December 3, 2024 • 42 mins
It's Giving Tuesday - a time when many people donate to charity (using websites like this: givingmultiplier.org/happiness). Giving money to help people makes them feel good, but it can also make you feel great too. Last year, Happiness Lab listeners gave over $100,000 to raise a whole village in Rwanda out of extreme poverty. Dr Laurie hears the stories of how we all helped transform lives in Kibobo.
With the aid of happiness expert, Nick Epley, we explain why helping Kibobo felt so uplifting and how we can make the act of giving a daily happiness habit.
If you want to donate money to help people in places like Kibobo - or give to any other charity you care to support - go to givingmultiplier.org/happiness.
This episode of The Happiness Lab on the joy of giving is brought to you by the 2024 Subaru Share the Love Event. From now until January 2nd, when you get a new Subaru, Subaru and its retailers will donate a minimum of $300 to charity.
To learn more, go to Subaru.com/share.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners, Welcome to an episode brought
to you by the twenty twenty four Subaru Share the
love of it and I'm pretty excited because today is
one of my favorite holidays, Giving Tuesday. Giving Tuesday is
the one day of the year that focuses on giving back,
(00:36):
whether that's gifting money to your favorite charity, checking in
on a friend, or doing a random act of kindness
for a stranger. Study after study shows that engaging in
actions like these can have a big impact on our happiness,
and that's the reason we tend to make a big
deal out of Giving Tuesday. We're at the Happiness Lab.
If you're a fan of the show, you'll remember that
each Giving Tuesday we offer listeners an opportunity to help
(00:59):
folks in need. In years past, we've partnered with groups
like giving multiplier dot org, a site that allows you
to donate not only to your favorite cause, but also
to a set of super effective charity is recommended by experts,
where every one of your dollars will do the most good.
Last year, we focused our efforts on just one of
these super effective charities. Give Directly. Give Directly strives to
(01:19):
end global poverty. Through a rather creative strategy, they find
a community in need and give every single member of
that community so much needed cash, no strings attached.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
What we do is we send about one thousand dollars
to each of the households in those villages.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
This is Gloria and Gibert give directly, his country director
in Rwanda, explaining where the donations usually go.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Ten percent of the money goes to busic needs, so
that would be food and the most essential items in
the house. Another twenty to twenty five percent goes to
house renovation, and that's usually a basic need. If you're
being rained on, you don't think straight and you don't
continue sending the children to school and so on and
so forth. And then the large portion, about seventy percent
(02:03):
usually goes towards productive investment. For example, if you buy
a goat here, that can turn into five votes within
three years, right, and that means true revenue for the family.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Gloria and her colleagues that give directly have found that
letting people make their own choices about these cash transfers
is incredibly cost effective, and the money doesn't just disappear,
It kickstarts the local economy, making everyone better off.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
The researcher keep directly demonstrate that you get a two
point five multiplier effect. So for every dollar that we sent,
you actually get an effect of two point five dollars
a circulating in the market.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
After learning about the effectiveness of cash transfers, I couldn't
wait to try them out. So last Giving Tuesday, I
invited Happiness Lab listeners to take part in one of
Give Directly It's projects, and we had a very ambitious goal.
We took one struggling village and vowed to raise enough
money to get every single household in that community out
of extreme poverty. Gloria's on the show to tell you
more about the community. We picked a place called Kibobo.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Sheboboy is remote, quite isolated village in Randa. It's that
the peripherse of Kigali, which is the capital. In general.
