Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this week’s SDA distinguished lecture, documentary & interview symposium. This week, for your delectation, here is Dr. Dan Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University, presenting his Exploring the Frontiers of Happiness ¤ lecture, in 2005 (34:09). As usual, I’ll be our symposiarch for this episode of this series; please recall that this is not Reader Tips (our regular Reader Tips entry will appear tonight as scheduled), and that the topic here is Dan’s lecture and related matters (and the dress code is: no gratuitous insults). And now, as I wrote over three years ago: your table’s waiting, simply link this way. (Yeah, yeah, if I could link that way, honey… 😉
I’m curious if Dan Gilbert has met Dan Ariely… regarding our choices.
If I’m not mistaken they are both behavioural economists, Marc. That experiment Dan Ariely reports on, where he has two faces, say A and B, and an ugly version of one of the faces, either ugly-A or ugly-B, and he found that given either ugly-X, X was then considered more attractive on average, was fascinating. That’s exactly the same comparison-bias observation that Dan Gilbert is making, in part, in today’s symposium.