Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book is a mixture of interesting examples of the ways in which our imagination is imperfect, and an imperfect defence of Gilbert's professional world view. The examples are clearly described, and prove engaging and surprising. The world view is presented piecemeal and tendentiously, and when finally extracted from the frothy prose it is less than appealing. * Gilbert's world view can be roughly labelled formal hedonism. He upholds the contention that humans are ultimately motivated by the maximization of their own happiness, where happiness is best considered in terms of a felt experience of brief duration - a sensation within a moment. Following from this, a person's happiness over a longer period of time is simply the sum total of the amounts of happiness contained in the moments. In this world view, a person behaves `rationally' when they act to maximize this sum total of happy moments, and they make a `mistake' when they fail to do so. Note that the place of each moment is irrelevant - it is only the total that counts - so to prefer a particular shape to the distribution of one's happiness, in preference to maximizing the overall `amount' of happiness, is irrational. His view is extreme, but it and more sophisticated variants are accepted within academic psychology and economic theory, to the detriment of both. Gilbert slips ambiguously between implying that his is a descriptive theory, that is, he is reporting what humans do in fact want, and implying that it is a normative theory, telling us that this is what we should want (on pain of being irrational). * It is in the light of the above world view, and only in this light, that Gilbert sees humans as making `mistakes'. His examples entertainingly show that people are bad at anticipating the amount of momentary happiness they will experience in an anticipated future moment and, for that matter, bad at remembering how happy they felt in a particular moment from the past. Given his presumption that humans are aiming to maximize the sum of their momentary happiness, he laments at our failure. * On his account, our failures are systematic, and by uncovering the regularities he hopes to give us a chance to circumvent our mistaken inclinations. The regularties are seen as stemming from various forms of the same basic human limitation, this being our inability to detect the defects in our imagination when envisaging ourselves in the future, or the past, or when trying to step into another person's shoes, be this present, past or future. The defects in turn stem from our imaginations inventing only a small fraction of the novel situations and using our present experience to `fill in' the remaining fraction. Such `filling in' leads to errors, and these errors become nefarious because we fail to detect them. His examples make all of this vivid and humorous. * Reading the book is a frustrating experience. Time and again he begins a discussion without telling you why he has chosen to discuss the matter, and, having finished the discussion, he fails to situate it within a broader argumentative structure. The result is that you feel he is waffling, and you anxiously await the next example drawn from psychological studies, since here you will have something solid to consider. Having completed the book, one sees that the unmotivated sections combine to form a haphazard explication of his world view. * Thus, at first one can be baffled by his prolonged rumination on whether there is anything substantive to measure when one studies happiness. But he allies measurement with hard science, and the history of psychology can, in part, be seen as a struggle for legitimacy within the sciences. This desire to be considered a scientist also motivates his views regarding happiness being `basically' a momentary felt experience - a more complex view of happiness would render it even more difficult to measure. If his topic is not amenable to experimental method, then he would stand defeated - defeated at least as a scientist. * A more general criticism of the book is that Gilbert's thinking is neither clear nor rigorous. At times, it is utterly wrongheaded. Two of a wealth of instances follow. * In Chapter 2, The View from in Here, he overtly discusses the fact that happiness might be taken to mean more than a momentary feeling, and mentions two of the many thinkers who explored a more complicated view, namely J.S.Mill and Robert Nozick - here he dismisses their arguments with a wave of his rhetorical hand, and summarizes their `mistake' in the claim, "...philosophers have muddled the moral and emotional meanings of the word `happiness'" - Nozick's argument, in his experience-machine paper, is a powerful attack on the very view which Gilbert espouses - to brand Nozick's thought `muddled' is the height of irony. Relatedly, in this section Gilbert blurs the distinction between happiness being one of the goods in a worthwhile life, and it being the only good. Bear in mind that the latter is his professed position - it is, however, intuitively unattractive, so he blurs the distinction to suit himself, hoping that some of the plausibility of the milder claim will rub off on his. Thus, the thinkers Gilbert cites would have no problem with the former contention, but would reject the latter; likewise, his hyperbolic claim, "...every thinker in every century has recognized that people seek emotional happiness" is utterly false if taken to mean that every thinker supports Gilbert's world view, but plausible if taken as the weaker claim that being happy is one of the many things people seek and reasonably hope to attain. Gilbert's entire discussion is very confused. * Chapter 4 has an unfortunate discussion of `realism'. Gilbert notices that this term occurs in Locke (and subsequent analytic philosophy), and also appears in Piaget - reading Gilbert one would assume the term has the same meaning in both contexts, when in fact the word refers to widely differing concepts. Locke's point is that there exists an external world, independent of our perception of it, with logical room for us to perceive it correctly and incorrectly; Piaget leaves no such room, as his entire thrust has the infant child unaware of the distinction between its own self and the world, and hence incapable of establishing the concept of an independent external world, and, a fortiori, the concept of perceiving - Piaget's `The Child's Conception of the World' makes all this very clear. Gilbert's error is grotesque, but it is no accident, as he labours the false analogy painfully. He strains the analogy further by bringing in a dubious one paragraph summary of Immanuel Kant's metaphysics, and likens the child's development to philosophy's alleged development from Locke to Kant. This is not just unhelpful, it is a misunderstanding of the thought of all the thinkers cited, and a misrepresentation of the history of philosophy. * While his examples are in themselves interesting, his interpretation of them is often simplistic and dogmatic. To again mention just one of many instances: in Chapter 5, p.100, he cites a 1970s study where Americans were given a list of four countries, East Germany, West Germany, Nepal and Ceylon; they were asked to pick the two countries most similar to each other, and they chose the two Germanies; when asked to pick the two most dissimilar, again they chose the two Germanies. He interprets this paradoxical result as showing that people `ignore absences', that is to say, when focused on similarities, they ignore dissimilarities, and vice versa. Yet alternate interpretations are viable, such as that people simply chose the two countries which were most familiar and hence which they knew most about. Here, as elsewhere, the reader is lead to believe that only one interpretation of the study is available * Perhaps the most unintended consequence of Gilbert's discussion is that his cited examples can be seen as contradicting the basic contention of his world view. If, after all, humans are systematically incapable of accurately predicting their future momentary happiness, and yet evolution has seen the development of frontal lobes uniquely capable of forward planning, it might be that we are not planning for our future momentary happiness but for something else - something more complicated, such as a genuinely satisfying human life.