Daniel Gilbert (psychologist)

Daniel Todd Gilbert (born November 5, 1957) is an American social psychologist and writer. 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. 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 non-fiction television series on PBS, and given three popular TED talks.

For other people named Daniel Gilbert, see Daniel Gilbert (disambiguation).
Daniel Gilbert
BornDaniel Todd Gilbert
(1957-11-05) November 5, 1957
Ithaca, New York
OccupationEdgar Pierce Professor of Psychology, Harvard University
NationalityAmerican
Alma materUniversity of Colorado Denver (BA)
Princeton University (PhD)
GenreSocial psychology
Notable worksStumbling on Happiness (2006)
Notable awardsEarly Career Award (American Psychological Association)
William James Award (Association for Psychological Science)
SpouseMarilynn Oliphant
Website
wjh-www.harvard.edu/~dtg/

Life and career

Gilbert dropped out of high school at age 15, and spent a year hitchhiking around the United States.[1] He later earned his GED and received a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from University of Colorado Denver in 1981 and a PhD in social psychology from Princeton University in 1985. From 1985 to 1996, he was a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin. Since 1996, he has worked at Harvard University where he is currently the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology.

He and his wife, Marilynn Oliphant, live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Gilbert has one son and three grandchildren.

Works

Gilbert's 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness was a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into more than 30 languages. It won the 2007 Royal Society Prizes for Science Books and was included as one of fifty key books in psychology in 50 Psychology Classics (2006) by Tom Butler-Bowdon.

Gilbert's non-fiction essays have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Time, and others, and his short stories have appeared in Amazing Stories and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, as well as other magazines and anthologies. He has been a guest on numerous television shows including 20/20, The Today Show, Charlie Rose, and The Colbert Report. He is the co-writer and host of the 6-hour Nova television series "This Emotional Life"[2] which aired on PBS in January, 2010, and won several Telly Awards.

He has given three popular TED talks, including one of the 25 most-viewed talks of all time (as of November 2022).[3]

Beginning in 2013, Gilbert appeared in a series of Prudential Financial television commercials that used data visualization to get Americans to think about the importance of saving for their retirements. For example, in one advertisement, people were asked to put stickers on a time-line to indicate the age of the oldest person they knew to illustrate the recent increase in life expectancy. In another, Gilbert started a chain-reaction and set a Guinness World Record[4] by toppling a 30-foot (9 m) domino to illustrate the power of compound interest. In a third, people put magnets on walls marked "Past" and "Future" to illustrate the optimism bias.

Books
  • Gilbert, Daniel (2006). Stumbling on Happiness. New York, NY: Knopf. ISBN 1-400-04266-6.
  • Fiske, Susan T.; Gilbert, Daniel T.; Lindzey, Gardner (2010). Handbook of Social Psychology (5th ed.). Hoboken, N.J: Wiley. ISBN 9780470137482.

Scholarly articles

Gilbert has also collaborated with other scholars on articles published in academic journals like Psychological Science, Social Cognition, and Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Awards and honors

Gilbert has won numerous awards for his teaching, including the Harvard College Professorship and the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize. He has also won awards for his research, including the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology. In 2008 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Gilbert was awarded an honorary degree from Bates College, in Lewiston, Maine on May 29, 2016.[5] In 2019, he received the William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science for his contributions to social psychology.[6]

See also

References
  1. "One Happy Man | Magazine | The Harvard Crimson". www.thecrimson.com. Retrieved 2022-05-06.
  2. "This Emotional Life Premieres on PBS early 2010". PBS. Archived from the original on October 11, 2009.
  3. "The most popular talks of all time | TED Talks". TED. Archived from the original on 2022-11-26.
  4. "Prudential Newsroom: Home". Archived from the original on 2015-07-22.
  5. "Civil Rights leader Rep. John Lewis to deliver 2016 Commencement address, joining honorands Lisa Genova '92, Daniel Gilbert and Robert Witt '62". www.bates.edu. April 2016. Retrieved 2016-05-20.
  6. "2019 William James Fellow Award Goes to Phelps, Gilbert, Nadel, Werker". Observer. 31 (9): 11. 2018-10-31.
Wikiquote has quotations related to Daniel Gilbert (psychologist).
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.