May 20, 2024 • 53 mins
Liz Dunn is a regular guest on The Happiness Lab, but in this extended interview with TED's Chris Anderson she take us on a deep dive into her research. It shows that by increasing our generosity and by giving to others we can significantly boost our own happiness.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin a Happiness Lab listeners, We're still putting the finishing
touches on our next season of shows, a whole series
addressing situations in which I the happiness Professor and flunking class.
Our new season will be out on June third, but
here's a quick sneak preview.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Can you hear me now?
Speaker 1 (00:32):
I'm doctor Laurie Santos, and I'm devoting the new season
of my podcast, The Happiness Lab to topics that are
dear to my heart, with people dear to my heart,
like my mom.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Wait a minute, let me put the TV.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
I'll be finding out why I personally struggle so badly
with perfectionism, stress, and even sitting still and doing nothing.
But I feel like I'm bad at boredom because you're
bad at boredom.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Yeah. No, I didn't do well with doing nothing.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
And once I find out why these things affect me
so badly, I'm hoping to do something about it. So
join me on my journey Wherever you get your podcasts,
so be sure to stay tuned. But today I wanted
to share an amazing episode of the Ted Interview podcast,
which focuses on the work of my friend and close
collaborator Liz Dunn, a psychology professor from the University of
(01:15):
British Columbia. Liz has been a guest on The Happiness
Lab a bunch, but in this episode, she'll take Chris
Anderson from TED on a deep dive across her entire career,
including some of her important work on how we can
all become happier. I hope you like this episode and
be sure to check out more editions of The Ted
Interview show wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
Hello everyone, I'm Chris Anderson. Welcome to The Ted Interview.
This season, we're delving deep into the concept of generosity,
which I've come to believe is the single most crucial
idea that our modern world needs. It's an idea that
I've spent the last three years thinking about and researching
for a book titled Infectious Generosity. Now, Today's episode is
(02:01):
a special one for two reasons. First of all, I'm
sitting in front of a live audience at TED twenty
twenty four. The audience is full of brilliant people and
they will be helping co create this episode by asking
questions part way through. And then secondly, our guest today
she has played a catalytic role in developing my thinking
(02:24):
about generosity. Her name is Elizabeth Dunn. She's a social
psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, and apart
from delivering a beautiful ted talk on the links between
generosity and happiness, she also was involved in an experience
which forced me to go ahead and write this book. Honestly,
(02:46):
we will be talking about that shortly, but for now,
please join me in welcoming Elizabeth Dunn. It's great to
(03:09):
have you here.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Oh, thank you for having me.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Let's start by your sharing a little bit of your
background and what drew you to the study of happiness,
generosity and related Yeah.
Speaker 4 (03:20):
So, I have been studying happiness for over twenty years
now as a social psychologist, and I got into studying
generosity primarily because I wanted to understand what made people
happy and specifically actually, when I got my first faculty
job as a professor at the University of British Columbia,
I started earning more money than I needed to stay
(03:42):
alive for the first time in my life, and I
was like, oh, I have disposable income. This is a
novelty for me, you know, And so I wanted to
understand how people could use money in order to enhance happiness,
and I thought generosity might.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Actually be a pretty good way to go.
Speaker 4 (03:55):
So we started running experiments, first, small experiments just here
in Vancouver, and then built it out from there. So
that's sort of where I started. And then my research
has taken me in all kinds of different directions to
try to understand what really matters for him and happiness.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
So typical experiment would be some students get given ten
or twenty bucks untel to do different things with it.
Speaker 4 (04:17):
Yeah, So in the first experiment we ever ran on
this topic, we sent our research assistants out on campus
at UBC armed with cash. We gave them five and
twenty dollars bills. We had them literally walk up and
hand them to people, and we either told each individual
to spend this money to benefit themselves or to benefit others,
and then we called them at the end of the day,
found out how their day had been, asked them to
(04:38):
complete measures of happiness. And what we discovered was that
people felt happier at the end of the day when
they'd been assigned, basically by the flip.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
Of a coin, to spend this money on.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
Others, and do you think they actually did spend it
on this?
Speaker 4 (04:50):
You know, they give us pretty detailed reports of like
exactly what they did, so yeah, I'm pretty confident.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
Give us some more headlines of big findings that have
happened over the last decade or two.
Speaker 4 (05:03):
So another big finding for us was to show that
this effect wasn't just limited to Vancouver to folks with
a reasonable amount of disposable income. We wanted to try
doing this in countries around the world. We explored this
idea with the littlest humans, with toddlers, showing that even
two year olds get joy from giving their resources to others.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Toddlers don't really care about money.
Speaker 4 (05:25):
We worked with toddler gold specifically goldfish crackers, and so
you know, we've explored this idea in a number of
different ways. We've also looked at other aspects that matter
for happiness. In a project that grew out of a
collaboration at TED, we've been examining how to increase social
connections by bringing together architects and software engineers to figure
out how we can design physical spaces to bring people
(05:48):
together in positive ways. So I've done all kinds of
different things, But along the way, happiness has been sort
of my north star.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
I mean, I think your team wrote a paper connected
to a giant Gallup survey that was done once asking
more than tw hundred thousand people across the world about
their happiness levels. Can you say a bit of yeah.
Speaker 4 (06:10):
So, In taking advantage of really amazing data collected by Gallop,
what we discovered was that around the world, people who
had donated money to charity in the past month reported
greater happiness than those who didn't.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
And this wasn't a small effect.
Speaker 4 (06:25):
In fact, when we really dug into the data, what
we saw was that spending donating money to charity was
basically equivalent to a doubling of household income in terms
of its relationship with happiness.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
People work their whole year to try to justify it.
Maybe if I could just get twenty percent more income,
that's what would make all the difference to me in
my family. Doubling of income rarely happens to most people.
It's like it's not quite winning the lottery, but it's close.
And yet on the face of it, just committing to
(06:59):
being generous to charities could actually deliver the same life
happiness that seems so implausible. Can that really be true?
Speaker 4 (07:06):
Well, first off, you know, in that particular study, it's
important recognize it's just a correlation, right, So people who
give money to charity are happier than people who do not, right,
And you can imagine that people who are getting to
charity might differ in all kinds of ways. And we
do our best as scientists to try to control for
the obvious ones like income, and that relationship still holds.
(07:26):
But I wouldn't presume that it's entirely causal, that it's
just about spending money on others leading to happiness. Now
that said, it is still fascinating, you know when we
see this relationship emerge in experimental work as well, so
we know there is this causal relationship, and yet it
doesn't seem like people are always aware of it.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
So it's a bit like the riddle about marriage and happiness,
Like all the stats show that on average marriage people
tend to be happier, But it did the marriage cause it?
Or is it that the happier people get married because
no one wants to marry us that'll get well, yeah.
Speaker 4 (07:58):
And you know, the really interesting thing with marriage is
that the best longitudinal studies on this.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Where you follow the same people over.
Speaker 4 (08:05):
Time, suggest that people do get happier when they get married,
but that boost and happiness last two years.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Now that's an average.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
Individuals vary, So like if you went to your friend's
wedding two years ago, you don't need to send a little,
you know, condolence note. But certainly that's the sort of
fundamental force that we as happiness researchers are working against.
This thing called hedonic adaptation or whatever wonderful thing we have,
we adapt to it. So it's super exciting to walk
down the aisle. It's less exciting to walk down and
see your spouse at the breakfast table.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
One thing I've learned about you, Liz, is that you
have all the skepticism that you would hopeful from a scientist,
and recently you've been involved in work trying to address
what's been this crisis in social science that all these
weird and wild experiments that were reported, some of them
didn't replicate. Talk about the work you've been doing recently
about that.
Speaker 4 (08:55):
Yeah, so this is really important, and I think it's
something that many people who are interested in psychology and
behavioral science don't realize is that there's really been a
revolution in behavioral science over the past decade where we
came to realize that some of the really neat, exciting
effects that some of you might have.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Heard about just don't replicate.
Speaker 4 (09:13):
And so my lab has been involved, along with many
other people in my field, in trying to change that,
trying to create a more replicable, reliable, robust science. And
so one of the big things that we've been involved
in doing is pre registering our studies. So I'm going
to get a little nerdy for a second, but I
promise it's going to be worth it because it's super important.
So in science sometimes it's like we throw a bunch
(09:37):
of darts against the wall and then we draw the
bullseye on afterward and say, hey, look we found what
we expected to find, right, And there's an obvious problem
with that because you don't know how many darts we
actually shot. And so this is a problem not just
for our psychology certainly, not just for happiness research, for
really all of quantitative science. And so now what we're
trying to do is pre register our studies and say
(10:00):
up front, we're going to call our shot ahead of
time and say this is what I'm going to do.
This is how I'm going to test it, and I'm
going to prove myself wrong that shot doesn't land. And
so one thing that I've been doing is going and
trying to reassess the happiness literature, in particular to try
to understand, you know, how good does it look when
we apply these newer approaches. Another really key piece is
(10:22):
using larger samples. So if you look at some of
the older psychology studies out there, they'll often have a
teeny tiny number of participants, and this can leave us
with a situation where those effects don't actually replicate.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
You can get.
Speaker 4 (10:35):
Little weird, fluky findings when you only study small numbers
of people. So increasingly in my field, we're using much
larger sample sizes, and that gives us much more reliable conclusions.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
And your work found that actually quite a large percentage
of some of the earlier work probably.
Speaker 4 (10:49):
Wasn't that valid, right, I mean, we don't know for
sure which studies would fail to replicate, but we found
we looked at some of the most widely reported ideas
about happiness in the media, So we looked at strategies
like getting out in nature, practicing, meditation and mindfulness as
well as exercise very popular strategies for promoting happiness, and
(11:09):
we found that ninety five percent of those experiments really did.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Not meet our current standards.
Speaker 4 (11:16):
It doesn't mean that those things, like if you're super
into meditation or exercise, I'm not saying like, give those
things up and just watch Netflix because whatever.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Like those things.
Speaker 4 (11:24):
There's good reasons to believe those strategies should work. But
it's just remarkable that we don't actually have the kind
of evidence that we would consider the kind of modern
gold standard to support them.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
I mean, that seems like really important social science to do.
I mean, as someone who loves being in nature, I
would really like to know that my impression that it
brings happiness wasn't just my imagination.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
Right, And I mean you may know, right, Like one
of the wonderful things about happiness is that you can
experiment on yourself, right, and you can see, hey, does this.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Make me happy? And that's great.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
So if you find being in nature makes you happy,
then do it. But if we want to make broader
recommendations and really push forward policies and stuff, we want
to know what has the most reliable and the biggest
effects for the most people. It turns out that if
you do little things like you say, oh, let me
analyze the data a little bit differently, let me control
for gender. These people seemed like they weren't really paying attention.
I'm going to cut them from my study. Then you
(12:16):
can quickly actually create an effect where none really exists.
