Official Story
Gabriele received her Ph.D. in biology from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Seewiesen, Germany. She did a post-doc in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania working with Martin E. P. Seligman. She then worked as a senior scientist at the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development in Berlin. She moved on to New York University in 1999, where she is Professor of Psychology to this date. Her research focuses on thinking about the future and behavior change. She explicated the perils of positive thinking and discovered Mental Contrasting, a self-regulation technique that is effective for mastering one’s everyday life and long-term development. In her recent work, Gabriele analyzes a phenomenon she calls misplaced certainty, which is a short-cut to knowledge leading to antisocial and fanatical behavior.
Unofficial Story
I was born and raised in a small town in Bavaria. Being pulled by visual arts, my dream was to become an architect, building homes for the financially strained. However, technical drawing was tough for me. So, I switched to photography, where I worked a couple of years, among others for a film sponsored by the WHO on the development of the World population (which doubled since then, 1974). Yearning for intellectual stimulation and for better understanding of the roots of life, I started studying biology at Ludwigs-Maximilian-University in Munich and completed my MA and PhD at the Max-Planck-Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Seewiesen. Unofficially though, I worked on my PhD in ethology at the Medical Research Council (MRC) in Cambridge, England, with Robert A. Hinde. I learned the observational techniques to establish ethograms with fish and birds, and how they can be applied to humans, immersing myself in the interpersonal dynamics of nursery school children. Still, the work was under the theoretical roof of sociobiology, and thus did not leave a lot of space for individual ideas. It was at that time that Bill Hartup was a guest at the MRC and he, as a psychologist, was allowed to test any idea he might come up with. That sold me to Psychology. I moved from Cambridge to Philadelphia to do a post-doc with Marty Seligman. There was a problem, however: Before I left for the US, I met Peter Gollwitzer, my later husband, who lived in Munich. We commuted for almost four years between Munich and Philly. In 1989 I, shortly before the fall of the wall, moved back to Europe, to work at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, staying there for 10 years: Commuting between Berlin and Munich, was so easy… In Berlin my two sons were born, and when they were 6 and 9, Peter and I moved to NYU, where, in 2002, I became Professor of Psychology. Since then, NYU was a hub for my passion of discovering different psychological phenomena related to future thinking and behavior change: The perils of positive future fantasies, mental contrasting of future and reality, silver linings of perceived vices, explanatory vacuum after nonconscious goal striving, nonconscious goal projection, ending in a well-rounded way, and in recent years the dark consequences of misplaced certainty, the feeling of being certain about the unknown. Next to academics, based on my research, I created WOOP (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan) a behavior change technique that can be applied by anyone. Without applying the technique myself, I would have never gone out of my academic hub to build the website, the app, or to write a trade book, focusing on supporting people to change their behavior by using mental contrasting.