Daniel Gilbert

Ran the happiness lab at Harvard and studies affective forecasting, which is the ordinary business of predicting how you will feel about something, and which people are reliably terrible at.

Stumbling on Happiness sets out the errors: imagination fills in details that will not be there, leaves out details that will, and fails to account for how quickly a person adapts to anything.

Gilbert dropped out of school, wrote science fiction, and enrolled in psychology by accident after a creative writing class was full. The book is funnier than its subject and does not tell anyone how to be happy, which he says is the honest position.