"If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people."
Daniel Gilbert is a psychology professor at Harvard University whose research on affective forecasting — how well people predict their own future emotions — became the foundation for Stumbling on Happiness. The book argues that human imagination is systematically bad at simulating future feelings, which is why people so often misjudge what will actually make them happy.
Our in-depth summaries and reviews of his work
Daniel Gilbert reveals why your brain is terrible at predicting happiness. Learn about impact bias, the psychological immune system, and the one…
Read Summary →Gilbert's research shows people consistently mispredict how future events will make them feel — both overestimating the intensity and the duration of emotional reactions to good and bad outcomes alike.
We judge past experiences largely by how they ended, and we poorly recall how we actually felt moment to moment — a systematic bias Gilbert calls the poverty of our 'wealth of experiences.'
Perception isn't a neutral recording of reality — the brain actively constructs what we see and remember based on expectation, which is part of why imagined futures feel more certain than they should.
"Our brain accepts what the eyes see and our eye looks for whatever our brain wants."— Stumbling on Happiness
"The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices."— Stumbling on Happiness
"If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people."— Stumbling on Happiness
"Our inability to recall how we really felt is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be poverty of riches."— Stumbling on Happiness
Daniel Gilbert reveals why your brain is terrible at predicting happiness. Learn about impact bias, the psychological immune system, and the one fix that actually works.
