Daniel Gilbert

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

Selected publications

• The Illusion of Conscious Will

  The MIT Press eBooks · 2018-09-20 · 1664 citations

  book

  Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. The first edition of this book proposed an innovative and provocative answer: the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain; it helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, the book says, b…

  PublisherDOI

• Prevalence-induced concept change in human judgment

  Science · 2018-06-28 · 147 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Perceptual and judgment creep Do we think that a problem persists even when it has become less frequent? Levari et al. show experimentally that when the “signal” a person is searching for becomes rare, the person naturally responds by broadening his or her definition of the signal—and therefore continues to find it even when it is not there. From low-level perception of color to higher-level judgments of ethics, there is a robust tendency for perceptual and judgmental standards to “creep” when t…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Do conversations end when people want them to?

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021 · 47 citations

  Do conversations end when people want them to? Surprisingly, behavioral science provides no answer to this fundamental question about the most ubiquitous of all human social activities. In two studies of 932 conversations, we asked conversants to report when they had wanted a conversation to end and to estimate when their partner (who was an intimate in Study 1 and a stranger in Study 2) had wanted it to end. Results showed that conversations almost never ended when both conversants wanted them…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The illusion of moral decline

  Nature · 2023 · 46 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  .

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cross-cultural consistency and relativity in the enjoyment of thinking versus doing.

  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 2018-07-23 · 31 citations

  articleOpen access

  Which is more enjoyable: trying to think enjoyable thoughts or doing everyday solitary activities? Wilson et al. (2014) found that American participants much preferred solitary everyday activities, such as reading or watching TV, to thinking for pleasure. To see whether this preference generalized outside of the United States, we replicated the study with 2,557 participants from 12 sites in 11 countries. The results were consistent in every country: Participants randomly assigned to do something…

  PublisherDOI

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

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…

Similar researchers at Harvard University

• Randy L. Bucknerh-268
• Matthew K. Nockh-126