Why Self-Help Books Don’t
Aug. 9th, 2007 10:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselJune 2007
Stumbling on Happiness - Daniel Gilbert - Harper Perennial, 2007
* * * *
I bought this one because it recently won the Royal Society (formerly Aventis, formerly Rhone-Poulenc) Prize for popular science writing. It’s a worthy winner; the theme - our chronic inability to predict what will make us happy - is both important and interesting, and the style is clear, accessible and in places laugh-out-loud funny. I do, however, have a few problems with the science.
Gilbert starts by finishing the sentence that, apparently, all psychologists vow to complete at some point in their careers, the one that starts “The human being is the only animal that...”. His answer is “...thinks about the future”, which in my view is a pretty good one (there are many animal behaviours that look forward-thinking, like squirrels storing nuts, but Gilbert argues that the lack of accompanying introspective behaviour - as far as we can tell, chimps don’t weep at the thought of growing old alone - indicates that these are just instinctual programs). To do this we use imagination - the capability to envision situations that are not related to our immediate circumstances - which is a facility that in all probability derives from the unique development of our frontal lobes. As a recent evolutionary innovation it is to be expected that there are some flaws in its implementation that natural selection hasn’t fixed.
After a section in which he discusses the subjectivity of happiness (I’ll return to this later), Gilbert goes on to list what these flaws are in a series of entertaining chapters. First, there is Realism. This is the tendency to believe what our imagination tells us because it is so good at its job of creating a complete picture based on incomplete information. For example, we rely on what we think our eyes are telling us even though the image that is received through them is wobbly, upside down and has a huge great blind spot in it. We do the same thing when we envision a future scenario, forgetting that our brain is a talented forger that simply invents the things it doesn’t know, and which tends not to consider information about missing or distant elements (like the dog that didn’t bark in the night).
The second flaw is Presentism. When our imagination does the filling-in trick, it behaves exactly as our visual processing circuits do when masking out the blind spot. It appropriates material that is close to our current circumstances and extends it to plug the gap. The result is that we tend to assume that our future thoughts and feelings will be rather more similar to our current ones than will actually be the case. Even something like bad weather can have an effect - measurably fewer people are optimistic about the future during bad weather than during good.
Rationalisation is our tendency to “cook the facts” to suit our preconceived notions. Studies show that when anticipating a pleasant or unpleasant event we tend to overestimate how strongly we will feel about it compared to how we actually feel when the event occurs. Gilbert suggests that this is because we have a “psychological immune system” which acts to damp down our emotions in traumatic circumstances.
The final section, Corrigibility, takes us into meme-land. We tend to subscribe to certain social beliefs in the face of the actual evidence. One such belief is that money will make us happy. Another, less obviously, is that our greatest source of happiness is our children. Most parents will say this, but if you actually measure their levels of contentment during a marriage you find that they dip when children come along and only recover after they leave for university. People forget how much hard work bringing up children is and how unrewarding it can be because, Gilbert says, there is a self-perpetuating “kids bring happiness” meme (an alternative explanation - that the contentment levels of couples with children who have flown the nest is higher than that of equivalent childless couples, making child-rearing an investment in future happiness - is unfortunately not discussed).
So are we doomed, as the title suggests, to find happiness only by accident, if it all? Is there really no reliable way of determining whether a particular course of action will make us happy? Well, according to Gilbert yes there is and it’s very simple. You abandon your imagination as a guide, find someone who is currently engaged in the action and ask them. Gilbert reckons that people are perfectly capable of describing accurately their current mental state; it’s just past and future ones that are problematic. He answers the obvious objection - “we are all different, so why should someone else’s report be a reliable indicator of what I will feel?” by giving psychological reasons why we should want to imagine that we are more individual than we in fact are.
This conclusion may be correct, but I do have some doubts about it. Firstly, a reductio ad absurdum. If Gilbert is right, then I should enjoy any activity that lots of my friends (or other people I trust to give me reliable reports) say makes them happy, for example drinking wine. But as I am essentially tee total because I don’t like the taste, I think it very unlikely that wine will ever make me happy. Some differences between individuals are genuine and deep-seated.
