Dan Gilbert

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.

Dan 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 everyones eyes in the same way—Dan 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.