Money, marriage, kids
Daniel Gilbert, Harvard professor of psychology and best-selling author of “Stumbling on Happiness,” on Wednesday presented an impressive array of scientific research from economics, psychology, and neuroscience to assess his mother’s recipe for happiness. “If your mom was like my mom, she gave you more advice than you probably wanted on how to be happy,” Gilbert said, before telling the capacity audience at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology that “mom was partially right” in suggesting three keys for happiness: marriage, money, and children. With a photograph of his late mother on the screen behind him, Gilbert asked the audience members how many believed getting married led to happiness. He laughed when a woman in the fourth row pushed up the left arm of the man next to her. Smiling at the man with the forcibly raised arm, Gilbert nodded, “You’re right!” And so was mom, he said. “Married people are happier...