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Can You Predict Happiness?
By Flora Morris Brown, Ph.D. | February 19, 2008
Daniel Gilbert, author and Harvard psychology professor is reported , in a recent Time article, as saying that we can not predict how much we will like a future experience. That’s because
we use past experiences to try to imagine future experiences. Once we are actually having
an experience we forget about the alternatives we imagined.
Dr. Gilbert calls this “attentional collapse.” By this he means that once we are engaged in an experience it takes all our attention and makes our preconceptions irrelevant. So, if we take
the road less traveled, it makes all the difference because we don’t think any longer about the roads we didn’t take.
When contemplating future decisions, Dr. Gilbert says
“When looking into the future, never trust your gut. That doesn’t mean it’s always wrong, you should just never trust it. It never hurts to stop and ask.”
I’m not in complete agreement with Dr. Gilbert’s findings. I believe that many people do dwell on the paths they did not take, the person they did not marry, or the job they didn’t get. They can’t be sure they would be happier experiencing those missed opportunities, but I believe many people regret choices they made.
On the other hand, many people, including me, experience being happy with a choice and knowing that the alternative choice would have been an disappointing one.
What is your take on this? Do you think it’s possible to predict if an experience will be happy or not?
Topics: Life choices, Making choices, Predicting happiness |