Daniel Gilbert

Daniel Gilbert is an American social psychologist and writer, born on November 5, 1957, in Ithaca, New York. He is the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and is known for his research with Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia on affective forecasting, the study of how people predict their own future feelings. Gilbert left high school at fifteen, later earned an equivalency diploma, and received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Colorado Denver in 1981 and a doctorate in social psychology from Princeton University in 1985. He taught at the University of Texas at Austin from 1985 to 1996 and has been at Harvard since 1996. His 2006 book Stumbling on Happiness was a bestseller and won the 2007 Royal Society Prize for Science Books. He also hosted the PBS series This Emotional Life and has given three popular TED talks.