The population in Kiboboy is quite poor and lives under
a dollar a day.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
That's right, one dollar a day. The World Bank defines
extreme poverty as households that survive on less than two
dollars and fifteen cents a day. Before Happiness Lab listeners
stepped in, nearly everyone in Kebobo was in that dire position.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
What you would have in Kiboboy is very little access
to drinking water. This translates into long trips one hour
and more and by the time they bring back a
jerry cab full of water, they have to decide whether
to shower or to feed the children. Those are the
choices that these villagers are confronted with.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
Imagine having to walk for over an hour just to
get something safe to drink. These are the conditions that
Kebobo residents faced every day. They lack the home comforts
that so many of us take for granted.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Roofing is very poor, there's no flooring, and most of
the time sanitation is a problem, so you don't have
access to a lad train and you sleep on the floor.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
These are admittedly huge challenges, but Gift Directly has found
that a little kindness can go a long way towards
fixing things in a place like Cabobo.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
A dollar in Rwanda has way more value than a
dollar in the US. What it does here is it
transforms her family's life, it transforms a community's life.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
And that was our goal. I wanted to rally Happiness
Lab listeners like you to donate enough money to completely
transform the life of every single resident of Cabobo. That's
hundreds and hundreds of people. Now I knew my listeners
were a generous bunch, but could we really raise enough
money to help an entire village. The answer, of course
was yes, yes we could, and yes we did.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Gibobo has about te hundred and ninety three families and
each of them was able to receive a cash transfer
of about eleven hundred dollars. We are very grateful to
have received that gift, very generous and very impactful.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
I want to let that sink in for a second.
We helped every single family and the entire village of
Kebobo get a cash transfer of over one thousand dollars.
That is absolutely incredible. Take the effect it's had on
one Cobobo resident, Tails four. Here he is talking about
(05:28):
what life was like before we all donated. My name
is Tadus for we are a family of seven.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
Before receiving the transfers, we often had to go without
meals and it was heartbreaking when our little children are
for food and we had nothing to give them. After
receiving cash transfers, we bought our on land for farming,
I also bought a cow, which is truly valuable as
it provides both medic for our family and fertilizer for farming.
I'm hopeful that we will have a great harvest. My
(05:59):
son needed two hundred dollars to purchase a motorbike for work,
and now he's working as a moto taxi driver. Before
the transfers, I had very old and torne clothes and
I was not computed to meet other people. Are no
longer embarrassed to meet people or go to any event.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
He's a very proud man. He smiles all the time.
He looks good, he looks clean, his wife looks happy.
He's also managed to send his daughter and his two
grandchildren to school, and his daughter, particularly who couldn't access
school back then, is getting really good grades.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
And tell usforce family is not the only one to
experience such radical improvements.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
You have people who have medical debt. So another family,
the mother of the family very sick before we got there,
and they managed to clear about seven hundred dollars of that,
and the alternative to that would have been that they
sell the one little plot of land they were farming on.
So really, the cash transfers have come to save them
(06:58):
and still left them with extra allowing them to continue
on the better path that they would have not reached
if we hadn't been there.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Give Directly has continued studying the impact of our donation,
and Gloria says that many families found ways to spend
their money and purchases that will have a positive impact
on their families and communities for years to come.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
The households that we found under a dollar a day
are now ranging between two point five dollars a day
to three dollars a day today.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Wow, so they like literally double their triple their income.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Definitely. I'll give you another example. Most of the recipients
in kebobo bota cow. But in return from the cow,
you get five liters of milk a day, and you
can sell four liters of milk and you bring back
the one litter your children and your family, and that
provides for the nutritional input that so many families are lacking.
