November 11, 2024 • 36 mins
The Happiness Lab debuted back in fall 2019. To celebrate our fifth birthday, we're revisiting Dr Laurie's favorite shows. We kick off with one from way back.
Technology allows us to bank, shop and dine without talking to another human, but what toll is this taking on our happiness? So in this episode, the inventor of the ATM and the Talking Heads singer David Byrne joined Dr Laurie to explore the ways in which talking to strangers can bring us all genuine joy.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. The Happiness Lab has just turned five years old.
It's hard to believe, but our first series went out
in the fall of twenty nineteen. Since then, we've made
a couple hundred episodes and say to all of you
out there, we've racked up more than one hundred and
(00:35):
thirty million doubtloads. We don't have much data on how
much happiness this has sparked, but I think it's probably
a ton. We've certainly tackled a lot of topics and
talked to some amazing people. But to celebrate these five years,
I've picked five episodes from the archive that holds a
special place in my heart. My producer, Ryan Dilly, has
(00:56):
been with me every step of this half decade journey.
So Ryan, tell me what the first show out of
the archive is.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
So it's an episode called Mistakingly Seeking Solid Shoot, it's
from our very first season. So why did you have
me grab this particular episode?
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Picked this episode because it's one of my favorite episodes.
I mean, which is always hard for me to say.
I love all my episodes. They're like children to me,
and so you have to love all of them. So
Mistakenly Singing Solitude is an episode about what we get
wrong when it comes to human connection, and in particular
our assumption that solitude, not chatting with people, enjoying our
space by ourselves, is maybe the right path to happiness,
(01:30):
when all the research seems to suggest that we'd be
much happier if we reached out to other people. But
this is genuinely one of my favorite. When I get asked,
you know, what are some of my favorite ones, this
one comes up at the top, and I think it's
for a couple of reasons. I really loved the science part.
It includes one of my favorite overall scientific guests, Nick Applee.
But it was also one of the first episodes that
we've recorded, I think the first episode that we recorded together,
(01:52):
right yeah, And I.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Guess it was also the first time you went on
a solo recording journey out in the field. You bet
the inventor of the ATM, didn't you, And you found
that immediately as a recalled, you found the woes of
being an audio producer, Right, Yes, that.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Was a trip that I got to take to Texas
to meet Don Walt's the inventor of the ATM, and
he had a lovely house. He actually let me journey
to his house so that I could record with him
at his house live. But his house had lots of clocks,
like he collected Google clocks that all kind of seemed
to go off at really random times, which was lovely.
(02:27):
It sounded beautiful, but it did not make for very
clean audio.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
If I re call.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
We made the best of it. I think it was
really lovely though, but yeah, there was lots and lots
of clocks going off. Since we've recorded this, you know,
five years ago, society seems to have gone in the
wrong direction since the episode aired. Whenever I get on
a train, I always lament the fact that there were
quiet cars still, but there are no chatty cars, which
is something we talk about. The chatty car is where
you can go to meet your fellow commuteritis and actually
get to know them.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Yeah, it's all a little bit depressing. I mean, when
we made the episode, I'd hope the idea for the
chatty car would resonate and some company would take it
on and we'd all have like you know, trains now
that everyone was chatting and stuff. But it didn't seem
to happen, And so I think that's another one of
the reasons that I loved this episode so much is
that I think it matters now just as much as
it did five years ago when we first put the
episode out. So given all of that, here is possibly
(03:12):
my favorite ever Happiness Lab episode. Mistakenly Seeking Solitude.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
The fighting in the streets of Saigon during the New
Year or Test Offensive made the war.
Speaker 5 (03:22):
Too real tonight.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
I have ordered aircraft and our naval vessels to make
no attacks on North Vietnam.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
It's nineteen sixty eight, a pretty tumultuous year had wrapped
in the combat.
Speaker 6 (03:34):
Ban agting helped the crock the road Now officers also
reportedly chased and fired on a radio equipped.
Speaker 5 (03:40):
Cark and very good negotiators.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
Certainly not optimistic about one hundred Peter League that one
Tumar Tumar wounded great.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
But there was one event in nineteen sixty eight that
didn't make the headlines even though it's still having a
huge effect on your well being.
Speaker 4 (03:56):
I had to wait, wait, wait, and I really got
a little bit averrogage because I knew I had the
money there, so all I had to do is, you know,
cashy check and get out of there.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
This is Don Wetzel calling a fateful day in November
of that year when he was trying to do something simple.
He just wanted to withdraw some cash at his bank.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
I was scheduled to take a trip on a Monday
morning on so on Friday, on the lunch hour, I
went to my bank to get some money. I would
say maybe eight to ten people in line. My guess is,
you know, maybe I was in that line for like
eighteen to twenty minutes just to cash and check.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Don's time was really valuable. He was a talented engineer
and vice president of a technology company that was on
the hunt for a new business. But instead of problem
solving at his desk at work, he was stuck in
a bank lobby.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
So my job was to come up with one or
more new products, and I was getting nowhere.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Half a century later, we still share Don's misery. We're
stuck in lines all the time, when we wait for
coffee in a cafe, when we stand on a crowded
train platform, when we get stuck for hours in airport security.
We know exactly what he was feeling watching time slip
through his fingers. My brother Aaron wrote a book called
(05:20):
how Many Licks? Hey, Hey, Santo's How's it going? Or
How to estimate damn near anything. I asked him to
calculate for us how much time we're likely to spend
waiting in line over our entire lifetimes.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Yeah, so, I think the number one came up with
was seven thousand hours.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Seven thousand hours waiting in line. That's more than six
months of our life stuck in some cue. That's crazy,
right With seven thousand hours, you could take a massive vacation.
You could learn a new instrument, or a new language,
or a new sport. But you're not doing any of that.
You're just waiting, staring at the back of someone's head,
(05:57):
and it sucks. We tell ourselves that standing in line
is an awful, annoying, happiness straining waste of time. But
what if we could see that line not has a
huge pain in the butt, but as an opportunity to
be happier. Our minds are constantly telling us what to
do to be happy. What if our minds are wrong?
(06:18):
What if our minds are lying to us, leading us
away from what will really make us happy. The good
news is that understanding the science of the mind can
point us all back in the right direction. You're listening
to the Happiness Lab with me, doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 5 (06:39):
Hey.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Don Don Wetzel doesn't have the same name recognition as
Thomas Edison or Steve Jobs, but he's an inventor too,
and it turns out his irritation with waiting in line
led to a creation that revolutionized the financial sector. It
has also completely changed the daily routines of ordinary people
around the world. Before I met Don, I had a
(07:03):
certain image of him in my mind. I rang the doorbell,
expecting to meet a slick, self important inventor guy. But
then ninety year old Don welcomed me into the cozy
Dallas home that he shares with his wife, Eleanor, and
I realized Don wasn't the Elon Musk type I had imagined.
Speaker 4 (07:19):
Well, I've delighted your ear.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Don was like the friendliest grandpa you've ever met. I
sat with Don and Eleanor in their living room, which
was filled with comfy pillows, smiling photos of their twelve children,
and clocks, lots of clocks. They were lovely, but clocks
are kind of the nemesis of the podcaster. And wait
till this answer stops at a second, and I'll finish up.
Speaker 6 (07:45):
I can stop that no, that's okay.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
The clocks are kind of fitting though, because Don understands
the value of time. In fact, it was that feeling
of wasted time back in nineteen sixty eight that led
to his life changing idea.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
So, while I was in line, I thought, seems to
me a teller's job mostly is cashy chick and taken deposits.
