Who says we'll be miserable if we don't get what we want? According to Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert, our "psychological immune system" lets us feel real, enduring happiness even when things don't go as planned. This kind of happiness -- "synthetic happiness," Gilbert calls it -- is "every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for." In a twenty-minute talk that is by turns funny and counter-intuitive, Gilbert synthesizes his most recent work.
