Happiness is something most of us spend a lot of thought and energy striving to achieve. But do we strive in the most effective ways? To a large extent, of course we do. We know that earning others’ respect and esteem will make us happier than earning their enmity, so we do our best to achieve the former and avoid the latter.

But the past 40 years of research on psychological well-being has uncovered some surprising findings that can help us fine tune our pursuit of happiness. This talk will review some of those findings with an eye toward preventing us from what some scholars have called “miswanting,” and highlight some simple actions we can all choose to take, starting today, to make us happier.

About the Speaker:
Tom Gilovich is the Irene Blecker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology at Cornell University and co-director of the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research.  He specializes in the study of everyday judgment and reasoning. In addition to his articles in scientific journals,

Dr. Gilovich has written How We Know What Isn’t So (Free Press), Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes (Simon and Schuster, with Gary Belsky), The Wisest One in the Room (Simon and Schuster, with Lee Ross), Social Psychology (W.W. Norton, with Dacher Keltner, Serena Chen, and Richard Nisbett), and co-edited (with Dale Griffin and Daniel Kahneman) Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment (Cambridge University Press).

Dr. Gilovich is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.