Hello, it's Chris Anderson, the head of TED, and you're listening to a special archive presentation of TED Talks Daily.

This talk features one of the most influential living psychologists, Daniel Kahneman.

It was recorded at TED 2010.

After the talk, you can join me for a deeper dive into Danny's ideas

by subscribing to our new podcast, The TED Interview.

We've posted an episode featuring Danny Kahneman,

in which he goes into much greater detail about how we make decisions

and what makes us happy.

So please join me for the TED interview, wherever you listen.

Everybody talks about happiness these days. I had somebody count the number of books with

happiness in the title published in the last five years, and they gave up after about 40,

and there were many more. There is a huge wave of interest in happiness among researchers.

There is a lot of happiness coaching.

Everybody would like to make people happier.

But in spite of all this flood of work, there are several cognitive traps that sort of make

it almost impossible to think straight about happiness.

And my talk today will be mostly about these cognitive traps.

This applies to lay people thinking about their own happiness,

and it applies to scholars thinking about happiness,

because it turns out we're just as messed up as anybody else's.

The first of these trap is a reluctance to admit complexity.

It turns out that the word happiness is just not a useful word anymore because we apply

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