#daniel gilbert

Affective forecasting: Knowing what to want.

“Most organisms avoid that which has previously caused them pain and approach that which has previously given them pleasure.

Humans are better at this than most other animals because they do more than merely associate stimuli with their affective consequences. 

People are naive scientists who explain events to themselves, and the sophisticated causal theories people generate allow them to pursue pleasures and avoid pains with an unusual degree of success.”

(…)

“People are motivated to recover from negative emotional events, and the kind of sense making they engage in often involves coping, psychological defenses, and rationalization.

Like the physiological immune system that fights threats to physical health, people have a psychological immune system that fights threats to emotional well-being.

These defenses have been well documented by social and personality psychologists and include dissonance reduction, motivated reasoning, self-serving attributions, self-affirmation, and positive illusions.

A feature that all these defenses have in common is that they are largely unconscious, and in fact are more effective by operating behind the mental scenes. 

When trying to cope with a romantic breakup, for example, people usually will not be able deliberately and consciously to adopt a more negative view of their partner in order to make themselves feel better.

Instead, the ex-partner will come to seem less suitable, with no awareness that one’s own psychological immune system was responsible for this shift in view.”

(…)

“Because people do not recognize that they have reduced the impact of negative events by explaining and rationalizing them, they sometimes attribute their unexpected resilience to the work of powerful, insightful, and benevolent external agents.

For example, employees who are transferred to undesirable locations might be surprised by how happy they are;

by failing to recognize that they produced their own happiness with non-conscious coping and defensive processes, they might attribute their good fortune to the guiding hand of an external agent, such as God.”

“Bu ifadede [“kendini bulmak”] benlik, önceden var olan bir öz; zamanın ve değişimin ötesindeki mistik bir alemde bulunan bir idea olarak öz şeklindeki Platon düşüncesini çağrıştırır (…) Absürtlüğün özü de [burada], çünkü benlik asla bulunamaz, benlik yaratılmalıdır. Pasif, şen bir tesadüf değil, binlerce eylemin ürünüdür; büyük ya da küçük, bilinçli ya da bilinçsiz, “her şeyden uzakta” değil “her şeyle” yüz yüze, iyi ya da kötü, boş zamanda değil, hem çalışırken hem de dinlenirken…”