 Do we know what makes us happy? A lot of the time we don't. Now of course I know that if my kid gets a great report on his report card, I know that makes me happy, it does make me happy. On the other hand, these are not trivial things. Everybody thinks they've got Blue Monday, actually. It's not really true. Everybody thinks that a variety of things that have a big impact on them don't really. And Wilson has also shown that people are terrible about predicting what kinds of effects on things in life. So you've got people who are college students who are dating and you ask them, what do you think, what would it do to you if this were to break up? Miserable, I wouldn't be able to hold my head up, I couldn't sleep and so on. Actually, that's not true. Are the unpleasantness only lasts for a small amount of time? Or you ask people who are just coming into a university freshman, what if you got dorm X? What do you think it would mean to you? So my God, that's terrible, it's dark, it's gloomy, the people that are boring, it would wreck my life. Actually, they're no less happy. Even, everybody assumes they'd be thrilled and delighted forever if they won the lottery. That only lasts for a few weeks and actually lottery winners end up being less happy than they were before. I mean, the neighbors are begging them for money, et cetera. The flip is true as well, I think it happens for death. One's own. That would be interesting, but death doesn't, bereavement doesn't last as long or it's not as bad as we think it predict would be. Breavement doesn't, if you ask people, what do you think it would do to you to become paraplegic, couldn't move you like, people take it for granted that would wreck their lives? And of course, it's terrible for a while, but eventually, I mean, they're never as happy as they were before or as the average person, but the misery does not last. And they find pleasure in things that we don't. They say, I enjoyed brushing my teeth today. So, I mean, there's Wilson and Dan Gilbert, his colleague, have a notion that we don't understand how good our psychological immune system is. That is ways we have of lifting ourselves up and we don't know what the hell is going on. Dissonance reduction is one. Somebody moves from the Midwest to California, but it's a different job and he has to go to a small house and so on. How do I, he's gonna lose some things, but he reduces dissonance by saying, who wants to take care of a big house like I had in the Midwest and the weather here just covers a multitude of sins and so on. So we're very good at rationalizing, explaining away, making things better than we think we could. So, and they have a concept of immune neglect. We don't understand that about ourselves. We don't understand that we will adapt. It's amazing how ignorant we are of things that are really important to us and how much we insist that we know why these things happened or would happen. My favorite study in this whole line of work was done with Harvard women. They were asked for a period of a month, maybe more, to at the end of each day, say, how good was your day? I mean, how happy were you? How satisfied were you? And then they answered a number of other questions to evaluate what went on during the day or just report what day of the week was it? How was their sex life that day? How did the work go? How much sleep did you get? Et cetera. And now at the end of all of this, you can see how much these things actually affected their mood. And you ask people, oh, by the way, would you just be interested in knowing how much you think each of these things influenced your mood in general? There was no correlation whatsoever between the actual impact of these things on people's mood and people's reports about the mood. And if instead of saying, how much did these things affect you, you would say, let's take a hypothetical person, Jane. Tell me how you think each of these things would affect him. Well, she gives the same answer that she would have given for herself. She's no more right about Jane than she is about herself. But we have a conviction that we know things like, I mean, you're telling me, I don't know what makes me happy or unhappy. I mean, give me a break. Sorry, can't give you a break. My name is Richard. I think about inference.