New Podcast Release: Daniel Gilbert

In the latest episode of Lives Well Lived, the podcast I co-host with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, we speak with Harvard professor of psychology and bestselling author Daniel Gilbert, whose book Stumbling on Happiness transformed our understanding of why we often don’t choose wisely when it comes to our own happiness.

In our conversation, we explore why people are remarkably poor at predicting what will make them happy, and whether decades of new research have changed that. Daniel explains the limits of imagination, why the best way to forecast our own satisfaction is to learn from others’ experiences, and how technology and online reviews have made us better at this in some areas of life but not in others.

We also discuss why too much choice can make us miserable, what it really means to live in the present, and how happiness relates to meaning and love. Daniel shares what psychology tells us about friendship, parenting, and luck, and why he believes that good relationships and a sense of gratitude are at the heart of a happy life.

Below are some highlights from our conversation, edited for clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform.

Why we’re so bad at predicting happiness

KASIA DE LAZARI RADEK: So in Stumbling on Happiness, you show that people are remarkably poor at predicting what will make them happy. But the book, as you said, was published long ago, and you have continued to talk and think about happiness. Can we actually get better at predicting what will make us happy? In other words, have we learned anything?

DANIEL GILBERT: The short answer is no. But that’s not nearly as interesting as the longer answer, which, at the time I wrote the book, didn’t have research to back it up, but now it does. So, my colleague Tim Wilson and I spent 30 years conducting studies showing that people are very poor at predicting their future affective or hedonic states, what most humans would call happiness.

And after dozens and dozens of experiments showing people doing something poorly, scientists start to ask: Well, can we fix them? Is there anything we can do?
Many people tried many things, and the answer is either that the things they tried failed, or they had very, very limited domain-specific effects... So we don’t learn much from our own experience.

The surprising way to predict your future happiness

PETER SINGER: Okay, so as you’ve said that there is this better way, I think we have to ask you to reveal this important secret now.

DANIEL GILBERT: Well, it’s called surrogation. That means using other human beings as surrogates for yourself. In any future situation you’re imagining, and you’re tempted to use your imagination and simulate yourself in it, surely other human beings have already experienced it. Their real experience with any event is a better guide to your experience than your imagination.

Here’s a very simple experiment. We brought people into a laboratory, all young single women. They were told they were going to have a speed date with a young man in another room, and their job was to predict how much they were going to like it.
Half of them were allowed to use their imaginations; they saw his photo, his interests, everything, and predicted how much they’d enjoy it.
The other half learned only one thing: on a scale of one to ten, how did the last woman who talked to him rate her experience?
The latter group was much more accurate. The group that used imagination made all the classic errors.

What online reviews reveal about happiness

PETER SINGER: That suggests to me that we should have got better at predicting what we’re going to like, because now we very often go online, we want to rent an Airbnb, or go to a restaurant, and we look at the reviews. That should have made us better at predicting when we’ll be happier.

DANIEL GILBERT: I totally agree, but only in particular domains. I think we’re much better at picking movies and restaurants than we would be without all those online reviews. Isn’t it curious that in those cases we flock to the reviews, but when it comes to getting married or divorced, or having children or taking a job in Cincinnati, we have this sense that we are unique individuals, quite different from others. Other people’s experiences may be mildly educational, but they can’t really tell us what we want to know.

Why too much choice makes us miserable

KASIA DE LAZARI RADEK: Does it mean that the world as it is now, at least the Western world with such an amazing amount of choices, is making us unhappy?

DANIEL GILBERT: Let’s distinguish between the number of items you have to choose from and your ability to change your mind once you’ve made that choice. Those are two entirely separate issues.
The research of Barry Schwartz and Sheena Iyengar suggests that too many choices do make people unhappy, leaving them feeling paralysed by the number they have to wrestle with.

There’s a wonderful study showing that if you give people three investment options for their retirement, they usually make a good choice. If you give them thirty, they puzzle about it so long they never decide and their money goes to the default fund, which turns out to be a poor choice.
Economists don’t believe that’s possible. Psychologists know it is.

Living in the present vs. planning for the future

PETER SINGER: You mention Ram Dass’s Be Here Now. Why isn’t trying to live in an eternal present a good response to the difficulty of predicting what will make us happy in the future?

DANIEL GILBERT: Be Here Now changed the course of my life when I read it at fifteen, but it’s obvious we shouldn’t live only in the present. There are people like that on Earth, they’re called two-year-olds.
Of course, we ought not. If we’re living all the time in the future, we miss the fun of what we’re doing, but if we live only in the present, we wouldn’t floss our teeth or save for retirement.
There’s got to be some healthy balance. It’s good to live many of your moments in the present, but to rise above the present once in a while to think about tomorrow and the past, and then come back down to live it.

What happiness really is

KASIA DE LAZARI RADEK: You seem to think that emotional happiness is pleasure. Are you a hedonist?

DANIEL GILBERT: Oh yes. Epicurus is my favourite philosopher. Happiness isn’t a kind of experience, it’s a property of experiences.
Every conscious moment lies somewhere on the feeling-good to feeling-bad continuum. Happiness is simply the label we give to that dimension.
There aren’t different kinds of happiness. Seeing your grandchild smile and eating chocolate are different experiences, but one simply has more happiness in it than the other.

The two biggest findings about happiness

DANIEL GILBERT: There are two real surprises in all the literature on what brings humans happiness.
First, social relationships are much more important than almost any other variable. If you could choose between good health and good friends, you should choose good friends, people can adapt to poor health, but they almost never adapt to having few social relationships.

The second surprise is about children. We love our kids and assume they make us happy. But when researchers measure moment-to-moment happiness, it’s actually lower when people are with their children.
Children make us happy when we think about them, not always when we’re with them.

On luck, love, and stumbling well

KASIA DE LAZARI RADEK: So, the question we always end with: what do you think of your own life — do you think you’ve lived it well so far?

DANIEL GILBERT: My life has turned out superbly, but I don’t want to say I’ve lived it well. It’s almost resisted my efforts to completely screw it up.
Everything good happened almost in spite of my intentions rather than due to them.
There’s not a day I don’t get up and look over at my wife and think, how am I the man lucky enough to be lying here in this bed with you?
If you have those two things, love and work, you’ve got a whole lot of the happiness part licked.