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
If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people.
People want to be happy, and all the other things they want are typically meant to be a means to that end.
My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it.
Our brain accepts what the eyes see and our eye looks for whatever our brain wants.
The human brain is the only object in the known universe that can predict its own future and tell its on fortune. The fact that we can make disastrous decisions even as we foresee their consequences is the great, unsolved mystery of human behavior. When you hold your fate in your hands, why would you ever make a fist?
Which is more important - experience or memory of experience? If you could have an hour of ecstasy that you'd forever remember as torture, or an hour of torture that you'd forever remember as ecstasy, which would you prefer?
We all have direct experience with things that do or don't make us happy, we all have friends, therapists, cabdrivers, and talk-show hosts who tell us about things that will or won't make us happy, and yet, despite all this practice and all this coaching, our search for happiness often culminates in a stinky mess. We expect the next car, the next house, or the next promotion to make us happy even though the last ones didn't and even though others keep telling us that the next ones won't.
The good news is that going blind is not going to make you as unhappy as you think it will. The bad news is that winning the lottery will not make you as happy as you expect.
I actually think the same things do make most people happy. The differences are extremely small, and around the margins. You like peach ice cream; I like strawberry ice cream. Both of us like ice cream much better than a smack on the head with two-by-four.
The word happiness is used to indicate at least three related things, which we might roughly call emotional happiness, moral happiness, and judgmental happiness.
Your emotions are meant to fluctuate, just like your blood pressure is meant to fluctuate. It's a system that's supposed to move back and forth, between happy and unhappy. That's how the system guides you through the world.
The brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.
We are happy when we have family, we are happy when we have friends and almost all the other things we think make us happy are actually just ways of getting more family and friends.
Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’re ever been. The one constant in our lives is change.