(07:52):
If that cow then has two paths over the span
of three years, you have saved the family.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
But Gloria also shared examples of families that made even
more creative investments, ones that I couldn't have imagined when
we began this project.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
So for example, there's a couple called Newland Alin and
it started the first pub in the village. And that
could be an atypical choice. Why would you spend the
money towards the pub. But what they explain is this
acts as a retail shop during the day so they
can make money and at the end of the day,
everybody gathers around them, they can serve drinks. And they've
(08:29):
described so much loughter, so much joy at the end
of the day, so much relaxation that happens, and that
was one of their objectives. They were like, how can
we get the community more together, so to say, And
now they are exploring the idea of a restaurant.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
You mentioned something about a mattress. Share that story with
me if you would.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
A mattress is considered luxury in Randi and you slip
on the floor. One of the first purchases is a
mattress and it costs you about sixty to seventy dollars
in Rwanda. But that's true luxury and most of the
families in Kibobo village have had that on their list
of purchases, said Beatrice, who lived there. That was purchased
(09:12):
number one, and they now confirmed that they sleep way
more comfortably than before. Beatrice was sick before, so that's
an extra layer of comfort that you have managed to
provide her.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
When we teamed up with Give Directly, I had a
guess about the kinds of things our money would be
spent on, stuff like when livestock, school books, and building repairs,
but I didn't know how our donations would actually feel
to the people on the receiving end. Talking to Gloria
had me beaming. I was so happy for Tilos four
and the other residents of Gobobo, and so proud of
us for sending whatever money we could. Hearing Gloria share
(09:46):
what we were able to accomplish was just incredible.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
The first thing you noticed when you're get in Gibobo
is how many people smile at you. That's the most
basic way of expressing the effect of what we are doing,
and before that it was a different feeling. And that's
the most powerful thing we can do in life, whether
it's giving cash, transfers or something else. It's all about
the love that you convey by sharing what you have.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
When I think about what we were able to do
in Cabobo, I'm brought to tears, But why don't we
do this more often? What gets in the way of
so many of us doing good in the world. We'll
find out when this special Giving Tuesday episode of the
Happiness Lab returns from the break Welcome Back. I wanted
(10:36):
to better understand what gets in the way of us
doing as much good as we can for others, So
I decided to ask an academic expert and a Happiness
Lab regular.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
I'm nickke Blame, a professor of behavioral science at the
University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, and I study
mind reading for a living, the inferences we make about
each other's thoughts and beliefs and attitudes, and mostly about
how we screw that up and misunderstand each other in
lots of different ways.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
My first question for Nick was why giving to others
makes us feel so good. One answer, he said, comes
from a psychological concept known as self determination theory.
Speaker 4 (11:06):
This theory proposes we have kind of three basic motivations
or needs. One is relatedness connectedness, another is competency feeling
like we are capable agents we can do things effectively
in the world. And autonomy that we feel like we're
responsible for this thing. And kindness, particularly when it's effective,
(11:28):
really hits all three of these in a major, major way.
So it's going right to the sweet spot of what
motivates us. Kindness connects us with others. When you do
something positive or somebody else and you can see that
it had a positive impact, that pokes right on that
relatedness motive and satisfies it really well, particularly when it's
(11:48):
a stranger, when it's somebody you're not already connected to,
when you do something really powerful for them that creates
a connection that wasn't there before. That's powerful. It's also
showing your competency that you are able to do something
really powerful for somebody else when you put your mind
to it, sometimes big, sometimes relatively small, and when you
(12:09):
feel responsible for that, when you feel more competent as
a result of that, when you try to do something
kind and it is effective, that tends to feel great.
And most often our efforts to be kind are effective.
When you pass along a compliment to somebody, when you
get somebody a bed when they need it, that works,
That works, and so that really hits the competency button
(12:32):
as well. And then when you're choosing to do this
when you're the one who's decided to initiate this action
and you feel responsible for it. That hits the autonomy button.
So it really hits the trifecta. I think of our
motivations when we're doing kind things for other people.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
I was totally miscalibrated on just how nice it would feel.
And this is something that I know you've studied a lot,
just like kind of how bad our miscalibrations are. You've
used this term under sociality. What's that?
Speaker 4 (12:59):
Yes, So, undersociality is a concept we used to describe
a broad set of empirical results we find where it seems,
as far as we can tell, we might not be
social enough for our own wellbeing. And part of that stems,
I think from the very experience that you had, which
is just underestimating how positive your act will feel for
(13:20):
somebody else, how much of a positive impact you might
be able to have on somebody else by reaching out
and doing this act of kindness. So with your give
directly campaign, typically when we you know, when we give
money to a charity, we don't necessarily see the outcome.