So I just got the idea that, hm, I think
a machine could do that.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
That's right. Don had just dreamed up the ATM, the
automated teller machine that millions upon millions of busy people
use every day nowadays. The idea of an ATM seems
really obvious, but Don faced a lot of resistance. When
he first pitched the idea.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
On the board of our company. There was a banker.
He thought it was the dumbest idea he had ever heard.
He said, we have tellers to do that. Has anybody
told you that?
Speaker 5 (08:46):
Yet?
Speaker 4 (08:46):
You know, we do have tellers that do exactly what
you're saying your machine can do, So why you think
anybody would buy this?
Speaker 1 (08:54):
That board member wasn't entirely crazy. There had been earlier
attempts at automated bank machines and they'd all failed, including
one that took deposits. It's inventor, Luther Simjion lamented the
only people using the machine were prostitutes and gamblers who
didn't want to deal with the teller face to face.
The genius of Don's ATM is that it won the
trust of millions of regular customers who loved its convenience.
Speaker 4 (09:17):
You know, everybody prefers to get things done quicker, and
you know, the ATM was a quick and easy way
anybody could use an ATM, really, because it's very simple.
Stick the card in, key in your pin number, and bingo,
here comes the money if you got it in the bank,
of course.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
But now in hindsight, can you see that this started,
you know, in some ways a revolution of convenience?
Speaker 4 (09:41):
Well, I never thought of it that way, really, Laurie.
Now I'll tell you a story about that. You know,
I had to come up with a forecast as to
how many of these ATMs were going to sell, and
I felt like we could sell four thousand of these machines.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
I think there might have been four thousand just in
the in the airport where I was just at DFW today.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
Well, at the latest report that I heard throughout the world.
They estimate there is one point three million ATMs installed nowadays.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
But the real success of the ATM, according to Don,
is that it improves people's well being. It gets them
out of those annoying lines.
Speaker 4 (10:22):
It just made sense that nobody wanted to wait in
the tell A line like I did, so it makes
every bank customer happy to get in and get out
and do some other things.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
A bit more free time is something we all need,
and down simple idea has probably freed up millions, possibly
billions of hours the world over. But it turns out
there's an awful downside to all this convenience and save time,
one that are lying minds don't even realize. Don Wetzel's
intuition was that most people want a bit of extra
(10:56):
free time, then it'll make us happier, and the science
backs him up. Simply put, we all feel way too
busy today. Many of us experience what scientists call time famine.
We're literally starving for time, and that famished feeling has
a negative effect on our well being. In fact, people
who report feelings short on time are more likely to
(11:17):
be depressed, anxious, and less happy than people who feel
like they have lots of free time. Psychologists have even
come up with a term for that amazing feeling you
get when, say, a meeting is canceled and you suddenly
have a free hour you didn't expect. We call it
time affluence, and those rare moments when we feel wealthy
in time can make us feel amazing. It's one of
(11:39):
the reasons that every once in a while, I sometimes
surprise my Yale students by canceling my Happiness class, and
their reactions show just how important a little unexpected time
off can be. One student even burst into tears. She
said it was the first time she had an hour
off all semester. She'd almost forgotten what it was like
(11:59):
to have some free time, so adding even a few
extra minutes to our perceived time banks can feel really good.
But recent studies also suggest something rather intuitive. That is,
we misestimate just how busy we really are. While there's
lots of work showing that we feel busier than ever before,
there is very little evidence showing that we actually are busier,
(12:22):
which is kind of weird. It's as though our minds
tell us we're super busy all the time, but in
reality it's not as bad as we think. But there's
another even more insidious way our mind leads us astray
when we try to save some time. It turns out
there's an opportunity cost that comes from avoiding those bank lines,
and the cost is a social one. Long lines are frustrating,
(12:45):
but they're also an opportunity to be around other people,
and the sheer amount of time we spend around other
people actually predicts how happy we are. Take one famous
study by positive psychologists Ed Diner and Marty Selliban. They
looked at people who scored in the highest tenth percentile
on happiness surveys and try to figure out what makes
them so much happier than the rest of us. The
(13:07):
researchers discover the these happy people didn't spend any more
time exercising or doing religious activities. What did these happy
folks do differently? They were more social. They spent more
time around other humans than people with average levels of happiness.
The results were so strong that these researchers deemed being
around other people as a necessary condition for very high happiness.
(13:30):
Another study by Nobel Prize winning psychologist Danny Kanneman confirmed this.
He and his colleagues tested which daily activities make us
feel best the winner socializing with others. It's better than eating, shopping, relaxing,
or even watching TV. Just being with other people makes
us feel good, even if those people are strangers.
Speaker 6 (13:52):
There are lots of sources of well being standing around you.
You just have to tap into them.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
My friend Nick Epley is a professor of behavioral science
at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.
Speaker 6 (14:04):
Happiness isn't about the intensity of experiences that we have,
It's about the frequency of them. Happiness is like is
like a you know, a leaky tire on your car.
You don't have a nice conversation with somebody and then
are happy forever. But if you're having a nice conversation
with somebody on a plane, that plane ride is more
enjoyable than it would have been otherwise. But then you know,
(14:27):
once you're off the plane ride, you know your tire
goes flat a little bit. You got to do something
else to pump it back up. And so I find
a lot of these conversations are like, are like, uh,
you know, air compressors for my tires.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Next studies why we're so resistant to being more social?
Why don't we take more time to fill up our
leaky happiness tires with a quick conversation.
Speaker 6 (14:46):
People get the consequences of social interaction wrong, particularly with strangers.
Not engaging in conversation with somebody else gives you a
cost somewhere else, and people don't always seem to recognize that.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
It turns out the cost of not being social, not
taking enough time to connect with other people is that
it makes us feel pretty awful.
Speaker 6 (15:06):
Feeling lonely or isolated, just kind.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Of loneliness is now a growing epidemic around the world.
People today report feeling lonely at double the rate they
did in the nineteen eighties. Take college campuses like where
I work at Yale Nationally in the US, right now,
over sixty percent of college students report feeling very lonely
most of the time. This is higher than in any
(15:30):
other previous generation.
Speaker 6 (15:32):
A stressor like that impairs your well being at it
impairs your health.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
Recent research shows that the physical consequences of our increased
loneliness are staggering. Feeling isolated is said to be as
bad for our health as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.
If loneliness had a health warning, it would sound like
this may cause increase risk of inflammation, disrupt its leap
abnormal immune responses, depression, anxiety, higher stress levels, early cognitive decline, alcoholism,
(15:58):
cardiovascular disease, stroke, Alzheimer's, diabetes, suicide, and even early dine.
So what can we do to fight this loneliness epidemic. Well,
you can get a few hints from people who don't
feel all that lonely, people like Eleanor Wetzel.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
I'm half extrovert and half introvert, and so that part
of my personality enjoys the connection with people.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
From the moment Don Wetzel's wife welcomed me into her home,
it was obvious that this old fashioned grandmother was the
opposite of lonely. She was one of the most sociable
people I had met in a while. She had a
story for everything, including how she met Don.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
It was a blind date, so we were starting at zero,
and I think there was just a chemistry there.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
I had planned to spend only thirty minutes or so
on this interview, but I ended up chatting with Eleanor
for over two hours. We talked about our families, while
her life was like growing up, how she was able
to raise so many children and other stuff too. I
asked what her secret was, how did she connect with
people so easily. It turns out she just chats with
(17:04):
strangers whenever she can.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
I had no problem with wrecked eye content and smiles,
and you know, that's that's who we are, that's how
you relate to people. But I can see a lot
of downers with the technology that we have available. The
ATM doesn't smile back at you, marvel or showing me
their pretty eyes or whatever. So we don't want to
(17:28):
lose all of that.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
It's true that Don's ATMs have given us back time,
but they've also robbed us of an important opportunity to
connect with human tellers and our fellow bank customers. They
steal one of the small chances we have each day
to fill up our leaky happiness tires with a quick conversation,
which is why Eleanor has taken a relatively shocking stance
on ATMs.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
Well, I've actually never used one period.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
That's right, Eleanor has never used an ATM, even though
her husband is the guy that invented them. She just
prefers to chat with the teller.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
I don't think we even know yet how much he's
being lost without that interaction of human beings, the whole bit.
