Do you know what makes you happy?
Sharing a moonlit walk on the beach with some special someone? Would that make you happy? You may think it would, but if you really want to know, ask a complete stranger.
According to a recent study, the best way to find out how much you'll enjoy an experience is to find out how much someone else enjoyed it, rather than finding out about the experience itself. We're better off looking at the experience of someone who has been there rather than trying to imagine it for ourselves.
Are you decisive? Sure you are. Ever noticed how much trouble people have when they try to predict what they'll like and how much they'll like it? Generally they just make a wide range of lousy decisions. We all do.
So instead of trying to improve human imagination, we get the best results when we eliminate it. Instead, ask people to predict how much they would enjoy a future event that they know absolutely nothing about, based only on how much a total stranger had enjoyed it. Generally, those people make extremely accurate predictions.
Does cyberspace dating or speed dating make you happy? The study asks a group of women to predict how much they'd enjoy a "speed date" with a certain man. Part of the group read the man's personal profile and saw his picture; the rest of the group learned nothing whatsoever about the man, except how much another woman (whom they'd never met) had enjoyed dating him. The group who heard about the previous woman's experience did much better at predicting their own enjoyment of the speed date than did those who studied the man's profile and photograph.
In the second experiment, two groups of participants were asked to predict how they would feel if they received negative personality feedback from a peer. The first group were shown a complete written copy of the feedback. The rest were shown no picture or text, but learned only how a total stranger had felt upon receiving the feedback. The latter group more accurately predicted their own reactions to the negative feedback.
Do alien life forms make you happy? Someone else's experience can be a profound source of information. We believe that everyone is a unique individual—different from everyone else. But the fact is that an alien who knew all the likes and dislikes of a single human being would know pretty much all there is to know about the whole species. Although people believe that the best way to predict how happy they will be in the future is to know what their future holds, what they really should want to know is how happy those who've been to the future actually ended up.
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