Daniel Gilbert
Daniel Gilbert
Daniel Todd Gilbertis an American social psychologist and writer. He is the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his researchon affective forecasting. He is the author of the international bestseller Stumbling on Happiness, which has been translated into more than 30 languages and won the 2007 Royal Society Prizes for Science Books. He has also written essays for several newspapers and magazines, hosted a short, non-fiction television series on PBS, and given three popular...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTeacher
Date of Birth5 November 1957
CountryUnited States of America
Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.
The word happiness is used to indicate at least three related things, which we might roughly call emotional happiness, moral happiness, and judgmental happiness.
Happiness refers to feelings, virtue refers to actions, and those actions can cause those feelings. But not necessarily and not exclusively.
Because your brain uses information from the areas around the blind spot to make a reasonable guess about what the blind spot would see if only it weren't blind, and then your brain fills in the scene with this information. That's right, it invents things, creates things, makes stuff up! It doesn't consult you about this, doesn't seek your approval. It just makes its best guess about the nature of the missing information and proceeds to fill in the scene...
The eye and brain are conspirators, and, like most conspiracies, theirs is negotiated behind closed doors, in the back room, outside of our awareness.
What’s so curious about human beings is that we can look deeply into the future, foresee disaster, and still do nothing in the present to stop it. The majority of people on this planet, they’re overwhelmed with concerns about their immediate well being.
Why isn’t it fun to watch a videotape of last night’s football game even when we don’t know who won? Because the fact that the game has already been played precludes the possibility that our cheering will somehow penetrate the television, travel through the cable system, find its way to the stadium, and influence the trajectory of the ball as it hurtles toward the goalposts!
In short, we derive support for our preferred conclusions by listening to the words that we put in the mouths of people who have already been preselected for their willingness to say what we want to hear.
Variety improves the things that we do too often, but it rules the things that we don't do often enough.
Humans react to danger when it is immediate, immoral, visible... Global warming does not press any of those buttons.
We humans can look deep into future and predict what will happen, but then turn around and do nothing about it.
Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed
In short, if we adhere to the standard of perfection in all our endeavors, we are left with nothing but mathematics and the White Album.
When we have an experience -- hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room -- on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage