Gilbert began his lesson by reminding us that we rarely expect someone to come instruct us on how to live life as a coward because cowardice is commonly understood to be a vice rather than a virtue. Yet, Gilbert quickly dispelled this common misconception. "There is nothing smart about being fearless," he said. "The emotion of being afraid is what keeps us from jumping off a building."
The first step in how to be a proper coward is to come to terms with the idea that fear is our friend. However, simply accepting fear is not enough to give us peace of mind. "Well-being depends on knowing when and how much fear to feel," explained Gilbert. "We want to feel fear properly in the right circumstances." The concept seems simple enough. According to Gilbert, the "trick to well-being" involves the unique ability to discern those prospects that are good and probable from those that are bad and improbable.
For decades, psychologists have searched for a way to solve the puzzle of cowardice and fear when, in fact, the mystery was actually solved for us long ago. In 1738, Daniel Bernoulli devised a principle which explained this phenomenon. Bernoulli wrote that the expected value of any action is the result of multiplying the odds that you will get what you are after by the value of gaining what you are after. That is: Expected value = (odds of gain) x (value of gain). "[Although the principle may seem clear on paper] it is very hard to apply in real life," said Gilbert.
Calculating the odds of gain and the value of gain is difficult, according to Gilbert. Our difficulty in calculating the odds of gain arises from our inability to accurately assess the probability of those events that we cannot imagine. Gilbert illustrated this point by asking the audience why people would continue to play the lottery when statistics show that our chances of winning the lottery are as great as our chances of the jackpot coming up through the toilet.
The reason people continuously choose to play the lottery despite the near impossibility of winning has to do with people's inability to imagine losing the lottery. "The ease with which we can imagine things affects how probable we think they are," explained Gilbert. Since the media only projects the image of the winning family with a great big check and never shows the image of the millions of people who did not win, it is relatively easy to imagine one's self winning the lottery.
A person's inability to imagine losing or failing has the catastrophic result of creating a society of "overly optimistic" people. Gilbert illustrated this theory using thesis writing as an example. A senior's average prediction of the number of days he or she will take to complete a thesis in a "best-case scenario" is 27.4 days. The senior estimates in a "worst-case scenario" the thesis will take him or her 48.6 days. In actuality, the average number of days a college senior spends completing a thesis is 55.5 days.
Imagining the value of gaining what we want is actually even harder than predicting the odds of gaining what we want. Gilbert asked the audience, "Is a Big Mac worth $25?" Every member of the audience answered "no." Gilbert then posed the same question-only this time he asked the audience to imagine themselves on a 14-hour flight on which no food was served. The audience response had overwhelmingly shifted; now most people admitted they would pay $25 for the Big Mac. According to Gilbert, the answer to the original question, "Is a Big Mac worth $25?" is "It depends."
Gilbert was trying to demonstrate that people rarely think about what they can do with their money. "We compare the past instead of the possible," said Gilbert. "In the past you only paid $1 for a Big Mac [so it would not seem reasonable to pay $25 now]." According to Gilbert, the question we should be asking before we spend is "What else can I do with my money?"
Even when people finally start to compare the various ways they can spend their dollar, they still tend to make mistakes. "The comparisons you make when you are shopping are not the same comparisons you make later [when you are no longer in the store]," Gilbert explained.
To demonstrate the difficulty that arises when comparing how to spend money, Gilbert used the following scenario: Most people will drive across town to save $100 on a $200 stereo; however, those same people will not drive across town to save $100 on a $30,000 car. The bottom line is the value of the $100 does not change. If you are willing to drive across town to save $100 you should be willing to drive across town regardless of on what you are saving $100.
If Bernoulli was right in 1738, why have we been so slow in adopting his reasoning? "Making decisions is such an important part of adult life that it is easy to forget that [we] are the first generation of homosapiens [who have had to do so]," Gilbert explained. "[Generations ago] people did not have to wander around asking, "What ought I be doing?'" Gilbert attested that this "explosion of liberty" has left us all trying to figure out how to properly weigh the tough decisions we all make every day.
Gilbert left the crowd with a final thought: "We are living in a post modern world with a pre-modern brain."