About

Daniel Gilbert is the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, located in William James Hall, Cambridge, MA. He has received numerous awards for his research and teaching. His popular book, Stumbling on Happiness, spent six months on the New York Times bestseller list, sold over a million copies worldwide, and was awarded the Royal Society’s General Book Prize for the best science book of the year. Gilbert hosted and co-wrote the award-winning NOVA television series This Emotional Life, which was viewed by more than 10 million people in its first airing. He has also appeared in television commercials aimed at helping Americans overcome psychological obstacles to saving for retirement. Additionally, he is a contributor to Time, The New York Times, and NPR's All Things Considered, and was named one of the world’s 50 most-followed scientists on social media by Science in 2014. His TED talks have been viewed by more than 15 million people and remain among the most popular of all time.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Neuroscience
• Social psychology
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Engineering
• Communication
• Law
• Epistemology
• Philosophy
• Developmental psychology
• Audiology
• Medicine
• Clinical psychology
• Psychiatry

Selected publications

• Diversity comes at a cost: multifaceted diversity reduces plant community stability in peatlands

  2026-02-02

  articleOpen access

  1. Understanding how ecological stability relates to diversity is of crucial importance under global change. Greater biodiversity is expected to stabilize aggregate community properties through compensatory dynamics, as species fluctuate asynchronously and offset one another. Yet, diversity-stability relationships are not straightforward and can vary across and within ecosystems, particularly in wetlands where strong abiotic filters shape community assembly and temporal dynamics. 2. We examined how multiple facets of diversity (taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic) and functional trait identity relate to temporal stability (invariability) and species asynchrony in peatland vegetation. We used a 17-year field experiment in a montane peatland complex spanning a bog and a transitional poor fen, combining open-top chamber (OTC) passive warming with natural hydrological contrasts. 3. Water table depth was the dominant environmental filter of plant communities, explaining 46 % of total compositional variance, whereas OTC-induced warming had no detectable effect. Community temporal stability and species asynchrony were higher under drier conditions (deeper water table), consistent with moisture-driven constraints on peatland vegetation dynamics. 4. Contrary to insurance hypothesis predictions, temporal stability decreased with multiple biodiversity facets, particularly phylogenetic diversity and species richness, but increased with deeper-rooted plant strategies, after controlling for experimental conditions. Species asynchrony was largely unrelated to biodiversity, except for functional redundancy, which was associated with lower asynchrony but showed no association with temporal stability. The stability-asynchrony association weakened substantially after controlling for hydrology. 5. Synthesis. Our results reveal that in peatlands, hydrology simultaneously structures biodiversity patterns, temporal stability and species asynchrony, yielding negative diversity-stability relationships that contradict classical insurance hypothesis predictions. These findings suggest that in peatlands, stability arises primarily from hydrological constraints, with limited contribution from compensatory dynamics among plant species. In strongly constrained, species-poor ecosystems, conservation may therefore prioritize maintaining or restoring the key abiotic conditions that favor functionally adapted communities over increasing diversity to sustain stable ecosystem functioning under global change.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An illusion of unfairness in random coin flips.

  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 2025-04-07

  articleSenior author

  = 5,925) participants competed against another participant for a positive or negative outcome, determined by a physical or virtual coin flip. The independent variable was who called heads or tails and flipped the coin: the participant or their opponent. When participants lost the flip, we found an illusion of unfairness: They reported that the process was less fair, were less pleased with their outcome, and found the other person less likable when their opponent flipped the coin. When participants won the flip, they thought it was less fair, and they felt guiltier when they had flipped the coin. We present evidence that these fairness judgments were based on both illusory procedural control (the person who flips the coin appears to have an unfair advantage by virtue of executing the flip before the outcome is known) and illusory outcome control (the belief that the flipper can influence the outcome of the flip). Further, the illusion of unfairness appears to be a quick, intuitive process that is not easily corrected. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on procedural justice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Exploring farmers’ perceptions of the value and management of dairy-bred calves in block calving dairy systems in England

  Animal - science proceedings · 2025-06-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Costly Task Takeovers in Human Performance

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  articleSenior author

  When working together, employees often need to decide whether to step in and help one another. Do they know when to do so? In a series of experiments, we introduce a novel method that allows us to measure how well a task is performed when one person takes over from another, and the counterfactual they cannot see: performance if the takeover had never happened. Most participants took over for their partners, decreased task performance, and incorrectly believed that they had improved it. This may happen because people do not properly forecast task trajectories over time, and because they step in too early to see how well their partners perform, and fail to exceed that performance. Finally, using these mechanisms, we report two more experiments in which manipulating task visibility and performance trajectories improves takeover efficacy. Takeovers are common in cooperative contexts, but people may not realize when they harm the performances they are meant to improve.

  PublisherDOI

• The illusion of moral decline

  Nature · 2023 · 46 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Psychology
  • Social psychology

  .