There's just there's so many components. I wouldn't even have
time to go into all of them, and I'm sure
I haven't even thought of all of them.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
Eleanor's right here, we're automating the humans out of everything.
Take music, for example. Back in nineteen sixty eight, if
Eleanor wanted to hear a new song, she'd have to
interact with a bunch of people. She'd have to find
a record store, ask the clerk where to find that
new song, stand in line with other folks to buy it,
and only then could she drive home with her kids
(18:39):
to throw it on her record player. But today it's different.
Speaker 3 (18:44):
Who is this Alexa that you can do everything for you?
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Every new automated convenience we introduce into our lives has
a cost, and that cost, all too often is a
social one. The problem is it's not often a cost
we even realize. The question is why. But first we
need some music to send us into the break. So
let's tease what's coming up next, Alexa, play anything by
(19:13):
the Talking Heads.
Speaker 5 (19:15):
I'm having trouble connecting.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
To the internet. Oh, I'm so sorry. Give me a moment,
the Happiness Lab will be right back.
Speaker 6 (19:32):
I ride the train into Chicago every day to my
office in Hyde Park from one of the far southside suburbs,
and every day I get on the train and I
was seeing exactly the same kind of phenomena I'd seen
it for years.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Science begins with observation, and Nick ePIE observes something on
his daily commute that is so commonplace yet so odd
when you really think about it.
Speaker 6 (19:55):
Where people would get on sit down next to their neighbors,
perfectly decent, lovely people going into Chicago to work for
the day. They would sit down, cheek to jowl next
to somebody else, and they would then ignore each other
for forty five minutes.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Most train cars are full of people, which means they're
also full of knowledge, stories and jokes, but most are
also deathly quiet.
Speaker 6 (20:19):
I mean, almost nobody ever talks on the train. The
question is why.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
Nick decided to test this. He recruited passengers sharing his
commute to work, dividing them into three different groups or conditions,
as we researchers call them. He asked each group to
act in a certain way while they were on the train.
Speaker 6 (20:37):
The one condition we told them to keep to themselves,
just focus on their day ahead, don't engage others around
you in conversation this morning. Second condition, we asked them
to do whatever they normally do, which is typically the
same as what happens in the solitude condition, almost nobody
talks to strangers on the train. And in the third condition,
we asked them to do something radical. We asked them
(20:58):
to try to make a connection with the person who
sits down next to you this morning on the train.
Try to get to know something about him or her,
so they were going to have a conversation.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
Let's think about these different groups for a second. Which
one would you be happiest in the groups in which
you could enjoy your solitude or the one that forced
you to talk to a complete stranger. You might naturally
have a pretty strong intuition here, but I bet that
intuition is wrong.
Speaker 6 (21:25):
People reported the most positive commute in the connection condition,
less positive in the control condition, and least positive in
the solitude condition, where they kept to themselves.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Being forced to talk with a stranger was far and
away the most pleasurable experience. Simply making a connection with
someone we don't know makes us feel really Good nixed
out on this very same study. In a number of
different contexts, on city buses and cabs, at the airport,
in waiting rooms, they all find the same result. People
(21:57):
are happiest when they're being social with someone. But what
about that other person?
Speaker 6 (22:03):
You could imagine that we were potentially spreading misery that
the person who has talked to maybe was I was
unhappy about this. We were like polluting the train with
all of this unwonted conversation.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
So does your conversation make other people miserable?
Speaker 4 (22:18):
Well?
Speaker 1 (22:18):
Nick tested that too by creating a fake waiting room
in his laboratory.
Speaker 6 (22:23):
They were also happier when they were talked to than
when they were not talked to, and that effect was
just as big as the effect on the people who
were instructed to talk. So I didn't I don't think
we're spreading misery on the trains or the US. Is
connecting with someone as pleasant, whether you are the one
(22:44):
who's initiating it or the one you're receiving it.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Note that Nick's not advocating harassing someone on the train
or continuing to try to talk to someone who clearly
doesn't want you to speak to them. All nick saying
is that a quick conversation can make us feel good.
The problem is that's not what we think is going
to happen. When Nick asked people to imagine how they'd
feel getting into a conversation with a stranger, they wrongly
(23:09):
predicted that it wouldn't be fun or uplifting.
Speaker 6 (23:12):
The reason that's interesting is because our expectations guide our behavior.
So if you expect it's going to be freezing cold outside,
you'll pick up a jacket. You'll wear it when you
go outside. If you expect that it's going to be
really warm outside, you won't wear a jacket. If I
expect that talking to somebody will be pleasant, I'll do it.
If I expect it'll be miserable, I won't.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
But I bet you're thinking, what if you're shy around people?
Maybe all this talking to strangers stuff works if you're
really outgoing, but maybe it sucks for introverts.
Speaker 6 (23:39):
And we did measure this, and we found actually no
difference at all between introverts and extroverts, and in across
these conditions, that is, introverts enjoyed connecting with others as
extroverts did. Introverts did not enjoy keeping to themselves in solitude,
and extroverts didn't enjoy that either. What tends to vary
(24:01):
are people's expectations about how they're going to feel. So
an introvert, because they think they're not going to enjoy
a party, is going to choose not to go, whereas
an extrovert who enjoys a party might choose to go.
On average, people tend to feel happier when they are
connecting with others, and that's true for both extroverts and introverts.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Nix's results are quite challenging for a lot of people
to hear. No matter what your personality type is, you
will increase your happiness if you interact with people you
randomly meet in stores or on public transport.
Speaker 6 (24:33):
Creates a social connection. It keeps you connected on the
right level.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
I made this very point on the CBS Morning News recently.
Happy people take time for social connection. They try to
make connections with the people on the street, and I
got some interesting reactions from the viewers. Here's one tweet
from someone who says, quote, talk to a stranger on
the bus? Are you insane? Don't talk to strangers, It's dangerous.
Didn't your mama teach you anything. Here's another one one
(24:58):
of my personal favorites. If a stranger talks to me
on a bus, I will go nuts. People die because
of shite like this. Hell no. So do you hit
similar reactions where people hear these data and are just like,
not true, not me.
Speaker 6 (25:12):
Oh yeah yeah, yeah yeah yeah No. I get it
all the time. I get a lot of pushback on
this because the expectations are so strong. So what people
are imagining, I think, are random people who might come
up to you and talk to you, and they imagine
sort of the worst case outcome. So they're imagining homeless
(25:35):
people are you know, mentally ill people or something who
are dangerous to them, or psychopaths whatever. But that's a
different situation from what we're asking people to do here.
We're just asking you to talk to a person who
happens to be sitting next to you, and the person
who happens to be sitting next to you is likely
to just be a normal person, not a psychopath.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
We don't do something that's almost certain to make us
happier because we think we'll be preyed upon by some
imaginary psycho killer. Actually we're going into the break again.
