Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

Stumbling on Happiness

中译本《撞上幸福》
by Daniel Gilbert

建议阅读分：10/10
阅读日期: 2019.7

如果说佛学这条通往极乐世界的上山路不容易走的话，那么作为普通世人，可以换心理学这条路试一试。
与想象中不同，这本书读起来感觉更像一篇严肃的心理学研究报告，作者Daniel Gilbert是哈佛大学的一位心理学教授。通过对我们人类自身的研究揭示人对事物的心里反映和变化，以此来帮助我们了解自己，帮助我们理解理想与现实、现在与未来、理性与非理性之间的心里鸿沟。

Anticipation

Anticipating unpleasant events can minimize their impact. (On the other hand, things that one can not forsee are more painful than that one can.) [p20]
Fear, worry and anxiety have useful roles to play in our lives.
...In short, we sometimes imagine dark futures just to scare our own pants off. [p20]

Future

• We insist on steering our boats because we think we have a pretty good idea of where we should go, but the truth is that much of our steering is in vain--not because the boat won't respond, and not because we can't find our destination, but because the future is fundamentally different than it appears through the prospectiscope. [p25]
• People can be wrong in the present when they say they were in the past. [p54]

The word happiness is used to indicatite at least 3 related things, emotional happiness, moral happiness and judgmental happiness.
Emotional happiness: feelings, an experience, a subjective state.[p33]
*Fig.6 the birthday cake example Lori and Reba feel exactly as you feel but talk about it differently.[p51]
(针对同一事物，两者的感受度不同，因为个体之间的 感受尺度 本身就是不同的)

Rationality

• People prefer to have a job that pays 30k, then 40k, then 50k - rather than a job that earns 60k, then 50k, then 40k, even though the latter would earn more money.
• We don't think in absolute dollars. We think of relative dollars. (We would drive across town to save 50 on a 100 radio, but not to save 50 on a 100,000 car.)

Filling in Perception

[p90]
The powerful and undetectable filling in that suffuses our remembrances of things past pervades our perceptions of things present as well.

盲点. 闭上一只眼睛用另外一只看移动的球你会发现另外一个球会消失

When we think of events in the distant past or distant future we tend to think abstractly about why they happened or will happen, but when we think of events in the near past or near future we tend to think concretely about how they happened or will happen. [p116]

Once we have an experience, we cannot simply set it aside and see the world as we would have seen it had the experience never happened. The jury cannot disregard the prosecutor's snide remarks.

We think we are thinking outside the box only because we can't see how big the box really is. Imagination cannot easily transcend the boundaries of the present, and one reason for this is that it must borrow machinery that is owned by perception.

We assume that what we feel as we imagine the future is what we'll feel when we get there, but in fact, what we feel as we imagine the future is often a response to what's happening in the present.

We tend to imagine the future as the present with a twist, thus our imagined tomorrows inevitably look like slightly twisted versions of today... Presentism occurs because we fail to recognize that our future selves won't see the world the way we see it now.

We are more likely to generate a positive and credible view of an action than an inaction, of a painful experience than of an annoying experience, of an unpleasant situation that we cannot escape than of one we can. And yet, we rarely choose action over inaction, pain over annoyance, and commitment over freedom.

Awful incidents like train-missing come quickly to mind not because they are common but because they are uncommon. Because we don't recognize the real reasons why these auful episodes come quickly to mind, we mistakenly conclude that they are more common than they actually are.

Because we tend to remember the best of times and the worst times instead of the mostly likely of times, the wealth of experience that young people admire does not always pay clear dividends.

The way an experience ends is more important to us than the total amount of pleasure we receive--until we think about it.

Practice, it seems, doesn't always make perfect. But if you think back to all that talk about pooping, you'll remember that practice is just one of the two ways in which we learn.

Perhaps we should give up on remembering and imaging entirely and use other people as surrogates for our future.

Imagination's shortcoming

1. The first is its tendency to fill in and leave out without telling us.
2. The second is its tendency to project the present onto the future. (how we feel now can erroneously influence how we think we'll feel later.)
3. The third is its failure to recognize that things will look different once they happen--in particular, that bad things will look a whole lot better (which was explored in the section on rationalization)

理想与现实，现在与未来，非理性与理性，在这三个维度上做了一个实验，并把实验对象分为simulators(想象组）与surrogators（询问组）怎样更准确地把握自己的感受？

• 理想与现实：当理想/想象中的满足度低于现实的时候，想象组比预测的糟糕，询问组与预测相近。
• 现在与未来：当我们以现在的感受/满足感去预测未来在同样情况下的感受/满足感程度时，得到的结果也许是错误的。
• 非理性与理性：我们往往不能正确预测未来，有时候事情的结果会有所不同，特别是坏事情的结果往往并没预料的那么糟，甚至远远低于我们的恐惧。

怎样应用于生活?

• 咨询有相关经验的人，或已达到、已完成你所设定目标的人，这个人的水平不一定需要有多高，只要他走过你要走的路，都可以做参考。
• 对于未来即将发生的好事不要期待太多，问一问过来人，以缩小过度期待给自己带来的失落感。
• 对于或许要发生的坏事，无需过度恐惧，现实的坏结果往往没有预料的那么糟，不要让它太多影响到你现在的幸福感。

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.

We don't always see ourselves as superior, but we almost always see ourselves as unique.

We objectively get (wealth) is not the same as what we subjectively experience when we get it (utility). (by utility, Bernoulli meant something like goodness or pleasure.)

The determination of the value of an item must not be based on its price, but rather on the utility it yields.