Welcome back everyone to the second psychology of well-being lecture. It's exciting to see everyone back again. Hopefully, you guys learn something from taking your happiness measure, so we'll see how that goes. But just to kind of reorient everyone, especially for folks who weren't here the first time about what we're going to do, we're going to go through five different lectures. Last time, we talked about misconceptions about happiness. These spots where you think you have certain goals, but those goals are not going to make you as happy as you think. And today, we're going to turn to this question of, why our expectations are so bad? Why is it that we think all these things are going to make us happy when they won't? And so, this is going to be a little bit more of a science lecture, but it's going to be awesome, and that it's going to teach you about lots of your biases that lead you astray. And so, you're going to kind of see them in action. Just a reminder, because I'm being a professor. I have to check that you guys did your homework from last time. And so, hopefully, you all successfully went through and measured your happiness on this woman survey. Everybody measure their happiness? How many folks were kind of surprised that their happiness was lower than they thought? Let me show of hands. Couple folks. A lot. Anybody surprised it was happier than you thought? Couple folks. So, some room for movement either way, which is great. Just a wrap up of where we were before. When we last left, you guys finished up by realizing that all these things that you care about a lot, that you think are going to make you very happy, or not actually going to make you very happy at all? And also, we put up the list that we keep seeing. Good job, lots of money, awesome stuff, true love, perfect body, perfect grades, we make the prediction that these things are going to make us really happy. But in practice, they either don't, or they don't make us as happy as we think. And so, that was the main take home of last time. All these things that you think are going to make you happy don't make you as happy as you think. And today, we're going to walk through why that is. But I thought I would give you a nice word to sum up this take home, a kind of definition of this sort of phenomenon of not really thinking the things that are going to make us happy actually do. And it's a term that comes from two researchers, Tim Wilson at the University of Virginia, and Dan Gilbert at Harvard. And it's this fantastic term that I love, which is called miswanting. The definition of this is just, this act of being mistaken about what and how much you're going to like these things in the future. This is the problem, is that our brains deliver to us this idea that we want certain things, but we are wrong about it. We are constantly miswanting, right. And today, we're going to go through this question of, why does this miswanting occur? What is up with our mind that it delivers to us incorrect predictions about what we're going actually like? What are the biases that caused these? And we saw some hints of what the answer we're going to see this week, last week, because I noted that there are these lots of annoying features of our minds that are messing us up, annoying biases that we seem to have, that lead our predictions astray. And we saw one of them last week, which is what I'm going to call annoying feature number one. The first one you're going to learn about which is that, our minds' strongest intuitions are often not the ones we expect. We sometimes get things totally wrong. Our intuitions are just false. And we can see that in the context of vision, vision somehow gives us a nice set of intuitions into our biases. And we saw last time that even though it looks like these two tables are actually different sizes, in fact, the top part of the table is exactly the same size. You saw my fundamental where I stood up and did that last time. So, I won't do it again. But basically, we're getting this intuition from our visual system that those two things are different, and they are really the same. This is the way lots of our mind works. A lot of the intuitions we're getting are just incorrect. So, that's kind of annoying feature number one. Want to put it in the context of the other annoying features you're going to see. The rest of this lecture is going to be focused on three more annoying features that mess us up all the time. Standard ways our minds see things, that just don't really work. And just like the case of the other annoying feature, I want you to see them first in the context of our visual system, again, because it's easier to see our biases that way, because they operate kind of all through the mind, from vision to happiness decisions. You're going to see them in that context. And then, we're going to apply them in the case of happiness in this typical.
