by JULIET WATERS

Like Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, the book it usually gets compared to, Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness is engaging, controversial and raises way more questions than it answers. The Harvard psychologist’s conclusion: Humans are more often than not completely clueless about what makes them happy, and whether or not they actually are happy. I sat down with him last week while he was here on his book tour and got a sense of just how slippery this new genre of “consciousness studies” really is.

Mirror: I read about a study once where people were asked how important money was to happiness. The only people who believed that it was important were the rich. Do they know something we don’t know?

Daniel Gilbert: People cannot tell you how happy they were in the past, they cannot tell you how happy they’ll be in the future, they don’t know if they’re happy in general and what they absolutely cannot tell you is what causes their happiness. But one thing they can tell you very reliably is how happy they are at the moment you ask that question. It’s the scientist’s job to ask that question and that question alone, and from that determine what the causes of happiness are. You can’t ask them, “How happy does money make you?” any more than you can ask them how their pancreas works. They don’t know. They have theories.

Now let’s change the topic for a moment from money to children. In one study, 800 women were followed around day after day. Their happiness was measured at every moment of time. The startling thing about this study wasn’t just that they weren’t very happy when they were interacting with their kids. The puzzling thing is that if you asked them, “What’s your greatest source of joy?” they answer, “My children.” This is like sending somebody out and saying, “Does the Earth look round to you?” and they say, “No, it’s flat.” Well yes, it looks flat, but that’s not how you go about finding out whether the Earth is round or flat. You can’t just ask people. You go to space and take a picture.

Similarly, if you want to find out whether or not money makes people happy, you don’t ask rich people if it does. You ask them, “How happy are you right now?” not in general, not over the course of your life, but right now. And then you find more rich people. And you keep asking them this question over and over. And then you ask poor people the same question and then you look at the data. And what do you find? They’re about the same.

M: Let’s go back to the kids question. In my experience, having a kid made me much happier than I expected it to. Could it be a matter of expectations?

DG: Well, the scientist in me says I don’t care what you think makes you happy. You say your kid makes you happy, but that doesn’t mean anything to me. I’ll judge whether he makes you happy. And I’ll do it by actually measuring your happiness now, and measuring it when you’re with him. You can keep telling me you’d rather be with your kid than me, but if I keep finding on my little happy-o-meter that you’re happier when you’re doing your interviews than when you’re parenting, then...

M: Sure, but if you can catch me in one of those rare, precious moments when my son makes me happy, I would have to say that it’s a much deeper and richer happiness than my pleasant conversation with you even though you’re not yelling or grabbing food off the floor.

DG: I agree. I suspect that if you look at the whole pattern of happiness of interacting with children, it’s low a lot and then there are these transcendent peaks—the moments where your heart just swells and you feel awe and mystery and it’s a magnificent feeling, and it lasts for... seconds (laughs). But it’s kind of like orgasms. You don’t always get a lot of them, so you better have something else in your life.

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, Knopf, hc, 279pp, $34.95