Dan Gilbert on What Makes Us Happy

Dan Gilbert is a Harvard Professor of Psychology. This is an excerpt from interviews he gave which are found on BigThink.com.  I thought what he had to say about humans and how we think and make decisions related to our happiness was worth spending the half hour or so transcribing onto this post. I will post my thoughts later.
What is Affective Forecasting?
Affective forecasting is the process by which people look into their future and make predictions about what they'll like and what they won't like. When you make decisions, whether they're large ones like whom to marry, whether it's Jim and Charlie, whether to move to Anchorage or Cleveland, or small ones - to have a doughnut or a croissant, to wear the red blouse or the green blouse, all of these decisions are predicated upon some estimation that your brain is making very rapidly, that one of them will feel better than the other one. How does your brain do that? And how well does your brain do that? Those are some of the questions that Affective Forecasting tries to answer.

What Is Impact Bias?
Impact bias is the tendency for people to believe that events will have a stronger impact than they usually do.  And that tends to be the main form of error that affective forecasting takes. Most of the time, when people are wrong about how they will feel about the future, they're wrong in the direction of thinking that things will matter to them more than they'll really do. We are remarkable in our ability to adjust and adapt to almost any situation but we seem not to know this about ourselves and so we mistakenly predict that good things will make us happy, really happy for a really long time; bad things they'll just slay us....it turns out neither of these things is by and large really true.

Why are we susceptible to Impact Bias?

Well there's a whole host of reasons why people are susceptible to this impact bias, one, for example, is we have a remarkable capacity for rationalization. People are very good in finding the good in the bad, very good at making the best of the situations that they are irrevocably stuck with. They don't know they have this talent, so when we think, "how would I feel if my spouse left me" we go, "oh my god, I'll be devastated, I'll be devastated for weeks, months, years in fact." What we're overlooking is the fact that within a relatively short time, we wouldn't be thinking of the same way of our spouse as we do now. We'll be starting to see all the ways in which she wasn't right for us, we didn't share as many interests as I once thought, sex wasn't as good as I remembered, et cetera. All of these are illusions of prospection but rationalization has a funny reputation of having a bad reputation. Most people think of it as making stuff up. It's not making stuff up. It's finding ways of seeing the world that are both accurate and pleasant. Almost everything can be seen in multiple ways, almost everything has a good view, a bad view, the brain is very good at finding the good view. The good view isn't any more wrong than the bad view is, so in a sense what our brains do is to go shopping among the various ways of thinking about the situations we're in, and they settle on the most positive one. That's a talent, that's not a foible.

Historically, what has made people happy?

Well of course we don't know how the antecedents of what makes us happy have changed over time because there are no good fossil records of smiling. Um, the really serious research on the scientific bases of happiness have only begun in the last couple of decades. Nonetheless I'd say that it's an educated guess to say that social relationships have been, and continue to be the primary predictor os human happiness. We are a social mammal.  And the thing that makes us happy is the...the affiliation and the esteem, respect, goodwill of other human beings. We like...we're happy when we have family, we're happy when we have friends. And almost all the other things we think make us happy actually are just ways of getting more family and friends.