Daniel Gilbert

Daniel Todd Gilbert (born in the United States in 1957) is a social psychologist best known for his research on affective forecasting, that is, our ability to predict what will make us happy. His work sits within contemporary social psychology, and he has reached well beyond academia through his books, essays and talks.

He left high school at fifteen and spent a year hitchhiking across the United States before earning a GED. He then took a psychology degree at the University of Colorado Denver in 1981 and a PhD in social psychology at Princeton in 1985. From 1985 to 1996 he taught at the University of Texas at Austin, and since then he has been at Harvard, where he holds the Edgar Pierce Professorship of Psychology. With Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia, he studied how we picture our emotional futures and why we so often get them wrong.

His best-known book, Stumbling on Happiness (2006), argues that the mind is a good simulator of the present but a poor forecaster of the future, so we tend to overestimate how long and how deeply events will move us. It became an international bestseller, has been translated into more than forty languages and won the 2007 Royal Society Prize for Science Books. Gilbert has also written essays, presented a television series on emotional life and given three TED talks, one of the most viewed of all time. His influence can be seen in popular writing on happiness and cognitive biases.