Dan Gilbert: The psychology of your future self
丹.吉伯特: 未來自我的心理學
Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong -- a premise he supports with intriguing research, and explains in his accessible and unexpectedly funny book, Stumbling on Happiness. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
過去的決定感到開心。
急著結婚的對象離婚;
花大功夫囤積起的脂肪。
that fascinates me is,
我著迷的問題是:
有著徹底的誤解。
答案就是「現在」。
這些價值觀的比重會變。
change in the next 10 years,
價值觀會有多少改變,
changed in the last 10 years.
價值觀改變多少。
interesting kind of analysis,
throughout the lifespan.
從 18 到 68 歲,
還有許多事也一樣。
dimensions of personality:
changed over the last 10 years,
seeing this diagram over and over,
change over the next 10 years?"
十年後會改變嗎?」
跟十年前一樣嗎?」
that doesn't have consequences?
且不會有任何影響?
I'll give you an example of why.
我來舉例說明。
幫助各位思考。
how much they would pay
我們也無法完全確定,
who we were 10 years ago,
that because it's hard to imagine,
因為很難想像,
「我無法想像那會是怎樣」時,
their own lack of imagination,
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dan Gilbert - Psychologist; happiness expertHarvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong -- a premise he supports with intriguing research, and explains in his accessible and unexpectedly funny book, Stumbling on Happiness.
Why you should listen
Dan Gilbert believes that, in our ardent, lifelong pursuit of happiness, most of us have the wrong map. In the same way that optical illusions fool our eyes -- and fool everyone's eyes in the same way -- Gilbert argues that our brains systematically misjudge what will make us happy. And these quirks in our cognition make humans very poor predictors of our own bliss.
The premise of his current research -- that our assumptions about what will make us happy are often wrong -- is supported with clinical research drawn from psychology and neuroscience. But his delivery is what sets him apart. His engaging -- and often hilarious -- style pokes fun at typical human behavior and invokes pop-culture references everyone can relate to. This winning style translates also to Gilbert's writing, which is lucid, approachable and laugh-out-loud funny. The immensely readable Stumbling on Happiness, published in 2006, became a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages.
In fact, the title of his book could be drawn from his own life. At 19, he was a high school dropout with dreams of writing science fiction. When a creative writing class at his community college was full, he enrolled in the only available course: psychology. He found his passion there, earned a doctorate in social psychology in 1985 at Princeton, and has since won a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Phi Beta Kappa teaching prize for his work at Harvard. He has written essays and articles for The New York Times, Time and even Starbucks, while continuing his research into happiness at his Hedonic Psychology Laboratory.
Dan Gilbert | Speaker | TED.com