Author
Daniel Gilbert
The Harvard psychologist who showed that we are bad forecasters of our own happiness, and made the evidence funny.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Daniel Gilbert is a professor of psychology at Harvard University whose research, much of it with Timothy Wilson, helped build the field of affective forecasting: how people predict their future feelings and how reliably they get it wrong.
Stumbling on Happiness, published in 2006, brought that research to a general reader with an unusual amount of humour; it won the Royal Society's science book prize in 2007 and was translated widely. Its terms, such as the impact bias and presentism, are now widely used, and a 2009 study by his team named the remedy the book recommends: surrogation.
He has continued to publish on happiness, decision-making and the mind's relationship to time, and has been a frequent speaker and television presenter on the science of well-being.
The signature
Gilbert writes like a lecturer who has noticed the audience laughing and decided to keep it that way: a joke, a study, a conclusion you did not want. His signature is the reversal of a confident intuition by a well-designed experiment, delivered lightly.