Re: Who are you?

Description: Once Daniel Gilbert left Evanston, Illinois, luck took over.

Question: Daniel Gilbert. Professor of Psychology, Harvard University.

Transcript: Well I was born in Ithaca, New York. I grew up in Evanston, Illinois. Then I moved to Denver, Colorado. Then I went to Princeton, New Jersey. Then I went to Austin, Texas. And here I am in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I was about 15½ years old when I decided that I was smarter than my high school and I shouldn’t be attending. So I stuck out my thumb and started hitch-hiking around the country. Ended up in Denver, Colorado where I got married and had a child. I became a science fiction writer. One day I decided I might benefit from a course in writing at the local community college. So I jumped on a bus and went down there to sign up for one; but I was a little late and the course was full, so I . . . they said psychology was open. So I wandered into psychology.

Question: Has luck played a role in where you are today?

Transcript: Well I think that story makes it pretty evident that luck and chance is something between 99 and 100 percent of what’s happened to me. You know, had that bus been early or late, or had a different course been open, we might be having a chat about my career in cartography or some other discipline.

Question: Who was your greatest influence when you were young?

Transcript: Well there’s no doubt my parents were an enormous influence. My mother was an artist, a playwright, a visual artist, a writer. My father is a scientist. And in a sense, becoming a psychologist is splitting the difference between those two things – living at the intersection of a human science and a physical science.

Question: What do you miss about being a science fiction writer?

Transcript: Well being a science fiction writer is a little bit easier than being a science writer because you have fewer constraints on what you can say and what you can get away with. And so there’s . . . there’s something joyous about being able to be quite that free and unconstrained. On the other hand, it requires a certain amount of literary talent that I don’t have. So I think the trade off is fair.

Recorded on: 6/12/2007