Dan Gilbert — Why Are We Happy？
丹尼尔·吉尔伯特：我们为什么快乐？

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 . He challenges the idea that we'll be miserable if we don't get what we want. In fact，our “psychological immune system” lets us feel truly happy even when things don't go as planned.
丹尼尔·吉尔伯特是哈佛大学的心理学家，在他那本可读性强又不失幽默的著作《撞上幸福》中，他指出通常人们认为可以让自己幸福的东西其实是错误的。为了佐证这一点，他列举了许多引人入胜的研究案例。得不到想要的东西就会产生不幸的感觉，对这种想法，他提出了质疑。事实上，人们的“心理免疫系统”决定，即使事情没有按预想的进行，我们仍然会感受到真正的幸福。

Gilbert cites Dutch polymath Daniel Bernoulli's theory and proposes that the expected value of any of our actions — that is, the goodness that we can count on getting — is the product of two simple things: the odds that this action will allow us to gain something, and the value of that gain to us. But in real life, people generally find it hard to evaluate the two things. There are two kinds of errors people make when trying to decide what the right thing is to do, and those are errors in estimating the odds that they're going to succeed, and errors in estimating the value of their own success.
吉尔伯特引用荷兰博学家丹尼尔·伯努利的理论，提出我们行为的期望值——即我们期望得到的益处——其实可以由两个简单的值计算得出：成功的概率和成功的价值。在现实生活中，这两个值却不那么容易估计。当人们决定要做正确的事情时，通常容易犯两种错误：一种是成功率的预测错误，另一种是成功价值的评估错误。

The premise of his current research is supported with abundant clinical research drawn from psychology and neuroscience. But his delivery is what sets him apart. His engaging — and often hilarious — style pokes fun at typical human behavior and invokes pop-culture references everyone can relate to.
为了证明他的研究结论，吉尔伯特引用大量心理学和神经学的临床研究结果。但是在这次演讲中，吉尔伯特让观众印象十分深刻的还是他的演讲方式。他用有趣诙谐、令人捧腹的语言和动作，嘲笑了一些具有代表性的人类行为，用各种耳熟能详的流行文化赢得了观众的共鸣。