Most people have a list of wishes—things that they think will bring them happiness. Happiness lists are easy to come up with. However, the mechanism behind them is somewhat complicated, since it involves what psychologist Daniel Gilbert calls the greatest achievement of the human brain—the ability to imagine. To imagine what will bring joy to our future selves requires mental time travel, which is a unique human skill resulting from two million years of evolution. We use this skill every day, predicting our future emotions and then making decisions, whether big or small, according to our forecasts of how they'll make our future selves feel.
Yet, our imagination often fails us. When we're lucky enough to get what we wished for, we discover that it doesn't come with everlasting happiness. And when the things we feared come to pass, we realize that they don't crush us after all. In dozens of studies, Gilbert has shown that we can mispredict emotional consequences of positive events, such as receiving gifts or winning football games, as much as negative events, like breaking up or losing an election. This impact bias(影响偏差) —overestimation of the intensity and duration of our emotional reactions to future events—is significant, because the prediction of the duration of our future emotions is what often shapes our decisions, including those concerning our happiness.
Just as our immune systems work tirelessly to keep our bodies in good health, our psychological immune systems routinely employ an entire set of cognitive(认知) mechanisms in order to deal with life's habitual attack of less-than-pleasant circumstances. Actually, our psychological immune system has an impressive feature of its own: the ability to produce happiness. Thus, when life disappoints us, we "ignore, transform, and rearrange" information through a variety of creative strategies until the rough edges of negative effects have been dutifully dulled. When we fail to recognize this ability of our psychological immune systems to produce happiness, we're likely to make errors in our affective forecasting.
Happiness, Gilbert points out, is a fast moving target. As passionate as we're about finding it, we routinely misforecast what will make us happy, and how long our joy will last. In reality, he adds that the best way to make an affective forecast is not to use your imagination, but your eyes. Namely, instead of trying to predict how happy you 'll be in a particular future, look closely at those who are already in the future that you're merely contemplating(冥想)and ask how happy they are. If something makes others happy, it'll likely make you happy as well.
| Forecasting Happiness | |
| The mechanism behind happiness lists | *It's a bit complicated because of the involvement of the human ability to . *Mental time travel is a unique human skill we use on a(n) basis to make predictions about our future emotions and then all our decisions on them. |
| The with predicting happiness | *We can make wrong predictions about emotional consequences of positive or negative events, which can us from making right decisions. |
| The functions of the psychological immune system | *Our psychological immune system routinely help unpleasant circumstances in life. *Our wrong affective forecasting results from our to recognize the power of our psychological immune system. |
| An effective to predict happiness | *Use your eyes of your imagination while making affective forecasts. others who are in the future that you're contemplating and ask how happy they are. |