Secondly, I am not convinced that people can report on their current mental state accurately (even when they haven’t been drinking). Realism and Presentism are problems of imagination and so won’t apply, but surely Rationalisation and Corrigibility could colour people’s assessments of their current feelings just as they do their imagined ones?
Thirdly, like many people from the hard(ish) end of science, I have doubts about the objectivity of experiments to measure psychological states that Gilbert cites to support his argument. To be fair, he addresses this difficulty in the first chapter, but he comes to the anodyne conclusion that use of sufficiently large numbers of subjects allows a meaningful average to be determined. However, an average is meaningless if each of the readings used to determine it is of a different thing. For example, Gilbert cites the case of Lori and Reba Schappel, two sisters with contrasting personalities (one is an introvert country music composer, the other an extrovert hospital worker) who are joined at the forehead but nonetheless claim to be extremely happy and refuse to be separated. Given their highly unusual circumstances, does their notion of happiness correspond in any sense to anyone else’s? If they rate receiving a birthday cake as a 10 on a happiness scale of 1 to 10 and I rate it as a 5, does our average score actually mean anything?
The problem is compounded by Gilbert’s breezy style. He gives no details of the studies cited such as the number of individuals used or the way in which their responses were scored. And what about other factors? Have the studies been repeated in different countries to ensure that the effects seen aren’t cultural artifacts, for example?
Yes I know it’s a popular science book and Gilbert does at least cite his sources. But given the general mistrust of psychologists since Freud’s misappropriation of the word “scientific” to describe his theories, it would be wise for them to be more careful about accurate reporting. Gilbert cites Lord Kelvin’s remark that “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible”, but then admits in a footnote that he can’t find the original source for it. This should have been stated in the main text, or the original remark glossed with “alleged” or “attributed”.
Despite these caveats, it’s an interesting read and I enjoyed it. It’s also an important corrective to all the self-help and positive thinking tomes that litter the shelves of bookshops these days. They can’t help you be happy because neither they nor you can reliably predict what will make you happy. Gilbert’s solution to this conundrum is interesting, but his choice of title suggests that even he is not entirely convinced by it. But if he’s right, then reading reviews like this should be an indicator of an activity you could do that might make you happy, at least for a bit. Think nothing of it. It’s all part of the service.
Stumbling on Happiness - Daniel Gilbert - Harper Perennial, 2007
* * * *
I bought this one because it recently won the Royal Society (formerly Aventis, formerly Rhone-Poulenc) Prize for popular science writing. It’s a worthy winner; the theme - our chronic inability to predict what will make us happy - is both important and interesting, and the style is clear, accessible and in places laugh-out-loud funny. I do, however, have a few problems with the science.
Gilbert starts by finishing the sentence that, apparently, all psychologists vow to complete at some point in their careers, the one that starts “The human being is the only animal that...”. His answer is “...thinks about the future”, which in my view is a pretty good one (there are many animal behaviours that look forward-thinking, like squirrels storing nuts, but Gilbert argues that the lack of accompanying introspective behaviour - as far as we can tell, chimps don’t weep at the thought of growing old alone - indicates that these are just instinctual programs). To do this we use imagination - the capability to envision situations that are not related to our immediate circumstances - which is a facility that in all probability derives from the unique development of our frontal lobes. As a recent evolutionary innovation it is to be expected that there are some flaws in its implementation that natural selection hasn’t fixed.
After a section in which he discusses the subjectivity of happiness (I’ll return to this later), Gilbert goes on to list what these flaws are in a series of entertaining chapters. First, there is Realism. This is the tendency to believe what our imagination tells us because it is so good at its job of creating a complete picture based on incomplete information. For example, we rely on what we think our eyes are telling us even though the image that is received through them is wobbly, upside down and has a huge great blind spot in it. We do the same thing when we envision a future scenario, forgetting that our brain is a talented forger that simply invents the things it doesn’t know, and which tends not to consider information about missing or distant elements (like the dog that didn’t bark in the night).
The second flaw is Presentism. When our imagination does the filling-in trick, it behaves exactly as our visual processing circuits do when masking out the blind spot. It appropriates material that is close to our current circumstances and extends it to plug the gap. The result is that we tend to assume that our future thoughts and feelings will be rather more similar to our current ones than will actually be the case. Even something like bad weather can have an effect - measurably fewer people are optimistic about the future during bad weather than during good.
