Bochner Lecture to pose questions about happiness

Bochner Lecture to pose questions about happiness

BY LIA UNRAU
Rice News Staff

Are you happy?
What do you really know about your own happiness? Is it
possible that expectations and what you remember about your
experiences may be more important to your happiness than
how pleasant—or unpleasant—an experience was at
the time?

People not only
have trouble forecasting the future, they also have trouble
predicting how they will experience outcomes of situations.
They often make errors even in remembering the quality of
experiences they have had. These limitations and uncertainties
present obstacles to good decision making, and they also
raise difficult questions about conceptions of human well-being—happiness.
These will be the themes of the Bochner Lecture Oct. 3.

Daniel Kahneman,
the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and professor
of public affairs at Princeton University, will present
the Scientia Colloquia’s distinguished Bochner Lecture
Tuesday, Oct. 3, at 8 p.m. in McMurtry Auditorium, Anne
and Charles Duncan Hall. His talk is titled “Experience
and Memory: The Cognitive Psychology of Happiness.”

Are memories
precise or do they show a systematic bias? There is evidence,
Kahneman says, that there are substantial biases, both in
the prediction of how good or bad an experience will be
and in the memory of how good or bad it was.

Do people know
the extent of their happiness? The answer is probably not. “There is good reason to doubt that people know how
happy they are,” Kahneman says. He will discuss how
researchers define and measure well-being and talk about
the general issues associated with people’s well-being.

Kahneman has
taught at the University of California, Berkeley, at the
University of British Columbia and at the Hebrew University
in Jerusalem.

He is a member
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow
of the American Psychological Association, the American
Psychological Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists
and the Econometric Society. He has been the recipient of
numerous awards, among them the Distinguished Scientific
Contribution Award of the American Psychological Society,
the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists
and the Hilgard Award for Career Contributions to General
Psychology.

Scientia’s
theme for this academic year is “Taking Chances: Risk
and Randomness in Science and Society.”

Scientia is an
institute of Rice University faculty founded in 1981 by
the mathematician and historian of science Salomon Bochner.
Scientia provides an opportunity for scholarly discussion
across disciplinary boundaries; its members and fellows
come from a wide range of academic disciplines.

More information
about Scientia is available online at <www.ruf.rice.edu/~scientia>.