We don't see how much good we're actually doing for
somebody else, and it can be easy then to underestimate
just how much good is actually being done. You got
(13:42):
to see it directly, the positive impact you were having
on somebody else, and so that was big. The other thing, though,
that I think we seem to miss when we are
doing kind things for other people is that a kind
act does two things for the recipient. On the one hand,
there is some objective thing that we have done for them,
(14:02):
so getting somebody a mattress that they can sleep on
when they didn't have one, allowing somebody to go to
school when they could, and those things are objective outcomes
that matter. But in addition, a kind act also conveys
relational connection to the recipient. It makes them feel connected
to somebody else, It makes them realize somebody cares about them,
(14:23):
It makes them feel seen. That is a profound expression
of warmth to reach out to do something positive for
somebody else, and warmth is one of the things that
we value most in other people. And when somebody is
kind to us, that just feels great because it was kind.
So a recipient gets two things. One is the thing
(14:43):
that you're giving. But the thing we really seem to
undervalue or underestimate is the positive impact that just the
act itself, the expression of warmth, will have on somebody else.
You did really big things with all of your listeners
for this community in Rwanda, really big things. But in
our daily lives, even small things that we do for
other people around us that are easy to do, that
(15:04):
are everyday habits we can take on tend to have
a surprisingly positive impact because we think the positive impact
is going to come from just the thing that we're doing,
and it does, but it also comes from the fact
that we have been kind to them as well, and
that's something that we don't seem to anticipate.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
And you've done all these clever studies to show just
how systematically we underestimate the value that comes from these
two things together. And one of my favorite studies that
you've looked at was in the context of giving away
hot chocolate. So explain this hot chocolate study.
Speaker 4 (15:32):
Yeah, So this was a very simple, at least conceptually
simple thing that we asked people to do in Chicago.
Wasn't bagos a little thing? We went to downtown Chicago,
So if you visited our fair windy city, you will
notice that right smack dab, downtown is a massive park
and there's a skating rink down there, and it's a
very popular spot in the winter time, and there is
(15:52):
a kiosk right next to it that happens to sell
hot chocolate. It gets cold here in the winter, and
it's hard to think of something that feels warmer, both
literally and figuratively on a cold day than getting hot chocolate.
And so what we had people do was in our experiments,
if they were interest in parts, we walked up to
them and we told them, congratulations, you're in this experiment.
(16:13):
We are today giving you a free cup of hot chocolate.
Now you can keep it for yourself if you'd like to.
But what we'd really like you to do is to
look around and find somebody here and give that cup
of hot chocolate away to them. And this was our ticket,
and so they weren't giving away an actual cup of
hot chocolate. They were giving away this ticket that just
turned out to be easier experimentally if they were willing,
(16:35):
and nearly everybody was. A few people gave it to
their mostly girlfriends sitting next to them, but most people
gave it away to somebody else overwhelmingly before we then
went up and bought the cup of hot chocolate and
went out and gave it to their recipient. We asked
them to anticipate how's the recipient going to feel about this,
positive or negative they're going to feel on a couple
of different measures. We then went and got the cup
(16:57):
of hot chocolate. We gave it to the recipient. We
told them that somebody here in the park decided to
give this to you today as an act of kindness,
and they reported how it actually made them feel. Now
it's important to understand is every listener here on this
podcast can appreciate that that would feel pretty good to receive,
and our givers anticipated that they knew that it would
(17:19):
be pretty positive, but it turned out it was even
more positive than that for the recipient. And what we
learned in subsequent experiments that the part that they seemed
to be missing wasn't that they would like a cup
of hot chocolate. When we gave a cup of hot
chocolate away as a prize that they won as part
of the experiment, the givers thought that the recipients would
(17:41):
like that just as much as getting the cup of
hot chocolate. As an active kindness. It didn't matter how
they got the gift, what mattered was that they got
the hot chocolate. The recipients, however, they felt better when
they got the hot cup of hot chocolate as an
active kindness than when they won the hot cup of
hot chocolate in a lottery because the cup of hot
chocolate when it was an act of kindness was nice
because it was hot chocolate. A plus, it had this
(18:04):
added dose of kindness to it that made it feel
even a little better. And that's what our givers missed,
was that the kindness would make it feel even better.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
And you've also found in some of your studies that
this is like, not just true in the sort of
experimental set up with the hot chocolate, it's also true
just in these really straightforward acts of kindness that people
come up with on their own. Are people also miscalibrated
where it's kind of their choice about what act to
give and it's less experimentally induced.