And that is what we are trying to change. And
I think where our field has come so far over
the past decade.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
So wearing your full skeptical hat, you and I we
had a conversation in twenty twenty about a crazy idea
that happened because there was a donor in the tech
community who wanted to give away a million dollars and
to do some social science in the process. Talk about
what happened.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
This was like the coolest phone call I've ever gotten,
where Chris called me and said, you know, I've got
this interesting opportunity. Is this something that your lab would
like to study where we could potentially I think initially
that we would give ten thousand US dollars to one
hundred people in multiple countries around the world and study
what happened. And I was blown away. I was very
(13:04):
excited I was like, count me in. And then we
got to talking more and we thought it would be
interesting to vary, you know, to have a couple of
different conditions or groups. So give these groups some different
instructions and be able to test what kind of difference
that made. And so we thought, well, maybe we could
take that hundred people and split it into two groups
of fifty. And that's where I gave you, like a
(13:24):
born lecture on statistics and how like, when you have
fifty people per group, it's actually not necessarily enough to
detect these effects in a really reliable way. So I said,
is there any way we could have two groups of
one hundred people? You know, it would two million dollars
be possible? And I let me tell you, as somebody
who like applies to academic funding agencies, I just expected
(13:46):
the answer to be no. But I was like, ah,
you might might as well mention this, and you can.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
This is the tech community is full of surprises. It
really is full of surprises. And I'm so, but also
be careful what proposal you put to Liz done. But
so yeah, so ended up being two hundred people getting
ten thousand dollars each. That was the plan. How did
you structure the ex.
Speaker 4 (14:09):
Yeah, so we had one group of one hundred people
who were told to share their participation in this experiment publicly.
So they were told to share this with their social
networks on Twitter at the time, now x, and then
we told the other one hundred to just keep this
on the download. You know, you can tell a couple
close friends and family if you need to, but basically
keep this news private. And so this allowed us to
(14:31):
look at whether sharing this news publicly would make a
difference for how people spent the money or how they
felt about it. And also, in one of our early conversations,
I said, you know what would be really great is
if we could have a control group of people that
don't get any money and we could study them all
along the way. And you were like, okay, Liz, yeah,
sure we can do that too. So we had this
(14:52):
control group of folks that were chosen at random. So,
after recruiting people making sure they qualify, we randomly assign
people to either get this money, share it publicly, get
this money, keep it, keep this news private, or not
get any money, but complete all of our surveys and
get a small fee for completing the surveys.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
And specifically what they were told is that this money
was up to them as to how they could spend it.
First all, when they were recruited, because I got to
play a role in recruiting people, and we basically I
put out a tweet saying, Hey, do you want to
participate in an interesting experiment? Could be stressful, could be
potentially life changing, will take quite a bit of time,
(15:33):
what do you think? But with no mention of money.
So we got people not knowing really what they were
signing up for. And then when we told them they
were getting ten thousand dollars, like, some of them were like, oh,
it's a scam.
Speaker 4 (15:46):
And I think that was one of the biggest challenges, right,
because if you go to the spam folder of your
inbox right now, you can probably find an offer like this, right,
So we had to I think one of the biggest
challenges was convincing people was real. And so you made
a great video of yourself, just like kind of a
low production video explaining to people what was happening. And
I think that was really important and kind of convincing
people like, no, for real, We're going to send you
(16:08):
ten thousand dollars The.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
Only real strings attached then was that they just had
to report back to us how to fill out a
survey every few months.
Speaker 4 (16:15):
Basically once yeah, every month for three months, and then
again at.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
A six month mark.
Speaker 5 (16:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
Right. So what did we discover?
Speaker 4 (16:24):
Well, we learned a lot from this experiment, and I
just want to say one of the really beautiful things
about this whole experience was that we were able to
conduct this experiment at a scale that I never would
have thought was possible, and the donors were so committed
to doing the science really carefully too, and so we
were able to address several long standing fundamental questions in
(16:45):
behavioral science. And I think the one that was probably
the core question that we started with was how would
people spend this money and would they use it in
ways that benefited others? I think one of the remarkable
findings from this study was that people used the majority
of this money, over six thousand dollars of the ten
thousand dollars windfall, in ways that benefited other people.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Now, we were.
Speaker 4 (17:10):
Defining benefiting other people in a broad way, as you know,
any way that was you know, it could be anything
from taking friends out for dinner to making a donation
to charity, to treating a loved one to something special.
So perhaps in that sense, it's not so surprising that
that number was big. But even when we look at
a much narrower definition, we look just at charitable donations,
(17:31):
we still found that people spent almost seventeen hundred dollars
on average just on charitable donations.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
And you know that that kind of blew me away.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
In general, people I think, on average, spend two or
three or four percent at most of their income on charity,
and that's a massive increase. So what's going on there?
Speaker 4 (17:51):
Well, I mean, I think one important component here is
that it was a gift, right, So it wasn't like
people earned this money per se. It wasn't something that
they were expecting. It began with an active generosity by
the donors. And I think that's still very interesting, right,
that one powerful act of generosity, and in some cases
(18:12):
the kinds of donations that people were making could themselves
create other opportunities, could have these incredible ripple effects into
some of the communities.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
To me, that was one piece of it that was
just so powerful.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
Was there a difference in the behavior between people who
on social media proudly boasting of the amount that they
were giving away to those who were keeping in private.
Speaker 4 (18:36):
Yeah, so we expected that there would be a difference.
We thought people who were sharing this publicly would spend
more on others. If everyone knows you've got this money
and whatever, you can imagine, you would spend it more generously.
We pre registered that prediction, so we set up front, Hey,
this is what we think we're going to find this,
how we're going to test it.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
And we were wrong.
Speaker 4 (18:54):
So we found that it did not matter whether people
publicly sharing this information or not. Either way, we found
these very high levels of generosity, which you could call
a field experiment, but I call like a beautiful testament
to humanity that like, even when they're spending choice is private,
they still chose to spend the majority of the money
in ways that benefited others.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
So it really was this was a response to generosity.
It wasn't an attempt to boost reputation. It seemed.
Speaker 4 (19:23):
Yeah, I mean we can't. Of course, it's possible that
some people were you know, taking friends out for dinner
and in a way that can have reputational benefits. So
we can almost never erase reputation. And that's part of it.
And something that I love in your book is that
you say, you know, it's not necessarily bad if people
are engaging in generous behavior to enhance their reputations, Like,
what a wonderful feature of humanity, that that's something a
(19:45):
way that we would want to increase our enhance our reputation.
But yet we designed what we felt was a very
powerful manipulation of reputational concerns and it did not matter.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
So that tells us to me.
Speaker 4 (19:57):
My takeaway from that is that you know, perhaps reputational
concerns are not a necessary or driving force behind generosity.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
And have you heard from other social scientists that they
view that this is a contribution to the science.
Speaker 4 (20:11):
Yeah, we've gotten an amazing response to this from the
scientific community, and I think because we had the opportunity
to scale this up, to have this diverse, worldwide sample,
to work with amounts of money that are deeply meaningful.
So for folks who were in lower income countries who participated,
we were essentially doubling their annual income with this gift.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
So it was a huge amount of money.
Speaker 4 (20:36):
In contrast the kinds of experiments my lab has done
throughout my career are usually more on the order of
ten dollars, and so one might say, well, sure people
feel happy when they give away a few dollars, but
they don't really care.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
And so this shows us with.
Speaker 4 (20:48):
Very large amounts of money people are giving a lot
and as well, I'm sure talk about more getting a
lot of joy from it.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
So talk about the first pape you published.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
Yeah, So.
Speaker 4 (20:59):
Chris started out, of course with this interest in how
generously are people going to spend the money?
Speaker 2 (21:02):
And I wanted to know the answer to that too.
Speaker 4 (21:04):
But I was like, this experiment can answer a lot
of fascinating questions. And one thing that I wanted to
know just how much happiness can two million dollars buy
when it's distributed across a large, diverse group of people,
as opposed to concentrated in the hands of one affluent couple.
And so, in a paper that is entitled Wealth Redistribution
(21:25):
Promotes Happiness, we demonstrate and quantify just how much happiness
two million dollars can buy. And one of the things
that we demonstrate is that by giving this money away
to this diverse group of people, this couple provided two
hundred and twenty five times as much happiness as they
could possibly have found for themselves from this money.
Speaker 3 (21:48):
And that's an incredible number and wonderful when you think
about it, feminine, it's kind of obvious. I mean, when
someone's rich, how much happier can a bit of extra
money actually make them? Not much? But when it shared out,
we know that that can make a lot of difference
to a lot of people. I've just been hit so
many times since thinking about this work and writing the
(22:08):
book of just how big a deal it is that
generosity is fundamentally asymmetric. This is a really really exciting
feature about things that we normally think of the world
in zero some terms. You know, the reason people don't
give is because of loss, a version you don't want
to give away you lose it. It feels like you know,
you're gain my loss, no thank you. But actually there
(22:29):
are so many circumstances when that is not the case.
There's so much inequality in the world, and that money
is sitting there, and the cost to the richer person
literally is pretty low. And in fact, you could argue
and and in fact some of the other days you've
shown is that the actual act of generosity doesn't cost
them any happiness either it actually boosts their happiness. And
(22:52):
so it's this kind of thinking which which really gave
me no choice but to write this book. And if
there was a culture of generosity, everyone benefits in the
most amazing way, and we're all connected, and so it
should be easier to do this than ever. So, so,
how on earth is it that we're actually experiencing being
in a world that's getting meaner?
Speaker 4 (23:13):
Well, you know, I don't know if we are living
in a world that's getting meaner. I think that, you know,
we have that perception, but I think one thing that
we've been seeing already just this week at TED so
far is how much of that may be an illusion
and how much good really is happening. And that's one
thing that I love about this experiment is that it
really highlights, like when we did the science very carefully
(23:34):
and tracked exactly what happened, you know, we were discovering
that people were spending this money in ways that benefited others,
paying this.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Act of generosity forward.
Speaker 4 (23:46):
And so I actually, especially after doing this experiment, I
feel pretty good about humanity's potential for goodness.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
So part of the riddle is that we are filtering
the stories we tell each other about humanity in a
way that's very destructive. Social media algorithms are probably helping
with this, and that when you actually pull the camera
back and look for actual data about what's happening in
the world, really different pictures can amaze. And certainly what
you know in doing research for this book, my brilliant
(24:19):
researcher is actually here, Kate. Kate Honey spent a couple
of years researching and looking for stories under the radar,
and there are so many stories of people doing kind
things that create these amazing ripple effects. Are they on
your news feed? They are not. And so it's tragic
because there's a saying we are shaped by the stories
(24:41):
we tell ourselves. There's evidence for this.
Speaker 4 (24:43):
Yes, that's right, And I think it can also be
a kind of self reinforcing cycle where if we feel
like the world is this terrible place where nobody's doing
anything good, then why should I step up and do
something positive? And so I think flipping that script is
incredibly important.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
Well, one of the joyful things was that after the
experiment was done and the science was sort of locked down,
I got to write to some of the people who'd
participated because they'd told us, you know, what they're done,
and I got to ask them, why did you do that?
And it was an amazing consistent picture that came back.
People often use the same language. A typical thing that
(25:37):
people said, and this surprised me was I felt seen,
you know, the act this is weird to me, like
being given ten thousand dollars by a stranger on the internet.
They felt I felt seen, and I felt like I
needed to let other people feel seen the way I
had felt seen. So this was quite a powerful, you know,
(26:00):
biological thing that really surprised me. But several of them said,
if I'd won this money in a lottery, I wouldn't
have behaved this way.
Speaker 4 (26:07):
Well, and that's a really interesting hypothesis, right, So is
it the case, you know, that they wouldn't have been
so generous had we described the source of the money differently?
