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
Our inability to recall how we really felt is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be poverty of riches.
Reality' is a movie generated by our brains. Because we don't realize this, we are far too confident that the stuff appearing in the movie is actually 'out there' in the world when, in fact, it's not.
Is happiness really the only thing we should be aiming for?
The price we pay for our irresponsible explanatory urge is that we often spoil our most pleasant experiences by making good sense of them.
When we have an experience -- hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room -- on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage
Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.
In short, if we adhere to the standard of perfection in all our endeavors, we are left with nothing but mathematics and the White Album.
Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed
We humans can look deep into future and predict what will happen, but then turn around and do nothing about it.
Humans react to danger when it is immediate, immoral, visible... Global warming does not press any of those buttons.
Variety improves the things that we do too often, but it rules the things that we don't do often enough.
People are drastically overconfident about their judgments of others.
To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion.
We don't believe other people's experiences can tell us all that much about our own. I think this is an illusion of uniqueness.