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Joint statement in support of hepatitis C human challenge studies

  ˜The œLancet. Gastroenterology & hepatology · 2023-09-21 · 4 citations

  letterOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Dear Vera, Chuck, and Dave

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-09-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  I write these words two days before my 64th birthday, which the Beatles inadvertently defined as the beginning of old age. Boomers do not argue with the Beatles. Although I feel old enough to be a grandfather (which is presumably good news for my three grandchildren), I do not feel old enough to be a pillar of social psychology, or of anything else for that matter. A bit of Googling confirms that I am the second youngest contributor to this volume – the guy who sneaked in just before they slammed the door – so that feeling is not entirely unwarranted. It is an honor to be included in a book with the world’s greatest living social psychologists, of course, but also a bit of a horror to realize that from here on out people will be asking more about my past than my present. “What are you studying these days?” is about to be replaced by “What was the world like when dinosaurs roamed?”

  PublisherDOI

• Tips From the Top: Do the Best Performers Really Give the Best Advice?

  Psychological Science · 2022-04-18 · 10 citations

  article

  Everyone knows that if you want to learn how to do something, you should get advice from people who do it well. But is everyone right? In a series of studies ( N = 8,693), adult participants played a game after receiving performance advice from previous participants. Although advice from the best-performing advisors was no more beneficial than advice from other advisors, participants believed that it had been—and they believed this despite the fact that they were told nothing about their advisors’ performance. Why? The best performers did not give better advice, but they did give more of it, and participants apparently mistook quantity for quality. These studies suggest that performing and advising may often be unrelated skills and that in at least some domains, people may overvalue advice from top performers.

  PublisherDOI

• Speak Up! Mistaken Beliefs About How Much to Talk in Conversations

  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin · 2022-07-11 · 12 citations

  articleSenior author

  We hypothesized that people would exhibit a reticence bias , the incorrect belief that they will be more likable if they speak less than half the time in a conversation with a stranger, as well as halo ignorance , the belief that their speaking time should depend on their goal (e.g., to be liked vs. to be found interesting), when in fact, perceivers form global impressions of each other. In Studies 1 and 2, participants forecasted they should speak less than half the time when trying to be liked, but significantly more when trying to be interesting. In Study 3, we tested the accuracy of these forecasts by randomly assigning participants to speak for 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, or 70% of the time in a dyadic conversation. Contrary to people’s forecasts, they were more likable the more they spoke, and their partners formed global rather than differentiated impressions.

  PublisherDOI

• Intranasal Oxytocin Modulates Decision-Making Depending on Outcome Predictability—A Randomized Within-Subject Controlled Trial in Healthy Males

  Biomedicines · 2022-12-12 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access

  Oxytocin (OT) has been extensively studied with regard to its socio-cognitive and -behavioral effects. Its potential as a therapeutic agent is being discussed for a range of neuropsychiatric conditions. However, there is limited evidence of its effects on non-social cognition in general and decision-making in particular, despite the importance of these functions in neuropsychiatry. Using a crossover/within-subject, blinded, randomized design, we investigated for the first time if intranasal OT (24 IU) affects decision-making differently depending on outcome predictability/ambiguity in healthy males. The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and the Cambridge Risk Task (CRT) were used to assess decision-making under low outcome predictability/high ambiguity and under high outcome probability/low ambiguity, respectively. After administration of OT, subjects performed worse and exhibited riskier performance in the IGT (low outcome predictability/high ambiguity), whereas they made borderline-significant less risky decisions in the CRT (high outcome probability/low ambiguity) as compared to the control condition. Decision-making in healthy males may therefore be influenced by OT and adjusted as a function of contextual information, with implications for clinical trials investigating OT in neuropsychiatric conditions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Improving the Accuracy of Affective Forecasting

  NSF · $276k · 2010–2014

• NIH Grant K02MH000939

  NIH · $384k · 1996

• NIH Grant R01MH049613

  NIH · $327k · 1997

• Collaborative Research: The Psychological Difficulties and Benefits of Deliberative Reflection

  NSF · $180k · 2014–2017

• Collaborative Research: Dual Standards in Affective Forecasting and Experience

  NSF · $281k · 2007–2011

Frequent coauthors

• Timothy D. Wilson

  University of Virginia

  96 shared

• Carey K. Morewedge

  21 shared

• Daniel M. Wegner

  20 shared

• Erin Corwin Westgate

  University of Florida

  19 shared

• Daniel L. Schacter

  18 shared

• Nicholas R. Buttrick

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  14 shared

• Bruce Hood

  University of Bristol

  12 shared

• Douglas S. Krull

  Northern Kentucky University

  12 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Psychology

  Harvard University

  1988

• B.A., Psychology

  Williams College

  1983

Awards & honors

• Royal Society’s General Book Prize for best science book of…