And I think you and I had a conversation after
we'd collected the data, after we'd run the experiment, and
you said, I wish we'd, you know, had this other
condition where we told people the money was, you know,
from a lottery or if they'd earned it or something.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
And I was like, welcome to being a scientist.
Speaker 4 (26:28):
This is the experience you always have after you run
the experiment, you wish.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
You want the next thing.
Speaker 4 (26:32):
But that's also the beautiful thing about sciences that were
each each question we try to answer propels us toward
the next one. And I think that's a really, really
fascinating one that you know, if anyone wants to donate
two million dollars, I'd love to pursue.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
But there was there's a third payper you're working on.
Tell us about that one.
Speaker 4 (26:52):
Yeah, So in the paper that we're currently writing up,
so you all are among the first to hear about it.
We were looking at the choices that people made about
how to spend the money in terms of the implications
for their own happiness. So we painstakingly coded each and
every spending description to assess how people had spent the money.
So we placed each purchase into seventeen different possible categories,
(27:15):
ranging from paying for utility bills, buying durable goods, buying
purchases that would save you time, all kinds of different things.
And then we looked at how much happiness each purchase
provided participants. And so what we discovered is that out
of all seventeen categories. The type of spending that provided
the highest level of happiness was in fact, making charitable donations,
(27:39):
so it confirmed what we had seen in previous research,
but with much larger spending amounts. If you're curious what
some of the others were. Second place was buying experiences,
so you know, going on trips, going out for special meals.
These also provided a lot of happiness. One that hasn't
popped up in previous research, but that we discovered in
(28:00):
this study produced particularly high levels of happiness was spending
money on education.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
And as a professor, I like that one.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
This one thing I'm puzzled by is that, I mean,
in one level, it makes sense why being generous would
bring happiness with it. If you think from an evolutionary perspective,
you would want there to be a reward for cooperative
behavior because there's obviously, you know, the belief is that
species that learn to cooperate get benefit from it, and
(28:28):
so you need that reward to do it. And yet,
unlike with other types of happiness, it doesn't seem to
be advertised. So if I'm hungry, I know that if
I eat, I will feel better, and you can say
the same for most other sort of obvious sort of
biological urges. But on this one, I think a lot
(28:50):
of people don't know that they're going to be happy.
It becomes a matter of sort of wisdom passed down
by the elders in your community or something like that,
or something that you eventually discover. Why do you think
that is hidden?
Speaker 4 (29:05):
Yeah, I mean, I think it's actually surprisingly difficult for
people to figure out what makes them happy.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
For one thing.
Speaker 4 (29:13):
You know, we can notice that we feel happy after
you know, helping a friend engaging in some active generosity,
but we might say, oh, it's because you know, my
friend was in this particular situation and I'm glad that
I was able to help her out with that. But
we don't necessarily make the right broader inference of like
this is about generosity as a whole. And I think
there's also just a lot of smoke screens in our
(29:33):
society where that's not necessarily the message that we hear.
Although it's interesting because I have gotten, you know, letters
from people saying, why did we need you as a
social scientist to tell us that giving makes us happy?
This is something that is you know, taught to us
in religious traditions, by grandparents and so forth. So those
messages are out there. But I think it's really interesting
(29:54):
the point you make about, you know, feeling hungry, because
I think it's when people are in the moment that
they don't necessarily realize, oh, this is the best thing
that I could do with this money is use it
to benefit somebody else. And in fact, we've run studies
where we say, hey, we can give you money and
want you to tell us what would make you the happiest,
and they don't tend to think of using it to
(30:15):
benefit others. So's there does seem to be something about
money in particular that puts people in this mindset of
looking out for themselves, and so that that may actually
serve to distract us from this broader knowledge that we
have maybe picked up from important people and traditions in
our life that may get lost when we're faced with that,
you know wallet.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
In your wonderful ted talk, you said that generosity doesn't
always bring happiness. What matters is how it's done, and
that generosity that is done where there is direct contact,
for example, with a person, when you can feel or
see the human impact of it, works a lot better.
(30:57):
In terms of bringing happiness. Could you say a bit
more about that.
Speaker 4 (31:01):
Yeah, So I would say there's sort of three key
ingredients that are pretty essential in turning generosity into happiness.
So one is feeling a sense of connection ideally with it,
you know, the individuals or the causing you are helping,
having that actual In my case, for example, we were
able to privately sponsor a family of Searian refugees to
come to Vancouver, and we were literally picking them up
(31:22):
at the airport and hugging them, and so that's like
the ultimate form of contact. But even if you're a
little bit more removed from that, feeling that sense of
connection is critically important, and I think a lot of
charitable giving opportunities don't offer that, and that there's this
beautiful space for innovation and figuring out how to create that,
particularly when we're giving to people far away. So connection
is probably the number one. But also impact matters, so
(31:43):
being able to really understand or at least vividly imagine
how your generosity is making a difference.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
And finally, choice matters, So feeling that.
Speaker 4 (31:52):
You have a sense of choice, of autonomy of agency.
There's no better way to rob people of the joy
of giving than to back them into a corner and
make them feel like they've been forced to give. And
so I think, you know, we want to keep these
ingredients in mind because ideally we are building a future
that is filled with opportunities to give in these joyful
ways that involve you know, connection, impact, and choice.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
So help connect the dots here because that makes a
lot of sense to me, But it also seems to
contradict another piece of advice that feels important, which is
that we want people to bring their minds to their giving.
So much of you know, life is this battle between
our instincts and then our reflective selves. And Paul Bloom,
(32:38):
who's been on this podcast series, I wrote a book
called Against Empathy where he was arguing that, you know,
we have these powerful feelings of empathy. You see someone suffering,
you want to help them, and quite possibly that does
bring with it most happiness, but it may distract us
from the wisest spending of money. So many people their
charitable lives are limited to oh, I saw some need
(33:00):
on TV of some disaster, and so I'll text the
money there and then you forget about it. And part
of what we want to argue for is for people
to be reflective and almost strategic about their giving so
that they can spend the money wisely. Now that may
mean that that doesn't make them as happy because you're
(33:21):
not triggering those instants out of human instinctive selves. How
might we bridge and get the best of both worlds here?
Speaker 4 (33:28):
Yeah, I think the key to bridging those worlds is
to focus on impact. Because obviously impact is what matters
when we're kind of thinking with our heads. But we
also see in our research that people get a lot
more joy from giving when they can see or vividly
imagine the impact that they're having. And so I think
making it possible for charities that really do have a
(33:51):
genuine impact bringing that out in a way that potential
donors can see it, understand it, vividly experience it. I
think that is an opportunity where our heads and our
hearts meet and can center around impact. That said, you
mentioned you know, is this the wisest use.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Of your money?
Speaker 4 (34:10):
And my favorite part of your book was arguing that
maybe that's not the right question.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
Maybe we shouldn't be trying.
Speaker 4 (34:19):
For the wisest use of our charitable donation money or
our pro social spending because that puts us in a trap.
And I've experienced this myself where I'm like, I have
to find the best charity doing X right, and then
I don't get around to donating, or I just get
in my head about it. And so I love your
book for sort of freeing people to say, is this
(34:41):
a good use of the money? And if the answer
is yes, then maybe greenlight yourself to go ahead and donate.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
Yes. I like that. We have to really know ourselves
and figure out one how to avoid that trap. Two
how to feed some of those human instincts. So, say
you discover make an intellectual conclusion that an organization is
a wise one to support, don't just stop there. Give
(35:10):
your humanness a chance to actually see the impact. So
the statistics coming out of that group won't be enough,
But maybe if you actually can meet and get to
know some of the stories that are actually behind those statistics,
and perhaps join a community of other people who are
supporting them, that is the kind of thing that can
(35:32):
carry you on and turn a sort of short term
intellectual decision that's smart into an emotional thing that actually
brings with it joy and habit making.
Speaker 4 (35:40):
Yeah, and I think for folks working in the nonprofit world,
contemplating not just how can we get donors to give
more money, but how can we make the experience of
donation more joyful is potentially a way to tackle that
question from a different perspective.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
Well, okay, so ted, audience, this is your turn. Now.
If you have a question for Liz, please raise your hand,
A microphone will come to you and we're going to
get through as many as we can. Hi.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
Yes, Sarah.
Speaker 6 (36:11):
So I'm wondering is there a direct correlation between the
amount of happiness and the amount of generosity? Do you
get so much more money happiness out of giving a
million versus out of giving a thousand, And what does
that sort of racial look like.
Speaker 4 (36:23):
This is actually a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Certainly
there is a relationship, and in fact there's a relationship.
What we see in the data from the Mystery experiment
is that just in general, people get more happiness from
more expensive stuff. So like the more money they spent
on a purchase, the more the higher they tend to
(36:44):
rate it. Not perfectly in terms of happiness, but certainly
that relationship is there.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
So I would say.
Speaker 4 (36:49):
Overall, larger amounts of money spent charitably do provide more happiness.
And yet it is not at all like a perfect
or super strong relationship, because people can also spend a
pretty small amount of money but do so in a
way that provides a ton of connection, a lot of
impacts and the felt from really chosen and that can
(37:10):
deliver a big boost in terms of happiness. So it's
certainly not just like a dollar for dollar kind of relationship.
And I will say too, I just want to mention
there's more to discover in these data. And we have
done a lot of work on our side to make
these data.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
Accessible to researchers. So researchers need to come to us.
Speaker 4 (37:28):
We'll check their credentials and everything, but we think there
are unanswered questions. So or if you are a scientist
or a curious philanthropist and want to try to figure
something out. One thing we've talked about is trying to
make these data as much of a gift to the
scientific community as we can by allowing people to use
the data to answer their own questions.
Speaker 5 (37:47):
So I'm very nique, thank you for this. This is fascinating.
So I work in the US, but I live in
Europe and My question is to what extent does culture
impact how generous we are, Because what I've seen is
that in the US it's a very giving culture when
it comes to making a check, supporting your local charity,
(38:08):
donating your time. In Europe it's very, very different, and
it's really hard to find local charities, not even for children.
Or I tried to put something together for my daughter's school,
and everybody was so shocked, you know, and I think
they even doubted my intentions. It was really crazy. So
(38:28):
I had a thought, and I'd love to know what
you think. So in America we pay fewer taxes, really,
and there isn't this social safety net. So maybe there's
we have to do this because we have to fill
the gaps, and maybe in Europe that's not the case
and we pay a lot of taxes. That's a theory,
but I think it's probably more complex than that.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
So what are your thoughts.
Speaker 4 (38:49):
I mean, certainly we see big cultural differences when you look,
for example, in the Gallop World data that Chris mentioned,
there are substantial differences between different countries in terms of
how much people give to charity. I would say the
fascinating thing in this particular experiment was that, you know,
we had people from three lower income countries, so Kenya, Indonesia,
(39:10):
and Brazil. For higher income countries the US, the UK, Australia,
and Canada, and we didn't have enough people within each
country to treat each country separately. But we compared the
lower income countries with the higher income countries, and we
expected that perhaps people in the higher income countries would
spend more money on others because they have a lot
more disposable income on average, but we didn't find that.
(39:32):
We actually found people in the lower income countries spent
just as much on others compared to those in the
higher income countries.
Speaker 7 (39:40):
First of all, let me say I'm one hundred percent
on giving. I'm a philanthropist. I worked with my local
community foundations. The first challenging question I have is this is,
since you're measuring happiness, I want to focus on that
word because I want to talk about happiness versus joy.