Speaker 4 (18:29):
Absolutely they are. We find this consistently as well when
we just let people choose an active kindness that they
could do. So one of the ways I do this
is with my MBA students here at the University of Chicago.
I asked them to go out into the world and
do some active kindness for somebody, They just keep their
eyes out. Sometimes they plan it, sometimes it's spontaneous. Sometimes
(18:51):
they're big things, sometimes they're tiny little things. Sometimes folks
will say I held a door for somebody else, which is,
you know, a little bit of a stretch for an
active kindness.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
They're mva is they get to start smiling.
Speaker 4 (19:03):
They're busy people, right, Yeah, they're starting somewhere. So when
we let them just choose it, and then when we
reach out to the recipient of that, we find that
the recipients also value that act of kindness more than
the givers anticipated. We find it across the board.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
And so this is a so called prosociality paradox. We're
kind of consistently undervaluing like how much our act would
mean to other people. And I kind of when we
talked about one of the reasons that is right, we
underestimate the warmth. I think, particularly in this give directly case,
there seems to be something else that's going on, which
is sort of a funny framing effect, which is like
when I think of like donating five bucks, it's like, well,
(19:41):
it's not that helpful for me. It's a cup of coffee.
But when I look at how that money help the
people in Cobobo. It's like enormous, right, this is allowing
people to like completely change their lives around.
Speaker 4 (19:50):
Yeah, So I think, to go back to what we
were talking about just a moment before, when we do
some active kindness for somebody else, we're focused on the
thing that we're doing, the act that we're engaging in,
what we're giving somebody, what that means to us. Right
as a giver, we can't but evaluate the world from
our own unique egocentric perspective on it. So when we
(20:12):
in the United States think of five dollars, we think
about what that means to us, when we think about
the effort we had to go through and giving this
money away. It was super easy, It wasn't that hard.
It just doesn't seem like a big thing to us.
But to a recipient of that, if they're in a
more precarious spot in their life, five dollars isn't five
(20:33):
dollars to us. It's five dollars to them. And that
currency exchange is big. And so when you go across
perspective gaps like that, particularly one that goes in that direction,
we're likely to think this is a much smaller material
benefit to the recipient than it actually is.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
I mean, I think this is true in the financial
situation with this particular case of to give directly, but
I think just in kind acts that we can engage
in with the people around us that I imagine that
perspective taking bias comes in in a different way, which
is like, you know, say I have a friend who's struggling,
who's really a need, who's had a bad day in
a bad way. When I'm simulating what it would feel
like for me to reach out, I'm like, well, it's
(21:09):
not going to matter because I'm not the one who's
in a bad way. But if she's in a bad way,
then maybe I'm missing something. This is something we also
see in some research.
Speaker 4 (21:17):
Absolutely, so we've conducted a bunch of experiments on expressions
of support. Right, so this simple thing, you know somebody's
going through a hard time, you reach out to them
to express your support. It can often be hard for
us to reach out to people at those times, because
again we're thinking about our act in terms of its
objective features. What am I going to do for you,
Laurie when you are in a tough situation To actually
(21:40):
change the situation you're in to actually make you feel
better when you've lost the spouse or when you're sick
in some way. But what the recipient values, again is
not just the objective act. Somebody has just been diagnosed
with some bad health condition. You're not going to remedy
that health condition. You're not. That can often be a
barrier to reaching out because we think that's what we
(22:01):
have to do. That's not necessarily what the recipient values. Remember,
the recipient values the relational connection just like we do.
That's the part we can often miss. So psychologists in
lots of different ways, from simple text messages to reaching
out with a letter, which is what we've done in
some of our experiments. We find that people underestimate how
positively someone will respond when you just reach out to them,
(22:24):
tell them something even as simple as small as hey,
I'm thinking of you.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
And this is something that I think we get wrong.
In a different case, another way that we can sort
of boost this relational connection, which is in some ways
by asking for help. Right when I need help with
something and I'm like, oh, I don't want to burden anybody.
