Daniel Gilbert Immune To Reality Analysis

The perception of our emotions, and the world we live in isn’t all that it seems. Daniel Gilbert, a professor of social psychology at Harvard has an inquisitive view of the relationship between perceived happiness, and reality. In the chapter “Immune to Reality” from his book Stumbling on Happiness, Gilbert reasons that our psychological immune system causes us to be self-deceiving and as a result, causing us to have the tendency to cook the facts of situations that can affect our happiness. Moreover, we are unaware of our self-deceptive nature altogether. This viewpoint is supported and complicated by clinical psychologist Martha Stout in her book The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness who agrees that self-deception …show more content…
A result of this is the mind’s tendency to shift blame to maintain its own happiness. Gilbert mentions the example of a group of volunteers who were denied a theoretical job by either a judge or a unanimous vote against them by a jury. After they were told they had not gotten the job they were asked how happy they were; the jury group of volunteers were far less happy than the judge group of volunteers. This is because volunteers in the judge group had an easier time shifting the blame towards a single person, rather than having to shift the blame to an entire group (Gilbert 134). However when the volunteers were asked to predict how they would feel being rejected by a judge or a jury, the volunteers thought that they would feel equally unhappy (134). This shows that the volunteers could not predict that their mind would instantly shift blame towards the judge or jury, therefore the assumption that they would feel equally unhappy was constructed. The volunteers did not know their psychological immune system would shift blame nor did they know that they would find more success blaming a single judge. When shifting the blame the volunteers made no conscious attempt to do this, therefore it can be said that it was a legitimate act of their …show more content…
This dissociation can cause sporadic lapses in awareness that can last for days on end, lapses in awareness that can be experienced from childhood all the way up to adulthood (428). Stout references a patient, Julia, who experiences dissociation in the form of clinical fugue, beginning in childhood and continuing into her adulthood, resulting in loss of memory of significant childhood events (428). When asked about how she felt about not remembering her childhood Julia stated that she just assumed that nobody remembered their childhood in great detail (Stout 429). When Julia’s mind was inundated with this sudden realization that not remembering her childhood was in fact abnormal, it caused her psychological immune system to shift blame. Julia’s psychological immune system shifted the blame off of herself by saying that everyone else was like her and everyone else forgot major chunks of their childhood. This allowed Julia’s mind to form the idea that it is not her fault she did not remember her childhood because everyone else couldn’t remember their childhood either. When Julia shifted the blame off of herself it allowed her psychological immune system to maintain her happiness by making it seem that she is