I noticed that you use those two terms I guess
interchangeably too, and I'm going to ask you how you
(40:01):
define happiness in order to measure happiness.
Speaker 4 (40:03):
Thank you for asking, ma, because it is helpful to
clarify the definition. So we we define happiness as subjective
well being. That's like the technical jargon y term if
you want to google research in this area and broadly in.
Speaker 2 (40:17):
My field of social psychology, that is.
Speaker 4 (40:19):
The dominant way that we think about happiness. And so
subjective well being has three core components. And so we
have positive affect and that can include feelings like joy,
although it's sort of it's very central. It's like capturing
sort of the core elements of just feeling good. Basically,
we have negative affect, and so we're looking, you know,
(40:42):
just to be clear, even happy people experience negative emotions.
Negative emotions are healthy and they're good, they're part of
who we're meant to.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
Be as a species.
Speaker 4 (40:51):
But you know, very happy people tend to experience a
lot more positive emotion than negative emotion on a typical day.
And then the third component, which is really important is
life satisfaction, and that is a more cognitive and valuative,
more reflective judgment of like am I leading the kind
of life that I want to have? And the remarkable
thing about this experiment is that we saw substantial changes
(41:14):
not only in positive emotions and negative emotions, but also
in life satisfaction and in fact, when my lab reviewed
all of the preregistered experiments that have ever been conducted
on happiness, we found that this experiment had the largest
impact on life satisfaction that's ever been found.
Speaker 3 (41:31):
So I think what the question is getting at is
that we want to feel that there's a difference between
the temporary pleasure of eating strawberry ice cream versus sort
of the deeper life satisfaction or joy of that can
come from giving. And I mean it does science support
the fact that there's the form of happiness that you
get from generosity. You know, it goes to that deeper happiness.
(41:52):
It's longer lasting than just the sort of temporary positive
effect that you might otherwise get.
Speaker 4 (41:56):
Yeah, I mean we see it in this work and
in other studies. We see that the effects of generosity
are pretty broad and robust. So we see them both
in terms of this immediate increase in positive mood, but
also over time, this seems to result in actual changes
in people's satisfaction with their lives.
Speaker 8 (42:15):
When I'm giving, should I be giving a dollar a
day to get my happiness or quarterly? What's a cadence?
And then should I be paying attention to the percentage
of my income or the percentage of the receiver's income, I.
Speaker 4 (42:26):
Would say, again, it's not so much about the exact
number of dollars, but I would say looking for opportunities
to give where you really feel a sense of the impact.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
In the book, I suggest to people who are well
off that we could do worse than look at what
the religious traditions are and the expectations are, which in
Christianity and Judaism are ten percent of income and in
Islam it's two and a half percent of net worth annually.
And I say, if you really want to embrace the
(42:55):
notion that as secular people many of us here at
TA probably secular people, do we want omorle standards to
be at least as high as those are the religions.
If so, there's an argument that you should try and
get to the position where you can commit to the
hire of those two standards ten percent of income or
two and a half percent of networth. What amazed me
in doing the book is that if you accept that,
(43:17):
embrace that, and do the math at what that would raise,
it would transform the world and we could switch the
conversation around philanthropy from being this slightly awkward thing to
being one of thrilling imagination and possibility.
Speaker 9 (43:30):
Is there a difference in happiness experience between giving away
your money and giving away your time? And do you
get exponentially greater happiness by giving away both at the
same type.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
Yeah, fascinating question.
Speaker 4 (43:44):
You know, I can't think of an experiment that has
directly contrasted those but there's really strong, robust evidence that
does meet these kind of gold standards of modern behavioral
science showing that using money to benefit others promotes happiness.
And interestingly, the research on volunteering, for example, is one
way of giving time. Strangely that liurture hasn't produced the
(44:08):
strongest result, and I'm curious about why that is, and
I would love to see more large scale work on
that topic. But I especially love your insight about bringing
the time and the money together, in part because I
think putting in some of the time can maybe unleash
the benefits of the money.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
And in my TED.
Speaker 4 (44:24):
Talk I described a local charity just down the street
from here where folks in Vancouver will get together donate
money to this organization and then you go and you
make dinner for people on the downtown east Side and
you get to meet them, talk to them, and then
the money doesn't just buy them dinner. It also helps
to deal with the food security problem more broadly by
(44:45):
providing lunches throughout the week. And so that I think
is a beautiful model of a program where it bridges
the money and the time and the way that creates genuine,
meaningful connection for both donors and recipients.
Speaker 10 (44:56):
H I just read there is generosity really a function
of feeling needed, because one feels better after giving. So
is that my own for my own satisfaction that I'm
doing or is just happens a label for it.
Speaker 4 (45:11):
I love the answer you give to this question in
the box, so I think you should.
Speaker 3 (45:15):
So I have been dismayed at how the conversation around generosity,
especially in terms of philanthropy, is happening in the modern culture,
where it feels like every opportunity has taken to poke
at people and to criticize and snipe at decisions of generosity,
(45:36):
of saying oh there's mixed motivation here, Oh they're only
doing it to make themselves feel good or to boost
their reputation, or oh couldn't they have given more? Or
oh how did they make that money? In the first place,
all these things are said, and I think it's toxic.
I think generosity has actually always there's no such thing
as pure generosity. I think the philosopher Emmanuel Kant is
(45:59):
wrong on this. Even when I was brought up, it
was give and you shall receive. You know, even our
parents you had to apply these other incentives to give.
And I think as a philosophy student, I used to
agonize over this. It was like, but I give to
satisfy my conscience. But it feels good to satisfy my conscience.
(46:20):
And so is that generosity? Well, yes, it down well
is generosity. And so I think we should not look
for reasons to ding generosity. We should look for reasons
to celebrate it. And in the connected age there are
more reasons than ever. Why. You know, generosity can spread,
It can change how you're regarded. It can introduce your
work to thousands of other people who may want to
(46:41):
work with you. It can enhance your reputation. It can
bring you happiness. It will bring you happiness, just as
it's hard to decide to go and work out, but
you know that long term, you know afterwards you'll feel
good about it. This is in the same category. It's
hard to do, but we should celebrate it even though
we know that there are rewards to the giver. And
(47:03):
so yeah, I've got a tackle in the book called
imperfect generosity. Generosity is the classic case which the perfect
becomes the enemy of the good. Let's not do that,
and that way we'll have a lot more generosity in
the world.
Speaker 11 (47:19):
Religiously in the different traditions. I mean, the idea of
having a sincere heart or is the action itself good enough?
And I'm curious from the study, can I go in
with really bad motivations and still get the happiness effect
or does it change me?
Speaker 3 (47:33):
I'm curious.
Speaker 4 (47:36):
Well, we didn't ask people if they had bad motivations
going in, So yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (47:41):
What do you think, Chris, I mean, look, define bad motivations.
There's definitely a level of cynicism, which is something I
guess you can't claim is generous. But I think if
you see someone who needs something and you decide you
would like to meet that need, there's enough good motivation
(48:02):
in there for me to celebrate that act.
Speaker 4 (48:05):
Yeah, I mean, certainly we do see that overall people
are getting the highest levels of happiness from what we
might call, you know, the purest form of giving, of
making charitable donations.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
But also, you know, there's this interesting little finding.
Speaker 4 (48:18):
I don't want to make too much of it because
we didn't expect it totally exploratory, but we saw that
in the public condition where people had to share the
decisions they were making along the way with this money,
we actually saw those folks getting a little bit less
happiness from their charitable donations compared to those who are
keeping it private. So it actually suggests that when you're
trying to be a little showy about this, it might detract.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
Now, it doesn't mean we could never do this in.
Speaker 4 (48:42):
A way that would work where we could both share
it and feel happy about it. But maybe it speaks
to the idea that generosity isn't all about just looking
good to other people, and that maybe when we're doing
it in these more private ways, it can feel great.
Speaker 2 (48:56):
Oh.
Speaker 12 (48:56):
Hi, I'm Marla. I'm curious about the intake process for
your research. Did you track previous generosity, previous charitable donations,
et cetera. And I'm also wondering if your plan to
track moving forward if they continue to be generous, and
if so, how we.
Speaker 4 (49:15):
Did not track people's previous you know, charitable donations or
other spending choices. We did ask them, you know, just
as I think kind of a point of interest. We
did ask them some questions to make sure it would
be safe for them to be in this study. So
we did do a pretty careful intake process where we asked,
you know, we'd like to tell you about some wacky
things that could happen to you. Would any of these
(49:35):
cause you danger or serious distress? And so like having
a movie star show up on your doorstep getting ten
thousand dollars out of the blue, you know, all of
these things. And so we did not include people who
told us that it could be a danger to them,
but we didn't assess, you know, their previous giving. I
would love to know how this changes people in the
future and follow up with them, see you know, how
(49:57):
happy they are, what choices they've made down the road.
I think that would be a wonderful, fascinating thing to do.
Speaker 3 (50:03):
Okay, Liz, do you have any final thought you'd like
to share from the mystery experiment or just in general,
something from your work that you wish was more widely known.
Speaker 4 (50:13):
Yeah, I mean, I think this experiment, along with a
growing body of research, has really dealt the final death
blow to our notion of homoeconomicists as this self interested creature,
and it is time to leave that vision behind.
Speaker 2 (50:28):
And I think that that is very freeing.
Speaker 4 (50:31):
I'll also just leave you with one other stat that
didn't come up, which is that we found that people
in lower income countries got three times the happiness boost
from this money as those in higher income countries. So again,
in terms of an asymmetry, it's suggest how we can
really make.
Speaker 2 (50:47):
The most of our money.
Speaker 4 (50:49):
That said, we found that there were detectable benefits for
individuals making up to one hundred and twenty three thousand
dollars per year. Ninety nine percent of the world's population
makes less than that, and so I do think it
speaks to the incredible potential power of redistribution of wealth
to more happiness as we move into the future.
Speaker 3 (51:13):
Elizabeth Dunn, thank you so much. That was spectacular. Thank you. Okay, Well,
that's all for today. A reminder that if you'd like
to dig deeper into this conversation about the power of generosity,
please consider reading my book Infectious Generosity or listening to it.
(51:36):
Thanks to the Incredible Generosity of a Dona in the
TED community. You can claim a free copy of the
book by heading to Ted dot com slash Generosity. Next
week is our final episode of this season. We'll be
speaking with a visionary in the world of philanthropy, Natalie Cargill,
whose work we actually just referenced here with Litz about
(52:00):
the potential for truly big scale philanthropy. She's done a
fascinating and essential mission to replace pessimism about the world's
biggest problems with plans for actually solving them. And if
you're keen to start your own generosity journey but not
sure where to start, I would love you to check
out a new tool that we've created called Tig. Tig
(52:20):
is an AI assistant that can help you brainstorm ideas
for what you can do with a little generosity and
creativity in your own life or community. It's actually really
fun to play with, and you can find Tig at
infectious generosity dot org. The Ted Interview is part of
the Ted Audio Collective, a collection of podcasts dedicated to
sparking curiosity and sharing ideas that matter. This episode was
(52:44):
produced by Jess Shane, our team who are there at
the back includes Constanza Gaiado, Grace Rubinstein, Van van Cheng,
Michelle quint Roxanne high Lash and Danielle Ballereso. This show
is mixed by Sarah Bruguer and it was co created
by you, our amazing live audience here in Vancouver. All right,
(53:10):
If you like this show, please do share it with
others wherever you can. Thanks so much for listening until
next week
Pushkin a Happiness Lab listeners, We're still putting the finishing
touches on our next season of shows, a whole series
addressing situations in which I the happiness Professor and flunking class.
