One of the levels - and there are many - on which behavioural insights and its associated streams of thought appeal to me is the possibility that its insights could meaningfully improve my own life and perhaps even make me a better person via differently constructed choice architectures, greater awareness of my own biases, etc. And so I'd been thinking for a while that it would be great if, in addition to the many about its application to policy-making or more generally about its many interesting general emanations, there was a book about how to apply BI &c to making one's own life (and oneself) better. So it was pleasing when I came across just this one, endorsed by Daniel Kahneman on the front cover no less!
I've now read it a couple of times through over several months, discovered to my amusement that MH had written a letter to its author criticising parts of the book, given a copy of it to someone else and all that, and found it well worthwhile. I wouldn't call it a self-help book, and if it is then it's the first I've ever read - but nonetheless there's a lot in here that I think has been helping me to think about, and act on, things differently.
It turns out that the most interesting bits for me are in its first half, which is about what happiness is, what causes it, and why we aren't happier - the definition of happiness as involving both pleasure and purpose is one of those very simple formulations that, once articulated, seems both obviously true and the source of a large amount of new insight, while the metaphor of the allocation of (the scarce resource of) attention as a production process leading to happiness, where what we pay attention to and how we do so is a vital determinant of happiness is also, for me, an intuitive one - shades, even, of my old friend phenomenology and subjective world-constituting consciousness.
The matrix of types of spillover between different behaviours is also useful - one positive behaviour leading to another ('promoting') or instead to a negative ('permitting' - ie moral licensing), and similarly a negative behaviour leading to another ('promoting' again) or instead to a positive ('purging').
The second section, about 'delivering' happiness by deciding, designing and doing, is also quite good, though there's not a large amount there that feels new - priming, defaults, commitments, social norms - although the emphasis on the attentional dimension is a bit different. But, still, it was worth reading (twice!) and especially for the earlier bits stepping through a pretty concrete and satisfying consideration of happiness itself.
I've now read it a couple of times through over several months, discovered to my amusement that MH had written a letter to its author criticising parts of the book, given a copy of it to someone else and all that, and found it well worthwhile. I wouldn't call it a self-help book, and if it is then it's the first I've ever read - but nonetheless there's a lot in here that I think has been helping me to think about, and act on, things differently.
It turns out that the most interesting bits for me are in its first half, which is about what happiness is, what causes it, and why we aren't happier - the definition of happiness as involving both pleasure and purpose is one of those very simple formulations that, once articulated, seems both obviously true and the source of a large amount of new insight, while the metaphor of the allocation of (the scarce resource of) attention as a production process leading to happiness, where what we pay attention to and how we do so is a vital determinant of happiness is also, for me, an intuitive one - shades, even, of my old friend phenomenology and subjective world-constituting consciousness.
The matrix of types of spillover between different behaviours is also useful - one positive behaviour leading to another ('promoting') or instead to a negative ('permitting' - ie moral licensing), and similarly a negative behaviour leading to another ('promoting' again) or instead to a positive ('purging').
The second section, about 'delivering' happiness by deciding, designing and doing, is also quite good, though there's not a large amount there that feels new - priming, defaults, commitments, social norms - although the emphasis on the attentional dimension is a bit different. But, still, it was worth reading (twice!) and especially for the earlier bits stepping through a pretty concrete and satisfying consideration of happiness itself.
