Word: gilbert
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Happiness is what everybody is chasing,” Gilbert says. “There are people who say they aren’t, and they’re either lying or deluded. It’s the ultimate goal of what...
...Happiness,” “The Happiness Hypothesis,” and Harvard’s own Tal Ben-Shahar’s “Happier” are signs that its never been trendier to be happy in our Prozac nation. But Gilbert and his colleagues are quick to emphasize the difference between self-help texts and his work, which aims to inform readers rather than promising five magic steps to a better self...
...WEARTHERMAN WAS WRONG Unfortunately, finding happiness is much more difficult than people realize. In “Stumbling,” Gilbert writes that because we do not understand our own minds, we often make errors in “affective forecasting,” or predicting our future emotional states. People want to be happy, but because they can’t accurately foresee what will make them happy, they strive for things that do not, in the end, satisfy them...
...Gilbert presents three main explanations for errors in affective forecasting. First, the human imagination works too well, prompting people to adjust their images of the future, fabricating some details while removing others. This results in overly optimistic predictions: our birthdays, for example, are never as fun as our imagination predicts or our memory recalls...
...personal experience with his own psychological immune system that first inspired Gilbert to pursue this area of research. Around 1993, after experiencing a divorce, a falling out with his best friend, and the deaths of a parent and a mentor, Gilbert felt surprisingly okay—certainly better than he would have imagined. He shared this realization with friend and colleague Tim Wilson, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia. The observation resonated with Wilson and the two decided to futher explore this phenomenon, sparking the years of research that would lead to “Stumbling...