Our new season will be out on June third, but
here's a quick sneak preview.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Can you hear me now?
Speaker 1 (00:32):
I'm doctor Laurie Santos, and I'm devoting the new season
of my podcast, The Happiness Lab to topics that are
dear to my heart, with people dear to my heart,
like my mom.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Wait a minute, let me put the TV.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
I'll be finding out why I personally struggle so badly
with perfectionism, stress, and even sitting still and doing nothing.
But I feel like I'm bad at boredom because you're
bad at boredom.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Yeah. No, I didn't do well with doing nothing.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
And once I find out why these things affect me
so badly, I'm hoping to do something about it. So
join me on my journey Wherever you get your podcasts,
so be sure to stay tuned. But today I wanted
to share an amazing episode of the Ted Interview podcast,
which focuses on the work of my friend and close
collaborator Liz Dunn, a psychology professor from the University of
(01:15):
British Columbia. Liz has been a guest on The Happiness
Lab a bunch, but in this episode, she'll take Chris
Anderson from TED on a deep dive across her entire career,
including some of her important work on how we can
all become happier. I hope you like this episode and
be sure to check out more editions of The Ted
Interview show wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
Hello everyone, I'm Chris Anderson. Welcome to The Ted Interview.
This season, we're delving deep into the concept of generosity,
which I've come to believe is the single most crucial
idea that our modern world needs. It's an idea that
I've spent the last three years thinking about and researching
for a book titled Infectious Generosity. Now, Today's episode is
(02:01):
a special one for two reasons. First of all, I'm
sitting in front of a live audience at TED twenty
twenty four. The audience is full of brilliant people and
they will be helping co create this episode by asking
questions part way through. And then secondly, our guest today
she has played a catalytic role in developing my thinking
(02:24):
about generosity. Her name is Elizabeth Dunn. She's a social
psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, and apart
from delivering a beautiful ted talk on the links between
generosity and happiness, she also was involved in an experience
which forced me to go ahead and write this book. Honestly,
(02:46):
we will be talking about that shortly, but for now,
please join me in welcoming Elizabeth Dunn. It's great to
(03:09):
have you here.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Oh, thank you for having me.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Let's start by your sharing a little bit of your
background and what drew you to the study of happiness,
generosity and related Yeah.
Speaker 4 (03:20):
So, I have been studying happiness for over twenty years
now as a social psychologist, and I got into studying
generosity primarily because I wanted to understand what made people
happy and specifically actually, when I got my first faculty
job as a professor at the University of British Columbia,
I started earning more money than I needed to stay
(03:42):
alive for the first time in my life, and I
was like, oh, I have disposable income. This is a
novelty for me, you know, And so I wanted to
understand how people could use money in order to enhance happiness,
and I thought generosity might.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Actually be a pretty good way to go.
Speaker 4 (03:55):
So we started running experiments, first, small experiments just here
in Vancouver, and then built it out from there. So
that's sort of where I started. And then my research
has taken me in all kinds of different directions to
try to understand what really matters for him and happiness.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
So typical experiment would be some students get given ten
or twenty bucks untel to do different things with it.
Speaker 4 (04:17):
Yeah, So in the first experiment we ever ran on
this topic, we sent our research assistants out on campus
at UBC armed with cash. We gave them five and
twenty dollars bills. We had them literally walk up and
hand them to people, and we either told each individual
to spend this money to benefit themselves or to benefit others,
and then we called them at the end of the day,
found out how their day had been, asked them to
(04:38):
complete measures of happiness. And what we discovered was that
people felt happier at the end of the day when
they'd been assigned, basically by the flip.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
Of a coin, to spend this money on.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
Others, and do you think they actually did spend it
on this?
Speaker 4 (04:50):
You know, they give us pretty detailed reports of like
exactly what they did, so yeah, I'm pretty confident.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
Give us some more headlines of big findings that have
happened over the last decade or two.
Speaker 4 (05:03):
So another big finding for us was to show that
this effect wasn't just limited to Vancouver to folks with
a reasonable amount of disposable income. We wanted to try
doing this in countries around the world. We explored this
idea with the littlest humans, with toddlers, showing that even
two year olds get joy from giving their resources to others.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Toddlers don't really care about money.
Speaker 4 (05:25):
We worked with toddler gold specifically goldfish crackers, and so
you know, we've explored this idea in a number of
different ways. We've also looked at other aspects that matter
for happiness. In a project that grew out of a
collaboration at TED, we've been examining how to increase social
connections by bringing together architects and software engineers to figure
out how we can design physical spaces to bring people
(05:48):
together in positive ways. So I've done all kinds of
different things, But along the way, happiness has been sort
of my north star.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
I mean, I think your team wrote a paper connected
to a giant Gallup survey that was done once asking
more than tw hundred thousand people across the world about
their happiness levels. Can you say a bit of yeah.
Speaker 4 (06:10):
So, In taking advantage of really amazing data collected by Gallop,
what we discovered was that around the world, people who
had donated money to charity in the past month reported
greater happiness than those who didn't.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
And this wasn't a small effect.
Speaker 4 (06:25):
In fact, when we really dug into the data, what
we saw was that spending donating money to charity was
basically equivalent to a doubling of household income in terms
of its relationship with happiness.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
People work their whole year to try to justify it.
Maybe if I could just get twenty percent more income,
that's what would make all the difference to me in
my family. Doubling of income rarely happens to most people.
It's like it's not quite winning the lottery, but it's close.
And yet on the face of it, just committing to
(06:59):
being generous to charities could actually deliver the same life
happiness that seems so implausible. Can that really be true?
Speaker 4 (07:06):
Well, first off, you know, in that particular study, it's
important recognize it's just a correlation, right, So people who
give money to charity are happier than people who do not, right,
And you can imagine that people who are getting to
charity might differ in all kinds of ways. And we
do our best as scientists to try to control for
the obvious ones like income, and that relationship still holds.
(07:26):
But I wouldn't presume that it's entirely causal, that it's
just about spending money on others leading to happiness. Now
that said, it is still fascinating, you know when we
see this relationship emerge in experimental work as well, so
we know there is this causal relationship, and yet it
doesn't seem like people are always aware of it.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
So it's a bit like the riddle about marriage and happiness,
Like all the stats show that on average marriage people
tend to be happier, But it did the marriage cause it?
Or is it that the happier people get married because
no one wants to marry us that'll get well, yeah.
Speaker 4 (07:58):
And you know, the really interesting thing with marriage is
that the best longitudinal studies on this.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Where you follow the same people over.
Speaker 4 (08:05):
Time, suggest that people do get happier when they get married,
but that boost and happiness last two years.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Now that's an average.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
Individuals vary, So like if you went to your friend's
wedding two years ago, you don't need to send a little,
you know, condolence note. But certainly that's the sort of
fundamental force that we as happiness researchers are working against.
This thing called hedonic adaptation or whatever wonderful thing we have,
we adapt to it. So it's super exciting to walk
down the aisle. It's less exciting to walk down and
see your spouse at the breakfast table.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
One thing I've learned about you, Liz, is that you
have all the skepticism that you would hopeful from a scientist,
and recently you've been involved in work trying to address
what's been this crisis in social science that all these
weird and wild experiments that were reported, some of them
didn't replicate. Talk about the work you've been doing recently
about that.
Speaker 4 (08:55):
Yeah, so this is really important, and I think it's
something that many people who are interested in psychology and
behavioral science don't realize is that there's really been a
revolution in behavioral science over the past decade where we
came to realize that some of the really neat, exciting
effects that some of you might have.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Heard about just don't replicate.
Speaker 4 (09:13):
And so my lab has been involved, along with many
other people in my field, in trying to change that,
trying to create a more replicable, reliable, robust science. And
so one of the big things that we've been involved
in doing is pre registering our studies. So I'm going
to get a little nerdy for a second, but I
promise it's going to be worth it because it's super important.
So in science sometimes it's like we throw a bunch
(09:37):
of darts against the wall and then we draw the
bullseye on afterward and say, hey, look we found what
we expected to find, right, And there's an obvious problem
with that because you don't know how many darts we
actually shot. And so this is a problem not just
for our psychology certainly, not just for happiness research, for
really all of quantitative science. And so now what we're
trying to do is pre register our studies and say
(10:00):
up front, we're going to call our shot ahead of
time and say this is what I'm going to do.
This is how I'm going to test it, and I'm
going to prove myself wrong that shot doesn't land. And
so one thing that I've been doing is going and
trying to reassess the happiness literature, in particular to try
to understand, you know, how good does it look when
we apply these newer approaches. Another really key piece is
(10:22):
using larger samples. So if you look at some of
the older psychology studies out there, they'll often have a
teeny tiny number of participants, and this can leave us
with a situation where those effects don't actually replicate.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
You can get.
Speaker 4 (10:35):
Little weird, fluky findings when you only study small numbers
of people. So increasingly in my field, we're using much
larger sample sizes, and that gives us much more reliable conclusions.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
And your work found that actually quite a large percentage
of some of the earlier work probably.
Speaker 4 (10:49):
Wasn't that valid, right, I mean, we don't know for
sure which studies would fail to replicate, but we found
we looked at some of the most widely reported ideas
about happiness in the media, So we looked at strategies
like getting out in nature, practicing, meditation and mindfulness as
well as exercise very popular strategies for promoting happiness, and
(11:09):
we found that ninety five percent of those experiments really did.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Not meet our current standards.
Speaker 4 (11:16):
It doesn't mean that those things, like if you're super
into meditation or exercise, I'm not saying like, give those
things up and just watch Netflix because whatever.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Like those things.
Speaker 4 (11:24):
There's good reasons to believe those strategies should work. But
it's just remarkable that we don't actually have the kind
of evidence that we would consider the kind of modern
gold standard to support them.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
I mean, that seems like really important social science to do.
I mean, as someone who loves being in nature, I
would really like to know that my impression that it
brings happiness wasn't just my imagination.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
Right, And I mean you may know, right, Like one
of the wonderful things about happiness is that you can
experiment on yourself, right, and you can see, hey, does this.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Make me happy? And that's great.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
So if you find being in nature makes you happy,
then do it. But if we want to make broader
recommendations and really push forward policies and stuff, we want
to know what has the most reliable and the biggest
effects for the most people. It turns out that if
you do little things like you say, oh, let me
analyze the data a little bit differently, let me control
for gender. These people seemed like they weren't really paying attention.
I'm going to cut them from my study. Then you
(12:16):
can quickly actually create an effect where none really exists.
