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Who's in the Video
Dan Gilbert
Daniel Gilbert is the Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His research with Tim Wilson on "affective forecasting" investigates how and how well people can make predictions about[…]
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Gilbert talks about why we’re so bad at predicting what makes us happy.

Question: Beyond a simple title, how would you describe what you do for a living?

Dan Gilbert: Well I’m a professor, which means I’m a teacher and a researcher. And as a teacher I spend lots of time with young people – undergraduates and graduate students – training them . . . teaching them and training them for their later profession. As a researcher, I spend most of my time trying to understand why people are so damn bad at figuring out what will make them happy in the future.

Recorded on: 6/12/07

 

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