The New York Times did an interview recently with renowned social psychologist, Daniel Gilbert. This Harvard professor has spent many years studying the Fundamental Attribution Error, or the tendency for people to attribute human behavior more to internal dispositions than to external situations. He is now referred to as “Professor Happiness” due to a new line of research focusing on how accurately people predict their emotional reactions to future events. He found that people have a fundamental inability to predict what will make them happy or unhappy. This failure to distinguish positive from negative future outcomes makes it difficult for people to find lasting happiness.

In the NYT interview, Dr. Gilbert explains that as a species we adapt quickly to both good and bad situations. Bad events never make us as unhappy as we think, and similarly, good events never make us as happy as we think. Therefore, we tend to be moderately happy with whatever event occurs and we return to our emotional baselines more quickly than we think we will. For example, we may expect to be incredibly unhappy if our spouse leaves us or we lose a job. But if the dreaded indeed happens we tend to quickly rationalize the situation with explanations: “She was never right for me,” or “I needed more free time for my family,” and before we know it we are back in the swing of things.

What then does Professor Happiness suggest we do in order to be more happy? Build Relationships. Relationships are by far the best predictor of happiness. They have been found to be more important than money and even somewhat more important than health. Put another way, people take more pleasure in experiences than in things. A major reason for this is that experiences tend to be shared with other people and that, as we now know, is an effective predictor of lasting happiness.

Further Reading:

Daniel Gilbert’s Lab Homepage

Daniel Gilbert’s book: Stumbling on Happiness