Rationalisation is our tendency to “cook the facts” to suit our preconceived notions. Studies show that when anticipating a pleasant or unpleasant event we tend to overestimate how strongly we will feel about it compared to how we actually feel when the event occurs. Gilbert suggests that this is because we have a “psychological immune system” which acts to damp down our emotions in traumatic circumstances.
The final section, Corrigibility, takes us into meme-land. We tend to subscribe to certain social beliefs in the face of the actual evidence. One such belief is that money will make us happy. Another, less obviously, is that our greatest source of happiness is our children. Most parents will say this, but if you actually measure their levels of contentment during a marriage you find that they dip when children come along and only recover after they leave for university. People forget how much hard work bringing up children is and how unrewarding it can be because, Gilbert says, there is a self-perpetuating “kids bring happiness” meme (an alternative explanation - that the contentment levels of couples with children who have flown the nest is higher than that of equivalent childless couples, making child-rearing an investment in future happiness - is unfortunately not discussed).
So are we doomed, as the title suggests, to find happiness only by accident, if it all? Is there really no reliable way of determining whether a particular course of action will make us happy? Well, according to Gilbert yes there is and it’s very simple. You abandon your imagination as a guide, find someone who is currently engaged in the action and ask them. Gilbert reckons that people are perfectly capable of describing accurately their current mental state; it’s just past and future ones that are problematic. He answers the obvious objection - “we are all different, so why should someone else’s report be a reliable indicator of what I will feel?” by giving psychological reasons why we should want to imagine that we are more individual than we in fact are.
This conclusion may be correct, but I do have some doubts about it. Firstly, a reductio ad absurdum. If Gilbert is right, then I should enjoy any activity that lots of my friends (or other people I trust to give me reliable reports) say makes them happy, for example drinking wine. But as I am essentially tee total because I don’t like the taste, I think it very unlikely that wine will ever make me happy. Some differences between individuals are genuine and deep-seated.
Secondly, I am not convinced that people can report on their current mental state accurately (even when they haven’t been drinking). Realism and Presentism are problems of imagination and so won’t apply, but surely Rationalisation and Corrigibility could colour people’s assessments of their current feelings just as they do their imagined ones?
Thirdly, like many people from the hard(ish) end of science, I have doubts about the objectivity of experiments to measure psychological states that Gilbert cites to support his argument. To be fair, he addresses this difficulty in the first chapter, but he comes to the anodyne conclusion that use of sufficiently large numbers of subjects allows a meaningful average to be determined. However, an average is meaningless if each of the readings used to determine it is of a different thing. For example, Gilbert cites the case of Lori and Reba Schappel, two sisters with contrasting personalities (one is an introvert country music composer, the other an extrovert hospital worker) who are joined at the forehead but nonetheless claim to be extremely happy and refuse to be separated. Given their highly unusual circumstances, does their notion of happiness correspond in any sense to anyone else’s? If they rate receiving a birthday cake as a 10 on a happiness scale of 1 to 10 and I rate it as a 5, does our average score actually mean anything?
The problem is compounded by Gilbert’s breezy style. He gives no details of the studies cited such as the number of individuals used or the way in which their responses were scored. And what about other factors? Have the studies been repeated in different countries to ensure that the effects seen aren’t cultural artifacts, for example?
Yes I know it’s a popular science book and Gilbert does at least cite his sources. But given the general mistrust of psychologists since Freud’s misappropriation of the word “scientific” to describe his theories, it would be wise for them to be more careful about accurate reporting. Gilbert cites Lord Kelvin’s remark that “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible”, but then admits in a footnote that he can’t find the original source for it. This should have been stated in the main text, or the original remark glossed with “alleged” or “attributed”.
Despite these caveats, it’s an interesting read and I enjoyed it. It’s also an important corrective to all the self-help and positive thinking tomes that litter the shelves of bookshops these days. They can’t help you be happy because neither they nor you can reliably predict what will make you happy. Gilbert’s solution to this conundrum is interesting, but his choice of title suggests that even he is not entirely convinced by it. But if he’s right, then reading reviews like this should be an indicator of an activity you could do that might make you happy, at least for a bit. Think nothing of it. It’s all part of the service.