Alexa play psycho Killer by the talk, I'm having trouble
connecting to the Internet. That's so annoying. I'm so sorry.
The show will be back in a moment. Nick Epley
(26:32):
thinks we're too scared of falling victim to some psycho
killer to strike up conversations on a train. Such unfounded
fears are part of why we seem to find the
automation revolutions so alluring. Don Ze atm was the first step,
but now we're killing the human part of so many
of our interactions. I want to introduce you to someone
who's deeply worried about this new direction, someone who is
(26:55):
making changes in his own life to fight back. David Byrne.
Speaker 5 (27:00):
We're losing something, and a lot of the efficiency that
we think is there is kind of an illusion.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
This is in You probably know David as a Talking
Heads front man, but what you may not know is
that David also writes brilliant social essays. He recently authored
a fantastic article for the MIT Technology Review on the
hidden dangers of automation. It's title Eliminating the Human.
Speaker 5 (27:27):
If these things are becoming so ubiquitous, the elimination of
the human interaction, What does that mean for us as individuals,
as a society, as a community.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
David's thesis is that humans have developed over millions of
years to work, trade, have fun, and form relationships face
to face.
Speaker 5 (27:49):
You're getting all these different signals. You're getting signals from
their body language, their facial expression, what their eyes are doing,
the tone of their voice. We are social animals, That's
what we are. We're like ants and wolves, and we
are an animal that flourishes because we are social. And
(28:12):
you wonder what will happen or what is happening when
that aspect of our deep makeup starts to be taken
away from us, or not so much taken away, we
give it up voluntarily.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
David's worried that we're all voluntarily turning our backs on
our fellow humans every day thanks to new products which
promise us ease and convenience, be it an ATM or
an app to pre order our groceries, or a film
streaming service that saves us a trip to a crowded
movie theater.
Speaker 5 (28:41):
I'm not saying that whoever designed these things had in
the front of their mind. Can I come up with
a technology to eliminate some of the human interaction in
my life, but it sure seems to be the result.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
No disrespect to inventors like Don Wetzel, who is as
social as social can be. But David worries that a
relatively small section of society, namely the engineers who design
all this stuff, they're creating a world that the rest
of us must habit, and they are creating it in
their own image.
Speaker 6 (29:13):
My father was an engineer.
Speaker 5 (29:15):
I enjoy that mindset of looking at things from an
engineer's point of view, but I recognize a lot of
that and a lot of programmers, coders engineers who are
designing a lot of the things that kind of envelop
us in the contemporary world. You can sense that a
(29:39):
lot of these guys, and most of them are guys,
are not comfortable in social situations. So even if they
would not vocally say I want to make a world
where I never have to interact with a person, they
might unconsciously do that.
Speaker 6 (29:58):
That's the world that has.
Speaker 5 (29:59):
Been made for us, and whether we want to or not,
we're living in their world.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Whether or not you completely buy the stereotype that engineers
shun human company, most of us can admit that what
they've designed is often pretty tempting. Many of us have
moments where we relish opportunities to be by ourselves or
just hide away a bit.
Speaker 5 (30:22):
When I was much younger, I was much shyer, I
was much, much, much more uncomfortable in social situations. I
would create a kind of facade or character or persona
that would be my face for a social interaction, and
it was a little bit artificial in that sense. I
(30:43):
can identify and understand that a lot of people feel like,
oh no. If I can figure out a way to
navigate the world with as few annoying interactions with the human,
then very good. Let's design interfaces that speed things along
(31:05):
and help someone who is uncomfortable in social sitch situations,
for example, get through them without the pesky human.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
At the end of his MIT Tech Review article, David
argues that as we spend less and less time talking
and listening to each other, will become less tolerant of
each other's differences, will become more inclined to envy and antagonism.
It's a chilling prospect, but can science save us? Can
researchers like Nick convince the champions of automation that they're
(31:38):
getting the balance between convenience and happiness all wrong. I'm
afraid to say it doesn't look promising. Remember Nick's experiment
using trained passengers, how he found that the people he
forced into conversation with their fellow commuters had happier journeys.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
Well.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
Nick reported these findings back to the head of marketing
at the railroad company, and here was her response.
Speaker 6 (32:02):
Nick, You're not going to believe what we're about to do.
She said, we're going to roll out a new policy
on the train. We're going to put in place a
quiet car. I said, oh really, And the quiet car
is one she explained, where people are not allowed to
engage in conversation, they're not allowed to talk on their
cell phones, they're not allowed to talk to somebody sitting
(32:23):
next to them. It's supposed to be absolutely quiet.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
Nick was surprised why the train company had made a
decision that completely contradicted his well being research, and.
Speaker 6 (32:31):
She said, well, because we asked people on a survey
what they wanted, and this is what they said they wanted, which,
of course I pointed out, there is exactly what our
participants said they wanted to and it just turned out
not quite to be right. At least in terms of
their well being.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
Nick, being a good scientist, wanted to know if the
railroad people had carried out an experiment with the opposite
of a quiet car.
Speaker 6 (32:56):
Have you ever just put a chatty car on the
line where people can just get together, you know, maybe
you got snacks or something, and you can get together
and you just talk. You just you get to know
your neighbors a little bit, get to know your commuter,
your chatty car. And she laughed and she said, no,
we've never done the chatty car. But we used to
have bar cars on the trains where people would get
(33:19):
together and often they would then connect with each other there.
And I asked her to used to have the bar
cars anymore. She said, no, we don't have them anymore.
And I asked why not. I was imagining, you know,
her telling stories about people stumbling off the trains drunk
or something. But she said the real problem was they
were too crowded. That is, they were too popular, so
there were too many people who wanted to be in there.
(33:41):
That's the point at which as a behavioral scientists you
just sort of sigh, we think it clearly seems they
have clear data that people really enjoy being able to
connect with each other, and yet that service doesn't get extended,
so they canceled it because the chatty car or the
equivalent of it was too crowded.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
So if banks and railroad companies and app designers and
store owners aren't going to come to our rescue, what
are we to do to stop feeling so isolated? The
answer is pretty simple. We just need to connect with
other people, and not just our friends and family members.
We also need to make the effort to connect more
(34:24):
with strangers, the random people around us in lines and
on our commute. They matter more than we think. David
Byrne realized this. Despite his natural shyness, he's trying to
be part of the cure. He now embraces opportunities to
connect with the people who cross his path.
Speaker 5 (34:43):
Yeah, it happened the other day. The subways were messed
up and there was a Chinese guy who was really
having a heart. He had some luggage with him and
he was really having a hard time. Everything, all of
everything has changed. You know, this train's now on this line,
This train's now running on this line. This used to
be an express, now it's a local. And it was
all this we kind of figured it out together, which
(35:05):
was kind of sweet. You have made a connection. And
what I discover is very often they'll smile that you
are sharing this acknowledgment with them. They might laugh, You'll laugh,
and so it kind of well, it sounds like a cliche,
but it brightens your day for another fifteen minutes at least.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
So what have we learned in this episode? For one thing,
we too readily assume that convenience, efficiency and near instant
gratification are the roots to happiness, but that assumption is
often wrong. Tiny human interactions are the burst of air
we need for our happiness. Tires to steal. Next metaphor,
your mind might tell you a quick conversation is going
(35:52):
to be awkward, too much time, not worth it. But
those intuitions are wrong even for shy folks. So get
out there and make a new connection. Next time you
are standing in line, talk to the person next to you.
