Adam Grant interviewed Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert. An excerpt:
“[Grant] here’s so many demonstrations of these affective forecasting failures. If you were to choose your top three, what are your favorites?
[Gilbert] [..] Certainly one of the mistakes that’s caught my attention the most is our inability to imagine adaptation. My friend Danny Kahneman used to say, when you ask somebody how they would feel if they were blind, they imagine going blind. But the day you lose your eyesight, probably a very, very bad day. But it’s not like all the hundreds and thousands of days that will follow, because human beings are remarkably adaptive.
They adapt to almost any new situation. And yet when we look forward, if I say, how would you feel if you lost your children, if you lost your legs, if you lost your eyesight, if you lost your wife, if you, what you imagine is a calamity. And you are right to imagine it, that is what’s going to happen at first.
But if you are like most people, the data say, you’re going to get used to it. And most people who go through traumatic events, even the most traumatic events, adapt, come back to their baseline of happiness. Now, to me, that was mind blowing. And so Tim and I did quite a few studies trying to understand why and when this happens and with what effect.
So that would probably be my number one nomination for an affective forecasting error, believing that if you get knocked down, you will not get up again. You almost surely will. [..]
[Grant] Why do we fail to learn? All it should take is just one or two of these mistakes before we start to realize, hey, I’m more adaptable than I thought. I know that I’m not gonna be that bothered next month or next year, so why am I wasting my energy on it now?
Why is this so rare?
[Gilbert] Some people do learn the lesson you’re talking about, but most of us don’t. When you get divorced and you find six months later, you’re actually doing fine, you could learn one of two lessons. One is wow, I am more adaptable in the face of adversity than I ever realized. I have inner resources and the ability to see things in new ways. Nothing will get me down from here on. I’m confident. Okay. That’s what we would call the domain general lesson. The domain specific lesson you might learn is , Melissa was never right for me, and I’m really glad to be rid of her. It turns out people learn from their errors. They just learn very domain specific lessons.
They learn that this particular thing doesn’t knock you down forever and that they were wrong about that. What they don’t learn is the bigger lesson that I just articulated. So do we learn from errors? Yes. We just don’t learn quite enough. [..]
[Gilbert about wishing for making alternative choices] I’m not trying to be panglossian and suggest we are living in the best of all possible worlds. What I’m suggesting is we have no idea and we can’t ever know. Could be the best of all worlds, the worst of all worlds. Could be an average of all worlds.
Who knows? What you can’t be sure of is that any change you make would’ve made this world any better. If you spend a lot of time thinking about how things might have been different, I mean, we all should spend a little time on that. That’s called learning lessons from your experience. But maybe the key word here is little.
There’s a lot to be said for being here now. All the time you’re spending thinking about the past is all time that you are in the present, not being in the present. [..]
[Grant] What’s the worst career advice you’ve ever gotten?
[Gilbert] Follow your heart.
[Grant] Why is that bad advice?
[Gilbert] Because a successful career is the intersection of your passion and your talent. If I had followed my heart, I’d be a very bad guitar player right now. I mean, no, be realistic. Satisfaction’s gonna come from doing something really well that you love, and it might be the fifth thing on your love list is what you’re actually good at.
[Grant]: How about the best life advice?
[Gilbert]: My father was a professor, and when I became a professor, he was a scientist, molecular biologist. He said to me, you will think for your entire career that your research, it matters most. And then you will get old and realize it was the students. And I think there’s deeper advice in there, which is you may think all the things you’re up to in your life are what matter most, but in the end it was the people you touched and connected with.
My dad gave me very sage advice. I had to get very old before I really heard it. [..]
[Grant]: What would be your biggest expansion [to Gilbert’s book “Stumbling on Happiness”]?
[Gilbert]: Stumbling On Happiness basically is an indictment of your imagination. It says you’re gonna try to close your eyes and think about the future, and you’re gonna be prone to a bunch of errors. I’ll spend my whole book telling you what they are and why they matter. And the very end, it says, is there anything we can do about it? And I think we now know the answer and it’s a paradoxical answer. The answer is yes. There’s actually a pretty good way to make predictions about what will make you happy. And the paradox is people don’t like this method at all. It’s a method that we call surrogation, and it just means using other people as surrogates. If I wanna know how happy I’m going to be if I go to law school, what I really ought to do, the best data I can get, is to find out how happy people who went to law school are. I mean, a lot of ’em would be good, but even some of them would probably be better than my own imagination. But we’ve shown in experiments that when you give people this opportunity, they just shake their heads and go, well, what do you mean? Those people aren’t me. Knowing people are remarkably similar in what makes them happy and unhappy, right? Nobody says I’d rather be hit by a two by a four than have a weekend in Paris. Nobody would rather eat cardboard than chocolate. We’re very similar in our hedonic reactions to things. So other people’s reactions to, to events you’re only imagining are a very good guide to your own reaction. [..]
[Grant]: My main takeaway from Dan is that the impact of negative events rarely last as long as we expect. The changes in our lives matter, but how we adapt matters more.”
Full transcript, A Grant and D Gilbert, TED talk, 2025.4.8