 One area I'm particularly interested in is happiness. So we like to think, I like to think that I can predict what will make me happy and unhappy. But in fact, we asked people at the beginning of this course some questions about happiness. We told people at the start of this episode some things about some fictitious people. So for example, Jones who earns $20,000 a year and Smith who earns $100,000 a year. A couple of other people who had really close supervision at work versus another person who sort of had free reign. A person who was married and someone else who was unmarried. Someone who had really good health benefits and somebody else who didn't. Now we asked people to predict how happy these two people were. And what people did predict was that the people in the unfortunate situation would be completely miserable most of the time. They'd just be walking around with a frown, completely unhappy. But the people in the fortunate situation who had excellent benefits and who were earning far more money than they knew what to do with every year would be really, really happy. But, so for example, Danny Kahneman has done this experiment where in fact these people aren't any happier than anybody else. The people in the seemingly unfortunate situations are just as happy as the people in the seemingly fortunate situations. This kind of highlights one of the points of this episode and that is we don't really have any kind of conscious access to the determinants of our own behavior and happiness is exactly one example of that. And so people in those two sort of situations. I mean we're talking about fictitious people in this case people don't really seem to take into account when something is going to make them happy or unhappy. And so we often, as this experiment demonstrated, money doesn't necessarily buy happiness even though we think that it does. And so often we would take a higher paying job at the expense, for example, of commuting longer. Now commuting longer is horrible for one's happiness. Spending time in traffic is probably the worst thing that people can rate on a scale of happiness. Yet taking more money and moving further out is something that's commonly done. And so again if you have this idea that money doesn't buy happiness, that we have no real insight into that fact, then we might make kind of different decisions about the determinants of our own fates of what we're planning on doing. It really seems like we don't have any sort of privileged access into our own consciousness and happiness isn't really an exception to that rule. Exactly. Here's what Richard Nisbet had to say about what makes us happy.