If you can't think of something to say, you could
tell them that lines are an opportunity, and that the
guy who had the inspiration for the ATM machine did
(36:15):
so while waiting in a bank line, and that his
wife has never used that invention. You could even tell
them that you heard that on a podcast, a podcast
called The Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos,
Pushkin. The Happiness Lab has just turned five years old.
It's hard to believe, but our first series went out
in the fall of twenty nineteen. Since then, we've made
a couple hundred episodes and say to all of you
out there, we've racked up more than one hundred and
(00:35):
thirty million doubtloads. We don't have much data on how
much happiness this has sparked, but I think it's probably
a ton. We've certainly tackled a lot of topics and
talked to some amazing people. But to celebrate these five years,
I've picked five episodes from the archive that holds a
special place in my heart. My producer, Ryan Dilly, has
(00:56):
been with me every step of this half decade journey.
So Ryan, tell me what the first show out of
the archive is.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
So it's an episode called Mistakingly Seeking Solid Shoot, it's
from our very first season. So why did you have
me grab this particular episode?
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Picked this episode because it's one of my favorite episodes.
I mean, which is always hard for me to say.
I love all my episodes. They're like children to me,
and so you have to love all of them. So
Mistakenly Singing Solitude is an episode about what we get
wrong when it comes to human connection, and in particular
our assumption that solitude, not chatting with people, enjoying our
space by ourselves, is maybe the right path to happiness,
(01:30):
when all the research seems to suggest that we'd be
much happier if we reached out to other people. But
this is genuinely one of my favorite. When I get asked,
you know, what are some of my favorite ones, this
one comes up at the top, and I think it's
for a couple of reasons. I really loved the science part.
It includes one of my favorite overall scientific guests, Nick Applee.
But it was also one of the first episodes that
we've recorded, I think the first episode that we recorded together,
(01:52):
right yeah, And I.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Guess it was also the first time you went on
a solo recording journey out in the field. You bet
the inventor of the ATM, didn't you, And you found
that immediately as a recalled, you found the woes of
being an audio producer, Right, Yes, that.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Was a trip that I got to take to Texas
to meet Don Walt's the inventor of the ATM, and
he had a lovely house. He actually let me journey
to his house so that I could record with him
at his house live. But his house had lots of clocks,
like he collected Google clocks that all kind of seemed
to go off at really random times, which was lovely.
(02:27):
It sounded beautiful, but it did not make for very
clean audio.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
If I re call.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
We made the best of it. I think it was
really lovely though, but yeah, there was lots and lots
of clocks going off. Since we've recorded this, you know,
five years ago, society seems to have gone in the
wrong direction since the episode aired. Whenever I get on
a train, I always lament the fact that there were
quiet cars still, but there are no chatty cars, which
is something we talk about. The chatty car is where
you can go to meet your fellow commuteritis and actually
get to know them.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Yeah, it's all a little bit depressing. I mean, when
we made the episode, I'd hope the idea for the
chatty car would resonate and some company would take it
on and we'd all have like you know, trains now
that everyone was chatting and stuff. But it didn't seem
to happen, And so I think that's another one of
the reasons that I loved this episode so much is
that I think it matters now just as much as
it did five years ago when we first put the
episode out. So given all of that, here is possibly
(03:12):
my favorite ever Happiness Lab episode. Mistakenly Seeking Solitude.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
The fighting in the streets of Saigon during the New
Year or Test Offensive made the war.
Speaker 5 (03:22):
Too real tonight.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
I have ordered aircraft and our naval vessels to make
no attacks on North Vietnam.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
It's nineteen sixty eight, a pretty tumultuous year had wrapped
in the combat.
Speaker 6 (03:34):
Ban agting helped the crock the road Now officers also
reportedly chased and fired on a radio equipped.
Speaker 5 (03:40):
Cark and very good negotiators.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
Certainly not optimistic about one hundred Peter League that one
Tumar Tumar wounded great.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
But there was one event in nineteen sixty eight that
didn't make the headlines even though it's still having a
huge effect on your well being.
Speaker 4 (03:56):
I had to wait, wait, wait, and I really got
a little bit averrogage because I knew I had the
money there, so all I had to do is, you know,
cashy check and get out of there.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
This is Don Wetzel calling a fateful day in November
of that year when he was trying to do something simple.
He just wanted to withdraw some cash at his bank.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
I was scheduled to take a trip on a Monday
morning on so on Friday, on the lunch hour, I
went to my bank to get some money. I would
say maybe eight to ten people in line. My guess is,
you know, maybe I was in that line for like
eighteen to twenty minutes just to cash and check.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Don's time was really valuable. He was a talented engineer
and vice president of a technology company that was on
the hunt for a new business. But instead of problem
solving at his desk at work, he was stuck in
a bank lobby.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
So my job was to come up with one or
more new products, and I was getting nowhere.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Half a century later, we still share Don's misery. We're
stuck in lines all the time, when we wait for
coffee in a cafe, when we stand on a crowded
train platform, when we get stuck for hours in airport security.
We know exactly what he was feeling watching time slip
through his fingers. My brother Aaron wrote a book called
(05:20):
how Many Licks? Hey, Hey, Santo's How's it going? Or
How to estimate damn near anything. I asked him to
calculate for us how much time we're likely to spend
waiting in line over our entire lifetimes.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Yeah, so, I think the number one came up with
was seven thousand hours.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Seven thousand hours waiting in line. That's more than six
months of our life stuck in some cue. That's crazy,
right With seven thousand hours, you could take a massive vacation.
You could learn a new instrument, or a new language,
or a new sport. But you're not doing any of that.
You're just waiting, staring at the back of someone's head,
(05:57):
and it sucks. We tell ourselves that standing in line
is an awful, annoying, happiness straining waste of time. But
what if we could see that line not has a
huge pain in the butt, but as an opportunity to
be happier. Our minds are constantly telling us what to
do to be happy. What if our minds are wrong?
(06:18):
What if our minds are lying to us, leading us
away from what will really make us happy. The good
news is that understanding the science of the mind can
point us all back in the right direction. You're listening
to the Happiness Lab with me, doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 5 (06:39):
Hey.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Don Don Wetzel doesn't have the same name recognition as
Thomas Edison or Steve Jobs, but he's an inventor too,
and it turns out his irritation with waiting in line
led to a creation that revolutionized the financial sector. It
has also completely changed the daily routines of ordinary people
around the world. Before I met Don, I had a
(07:03):
certain image of him in my mind. I rang the doorbell,
expecting to meet a slick, self important inventor guy. But
then ninety year old Don welcomed me into the cozy
Dallas home that he shares with his wife, Eleanor, and
I realized Don wasn't the Elon Musk type I had imagined.
Speaker 4 (07:19):
Well, I've delighted your ear.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Don was like the friendliest grandpa you've ever met. I
sat with Don and Eleanor in their living room, which
was filled with comfy pillows, smiling photos of their twelve children,
and clocks, lots of clocks. They were lovely, but clocks
are kind of the nemesis of the podcaster. And wait
till this answer stops at a second, and I'll finish up.
Speaker 6 (07:45):
I can stop that no, that's okay.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
The clocks are kind of fitting though, because Don understands
the value of time. In fact, it was that feeling
of wasted time back in nineteen sixty eight that led
to his life changing idea.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
So, while I was in line, I thought, seems to
me a teller's job mostly is cashy chick and taken deposits.
So I just got the idea that, hm, I think
a machine could do that.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
That's right. Don had just dreamed up the ATM, the
automated teller machine that millions upon millions of busy people
use every day nowadays. The idea of an ATM seems
really obvious, but Don faced a lot of resistance. When
he first pitched the idea.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
On the board of our company. There was a banker.
