Daniel Gilbert Immune To Reality Summary

Daniel Gilbert’s article “Immune to Reality” reveals how humans tend to make up excuses for their behavior in defence to the psychological immune system. Gilbert looks at the mechanisms we use to fend off unhappiness and spells out the details of what he calls the psychological immune system. Like the physical immune system defends us from illness, the psychological immune system defends us from unhappiness. Gilbert says, "Ignorance of our psychological immune system causes us to predict incorrectly the circumstance under which we will face". In other words, every day people are shocked because when they have thought a situation would make them happy, but that results to the opposite. They only pay attention to their personal belief and they
ignore the unconscious. In contrast, their brain plays an important role after every situation they will face to engage their psychological immune system especially, when something bad happen to them. In the article gives an great example of how Wilhelm von Osten claimed that his stallion Clever Hans was able to “answer questions about current events, mathematics, and a host of other topics by tapping the ground with his foreleg”. Osten, who is a retired school teacher spent all his time with his horse to prove to others Clever Hans was an actual genius. Gilbert goes on to state “When we expose ourselves to favorable facts, notice and remember favorable facts we are generally no more aware” because “we are normally unaware of the processes that change them”. Due to the favorable facts individuals are exposed to, they tend to generate positive views of their actions unconsciously by cooking facts. The psychological immune system automatically changes the behavior depending on its reaction towards something. With that said Gilbert’s argument is believable and realistic. Throughout the entire article he gives reasonable examples to back up his argument and explain to the reader why he believes the way people are.