Stumbling on Happiness

Stumbling on Happiness is a nonfiction book by the American psychologist Daniel Gilbert, published in the United States and Canada in 2006 by Knopf. It has been translated into more than thirty languages and reached the bestseller list of The New York Times. Its central thesis is that, through perception and various cognitive biases, people imagine the future poorly, particularly what will make them happy.

Gilbert argues that imagination fails in three ways. First, when we imagine, we add and remove details without realizing that key ones may be fabricated or missing. Second, imagined futures resemble the present more than they turn out to be. Third, imagination overlooks the fact that things feel different once they happen: our psychological immune system makes bad experiences seem less painful than we anticipated. The book also discusses the mind's tendency to "fill in" gaps with expected patterns, a process similar to the one the eye uses to conceal its blind spot.

Written for a general reader, the book avoids abstruse terminology and explains the quirks of reasoning through simple experiments. It is organized into six sections: prospection, subjectivity, realism, presentism, rationalization, and corrigibility. In the last, Gilbert proposes that illusions about the future are best corrected by consulting the experiences of other people, and he notes that cultural values often spread as inherited ideas that distort our beliefs about what will make us happy.

Critics praised the book for its clarity and readability, although some reviewers found its tone at times overly prescriptive. In 2007 it won the general prize of the Royal Society Prizes for Science Books, awarded for the best science writing for a non-specialist audience.