He thought it was the dumbest idea he had ever heard.
He said, we have tellers to do that. Has anybody
told you that?
Speaker 5 (08:46):
Yet?
Speaker 4 (08:46):
You know, we do have tellers that do exactly what
you're saying your machine can do, So why you think
anybody would buy this?
Speaker 1 (08:54):
That board member wasn't entirely crazy. There had been earlier
attempts at automated bank machines and they'd all failed, including
one that took deposits. It's inventor, Luther Simjion lamented the
only people using the machine were prostitutes and gamblers who
didn't want to deal with the teller face to face.
The genius of Don's ATM is that it won the
trust of millions of regular customers who loved its convenience.
Speaker 4 (09:17):
You know, everybody prefers to get things done quicker, and
you know, the ATM was a quick and easy way
anybody could use an ATM, really, because it's very simple.
Stick the card in, key in your pin number, and bingo,
here comes the money if you got it in the bank,
of course.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
But now in hindsight, can you see that this started,
you know, in some ways a revolution of convenience?
Speaker 4 (09:41):
Well, I never thought of it that way, really, Laurie.
Now I'll tell you a story about that. You know,
I had to come up with a forecast as to
how many of these ATMs were going to sell, and
I felt like we could sell four thousand of these machines.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
I think there might have been four thousand just in
the in the airport where I was just at DFW today.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
Well, at the latest report that I heard throughout the world.
They estimate there is one point three million ATMs installed nowadays.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
But the real success of the ATM, according to Don,
is that it improves people's well being. It gets them
out of those annoying lines.
Speaker 4 (10:22):
It just made sense that nobody wanted to wait in
the tell A line like I did, so it makes
every bank customer happy to get in and get out
and do some other things.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
A bit more free time is something we all need,
and down simple idea has probably freed up millions, possibly
billions of hours the world over. But it turns out
there's an awful downside to all this convenience and save time,
one that are lying minds don't even realize. Don Wetzel's
intuition was that most people want a bit of extra
(10:56):
free time, then it'll make us happier, and the science
backs him up. Simply put, we all feel way too
busy today. Many of us experience what scientists call time famine.
We're literally starving for time, and that famished feeling has
a negative effect on our well being. In fact, people
who report feelings short on time are more likely to
(11:17):
be depressed, anxious, and less happy than people who feel
like they have lots of free time. Psychologists have even
come up with a term for that amazing feeling you
get when, say, a meeting is canceled and you suddenly
have a free hour you didn't expect. We call it
time affluence, and those rare moments when we feel wealthy
in time can make us feel amazing. It's one of
(11:39):
the reasons that every once in a while, I sometimes
surprise my Yale students by canceling my Happiness class, and
their reactions show just how important a little unexpected time
off can be. One student even burst into tears. She
said it was the first time she had an hour
off all semester. She'd almost forgotten what it was like
(11:59):
to have some free time, so adding even a few
extra minutes to our perceived time banks can feel really good.
But recent studies also suggest something rather intuitive. That is,
we misestimate just how busy we really are. While there's
lots of work showing that we feel busier than ever before,
there is very little evidence showing that we actually are busier,
(12:22):
which is kind of weird. It's as though our minds
tell us we're super busy all the time, but in
reality it's not as bad as we think. But there's
another even more insidious way our mind leads us astray
when we try to save some time. It turns out
there's an opportunity cost that comes from avoiding those bank lines,
and the cost is a social one. Long lines are frustrating,
(12:45):
but they're also an opportunity to be around other people,
and the sheer amount of time we spend around other
people actually predicts how happy we are. Take one famous
study by positive psychologists Ed Diner and Marty Selliban. They
looked at people who scored in the highest tenth percentile
on happiness surveys and try to figure out what makes
them so much happier than the rest of us. The
(13:07):
researchers discover the these happy people didn't spend any more
time exercising or doing religious activities. What did these happy
folks do differently? They were more social. They spent more
time around other humans than people with average levels of happiness.
The results were so strong that these researchers deemed being
around other people as a necessary condition for very high happiness.
(13:30):
Another study by Nobel Prize winning psychologist Danny Kanneman confirmed this.
He and his colleagues tested which daily activities make us
feel best the winner socializing with others. It's better than eating, shopping, relaxing,
or even watching TV. Just being with other people makes
us feel good, even if those people are strangers.
Speaker 6 (13:52):
There are lots of sources of well being standing around you.
You just have to tap into them.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
My friend Nick Epley is a professor of behavioral science
at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.
Speaker 6 (14:04):
Happiness isn't about the intensity of experiences that we have,
It's about the frequency of them. Happiness is like is
like a you know, a leaky tire on your car.
You don't have a nice conversation with somebody and then
are happy forever. But if you're having a nice conversation
with somebody on a plane, that plane ride is more
enjoyable than it would have been otherwise. But then you know,
(14:27):
once you're off the plane ride, you know your tire
goes flat a little bit. You got to do something
else to pump it back up. And so I find
a lot of these conversations are like, are like, uh,
you know, air compressors for my tires.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Next studies why we're so resistant to being more social?
Why don't we take more time to fill up our
leaky happiness tires with a quick conversation.
Speaker 6 (14:46):
People get the consequences of social interaction wrong, particularly with strangers.
Not engaging in conversation with somebody else gives you a
cost somewhere else, and people don't always seem to recognize that.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
It turns out the cost of not being social, not
taking enough time to connect with other people is that
it makes us feel pretty awful.
Speaker 6 (15:06):
Feeling lonely or isolated, just kind.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Of loneliness is now a growing epidemic around the world.
People today report feeling lonely at double the rate they
did in the nineteen eighties. Take college campuses like where
I work at Yale Nationally in the US, right now,
over sixty percent of college students report feeling very lonely
most of the time. This is higher than in any
(15:30):
other previous generation.
Speaker 6 (15:32):
A stressor like that impairs your well being at it
impairs your health.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
Recent research shows that the physical consequences of our increased
loneliness are staggering. Feeling isolated is said to be as
bad for our health as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.
If loneliness had a health warning, it would sound like
this may cause increase risk of inflammation, disrupt its leap
abnormal immune responses, depression, anxiety, higher stress levels, early cognitive decline, alcoholism,
(15:58):
cardiovascular disease, stroke, Alzheimer's, diabetes, suicide, and even early dine.
So what can we do to fight this loneliness epidemic. Well,
you can get a few hints from people who don't
feel all that lonely, people like Eleanor Wetzel.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
I'm half extrovert and half introvert, and so that part
of my personality enjoys the connection with people.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
From the moment Don Wetzel's wife welcomed me into her home,
it was obvious that this old fashioned grandmother was the
opposite of lonely. She was one of the most sociable
people I had met in a while. She had a
story for everything, including how she met Don.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
It was a blind date, so we were starting at zero,
and I think there was just a chemistry there.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
I had planned to spend only thirty minutes or so
on this interview, but I ended up chatting with Eleanor
for over two hours. We talked about our families, while
her life was like growing up, how she was able
to raise so many children and other stuff too. I
asked what her secret was, how did she connect with
people so easily. It turns out she just chats with
(17:04):
strangers whenever she can.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
I had no problem with wrecked eye content and smiles,
and you know, that's that's who we are, that's how
you relate to people. But I can see a lot
of downers with the technology that we have available. The
ATM doesn't smile back at you, marvel or showing me
their pretty eyes or whatever. So we don't want to
(17:28):
lose all of that.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
It's true that Don's ATMs have given us back time,
but they've also robbed us of an important opportunity to
connect with human tellers and our fellow bank customers. They
steal one of the small chances we have each day
to fill up our leaky happiness tires with a quick conversation,
which is why Eleanor has taken a relatively shocking stance
on ATMs.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
Well, I've actually never used one period.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
That's right, Eleanor has never used an ATM, even though
her husband is the guy that invented them. She just
prefers to chat with the teller.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
I don't think we even know yet how much he's
being lost without that interaction of human beings, the whole bit.
