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Volume III, Issue 2: Fall / Winter 2006-07 Stumbling on Happiness  Daniel Gilbert's engaging and surprising new book, Stumbling on Happiness, won't teach you how to become happy, but it will convince you of how difficult that goal is to achieve. Gilbert, a social psychologist at Harvard, specializes in "affective forecasting," which means he studies how people remember their feelings during past events and predict their reactions to future ones. Unfortunately, as Gilbert shows in study after study, our brains are "talented forgers," which take out and fill in details essential to accurate judgments: We use our current emotions to (mis)estimate our past feelings, we tend to pay extra attention to information that corroborates our opinions, and we are much more sensitive to changes in our environment than to the status quo. In addition, when we imagine something we would like to experience in the future, we tend to gloss over the fine details and focus on a more abstract, general idea of that experience. This would be fine if we realized that we left out so much detail and adjusted our expectations accordingly, but we don't. So when we decide to go to our high school reunion, for example, we imagine how meaningful it will be to see old friends, but we fail to anticipate the specifics. When that reunion rolls around, we will likely be faced with uncomfortable silences and wonder why we decided to go in the first place. Given our failures as forecasters, Gilbert explains, the things we expect to make us happy may leave us disappointed and supposed disappointments may actually bring us happiness. Gilbert quotes a man who was wrongfully imprisoned for 37 years as saying his ordeal was "a glorious experience"; another man who was paralyzed from the neck down said that before his accident, he "didn't appreciate others nearly as much as I do now." What's going on here? According to Gilbert, unhappy outcomes make us adjust our expectations for life and reappraise our situation, so that we find it more pleasurable. "The moral of the story?" Gilbert glibly writes, "If you want to be happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise, then skip the vitamin pills and plastic surgeries and try public humiliation, unjust incarceration, or quadriplegia instead." Gilbert's book does offer some hope for
happiness that doesn't involve paralysis or a
prison sentence. His final point is that, odd
as it may sound, one of the best ways to
predict happiness during a future event is
to talk with people who have experienced
that same event already. Although we
imagine ourselves to be so unique as to be
unable to use random people's experience
as a guide to personal fulfillment, Gilbert
shows how this is actually a much better
predictor of happiness than our own wishful thinking. The Anatomy of Peace 
The premise of this book may seem familiar to some readers: that conflict, whether between spouses or nations, begins when we stigmatize and dehumanize those with whom we disagree. But The Anatomy of Peace takes an original approach to making this point. It tells the story of Lou, the father of a drug-addicted teenage boy, who reluctantly attends a workshop for parents of troubled teens. Lou enters the workshop assuming no responsibility for his family's problems, attributing all blame to his son. The workshop leaders a Palestinian and an Israeli teach Lou and the other parents how to help their children by first changing their own attitudes and behaviors. They demonstrate that treating others humanely can resolve conflict better than direct confrontation, and they use the conflicts between the parents and their children, between the spouses, and even between workshop participants themselves to prove their point. Though the workshop depicted in the book is fictional, it feels authentic. In fact, it is based on hundreds of actual workshops conducted by the Arbinger Institute a consulting firm specializing in conflict resolution. The book was written by Jim Ferrell, Arbinger's managing director, and Ferrell's real-world experience has clearly informed his writing. One of the book's strengths is that it doesn't assume transformation is easy, and indeed, it is not easy for Lou. A crisis at Lou's workplace keeps him on the phone between workshop sessions and provides another interpersonal problem for him to solve. As conflicts escalate around him, the workshop prompts Lou to re-evaluate his attitudes and take more responsibility for solving the problems he faces. When he tentatively calls a mutinous employee to make amends, he is met with hostility, and the reader sympathizes with Lou's confusion and disappointment. But as Lou perseveres, the reader is subtly inspired to do the same. The book offers a realistic portrayal of conflict and is prescriptive without being preachy. It is difficult to read The Anatomy of Peace and not recognize the role we all play in perpetuating conflict. One can't help but fantasize that, somehow, the book could become required reading for world leaders. But of course, as this book so ably demonstrates, it is much easier to expect change from others than to work on transforming oneself. -Jill SuttieCritical Lessons: What Our Schools Should Teach 
Does homework help kids learn, or does it just teach docility and obedience? Why are so many men and women attracted to war? What does it take to build a home physically, socially, and emotionally? These are some of the many questions Nel Noddings poses in Critical Lessons, a new book that advocates critical thinking and self-knowledge as the best ways to reinvigorate our woefully inadequate school systems. Rather than teach 13 years of lessons that serve only to prepare kids for the next year's lessons, Noddings argues that our schools should nurture critical thinking skills by asking students tough questions that require self-reflection. Critical Lessons is more of an extended thought-exercise than a curriculum for teachers. Noddings clearly intends for her book to be a challenge for educators and the educated and a way to ask them the same questions they'd ask to students. Indeed, education is only the starting point in Noddings' ambitious book. Her chapters cover war, parenting, choosing a career, religion, animal rights, and more. Each section is stacked with questions designed to get students thinking and talking, and to increase their awareness of the connections between subjects that schools now treat as completely separate. Most readers of education-policy books like this expect the author to tell them what to think. But Noddings rarely advocates for any controversial position; instead, she gives teachers suggestions on how to begin provocative conversations, and offers ideas to keep these conversations safe, civil, and engaging. Teachers and students won't be the only ones to benefit from Noddings' ideas: Most public-school graduates will find Critical Lessons a provocative course in their post- secondary education. Matthew WheelandWhat Children Need 
In What Children Need, Jane Wald-fogel, a professor of social work and public affairs at Columbia University, outlines years worth of research into children's needs at different ages, and reviews the evidence on how children are faring. She makes pain- fully clear that many of these needs are not being met. For example, 75 percent of day care centers for infants and toddlers have been rated as being of "fair" or "poor" quality. Similarly, many 6- to 12-year-olds do not have any access to high quality after- school programs. Waldfogel notes that little research has been done on the effects of early paternal employment. But she does find short-lived behavioral problems in young children whose mothers work full-time, which indicates that many aren't getting the sensitive, responsive care they need as infants. "The research clearly suggests," writes Waldfo- gel, "that at least some children would be better off if their parents could spend more time at home in the first year of life, either by delaying their return to work or by returning to work part-time." Rather than blame mothers for going to work (as many commentators do), Waldfogel recommends policies that would enable parents of either sex to stay at home in the first year, should they want to and that would improve the quality of non-parental childcare, should they not. Waldfogel offers three principles for evaluating policies meant to improve children's welfare: respecting parent's own choices, promoting high standards for quality, and supporting parental employment. In this way, she gives readers a solid sense of the gaps between what children need and what they are getting, as well as a blueprint for what public policy can and should do to provide for those needs. Waldfogel's final chapter, "Where do we go from here?" is a compelling call to action for us as a society to invest more wisely in social programs that will benefit our children today and the rest of us tomorrow. -Christine Carter McLaughlin |