I'm kind of in my own headspace about it. But
to someone who with whom I ask for help, that
kind of feels really nice. And you've done some lovely
work showing that we don't ask for help enough. Right.
Speaker 4 (22:48):
Yeah, But I'm going to turn the tables on here
a little bit. Oh now, I'm going to turn the
spotlight on you.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Turn the spotlight on me. Well, you'll find out what
that means when The Happiness Lab returns in a moment.
Welcome back to our special Giving Tuesday episode of The
Happiness Lab. Before the break, I asked kindness expert Nick
(23:17):
Epley why we don't ask for help as much as
we should. But before answering my question, Nick wanted to
flip the script a bit.
Speaker 4 (23:23):
I'll tell you about my research in a minute, but
I'll tell you about a personal experience to your listeners. So,
last year, my daughter, Sion, our daughter, was diagnosed with
ovarian cancer. And that's a very scary thing to have
a teenage daughter diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She had the
best medical care in the world. She's in wonderful shape
(23:44):
right now. Everything is great, But that was a very
hard time. It was a very hard time for us.
And when we were in the hospital, you will remember
I reached out to you because we are big fans
of yours, Sione and my wife Jen in particular, we
reached out to you because I knew that because of
(24:05):
who you are, I knew that you would be able
to do something for her her that would just really
lift her up. Wouldn't cure of ovarian cancer, but it
would lift her up in a time when she really
need to be uplifted. And you sent us T shirts
which we still wear today. You sent us Happiness Lab mugs,
(24:27):
which we still drink coffee from today. The most amazing,
most amazing thing you did one day you were you
were given a talk in Boston, a live a live
talk I remember, and uh you. You had the audience
(24:51):
give a shout out to see you on held up
your phone and had them call out, get well soon
to see on.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
I got a message for you.
Speaker 4 (25:06):
We're all thinking of you with the Happiness lif And
that was just so powerful. It was so powerful for
us and so uplifting for her. And I knew. I knew,
just because I've seen ten thousand data points and this
kind of stuff, I knew that this was something that
you would be able to do that would not be
(25:26):
a huge amount of effort for you. But that would
have such a meaningful impact on my daughter because she
would feel seen and uplifted by a celebrity even in
our lives. And that was just really really huge. And
I am certain you underestimated just how meaningful that was.
This morning, when I left the house and told CeON
(25:49):
and Jen, my daughter and wife, that I was going
to be doing this podcast, they just smiles all around. Oh,
we love Laurie say hello. That just stands out for
us like a beacon. And I think the important.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
Well before you say the important part. I mean, it's
so incredible to hear you tell the story and you
know you had a little thanks over email, but I'm
watching you almost tear up explaining the story. And two
things from my side. Right First, I had no idea
it impacted you and see On that much. I mean,
if I had guess, I'm like, oh, it was probably
cool to get the video or to get the T shirts.
I had no idea you'd still be thinking about it,
you'd still remember it, that you'd still be using the mugs. Right, So,
(26:27):
completely underestimated the value to you. But on my end,
I thought it was so when you reached out and
I got that email about Seon. I thought, not excited,
it's not the right word, but I felt so touch
that you shared that with me. It seemed like such
a personal thing about your family. I knew we're friends
and colleagues and you've been on the show, but it
just made me feel so much more connected to you,
to know you much more personally, and that felt so
(26:49):
nice to kind of feel like you were willing to
share that with me, And I was super excited to
be able to do that, you know, like to me,
you know, the Happiness lab t shirts didn't feel like
a big deal, you know, even the part about like,
you know, having our live audience do that. But it
was just fun for me, and honestly, it was fun
for the folks at the live show. I think if
I had to pick, you know, one of the best
moments of that live show, they kind of enjoyed most,
(27:09):
Like you know, streaming for ceone. So it's kind of
off in two ways, right. It's like, you didn't realize
the value that I would get from engaging in helping you,
and I didn't realize, you know, even now, the value
that you got out of that action, and we you
and I are both like the world, You're a world
extra on this. I'm the podcast, right, we should know
how to do this better.
