3

The Science Behind the Smile

An interview with Daniel Gilbert by Gardiner Morse

Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert is widely known for his 2006 best seller, Stumbling on Happiness. His work reveals, among other things, the systematic mistakes we all make in imagining how happy (or miserable) we’ll be. In this edited interview with HBR’s Gardiner Morse, Gilbert surveys the field of happiness research and explores its frontiers.

HBR: Happiness research has become a hot topic in the past 20 years. Why?

Gilbert: It’s only recently that we realized we could marry one of our oldest questions—“What is the nature of human happiness?”—to our newest way of getting answers: science. Until just a few decades ago, the problem of happiness was mainly ...

Get Happiness (HBR Emotional Intelligence Series) now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.