a religious experience Harriet's Langerman uttered these words and he's somebody you might have known but because in 1949 he read a little article in the paper about a hamburger stand owned by these two brothers named McDonald's and he thought that's a really neat idea

so he went to find them they said we'd give you a franchise on this for three thousand bucks Harry went back to New York asked his brother who was an investment banker to loan him the three thousand dollars and his brothers and mortal words were you idiot nobody eats hamburgers he wouldn't land in the money and of course six months later Ray Kroc had exactly the same idea it turns out people do eat hamburgers and Ray Kroc for a while became the richest man in America oh and then finally you know the best of all

possible worlds some of you recognize this young photo of Pete best who was the original drummer for The Beatles until they you know kind of like sent him out on an errand and snuck away and picked up Ringo on a tour well in 1994 when Pete best was interviewed yes he's still a drummer yes he's a studio musician he this to say I'm happier than I would have been with the Beatles okay there's something important to be learned from these people and it is the secret of happiness here it is finally to be revealed first

accrue wealth power and prestige than losing second spend as much of your life in prison as you possibly can third make somebody else really really rich and finally never ever join the Beatles okay no I like zefrank can predict your next thought which is yeah right because when people synthesize happiness is these gentlemen seem to have done we all smile at them but we kind of roll our eyes and say yeah right you never really wanted the job oh yeah right she you really didn't have that much in common with her and you figured that

out just about the time she threw the engagement ring in your face we smirk because we believe that synthetic happiness is not of the same quality as what we might call natural happiness what are these terms natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don't get what we wanted and in our society we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind why do we have that belief well it's very simple what kind of economic engine would keep churning if

we believe that not getting what we want could make us just as happy as getting it with all apologies to my friend matthieu ricard a shopping mall full of Zen monks is not going to be particularly profitable because they don't want stuff enough I want to suggest to you that synthetic happiness is every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for now in a scientist so I'm gonna do this not with a rhetoric but by marinating you in a little bit of

data let me first show you an experimental paradigm that is used to demonstrate the synthesis of happiness among regular old folks and this isn't mine there's a 50 year old paradigm called the free choice paradigm it's very simple you bring in say six objects and you ask a subject to rank them for the most of the least liked in this case because the experiment I'm going to tell you about uses them these are Monet prints so everybody can rank these Monet prints from the one they liked the most to the one they liked the least

now we give you a choice we happen to have some extra prints in the closet we're gonna give you one as your prize to take home we happen to have number three and number four we tell the subject there's a bit of a difficult choice because neither one is preferred strongly to the there but naturally people tend to pick number three because they liked it a little better than number four sometime later it could be 15 minutes it could be 15 days the same stimuli or put before the subject and the subject is asked to

rewrite the stimuli tell us how much you like them now what happens watch as happiness is synthesized this is the result that has been replicated over and over again you're watching happiness be synthesized would you like to see it again happiness the one I got is really better than I thought that other one I didn't get sucks that's the synthesis of happiness now what's the right response to that yeah right now here's the experiment we did and I hope this is gonna convince you that yeah right was not the right response we did this experiment

with a group of patients who had antara grade amnesia these are hospitalized patients most of them have korsakoff's syndrome Paulina attic psychosis that they they drank way too much and they can't make new memories okay they remember their childhood but if you walk in and introduce yourself and then leave the room when you come back they don't know who you are we took our Monet prints to the hospital and we asked these patients to rank them from the one they liked the most to the one they liked the least we then gave them the choice

between number three and number four like everybody else they said gee thanks doc that's great I can use a new print I'll take number three we explained we would have number three mailed to them we gathered up our materials and we went out of the room and counted to a half-hour back into the room we say hi we're back the patients bless them say doc I'm sorry I kind of memory problems one here if I've met you before I don't remember really Jim you don't remember I was just here with the Monet prints sorry doc

I just don't have a clue no problem Jim all I want you to do is rank these for me from the one you like the most to the one you like the least what do they do well let's first check and make sure they're really amnesiac we ask these amnesiac patients to tell us which one they own which one they chose which one is theirs and what we find is have music patience just guess these are normal controls with I did this with you all of you would know which print you chose but if I

do this with amnesia patients they don't have a clue they can't pick their print out of a lineup here's what normal controls do they synthesize happiness right this is the change in liking score the change for the first time they ranked - the second time they're ranked normal controls show that was the magic I showed you now I'm showing it to you in graphical form the one I own is better than I thought the one I didn't own the one I left behind is not as good as I thought and Nix do exactly the same

thing think about this result these people liked better the one they own but they don't know they own it Yeah right is not the right response what these people did when they synthesized happiness is they really truly change their affective hedonic aesthetic reactions to that poster they're not just singing it because they own it because they don't know they own it now when psychologists show you bars you know that they are showing you averages of lots of people and yet all of us have this psychological immune system this capacity to synthesize happiness but some of