And that is what we are trying to change. And
I think where our field has come so far over
the past decade.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
So wearing your full skeptical hat, you and I we
had a conversation in twenty twenty about a crazy idea
that happened because there was a donor in the tech
community who wanted to give away a million dollars and
to do some social science in the process. Talk about
what happened.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
This was like the coolest phone call I've ever gotten,
where Chris called me and said, you know, I've got
this interesting opportunity. Is this something that your lab would
like to study where we could potentially I think initially
that we would give ten thousand US dollars to one
hundred people in multiple countries around the world and study
what happened. And I was blown away. I was very
(13:04):
excited I was like, count me in. And then we
got to talking more and we thought it would be
interesting to vary, you know, to have a couple of
different conditions or groups. So give these groups some different
instructions and be able to test what kind of difference
that made. And so we thought, well, maybe we could
take that hundred people and split it into two groups
of fifty. And that's where I gave you, like a
(13:24):
born lecture on statistics and how like, when you have
fifty people per group, it's actually not necessarily enough to
detect these effects in a really reliable way. So I said,
is there any way we could have two groups of
one hundred people? You know, it would two million dollars
be possible? And I let me tell you, as somebody
who like applies to academic funding agencies, I just expected
(13:46):
the answer to be no. But I was like, ah,
you might might as well mention this, and you can.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
This is the tech community is full of surprises. It
really is full of surprises. And I'm so, but also
be careful what proposal you put to Liz done. But
so yeah, so ended up being two hundred people getting
ten thousand dollars each. That was the plan. How did
you structure the ex.
Speaker 4 (14:09):
Yeah, so we had one group of one hundred people
who were told to share their participation in this experiment publicly.
So they were told to share this with their social
networks on Twitter at the time, now x, and then
we told the other one hundred to just keep this
on the download. You know, you can tell a couple
close friends and family if you need to, but basically
keep this news private. And so this allowed us to
(14:31):
look at whether sharing this news publicly would make a
difference for how people spent the money or how they
felt about it. And also, in one of our early conversations,
I said, you know what would be really great is
if we could have a control group of people that
don't get any money and we could study them all
along the way. And you were like, okay, Liz, yeah,
sure we can do that too. So we had this
(14:52):
control group of folks that were chosen at random. So,
after recruiting people making sure they qualify, we randomly assign
people to either get this money, share it publicly, get
this money, keep it, keep this news private, or not
get any money, but complete all of our surveys and
get a small fee for completing the surveys.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
And specifically what they were told is that this money
was up to them as to how they could spend it.
First all, when they were recruited, because I got to
play a role in recruiting people, and we basically I
put out a tweet saying, Hey, do you want to
participate in an interesting experiment? Could be stressful, could be
potentially life changing, will take quite a bit of time,
(15:33):
what do you think? But with no mention of money.
So we got people not knowing really what they were
signing up for. And then when we told them they
were getting ten thousand dollars, like, some of them were like, oh,
it's a scam.
Speaker 4 (15:46):
And I think that was one of the biggest challenges, right,
because if you go to the spam folder of your
inbox right now, you can probably find an offer like this, right,
So we had to I think one of the biggest
challenges was convincing people was real. And so you made
a great video of yourself, just like kind of a
low production video explaining to people what was happening. And
I think that was really important and kind of convincing
people like, no, for real, We're going to send you
(16:08):
ten thousand dollars The.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
Only real strings attached then was that they just had
to report back to us how to fill out a
survey every few months.
Speaker 4 (16:15):
Basically once yeah, every month for three months, and then
again at.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
A six month mark.
Speaker 5 (16:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
Right. So what did we discover?
Speaker 4 (16:24):
Well, we learned a lot from this experiment, and I
just want to say one of the really beautiful things
about this whole experience was that we were able to
conduct this experiment at a scale that I never would
have thought was possible, and the donors were so committed
to doing the science really carefully too, and so we
were able to address several long standing fundamental questions in
(16:45):
behavioral science. And I think the one that was probably
the core question that we started with was how would
people spend this money and would they use it in
ways that benefited others? I think one of the remarkable
findings from this study was that people used the majority
of this money, over six thousand dollars of the ten
thousand dollars windfall, in ways that benefited other people.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Now, we were.
Speaker 4 (17:10):
Defining benefiting other people in a broad way, as you know,
any way that was you know, it could be anything
from taking friends out for dinner to making a donation
to charity, to treating a loved one to something special.
So perhaps in that sense, it's not so surprising that
that number was big. But even when we look at
a much narrower definition, we look just at charitable donations,
(17:31):
we still found that people spent almost seventeen hundred dollars
on average just on charitable donations.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
And you know that that kind of blew me away.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
In general, people I think, on average, spend two or
three or four percent at most of their income on charity,
and that's a massive increase. So what's going on there?
Speaker 4 (17:51):
Well, I mean, I think one important component here is
that it was a gift, right, So it wasn't like
people earned this money per se. It wasn't something that
they were expecting. It began with an active generosity by
the donors. And I think that's still very interesting, right,
that one powerful act of generosity, and in some cases
(18:12):
the kinds of donations that people were making could themselves
create other opportunities, could have these incredible ripple effects into
some of the communities.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
To me, that was one piece of it that was
just so powerful.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
Was there a difference in the behavior between people who
on social media proudly boasting of the amount that they
were giving away to those who were keeping in private.
Speaker 4 (18:36):
Yeah, so we expected that there would be a difference.
We thought people who were sharing this publicly would spend
more on others. If everyone knows you've got this money
and whatever, you can imagine, you would spend it more generously.
We pre registered that prediction, so we set up front, Hey,
this is what we think we're going to find this,
how we're going to test it.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
And we were wrong.
Speaker 4 (18:54):
So we found that it did not matter whether people
publicly sharing this information or not. Either way, we found
these very high levels of generosity, which you could call
a field experiment, but I call like a beautiful testament
to humanity that like, even when they're spending choice is private,
they still chose to spend the majority of the money
in ways that benefited others.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
So it really was this was a response to generosity.
It wasn't an attempt to boost reputation. It seemed.
Speaker 4 (19:23):
Yeah, I mean we can't. Of course, it's possible that
some people were you know, taking friends out for dinner
and in a way that can have reputational benefits. So
we can almost never erase reputation. And that's part of it.
And something that I love in your book is that
you say, you know, it's not necessarily bad if people
are engaging in generous behavior to enhance their reputations, Like,
what a wonderful feature of humanity, that that's something a
(19:45):
way that we would want to increase our enhance our reputation.
But yet we designed what we felt was a very
powerful manipulation of reputational concerns and it did not matter.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
So that tells us to me.
Speaker 4 (19:57):
My takeaway from that is that you know, perhaps reputational
concerns are not a necessary or driving force behind generosity.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
And have you heard from other social scientists that they
view that this is a contribution to the science.
Speaker 4 (20:11):
Yeah, we've gotten an amazing response to this from the
scientific community, and I think because we had the opportunity
to scale this up, to have this diverse, worldwide sample,
to work with amounts of money that are deeply meaningful.
So for folks who were in lower income countries who participated,
we were essentially doubling their annual income with this gift.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
So it was a huge amount of money.
Speaker 4 (20:36):
In contrast the kinds of experiments my lab has done
throughout my career are usually more on the order of
ten dollars, and so one might say, well, sure people
feel happy when they give away a few dollars, but
they don't really care.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
And so this shows us with.
Speaker 4 (20:48):
Very large amounts of money people are giving a lot
and as well, I'm sure talk about more getting a
lot of joy from it.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
So talk about the first pape you published.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
Yeah, So.
Speaker 4 (20:59):
Chris started out, of course with this interest in how
generously are people going to spend the money?
Speaker 2 (21:02):
And I wanted to know the answer to that too.
Speaker 4 (21:04):
But I was like, this experiment can answer a lot
of fascinating questions. And one thing that I wanted to
know just how much happiness can two million dollars buy
when it's distributed across a large, diverse group of people,
as opposed to concentrated in the hands of one affluent couple.
And so, in a paper that is entitled Wealth Redistribution
(21:25):
Promotes Happiness, we demonstrate and quantify just how much happiness
two million dollars can buy. And one of the things
that we demonstrate is that by giving this money away
to this diverse group of people, this couple provided two
hundred and twenty five times as much happiness as they
could possibly have found for themselves from this money.
Speaker 3 (21:48):
And that's an incredible number and wonderful when you think
about it, feminine, it's kind of obvious. I mean, when
someone's rich, how much happier can a bit of extra
money actually make them? Not much? But when it shared out,
we know that that can make a lot of difference
to a lot of people. I've just been hit so
many times since thinking about this work and writing the
(22:08):
book of just how big a deal it is that
generosity is fundamentally asymmetric. This is a really really exciting
feature about things that we normally think of the world
in zero some terms. You know, the reason people don't
give is because of loss, a version you don't want
to give away you lose it. It feels like you know,
you're gain my loss, no thank you. But actually there
(22:29):
are so many circumstances when that is not the case.
There's so much inequality in the world, and that money
is sitting there, and the cost to the richer person
literally is pretty low. And in fact, you could argue
and and in fact some of the other days you've
shown is that the actual act of generosity doesn't cost
them any happiness either it actually boosts their happiness. And
(22:52):
so it's this kind of thinking which which really gave
me no choice but to write this book. And if
there was a culture of generosity, everyone benefits in the
most amazing way, and we're all connected, and so it
should be easier to do this than ever. So, so,
how on earth is it that we're actually experiencing being
in a world that's getting meaner?
Speaker 4 (23:13):
Well, you know, I don't know if we are living
in a world that's getting meaner. I think that, you know,
we have that perception, but I think one thing that
we've been seeing already just this week at TED so
far is how much of that may be an illusion
and how much good really is happening. And that's one
thing that I love about this experiment is that it
really highlights, like when we did the science very carefully
(23:34):
and tracked exactly what happened, you know, we were discovering
that people were spending this money in ways that benefited others,
paying this.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Act of generosity forward.
Speaker 4 (23:46):
And so I actually, especially after doing this experiment, I
feel pretty good about humanity's potential for goodness.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
So part of the riddle is that we are filtering
the stories we tell each other about humanity in a
way that's very destructive. Social media algorithms are probably helping
with this, and that when you actually pull the camera
back and look for actual data about what's happening in
the world, really different pictures can amaze. And certainly what
you know in doing research for this book, my brilliant
(24:19):
researcher is actually here, Kate. Kate Honey spent a couple
of years researching and looking for stories under the radar,
and there are so many stories of people doing kind
things that create these amazing ripple effects. Are they on
your news feed? They are not. And so it's tragic
because there's a saying we are shaped by the stories
(24:41):
we tell ourselves. There's evidence for this.
Speaker 4 (24:43):
Yes, that's right, And I think it can also be
a kind of self reinforcing cycle where if we feel
like the world is this terrible place where nobody's doing
anything good, then why should I step up and do
something positive? And so I think flipping that script is
incredibly important.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
Well, one of the joyful things was that after the
experiment was done and the science was sort of locked down,
I got to write to some of the people who'd
participated because they'd told us, you know, what they're done,
and I got to ask them, why did you do that?
And it was an amazing consistent picture that came back.
People often use the same language. A typical thing that
(25:37):
people said, and this surprised me was I felt seen,
you know, the act this is weird to me, like
being given ten thousand dollars by a stranger on the internet.
They felt I felt seen, and I felt like I
needed to let other people feel seen the way I
had felt seen. So this was quite a powerful, you know,
(26:00):
biological thing that really surprised me. But several of them said,
if I'd won this money in a lottery, I wouldn't
have behaved this way.
Speaker 4 (26:07):
Well, and that's a really interesting hypothesis, right, So is
it the case, you know, that they wouldn't have been
so generous had we described the source of the money differently?
And I think you and I had a conversation after
we'd collected the data, after we'd run the experiment, and
you said, I wish we'd, you know, had this other
condition where we told people the money was, you know,
from a lottery or if they'd earned it or something.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
And I was like, welcome to being a scientist.
