Stumbling on Happiness Book Review

Book Review: Stumbling on Happiness Despite the title of this book, Stumbling on Happiness is not, just as the author claims, “an instruction manual that will tell you anything useful about how to be happy.”1 Daniel Gilbert expresses the fact that happiness is often stumbled upon instead of successfully achieved through planning and imagination. Gilbert explains this theory through a social psychological approach of three shortcomings of imagination that often make people error when they imagine their future happiness. The explanations of these three shortcomings and their impact on how they affect the way we think about our future, are the strong points of the book. Additionally, Gilbert used a social psychological perspective to approach this issue because how we view our future emotions is influenced by how we imagine and perceive our future to be. Moreover, our imagination is influenced by three shortcomings that affect the way we imagine our future emotions. According to Gilbert, the first shortcoming of imagination is Realism; our brain does a lot of filling-in and leaving out of bits of information which affect the accuracy of our imagination. This filling-in trick the brain plays affects how we image future events; when gaps appear in our thoughts our brains automatically presents us with information related to the subject at hand, which we use to fill in our thoughts (much like our brain does with the blind spot in our vision).2 This is shown through the result of a study where volunteers made predictions about what they would do in future events; two groups of volunteers (assumers and non-assumers) were both confident that their predictions about future events were accurate.3 This experiment shows that our brains often use the filling-in trick to manufacture images when we imagine future events; leading us to treat our imagination as an accurate representation of the future. Additionally, our brains are also prone to leaving out information. A study of