us do this trick better than others and some situations allow anybody to do it more effectively than other situations do it turns out that freedom the ability to make up your mind and change your mind is the friend of natural happiness because it allows you to choose among all those delicious futures that and find the one that you would most enjoy but freedom to choose to change and make up your mind is the enemy of synthetic happiness and I'm gonna show you why Dilbert already knows of course you're reading the cartoon as I'm talking dogbert's

tech-support how come eh I abuse you my printer prints a blank page after every document why would you complain about getting free paper freeze the other users giving my own paper egad man look at the quality of the free paper compared to your lousy regular paper only fool or a liar would say that they look the same now that you mention it it does seem a little silkier what are you doing I'm helping people accept the things they cannot change indeed the psychological immune system works best when we are totally stuck when we are trapped

this is this is the difference from dating in marriage right I mean you go out on a date with a guy and he picks his nose you don't go out on another date you're married to a guy and he picks his nose you know he has a heart of gold don't touch the fruitcake right you find a way to be happy with what's happened now what I want to show you is that people don't know this about themselves and not knowing this can work to our supreme disadvantage here's an experiment we did it Harvard we

created a photography course a black-and-white photography course and we allowed students to come in and learn how to use a darkroom so we gave them cameras they went around campus they took 12 pictures of their favorite professors in their dorm room and their you know their dog and all the other things they wanted to have Harvard memories of they bring us the camera we make up a contact sheet they figure out which are the two best pictures and we now spend six hours teaching them about dark rooms and they blow two of them up and

they have two gorgeous eight-by-ten glossies of meaningful things to them and we say which one would you like to give up I have to give one up oh yes we need one is evidence of the class project so you have to give me one you have to make a choice you get to keep one and I get to keep one now there are two conditions in this experiment in one case the students are told but you know if you want to change your mind I'll always have the other one here and in the next four

days before I actually mail it to headquarters I'd be glad to headquarters I'll be glad to swap it out with you in fact I'll come to your dorm room and give just give me an email better yet I'll check with you you ever want to change your mind it's totally returnable the other half of the students are told exactly the opposite make your choice and by the way the mail is going out gosh in two minutes to England your picture will be winging its way over the Atlantic you will never see it again now half

of the students in each of these conditions are asked to make predictions about how much they're going to come to the picture that they keep in the picture they leave behind other students are just sent back to their little dorm rooms and they are measured over the next 6 to 3 to 6 days on their liking satisfaction with the pictures and look at what we find first of all here's what students think is going to happen they think they're gonna maybe come to like the picture they chose a little more than the one they left

behind but these are not statistically significant differences it really it's this very small increase and it doesn't much matter whether they were in the reversible or irreversible condition wrong Oh bad simulators because here's what's really happening both right before the swap and five days later people who are stuck with that picture who have no choice who can never change their mind liked it a lot and people who are deliberating should I return it have I gotten the right one maybe this isn't the good one maybe I left the good one have killed themselves they don't

like their picture and in fact even after the opportunity to swap has expired they still don't like their picture why because the irreversible condition is not conducive to the synthesis of happiness so here's the final piece of this experiment we bring in a whole new group of naive Harvard students and we say you know we're doing a photography course and we can do it one of two ways we could do it so that when you take the two pictures you'd have four days to change your mind oh we're doing another course where you take the

two pictures and you make up your mind right away and you can never change it which course would you like to be in sixty-six percent of the students two-thirds prefer to be in the course where they have the opportunity to change their mind hello sixty-six percent of the students choose to be in the course in which they will ultimately be deeply dissatisfied with the picture because they do not know the conditions under which synthetic happiness grows the Bard said everything best of course and he's making my point here but he's making it hyperbolically it is

nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so it's nice poetry but that can't exist we be right is there really nothing good or bad is it really the case that gallbladder surgery and a trip to Paris are just the same thing yeah there that seems like a one-question IQ test they can't be exactly the same in more turgid pros but closer to the truth was the father of modern capitalism Adam Smith and he said this this is worth contemplating the great source of both the misery and disorders of human life seems to arise from

overrating the difference between one permanent situation and another some of these situations may no doubt deserve to be preferred to others but none of them can be desert none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardor which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice or to corrupt the future tranquillity of our minds either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly or by remorse for the horror of our own injustice in other words yes some things are better than others we should have preferences that lead us

into one future over another but when those preferences drive us too hard and too fast because we have overrated the difference between these futures we are at risk when our ambition is bounded it leads us to work joyfully when our ambition is unbounded it leads us to lie to cheat to steal to hurt others to sacrifice things of real value when our fears are bounded we're prudent we're cautious we're thoughtful when our fears are unbounded and overblown we're reckless and we're cowardly the lesson I want to leave you with from these data is that 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 thank you you