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, established 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 impact bias, presentism and surrogation are now standard terms.
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.