STUDY GUIDE Introduction 00 Journey to Elsewhen 01 The View from in Here 02 Outside Looking In 03 In the Blindspot of the Mind's Eye 04 The Hound of Silence 05 The Future Is Now 06 Time Bombs 07 Paradise Glossed 08 Immune to Reality 09 Once Bitten 10 Reporting Live from Tomorrow 11 Afterword 12 Printable Version |
Outside Looking In In Chapter 3, I dive into the psychological research literature by posing what seems like a simple question: How are you? As it turns out, people can't always answer this question accurately because they don't always know what they are feeling. This is a real problem, because a science of happiness requires that we measure happiness—and if people don't know what they are feeling, then how in the world can they tell us? In his unbelievably brilliant book, the unbelievably brilliant psychologist Tim Wilson (who just so happens to be my research collaborator, so there is some small possibility I'm biased) explains how and why we are such "strangers to ourselves." The psychologists Norbert Schwarz and Fritz Strack describe some of the perils and pitfalls of measuring happiness. Question What can and can't people tell us about their current emotional state, and are the things they tell us the best measure—or perhaps even the only measure—of their happiness? Readings "Knowing Why" and "Knowing How We Feel" in T.D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 93-136. N. Schwarz & F. Strack, "Reports of Subjective Well-Being: Judgmental Processes and Their Methodological Implications," in Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, ed. D. Kahneman, E. Diener, and N. Schwarz (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), 61-84; D. Kahneman, "Objective Happiness," in Well-Being, 3-25. |
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