There's just there's so many components. I wouldn't even have
time to go into all of them, and I'm sure
I haven't even thought of all of them.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
Eleanor's right here, we're automating the humans out of everything.
Take music, for example. Back in nineteen sixty eight, if
Eleanor wanted to hear a new song, she'd have to
interact with a bunch of people. She'd have to find
a record store, ask the clerk where to find that
new song, stand in line with other folks to buy it,
and only then could she drive home with her kids
(18:39):
to throw it on her record player. But today it's different.
Speaker 3 (18:44):
Who is this Alexa that you can do everything for you?
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Every new automated convenience we introduce into our lives has
a cost, and that cost, all too often is a
social one. The problem is it's not often a cost
we even realize. The question is why. But first we
need some music to send us into the break. So
let's tease what's coming up next, Alexa, play anything by
(19:13):
the Talking Heads.
Speaker 5 (19:15):
I'm having trouble connecting.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
To the internet. Oh, I'm so sorry. Give me a moment,
the Happiness Lab will be right back.
Speaker 6 (19:32):
I ride the train into Chicago every day to my
office in Hyde Park from one of the far southside suburbs,
and every day I get on the train and I
was seeing exactly the same kind of phenomena I'd seen
it for years.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Science begins with observation, and Nick ePIE observes something on
his daily commute that is so commonplace yet so odd
when you really think about it.
Speaker 6 (19:55):
Where people would get on sit down next to their neighbors,
perfectly decent, lovely people going into Chicago to work for
the day. They would sit down, cheek to jowl next
to somebody else, and they would then ignore each other
for forty five minutes.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Most train cars are full of people, which means they're
also full of knowledge, stories and jokes, but most are
also deathly quiet.
Speaker 6 (20:19):
I mean, almost nobody ever talks on the train. The
question is why.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
Nick decided to test this. He recruited passengers sharing his
commute to work, dividing them into three different groups or conditions,
as we researchers call them. He asked each group to
act in a certain way while they were on the train.
Speaker 6 (20:37):
The one condition we told them to keep to themselves,
just focus on their day ahead, don't engage others around
you in conversation this morning. Second condition, we asked them
to do whatever they normally do, which is typically the
same as what happens in the solitude condition, almost nobody
talks to strangers on the train. And in the third condition,
we asked them to do something radical. We asked them
(20:58):
to try to make a connection with the person who
sits down next to you this morning on the train.
Try to get to know something about him or her,
so they were going to have a conversation.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
Let's think about these different groups for a second. Which
one would you be happiest in the groups in which
you could enjoy your solitude or the one that forced
you to talk to a complete stranger. You might naturally
have a pretty strong intuition here, but I bet that
intuition is wrong.
Speaker 6 (21:25):
People reported the most positive commute in the connection condition,
less positive in the control condition, and least positive in
the solitude condition, where they kept to themselves.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Being forced to talk with a stranger was far and
away the most pleasurable experience. Simply making a connection with
someone we don't know makes us feel really Good nixed
out on this very same study. In a number of
different contexts, on city buses and cabs, at the airport,
in waiting rooms, they all find the same result. People
(21:57):
are happiest when they're being social with someone. But what
about that other person?
Speaker 6 (22:03):
You could imagine that we were potentially spreading misery that
the person who has talked to maybe was I was
unhappy about this. We were like polluting the train with
all of this unwonted conversation.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
So does your conversation make other people miserable?
Speaker 4 (22:18):
Well?
Speaker 1 (22:18):
Nick tested that too by creating a fake waiting room
in his laboratory.
Speaker 6 (22:23):
They were also happier when they were talked to than
when they were not talked to, and that effect was
just as big as the effect on the people who
were instructed to talk. So I didn't I don't think
we're spreading misery on the trains or the US. Is
connecting with someone as pleasant, whether you are the one
(22:44):
who's initiating it or the one you're receiving it.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Note that Nick's not advocating harassing someone on the train
or continuing to try to talk to someone who clearly
doesn't want you to speak to them. All nick saying
is that a quick conversation can make us feel good.
The problem is that's not what we think is going
to happen. When Nick asked people to imagine how they'd
feel getting into a conversation with a stranger, they wrongly
(23:09):
predicted that it wouldn't be fun or uplifting.
Speaker 6 (23:12):
The reason that's interesting is because our expectations guide our behavior.
So if you expect it's going to be freezing cold outside,
you'll pick up a jacket. You'll wear it when you
go outside. If you expect that it's going to be
really warm outside, you won't wear a jacket. If I
expect that talking to somebody will be pleasant, I'll do it.
If I expect it'll be miserable, I won't.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
But I bet you're thinking, what if you're shy around people?
Maybe all this talking to strangers stuff works if you're
really outgoing, but maybe it sucks for introverts.
Speaker 6 (23:39):
And we did measure this, and we found actually no
difference at all between introverts and extroverts, and in across
these conditions, that is, introverts enjoyed connecting with others as
extroverts did. Introverts did not enjoy keeping to themselves in solitude,
and extroverts didn't enjoy that either. What tends to vary
(24:01):
are people's expectations about how they're going to feel. So
an introvert, because they think they're not going to enjoy
a party, is going to choose not to go, whereas
an extrovert who enjoys a party might choose to go.
On average, people tend to feel happier when they are
connecting with others, and that's true for both extroverts and introverts.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Nix's results are quite challenging for a lot of people
to hear. No matter what your personality type is, you
will increase your happiness if you interact with people you
randomly meet in stores or on public transport.
Speaker 6 (24:33):
Creates a social connection. It keeps you connected on the
right level.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
I made this very point on the CBS Morning News recently.
Happy people take time for social connection. They try to
make connections with the people on the street, and I
got some interesting reactions from the viewers. Here's one tweet
from someone who says, quote, talk to a stranger on
the bus? Are you insane? Don't talk to strangers, It's dangerous.
Didn't your mama teach you anything. Here's another one one
(24:58):
of my personal favorites. If a stranger talks to me
on a bus, I will go nuts. People die because
of shite like this. Hell no. So do you hit
similar reactions where people hear these data and are just like,
not true, not me.
Speaker 6 (25:12):
Oh yeah yeah, yeah yeah yeah No. I get it
all the time. I get a lot of pushback on
this because the expectations are so strong. So what people
are imagining, I think, are random people who might come
up to you and talk to you, and they imagine
sort of the worst case outcome. So they're imagining homeless
(25:35):
people are you know, mentally ill people or something who
are dangerous to them, or psychopaths whatever. But that's a
different situation from what we're asking people to do here.
We're just asking you to talk to a person who
happens to be sitting next to you, and the person
who happens to be sitting next to you is likely
to just be a normal person, not a psychopath.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
We don't do something that's almost certain to make us
happier because we think we'll be preyed upon by some
imaginary psycho killer. Actually we're going into the break again.
Alexa play psycho Killer by the talk, I'm having trouble
connecting to the Internet. That's so annoying. I'm so sorry.