Speaker 4 (26:28):
This is the experience you always have after you run
the experiment, you wish.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
You want the next thing.
Speaker 4 (26:32):
But that's also the beautiful thing about sciences that were
each each question we try to answer propels us toward
the next one. And I think that's a really, really
fascinating one that you know, if anyone wants to donate
two million dollars, I'd love to pursue.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
But there was there's a third payper you're working on.
Tell us about that one.
Speaker 4 (26:52):
Yeah, So in the paper that we're currently writing up,
so you all are among the first to hear about it.
We were looking at the choices that people made about
how to spend the money in terms of the implications
for their own happiness. So we painstakingly coded each and
every spending description to assess how people had spent the money.
So we placed each purchase into seventeen different possible categories,
(27:15):
ranging from paying for utility bills, buying durable goods, buying
purchases that would save you time, all kinds of different things.
And then we looked at how much happiness each purchase
provided participants. And so what we discovered is that out
of all seventeen categories. The type of spending that provided
the highest level of happiness was in fact, making charitable donations,
(27:39):
so it confirmed what we had seen in previous research,
but with much larger spending amounts. If you're curious what
some of the others were. Second place was buying experiences,
so you know, going on trips, going out for special meals.
These also provided a lot of happiness. One that hasn't
popped up in previous research, but that we discovered in
(28:00):
this study produced particularly high levels of happiness was spending
money on education.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
And as a professor, I like that one.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
This one thing I'm puzzled by is that, I mean,
in one level, it makes sense why being generous would
bring happiness with it. If you think from an evolutionary perspective,
you would want there to be a reward for cooperative
behavior because there's obviously, you know, the belief is that
species that learn to cooperate get benefit from it, and
(28:28):
so you need that reward to do it. And yet,
unlike with other types of happiness, it doesn't seem to
be advertised. So if I'm hungry, I know that if
I eat, I will feel better, and you can say
the same for most other sort of obvious sort of
biological urges. But on this one, I think a lot
(28:50):
of people don't know that they're going to be happy.
It becomes a matter of sort of wisdom passed down
by the elders in your community or something like that,
or something that you eventually discover. Why do you think
that is hidden?
Speaker 4 (29:05):
Yeah, I mean, I think it's actually surprisingly difficult for
people to figure out what makes them happy.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
For one thing.
Speaker 4 (29:13):
You know, we can notice that we feel happy after
you know, helping a friend engaging in some active generosity,
but we might say, oh, it's because you know, my
friend was in this particular situation and I'm glad that
I was able to help her out with that. But
we don't necessarily make the right broader inference of like
this is about generosity as a whole. And I think
there's also just a lot of smoke screens in our
(29:33):
society where that's not necessarily the message that we hear.
Although it's interesting because I have gotten, you know, letters
from people saying, why did we need you as a
social scientist to tell us that giving makes us happy?
This is something that is you know, taught to us
in religious traditions, by grandparents and so forth. So those
messages are out there. But I think it's really interesting
(29:54):
the point you make about, you know, feeling hungry, because
I think it's when people are in the moment that
they don't necessarily realize, oh, this is the best thing
that I could do with this money is use it
to benefit somebody else. And in fact, we've run studies
where we say, hey, we can give you money and
want you to tell us what would make you the happiest,
and they don't tend to think of using it to
(30:15):
benefit others. So's there does seem to be something about
money in particular that puts people in this mindset of
looking out for themselves, and so that that may actually
serve to distract us from this broader knowledge that we
have maybe picked up from important people and traditions in
our life that may get lost when we're faced with that,
you know wallet.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
In your wonderful ted talk, you said that generosity doesn't
always bring happiness. What matters is how it's done, and
that generosity that is done where there is direct contact,
for example, with a person, when you can feel or
see the human impact of it, works a lot better.
(30:57):
In terms of bringing happiness. Could you say a bit
more about that.
Speaker 4 (31:01):
Yeah, So I would say there's sort of three key
ingredients that are pretty essential in turning generosity into happiness.
So one is feeling a sense of connection ideally with it,
you know, the individuals or the causing you are helping,
having that actual In my case, for example, we were
able to privately sponsor a family of Searian refugees to
come to Vancouver, and we were literally picking them up
(31:22):
at the airport and hugging them, and so that's like
the ultimate form of contact. But even if you're a
little bit more removed from that, feeling that sense of
connection is critically important, and I think a lot of
charitable giving opportunities don't offer that, and that there's this
beautiful space for innovation and figuring out how to create that,
particularly when we're giving to people far away. So connection
is probably the number one. But also impact matters, so
(31:43):
being able to really understand or at least vividly imagine
how your generosity is making a difference.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
And finally, choice matters, So feeling that.
Speaker 4 (31:52):
You have a sense of choice, of autonomy of agency.
There's no better way to rob people of the joy
of giving than to back them into a corner and
make them feel like they've been forced to give. And
so I think, you know, we want to keep these
ingredients in mind because ideally we are building a future
that is filled with opportunities to give in these joyful
ways that involve you know, connection, impact, and choice.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
So help connect the dots here because that makes a
lot of sense to me, But it also seems to
contradict another piece of advice that feels important, which is
that we want people to bring their minds to their giving.
So much of you know, life is this battle between
our instincts and then our reflective selves. And Paul Bloom,
(32:38):
who's been on this podcast series, I wrote a book
called Against Empathy where he was arguing that, you know,
we have these powerful feelings of empathy. You see someone suffering,
you want to help them, and quite possibly that does
bring with it most happiness, but it may distract us
from the wisest spending of money. So many people their
charitable lives are limited to oh, I saw some need
(33:00):
on TV of some disaster, and so I'll text the
money there and then you forget about it. And part
of what we want to argue for is for people
to be reflective and almost strategic about their giving so
that they can spend the money wisely. Now that may
mean that that doesn't make them as happy because you're
(33:21):
not triggering those instants out of human instinctive selves. How
might we bridge and get the best of both worlds here?
Speaker 4 (33:28):
Yeah, I think the key to bridging those worlds is
to focus on impact. Because obviously impact is what matters
when we're kind of thinking with our heads. But we
also see in our research that people get a lot
more joy from giving when they can see or vividly
imagine the impact that they're having. And so I think
making it possible for charities that really do have a
(33:51):
genuine impact bringing that out in a way that potential
donors can see it, understand it, vividly experience it. I
think that is an opportunity where our heads and our
hearts meet and can center around impact. That said, you
mentioned you know, is this the wisest use.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Of your money?
Speaker 4 (34:10):
And my favorite part of your book was arguing that
maybe that's not the right question.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
Maybe we shouldn't be trying.
Speaker 4 (34:19):
For the wisest use of our charitable donation money or
our pro social spending because that puts us in a trap.
And I've experienced this myself where I'm like, I have
to find the best charity doing X right, and then
I don't get around to donating, or I just get
in my head about it. And so I love your
book for sort of freeing people to say, is this
(34:41):
a good use of the money? And if the answer
is yes, then maybe greenlight yourself to go ahead and donate.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
Yes. I like that. We have to really know ourselves
and figure out one how to avoid that trap. Two
how to feed some of those human instincts. So, say
you discover make an intellectual conclusion that an organization is
a wise one to support, don't just stop there. Give
(35:10):
your humanness a chance to actually see the impact. So
the statistics coming out of that group won't be enough,
But maybe if you actually can meet and get to
know some of the stories that are actually behind those statistics,
and perhaps join a community of other people who are
supporting them, that is the kind of thing that can
(35:32):
carry you on and turn a sort of short term
intellectual decision that's smart into an emotional thing that actually
brings with it joy and habit making.
Speaker 4 (35:40):
Yeah, and I think for folks working in the nonprofit world,
contemplating not just how can we get donors to give
more money, but how can we make the experience of
donation more joyful is potentially a way to tackle that
question from a different perspective.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
Well, okay, so ted, audience, this is your turn. Now.
If you have a question for Liz, please raise your hand,
A microphone will come to you and we're going to
get through as many as we can. Hi.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
Yes, Sarah.
Speaker 6 (36:11):
So I'm wondering is there a direct correlation between the
amount of happiness and the amount of generosity? Do you
get so much more money happiness out of giving a
million versus out of giving a thousand, And what does
that sort of racial look like.
Speaker 4 (36:23):
This is actually a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Certainly
there is a relationship, and in fact there's a relationship.
What we see in the data from the Mystery experiment
is that just in general, people get more happiness from
more expensive stuff. So like the more money they spent
on a purchase, the more the higher they tend to
(36:44):
rate it. Not perfectly in terms of happiness, but certainly
that relationship is there.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
So I would say.
Speaker 4 (36:49):
Overall, larger amounts of money spent charitably do provide more happiness.
And yet it is not at all like a perfect
or super strong relationship, because people can also spend a
pretty small amount of money but do so in a
way that provides a ton of connection, a lot of
impacts and the felt from really chosen and that can
(37:10):
deliver a big boost in terms of happiness. So it's
certainly not just like a dollar for dollar kind of relationship.
And I will say too, I just want to mention
there's more to discover in these data. And we have
done a lot of work on our side to make
these data.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
Accessible to researchers. So researchers need to come to us.
Speaker 4 (37:28):
We'll check their credentials and everything, but we think there
are unanswered questions. So or if you are a scientist
or a curious philanthropist and want to try to figure
something out. One thing we've talked about is trying to
make these data as much of a gift to the
scientific community as we can by allowing people to use
the data to answer their own questions.
Speaker 5 (37:47):
So I'm very nique, thank you for this. This is fascinating.
So I work in the US, but I live in
Europe and My question is to what extent does culture
impact how generous we are, Because what I've seen is
that in the US it's a very giving culture when
it comes to making a check, supporting your local charity,
(38:08):
donating your time. In Europe it's very, very different, and
it's really hard to find local charities, not even for children.
Or I tried to put something together for my daughter's school,
and everybody was so shocked, you know, and I think
they even doubted my intentions. It was really crazy. So
(38:28):
I had a thought, and I'd love to know what
you think. So in America we pay fewer taxes, really,
and there isn't this social safety net. So maybe there's
we have to do this because we have to fill
the gaps, and maybe in Europe that's not the case
and we pay a lot of taxes. That's a theory,
but I think it's probably more complex than that.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
So what are your thoughts.
Speaker 4 (38:49):
I mean, certainly we see big cultural differences when you look,
for example, in the Gallop World data that Chris mentioned,
there are substantial differences between different countries in terms of
how much people give to charity. I would say the
fascinating thing in this particular experiment was that, you know,
we had people from three lower income countries, so Kenya, Indonesia,
(39:10):
and Brazil. For higher income countries the US, the UK, Australia,
and Canada, and we didn't have enough people within each
country to treat each country separately. But we compared the
lower income countries with the higher income countries, and we
expected that perhaps people in the higher income countries would
spend more money on others because they have a lot
more disposable income on average, but we didn't find that.
(39:32):
We actually found people in the lower income countries spent
just as much on others compared to those in the
higher income countries.
Speaker 7 (39:40):
First of all, let me say I'm one hundred percent
on giving. I'm a philanthropist. I worked with my local
community foundations. The first challenging question I have is this is,
since you're measuring happiness, I want to focus on that
word because I want to talk about happiness versus joy.
I noticed that you use those two terms I guess
interchangeably too, and I'm going to ask you how you
(40:01):
define happiness in order to measure happiness.
