Gilbert's 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness, was a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into more than 30 languages. It won the 2007 Royal Society Prizes for Science Books and was included as one of fifty key books in psychology in 50 Psychology Classics by Tom Butler-Bowdon. Gilbert's non-fiction essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times,Forbes, TIME, and others, and his short stories have appeared in Amazing Stories and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, as well as other magazines and anthologies. He has been a guest on numerous television shows including 20/20, the Today Show, Charlie Rose, and The Colbert Report. He is the co-writer and host of the 6-hour NOVA television series "This Emotional Life" which aired on PBS in January, 2010 and won several . He has given three popular TED talks, including one of the 20 most-viewed talks of all time. Beginning in 2013, Gilbert appeared in a series of Prudential Financialtelevision commercials that used data visualization to get Americans to think about the importance of saving for their retirements. For example, in one advertisement, people were asked to put stickers on a time-line to indicate the age of the oldest person they knew to illustrate the recent increase in life expectancy. In another, Gilbert started a chain-reaction and set a Guinness World Record by toppling a domino to illustrate the power of compound interest. In a third, people put magnets on walls marked "Past" and "Future" to illustrate the optimism bias.
Books
Scholarly Articles
Gilbert has also collaborated with other scholars on articles published in academic journals like Psychological Science, Social Cognition, and Current Directions in Psychological Science.
"How Happy Was I, Anyway?' A Retrospective Impact Bias," ''Social Cognition'' (2003)
Gilbert wrote "'How Happy Was I, Anyway?' A Retrospective Impact Bias" with Timothy D. Wilson and Jay Meyers in Social Cognition in 2003. The article included the scholars' study that found that humans believe their futures have more of a direct effect on their emotions and mood than future events actually do.
"The Least Likely of Times: How Remembering the Past Biases Forecasts of the Future," ''Psychological Science'' (2005)
In Psychological Science, Gilbert contributed to "The Least Likely of Times: How Remembering the Past Biases Forecasts of the Future" in 2005, which included studies that demonstrated that people rely on memories of past events when predicting and thinking about their futures. The study also concluded that people primarily rely on memorable but unique and atypical life events to make these sort of predictions about their futures.
"Affective Forecasting: Knowing What to Want," ''Current Directions in Psychological Science'' (2005)
Gilbert co-authored "Affective Forecasting: Knowing What to Want" with Timothy D. Wilson in 2005 in Current Directions in Psychological Science. In this piece, the two scholars studied how humans make all life choices with a lens that leads them to consider how that decision would impact their future happiness. Gilbert and Wilson call this tendency to base decisions off of their impact on eventual feelings "affective forecasts." The study also took into account impact bias, or when people miscalculate how much or how little a future event will affect one's levels of happiness. However, the two could not definitively claim whether or not these affective forecasts had a positive impact on human lives in practice.
"A Wrinkle in Time: Asymmetric Valuation of Past and Future Events," ''Psychological Science'' (2008)
In 2008, Gilbert co-authored "A Wrinkle in Time: Asymmetric Valuation of Past and Future Events" in Psychological Science, which included Gilbert's studies conducted with Eugene M. Caruso and Timothy D. Wilson that illustrated that humans value future events more than past events.
