Why and How a Stranger Knows You Best…

Stranger knows best: Other people know more about what will make us happy than we do

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Want to know what will make you happy? Then ask a total stranger — or so says a new study from Harvard University, which shows that another person’s experience is often more informative than your own best guess.

The study, which appears in the current issue of Science, was led by Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the 2007 bestseller “Stumbling on Happiness,” along with Matthew Killingsworth and Rebecca Eyre, also of Harvard, and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia.

“If you want to know how much you will enjoy an experience, you are better off knowing how much someone else enjoyed it than knowing anything about the experience itself,” says Gilbert. “Rather than closing our eyes and imagining the future, we should examine the experience of those who have been there.”

Previous research in psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics has shown that people have difficulty predicting what they will like and how much they will like it, which leads them to make a wide variety of poor decisions. Interventions aimed at improving the accuracy with which people imagine future events have been generally unsuccessful.

So rather than trying to improve human imagination, Gilbert and his colleagues sought to eliminate it from the equation by asking people to predict how much they would enjoy a future event about which they knew absolutely nothing — except how much a total stranger had enjoyed it. Amazingly enough, those people made extremely accurate predictions.

In one experiment, women predicted how much they would enjoy a “speed date” with a man. Some women read the man’s personal profile and saw his photograph, and other women learned nothing whatsoever about the man, but did learn how much another woman (whom they had never met) had enjoyed dating him. Women who learned about a previous woman’s experience did a much better job of predicting their own enjoyment of the speed date than did woman who studied the man’s profile and photograph.

Interestingly, both groups of women mistakenly expected the profile and photo to lead to greater accuracy, and after the experiment was over both groups said they would strongly prefer to have the profile and photograph of their next date.

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. Some participants were shown a complete written copy of the feedback. Other were shown nothing, and 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. Once again, participants mistakenly guessed that a written copy of the feedback would be more informative than knowledge of a total stranger’s experience.

“People do not realize what a powerful source of information another person’s experience can be,” says Gilbert, “because they mistakenly believe that everyone is remarkably 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 a great deal about the species. People believe that the best way to predict how happy they will be in the future is to know what their future holds, but what they should really want to know is how happy those who’ve been to the future actually turned out to be.”

Gilbert’s research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Manifesting Kute Blackson Part III

It has finally happened…

If you haven’t yet read the background to this story you can read:

Manifesting Kute Blackson Part I

Manifesting Kute Blackson Part II

As of the time of this post the news is official… I have now met Kute Blackson live and in the flesh. It happened this past weekend and am still “vibrating” from the level that he helped take us to!

It turns out that the story way true, as Kute himself claims he came to my city because of an intuition received during his meditation. Something was telling him to offer himself more deeply here. He had no way of even knowing his meditation was right around my discovery of him on YouTube and the creation of my intention. 

I should add in fairness to the story that there were easily over 120 people out to see Kute at this event, therefore it would be ignorant to assume I was the only reason. The most important part was the Kute heard the message and honored it. 

Who delivered that message you might be tempted to ask? Why of course it was the world’s most fluid, precise and all-knowing accounting system, also known as the universe, or consciousness. When we send out messages (thoughts) the universe acts like an invisible delivery station that relays the right information to the right players. 

Best of all, when you tap into the universal system it takes care of all the details like the hows. I didn’t have to worry about any of that. In fact I didn’t even have to worry about buying tickets. Nor did I have to fly down to Los Angeles where Kute resides to go see him, instead he came to my hometown. I didn’t have to worry about any of the small details, my intention was set on a higher plane, the vision to simply meet and learn from him.

When you set an intention the universe has no choice but to shift all the players simultaneously around to accommodate your manifestation. The world is but a play and you are a character within it. Is it time to treat life and live it like you wrote the script? Who would you like to meet in this lifetime? Think about someone you admire. Who are your hereos, shereos? The sky is the limit. 

I know anything is possible because only a few short years ago I hadn’t met any one that was special to me. Then I conducted an intention-based experiment and wrote down a list of some interesting people that I would love to meet. Since setting the goal I’ve managed to meet the majority of them and have the pictures to prove it. People like Jack Canfield, John Assaraf, Lisa Nichols, Bijan, Kevin Nations, Bob Proctor, Nassim Haramein, Mike Dooley and now, Kute Blackson. 

You have the capacity to create everything you desire in this life, so imagine bigger and better for yourself!