Speaker 4 (40:03):
Thank you for asking, ma, because it is helpful to
clarify the definition. So we we define happiness as subjective
well being. That's like the technical jargon y term if
you want to google research in this area and broadly in.
Speaker 2 (40:17):
My field of social psychology, that is.
Speaker 4 (40:19):
The dominant way that we think about happiness. And so
subjective well being has three core components. And so we
have positive affect and that can include feelings like joy,
although it's sort of it's very central. It's like capturing
sort of the core elements of just feeling good. Basically,
we have negative affect, and so we're looking, you know,
(40:42):
just to be clear, even happy people experience negative emotions.
Negative emotions are healthy and they're good, they're part of
who we're meant to.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
Be as a species.
Speaker 4 (40:51):
But you know, very happy people tend to experience a
lot more positive emotion than negative emotion on a typical day.
And then the third component, which is really important is
life satisfaction, and that is a more cognitive and valuative,
more reflective judgment of like am I leading the kind
of life that I want to have? And the remarkable
thing about this experiment is that we saw substantial changes
(41:14):
not only in positive emotions and negative emotions, but also
in life satisfaction and in fact, when my lab reviewed
all of the preregistered experiments that have ever been conducted
on happiness, we found that this experiment had the largest
impact on life satisfaction that's ever been found.
Speaker 3 (41:31):
So I think what the question is getting at is
that we want to feel that there's a difference between
the temporary pleasure of eating strawberry ice cream versus sort
of the deeper life satisfaction or joy of that can
come from giving. And I mean it does science support
the fact that there's the form of happiness that you
get from generosity. You know, it goes to that deeper happiness.
(41:52):
It's longer lasting than just the sort of temporary positive
effect that you might otherwise get.
Speaker 4 (41:56):
Yeah, I mean we see it in this work and
in other studies. We see that the effects of generosity
are pretty broad and robust. So we see them both
in terms of this immediate increase in positive mood, but
also over time, this seems to result in actual changes
in people's satisfaction with their lives.
Speaker 8 (42:15):
When I'm giving, should I be giving a dollar a
day to get my happiness or quarterly? What's a cadence?
And then should I be paying attention to the percentage
of my income or the percentage of the receiver's income, I.
Speaker 4 (42:26):
Would say, again, it's not so much about the exact
number of dollars, but I would say looking for opportunities
to give where you really feel a sense of the impact.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
In the book, I suggest to people who are well
off that we could do worse than look at what
the religious traditions are and the expectations are, which in
Christianity and Judaism are ten percent of income and in
Islam it's two and a half percent of net worth annually.
And I say, if you really want to embrace the
(42:55):
notion that as secular people many of us here at
TA probably secular people, do we want omorle standards to
be at least as high as those are the religions.
If so, there's an argument that you should try and
get to the position where you can commit to the
hire of those two standards ten percent of income or
two and a half percent of networth. What amazed me
in doing the book is that if you accept that,
(43:17):
embrace that, and do the math at what that would raise,
it would transform the world and we could switch the
conversation around philanthropy from being this slightly awkward thing to
being one of thrilling imagination and possibility.
Speaker 9 (43:30):
Is there a difference in happiness experience between giving away
your money and giving away your time? And do you
get exponentially greater happiness by giving away both at the
same type.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
Yeah, fascinating question.
Speaker 4 (43:44):
You know, I can't think of an experiment that has
directly contrasted those but there's really strong, robust evidence that
does meet these kind of gold standards of modern behavioral
science showing that using money to benefit others promotes happiness.
And interestingly, the research on volunteering, for example, is one
way of giving time. Strangely that liurture hasn't produced the
(44:08):
strongest result, and I'm curious about why that is, and
I would love to see more large scale work on
that topic. But I especially love your insight about bringing
the time and the money together, in part because I
think putting in some of the time can maybe unleash
the benefits of the money.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
And in my TED.
Speaker 4 (44:24):
Talk I described a local charity just down the street
from here where folks in Vancouver will get together donate
money to this organization and then you go and you
make dinner for people on the downtown east Side and
you get to meet them, talk to them, and then
the money doesn't just buy them dinner. It also helps
to deal with the food security problem more broadly by
(44:45):
providing lunches throughout the week. And so that I think
is a beautiful model of a program where it bridges
the money and the time and the way that creates genuine,
meaningful connection for both donors and recipients.
Speaker 10 (44:56):
H I just read there is generosity really a function
of feeling needed, because one feels better after giving. So
is that my own for my own satisfaction that I'm
doing or is just happens a label for it.
Speaker 4 (45:11):
I love the answer you give to this question in
the box, so I think you should.
Speaker 3 (45:15):
So I have been dismayed at how the conversation around generosity,
especially in terms of philanthropy, is happening in the modern culture,
where it feels like every opportunity has taken to poke
at people and to criticize and snipe at decisions of generosity,
(45:36):
of saying oh there's mixed motivation here, Oh they're only
doing it to make themselves feel good or to boost
their reputation, or oh couldn't they have given more? Or
oh how did they make that money? In the first place,
all these things are said, and I think it's toxic.
I think generosity has actually always there's no such thing
as pure generosity. I think the philosopher Emmanuel Kant is
(45:59):
wrong on this. Even when I was brought up, it
was give and you shall receive. You know, even our
parents you had to apply these other incentives to give.
And I think as a philosophy student, I used to
agonize over this. It was like, but I give to
satisfy my conscience. But it feels good to satisfy my conscience.
(46:20):
And so is that generosity? Well, yes, it down well
is generosity. And so I think we should not look
for reasons to ding generosity. We should look for reasons
to celebrate it. And in the connected age there are
more reasons than ever. Why. You know, generosity can spread,
It can change how you're regarded. It can introduce your
work to thousands of other people who may want to
(46:41):
work with you. It can enhance your reputation. It can
bring you happiness. It will bring you happiness, just as
it's hard to decide to go and work out, but
you know that long term, you know afterwards you'll feel
good about it. This is in the same category. It's
hard to do, but we should celebrate it even though
we know that there are rewards to the giver. And
(47:03):
so yeah, I've got a tackle in the book called
imperfect generosity. Generosity is the classic case which the perfect
becomes the enemy of the good. Let's not do that,
and that way we'll have a lot more generosity in
the world.
Speaker 11 (47:19):
Religiously in the different traditions. I mean, the idea of
having a sincere heart or is the action itself good enough?
And I'm curious from the study, can I go in
with really bad motivations and still get the happiness effect
or does it change me?
Speaker 3 (47:33):
I'm curious.
Speaker 4 (47:36):
Well, we didn't ask people if they had bad motivations
going in, So yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (47:41):
What do you think, Chris, I mean, look, define bad motivations.
There's definitely a level of cynicism, which is something I
guess you can't claim is generous. But I think if
you see someone who needs something and you decide you
would like to meet that need, there's enough good motivation
(48:02):
in there for me to celebrate that act.
Speaker 4 (48:05):
Yeah, I mean, certainly we do see that overall people
are getting the highest levels of happiness from what we
might call, you know, the purest form of giving, of
making charitable donations.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
But also, you know, there's this interesting little finding.
Speaker 4 (48:18):
I don't want to make too much of it because
we didn't expect it totally exploratory, but we saw that
in the public condition where people had to share the
decisions they were making along the way with this money,
we actually saw those folks getting a little bit less
happiness from their charitable donations compared to those who are
keeping it private. So it actually suggests that when you're
trying to be a little showy about this, it might detract.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
Now, it doesn't mean we could never do this in.
Speaker 4 (48:42):
A way that would work where we could both share
it and feel happy about it. But maybe it speaks
to the idea that generosity isn't all about just looking
good to other people, and that maybe when we're doing
it in these more private ways, it can feel great.
Speaker 2 (48:56):
Oh.
Speaker 12 (48:56):
Hi, I'm Marla. I'm curious about the intake process for
your research. Did you track previous generosity, previous charitable donations,
et cetera. And I'm also wondering if your plan to
track moving forward if they continue to be generous, and
if so, how we.
Speaker 4 (49:15):
Did not track people's previous you know, charitable donations or
other spending choices. We did ask them, you know, just
as I think kind of a point of interest. We
did ask them some questions to make sure it would
be safe for them to be in this study. So
we did do a pretty careful intake process where we asked,
you know, we'd like to tell you about some wacky
things that could happen to you. Would any of these
(49:35):
cause you danger or serious distress? And so like having
a movie star show up on your doorstep getting ten
thousand dollars out of the blue, you know, all of
these things. And so we did not include people who
told us that it could be a danger to them,
but we didn't assess, you know, their previous giving. I
would love to know how this changes people in the
future and follow up with them, see you know, how
(49:57):
happy they are, what choices they've made down the road.
I think that would be a wonderful, fascinating thing to do.
Speaker 3 (50:03):
Okay, Liz, do you have any final thought you'd like
to share from the mystery experiment or just in general,
something from your work that you wish was more widely known.
Speaker 4 (50:13):
Yeah, I mean, I think this experiment, along with a
growing body of research, has really dealt the final death
blow to our notion of homoeconomicists as this self interested creature,
and it is time to leave that vision behind.
Speaker 2 (50:28):
And I think that that is very freeing.
Speaker 4 (50:31):
I'll also just leave you with one other stat that
didn't come up, which is that we found that people
in lower income countries got three times the happiness boost
from this money as those in higher income countries. So again,
in terms of an asymmetry, it's suggest how we can
really make.
Speaker 2 (50:47):
The most of our money.
Speaker 4 (50:49):
That said, we found that there were detectable benefits for
individuals making up to one hundred and twenty three thousand
dollars per year. Ninety nine percent of the world's population
makes less than that, and so I do think it
speaks to the incredible potential power of redistribution of wealth
to more happiness as we move into the future.
Speaker 3 (51:13):
Elizabeth Dunn, thank you so much. That was spectacular. Thank you. Okay, Well,
that's all for today. A reminder that if you'd like
to dig deeper into this conversation about the power of generosity,
please consider reading my book Infectious Generosity or listening to it.
(51:36):
Thanks to the Incredible Generosity of a Dona in the
TED community. You can claim a free copy of the
book by heading to Ted dot com slash Generosity. Next
week is our final episode of this season. We'll be
speaking with a visionary in the world of philanthropy, Natalie Cargill,
whose work we actually just referenced here with Litz about
(52:00):
the potential for truly big scale philanthropy. She's done a
fascinating and essential mission to replace pessimism about the world's
biggest problems with plans for actually solving them. And if
you're keen to start your own generosity journey but not
sure where to start, I would love you to check
out a new tool that we've created called Tig. Tig
(52:20):
is an AI assistant that can help you brainstorm ideas
for what you can do with a little generosity and
creativity in your own life or community. It's actually really
fun to play with, and you can find Tig at
infectious generosity dot org. The Ted Interview is part of
the Ted Audio Collective, a collection of podcasts dedicated to
sparking curiosity and sharing ideas that matter. This episode was
(52:44):
produced by Jess Shane, our team who are there at
the back includes Constanza Gaiado, Grace Rubinstein, Van van Cheng,
Michelle quint Roxanne high Lash and Danielle Ballereso. This show
is mixed by Sarah Bruguer and it was co created
by you, our amazing live audience here in Vancouver. All right,
(53:10):
If you like this show, please do share it with
others wherever you can. Thanks so much for listening until
next week
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