The show will be back in a moment. Nick Epley
(26:32):
thinks we're too scared of falling victim to some psycho
killer to strike up conversations on a train. Such unfounded
fears are part of why we seem to find the
automation revolutions so alluring. Don Ze atm was the first step,
but now we're killing the human part of so many
of our interactions. I want to introduce you to someone
who's deeply worried about this new direction, someone who is
(26:55):
making changes in his own life to fight back. David Byrne.
Speaker 5 (27:00):
We're losing something, and a lot of the efficiency that
we think is there is kind of an illusion.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
This is in You probably know David as a Talking
Heads front man, but what you may not know is
that David also writes brilliant social essays. He recently authored
a fantastic article for the MIT Technology Review on the
hidden dangers of automation. It's title Eliminating the Human.
Speaker 5 (27:27):
If these things are becoming so ubiquitous, the elimination of
the human interaction, What does that mean for us as individuals,
as a society, as a community.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
David's thesis is that humans have developed over millions of
years to work, trade, have fun, and form relationships face
to face.
Speaker 5 (27:49):
You're getting all these different signals. You're getting signals from
their body language, their facial expression, what their eyes are doing,
the tone of their voice. We are social animals, That's
what we are. We're like ants and wolves, and we
are an animal that flourishes because we are social. And
(28:12):
you wonder what will happen or what is happening when
that aspect of our deep makeup starts to be taken
away from us, or not so much taken away, we
give it up voluntarily.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
David's worried that we're all voluntarily turning our backs on
our fellow humans every day thanks to new products which
promise us ease and convenience, be it an ATM or
an app to pre order our groceries, or a film
streaming service that saves us a trip to a crowded
movie theater.
Speaker 5 (28:41):
I'm not saying that whoever designed these things had in
the front of their mind. Can I come up with
a technology to eliminate some of the human interaction in
my life, but it sure seems to be the result.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
No disrespect to inventors like Don Wetzel, who is as
social as social can be. But David worries that a
relatively small section of society, namely the engineers who design
all this stuff, they're creating a world that the rest
of us must habit, and they are creating it in
their own image.
Speaker 6 (29:13):
My father was an engineer.
Speaker 5 (29:15):
I enjoy that mindset of looking at things from an
engineer's point of view, but I recognize a lot of
that and a lot of programmers, coders engineers who are
designing a lot of the things that kind of envelop
us in the contemporary world. You can sense that a
(29:39):
lot of these guys, and most of them are guys,
are not comfortable in social situations. So even if they
would not vocally say I want to make a world
where I never have to interact with a person, they
might unconsciously do that.
Speaker 6 (29:58):
That's the world that has.
Speaker 5 (29:59):
Been made for us, and whether we want to or not,
we're living in their world.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Whether or not you completely buy the stereotype that engineers
shun human company, most of us can admit that what
they've designed is often pretty tempting. Many of us have
moments where we relish opportunities to be by ourselves or
just hide away a bit.
Speaker 5 (30:22):
When I was much younger, I was much shyer, I
was much, much, much more uncomfortable in social situations. I
would create a kind of facade or character or persona
that would be my face for a social interaction, and
it was a little bit artificial in that sense. I
(30:43):
can identify and understand that a lot of people feel like,
oh no. If I can figure out a way to
navigate the world with as few annoying interactions with the human,
then very good. Let's design interfaces that speed things along
(31:05):
and help someone who is uncomfortable in social sitch situations,
for example, get through them without the pesky human.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
At the end of his MIT Tech Review article, David
argues that as we spend less and less time talking
and listening to each other, will become less tolerant of
each other's differences, will become more inclined to envy and antagonism.
It's a chilling prospect, but can science save us? Can
researchers like Nick convince the champions of automation that they're
(31:38):
getting the balance between convenience and happiness all wrong. I'm
afraid to say it doesn't look promising. Remember Nick's experiment
using trained passengers, how he found that the people he
forced into conversation with their fellow commuters had happier journeys.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
Well.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
Nick reported these findings back to the head of marketing
at the railroad company, and here was her response.
Speaker 6 (32:02):
Nick, You're not going to believe what we're about to do.
She said, we're going to roll out a new policy
on the train. We're going to put in place a
quiet car. I said, oh really, And the quiet car
is one she explained, where people are not allowed to
engage in conversation, they're not allowed to talk on their
cell phones, they're not allowed to talk to somebody sitting
(32:23):
next to them. It's supposed to be absolutely quiet.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
Nick was surprised why the train company had made a
decision that completely contradicted his well being research, and.
Speaker 6 (32:31):
She said, well, because we asked people on a survey
what they wanted, and this is what they said they wanted, which,
of course I pointed out, there is exactly what our
participants said they wanted to and it just turned out
not quite to be right. At least in terms of
their well being.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
Nick, being a good scientist, wanted to know if the
railroad people had carried out an experiment with the opposite
of a quiet car.
Speaker 6 (32:56):
Have you ever just put a chatty car on the
line where people can just get together, you know, maybe
you got snacks or something, and you can get together
and you just talk. You just you get to know
your neighbors a little bit, get to know your commuter,
your chatty car. And she laughed and she said, no,
we've never done the chatty car. But we used to
have bar cars on the trains where people would get
(33:19):
together and often they would then connect with each other there.
And I asked her to used to have the bar
cars anymore. She said, no, we don't have them anymore.
And I asked why not. I was imagining, you know,
her telling stories about people stumbling off the trains drunk
or something. But she said the real problem was they
were too crowded. That is, they were too popular, so
there were too many people who wanted to be in there.
(33:41):
That's the point at which as a behavioral scientists you
just sort of sigh, we think it clearly seems they
have clear data that people really enjoy being able to
connect with each other, and yet that service doesn't get extended,
so they canceled it because the chatty car or the
equivalent of it was too crowded.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
So if banks and railroad companies and app designers and
store owners aren't going to come to our rescue, what
are we to do to stop feeling so isolated? The
answer is pretty simple. We just need to connect with
other people, and not just our friends and family members.
We also need to make the effort to connect more
(34:24):
with strangers, the random people around us in lines and
on our commute. They matter more than we think. David
Byrne realized this. Despite his natural shyness, he's trying to
be part of the cure. He now embraces opportunities to
connect with the people who cross his path.
Speaker 5 (34:43):
Yeah, it happened the other day. The subways were messed
up and there was a Chinese guy who was really
having a heart. He had some luggage with him and
he was really having a hard time. Everything, all of
everything has changed. You know, this train's now on this line,
This train's now running on this line. This used to
be an express, now it's a local. And it was
all this we kind of figured it out together, which
(35:05):
was kind of sweet. You have made a connection. And
what I discover is very often they'll smile that you
are sharing this acknowledgment with them. They might laugh, You'll laugh,
and so it kind of well, it sounds like a cliche,
but it brightens your day for another fifteen minutes at least.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
So what have we learned in this episode? For one thing,
we too readily assume that convenience, efficiency and near instant
gratification are the roots to happiness, but that assumption is
often wrong. Tiny human interactions are the burst of air
we need for our happiness. Tires to steal. Next metaphor,
your mind might tell you a quick conversation is going
(35:52):
to be awkward, too much time, not worth it. But
those intuitions are wrong even for shy folks. So get
out there and make a new connection. Next time you
are standing in line, talk to the person next to you.
If you can't think of something to say, you could
tell them that lines are an opportunity, and that the
guy who had the inspiration for the ATM machine did
(36:15):
so while waiting in a bank line, and that his
wife has never used that invention. You could even tell
them that you heard that on a podcast, a podcast
called The Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos,
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