Re: How do you contribute?

Description: Gilbert is not ready to think about questions of legacy.

Question:What are you best known for?

Transcript: Well I guess . . . What am I best . . . ? This is a hard question because you’re asking me to see myself as others see me. And one of the things we know from lots of research is that’s a difficult task. My conception from Dan Gilbert is very different, I suspect, from everybody else’s conception. But what I do suspect is that people associate my name with the work on affective forecasting. My name, and of course the name of my collaborator Tim Wilson, with whom all of this work over 15 years has been done.

Question: What have you taught us about happiness?

Transcript: Wow. Well “taught” is a funny word, because it makes it sound like I’ve discovered all sorts of things on my own. And as a scientist, I’m a member of a big community. I spend my day digging with a little spoon in the dirt finding tiny little facts. What I’ve had the privilege of doing is bringing together the facts that my laboratory and hundreds of others in psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics have discovered and melding them into a single story about the nature of happiness. So “taught” isn’t quite the word I would use. Maybe I’d like to say there are things I’ve been able to tell the world about happiness, but not necessarily things I’ve discovered myself.

Question:What impact does your work have on the world?

Transcript: That’s a humbling question because I’m a basic scientist. So I see myself as being in the truth business, not in the advice business. I see myself in the business of discovering what’s true about human beings on the planet earth, and it’s for other people to decide how to use that information. Now it’s a little bit of a copout I think. And we all think a little bit about what the policy implications might be of our work; but it’s not my primary concern and my primary interest. I think they are in a lot of people who are well-trained and more qualified than I to take the research we do and say, “Gosh. Here’s what it means for society. Here’s how we ought to build society. Here’s how we ought to build public policies now that we know these things about people and their inability to predict what they like.” I’m not exactly in that business, so I wouldn’t be very comfortable proscribing a policy for anybody.

Question: What is your proudest achievement?

Transcript: You don’t just mean my scientific achievement. Oh Dale and Gilbert, no doubt. My five year old granddaughter who cuddled up with me the other day and said, “Do you know how much I love you? Infinity!” And then she asked if I could count to infinity. There’s no achievement greater than that.

My greatest achievement in my work . . . (Long pause) That’s a really tough one. I don’t know the answer to my greatest achievement. You know, like most scientists, I just muddle along doing the next thing that seems interesting to me, hoping that in the scheme of things, even a small percentage of it, has some utility or some impact for others. I don’t spent a lot of time asking whether it does. I think it’s something that history decides, and the best thing we can do is keep on keeping on doing what we do best. I . . . I . . . I guess I’m having a hard time answering it because I’ve never really asked myself the question, “What’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done?” I’m saving that for retirement. That’s what I’m gonna think about when I get out of here.

Question: What is your legacy?

Transcript: Oh legacies are things that old people think about. I’m far too young to think about legacies. Look, you know, one percent of all scientists ever get noticed. And one percent of those are ever remembered. So it’s a . . . the base rate guess is I will have no legacy whatsoever. If I could have a legacy . . . if I could pick one and you could write your own epitaph, I suppose I would love to be remembered as the person who didn’t answer the question, but who showed us that we were asking the wrong one. I think in psychology, many of the questions we’re asking right now won’t be answered; but we will discover that they were non-questions in the first place.

Dan Dennant, the philosopher, has made this argument about consciousness – that many of the things that we’re asking about where the mind and the body meet are, in a sense, 17th century questions that we’re not going to answer. We’re going to throw them away and realize they were defective questions in the first place. I wouldn’t mind having a legacy as the guy who got rid of some questions not necessarily by answering them.

Question: What do you have left to achieve in your field?

Transcript: What I’d like to achieve in my field . . . I’ve achieved everything I could possibly want to achieve in my field in terms of I’ve been far more appreciated than I think I deserve. What I’d like to do is just have another couple of good decades of puttering around the laboratory investigating interesting things about the human mind and human behavior.

Question: What do you hope to accomplish outside of your profession?

Transcript: Well you asked about what I’d like to achieve. But I think the things we’d like to achieve and the things that we realistically might achieve sometimes are almost non-overlapping. There are all sorts of wonderful things I could think of achieving. You know, if I were 21 I might be aspiring to some of them; but at this point in my life, I think I recognize what’s realistic. It’s realistic that I might write another good book. It’s not realistic that I’m going to solve the problem of global warming. So I think I’m afraid that these are two questions with very different answers.

Question: What is the biggest challenge psychology faces?

Transcript: Psychology’s confronted by all sorts of large issues – delightful ones – big questions that people are pounding away at and kicking away at, and are making good dents in, and that we ultimately might answer. I don’t think these are the problems facing psychology. I don’t think the questions are the problems. I think the problems are one, we have a . . . we have a tendency toward irrational exuberance. That is, when we get an exciting new idea, we tend to throw out all the old, unexciting ideas in psychology. So introspection is always replaced by behaviorism. Behaviorism was replaced by the cognitive revolution. The cognitive revolution now looks like it’s being replaced by neuroscience. All of these are great leaps forward. Our problem is we tend to throw babies out when we drain the bath water. And so I think one of the problems confronting psychology is we have to stop throwing away the paths every time we make headway into the future.

Surely the other big problem facing psychology is the problem facing any behavioral science in the United States of America, which is we have leaders who don’t much appreciate behavioral science. It’s an odd thing, given that virtually every problem you’re trying to solve is a problem of human behavior. These aren’t sciences that gather much respect. And as a result, they’re not sciences that are doing very well in terms of funding. It’s quite possible that psychology as we know it won’t exist as a science in 10 or 15 years if we follow the present course of funding in the U.S.A.

Question: What is most exciting in psychology today?

Transcript: Well I think what’s most exciting about any field of science – and I’ll certainly speak for my own – is that the answers that are going to be most delicious in the next 10 or 15 years are to questions we haven’t even asked yet. Young people are going to be asking questions that haven’t even occurred to us and providing answers. And we’re either gonna sit back astonished and go, “Wow!”, or we’re going to sit back like a bunch of grumpy old men and women and say, “Things aren’t like they used to be.

Recorded on: 6/12/1007