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Dan Gilbert

Professor of Psychology, Harvard University

Daniel Gilbert is the Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His research with Tim Wilson on "affective forecasting" investigates how and how well people can make predictions about the emotional impact of future events.

Dan has won numerous awards for his teaching and research—from the Guggenheim Fellowship to the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology. However, he says that his greatest accomplishment is that he appears just before Dizzy Gillespie on the list of Most Famous High School Dropouts.

Dan's research has been covered by The New York Times Magazine, Forbes, Money, CNN, U.S. News & World Report, The New Yorker, Scientific American, Oprah Magazine, Psychology Today, and many others.

Whom would you like to interview, and what would you ask?

Gilbert would like to interview my great, great, great granddaughter.

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If you had $100 billion to give away, how would you spend it?

Gilbert would build an irrational Walden.

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Can technology make us happy?

Dan Gilbert says technology could make us happier if we used it in the right ways.

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How will this age be remembered?

An age of believing our eyes, rather than our elders.

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Are our problems a result of not living in the moment?

We don’t have everything we want, but we sure have a lot, says Dan Gilbert.

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What should be the big issues of the 2008 presidential election?

Dan Gilbert says the environment should be the most pressing issue because of its urgency and gay marriage, precisely because it is a non-issue.

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What do mistakes reveal about human nature?

Interesting things happen when two sides of the brain duke it out.

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Does religion inform your worldview?

Belief in something we absolutely can’t see, for which there’s no evidence, cuts against the grain of what it means to be a scientist to me.

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What forces have shaped humanity most?

Science is the worst way of knowing except for all the other ways of knowing.

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Which philosopher really gets it?

Kant is the foundation for modern psychology, Gilbert says.

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Dan Gilbert’s Idea Of A Great Book

Scientific psychology from science fiction.

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How do you balance creativity and scientific rigor?

Simply put, good science is creative, says Dan Gilbert.

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Do you have a creative process?

Dan Gilbert’s creative process involves a lot of puzzling and puzzling and puzzling.

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What are the biggest issues in psychology today?

Gilbert looks forward to answers to questions we haven’t even asked yet.

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What is Happiness?

Gilbert discusses the nature of happiness and his work in affective forecasting, which is the process by which people look into their future and make predictions about what they’ll like […]

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Dan Gilbert On Dumb Luck

Daniel Gilbert wandered into psychology.

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Dan Gilbert On Growing Up in Chicago

The city that teaches probability.

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What is your question?

Would you want to pay for it today?

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What is your counsel?

Dan Gilbert implores us to take care of the environment.

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Dan Gilbert Predicts the Future

Harvard happiness guru Dan Gilbert delivers his pessimistic forecast.

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Gilbert wonders which issues will still matter in a hundred years.

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The tug of war between science and religion helps define us, Gilbert says.

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What do you believe?

Since Gilbert’s personal philosophy is a blank slate waiting for scientific building blocks.

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What inspires you?

Gilbert has no shortage of inspiration, though most of his work comes out of banging heads with his collaborator.

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How do you contribute?

Gilbert is not ready to think about questions of legacy.

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What do you do?

Gilbert talks about why we’re so bad at predicting what makes us happy.

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Once Daniel Gilbert left Evanston, Illinois, luck took over.

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