Speaker 4 (27:28):
Yeah, well, I will say, I think to my credit,
at least I have learned the power that kindness can have,
particularly things that seem small and easy for somebody to do.
We also learned through our research that people tend to
underestimate how positively others respond when you reach out and
ask them for help, ask them to do things that
(27:48):
they can do, give them an opportunity to experience relational connection, competency,
and autonomy. I've actually come to think differently about asking
for help from other people when I need it, when
I think other people can really be helpful, I've come
to think of it as an act of selfishness because
I've deprived somebody else of the opportunity to feel good
and more connected to us by helping us in some way.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
And I think this is a really important point on
Giving Tuesday right, which is that we often think of
acts of kindness as giving something right. We have to
give money to this campaign to give directly, which is great,
but one of the things we can actually do to
help someone else is to let them help us. That
can be really important for anyone who's listening, who's feeling
like this giving Tuesday. I either don't have the finances
(28:33):
or I don't have the bandwidth to kind of do
what I would normally like to do. Sometimes asking for
help can be that gift back. It's a way to
sort of give to other people too. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (28:41):
So it turns out that when people, for instance, ask
for advice, there's some interesting research on this, they think
they're going to be seen as not very competent. But
in fact, when you ask somebody for advice, I mean,
think about how you feel when you actually give what
you think is helpful advice to somebody else. That makes
feel good you're helping somebody else. That's an example of
how we can ask for help when we need it
(29:03):
in ways that are beneficial both to us and of
the person giving us. And I think you're right. We
think of this often as as zero sum. I'm giving
in your getting, and there's a zero sum nature to this,
but that's not the way kindness actually works psychologically. It
can uplift both sides, particularly when we do kindness or
we seek kindness in a way that's authentic, that has
(29:24):
good intentions at heart, that's what tends to be uplifting.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
So we just talked about ways that you can ask
for help, and that's kind of participating in giving Tuesday,
even though it doesn't feel like it because you might,
in some sense even be getting monetary stuff from other people.
Are there other ways that we can kind of give
to others that don't cost us any money.
Speaker 4 (29:43):
So the biggest ways to do this are in psychological
self affirming sorts of ways. And I think the two
that at least we've studied in our research that are
the clearest examples of this involve psychological acts of kindness,
where we express our appreciation to somebody else, either in
the form of gratitude or in the form of compliments.
(30:04):
Those are cases where you're not exchanging money. If I
tell you that I like the necklace here wearing today,
or that I'm so grateful for the kindness you showed
us when we were going through a hard time, I'm
not exchanging anything of objective value there. But what I'm
doing is I am uplifting you in some way. I'm
affirming you as a positive person when I'm feeling it.
(30:28):
What's interesting to me is that in many cases, when
we feel these emotions, when we feel appreciation of gratitude
for somebody else, when we have a kind thought about
somebody else, we're a little nervous to share it, right,
We're a little reluctant to send it out. One of
my good friends in the field and somebody you know well,
Jillian Sanstrom who's in the UK, just ran a demonstration
(30:51):
in her class there in the UK where she had
people write gratitude letters, gave them an opportunity to send it.
Even when they wrote it, most people didn't send a letter.
They were nervous, right. We've seen that in our research
as well. We had people in one experiment generate compliments
to send us somebody else. In the experiment, we gave
them a two minute window to send it in the
(31:13):
experiment like they had already generated. It wasn't hard. They
just had to send it out. And most people didn't
send along the compliment. They were waiting for the right
time or something. It was awkward at the moment. There
were yet other barriers, right, And those barriers are interesting
to me. We find in our work that with both
appreciation and compliments, people think it'll have a less positive
(31:35):
impact on the recipient than it actually does. In the
cases of expressing gratitude, these are folks who typically know
each other very well, been together for a long time,
or this is a person they've been very close to
for a long time, and yet even with that, they
still think it'll be weird for somebody to receive this
letter out of the blue. I do this in my
MBA class every year, and every year I get stories
(31:57):
from my letter writers that they just couldn't believe. Notes
back saying, dude, don't send this to me at work.
I can't sit here and cry at my desk. Right
really really powerful, surprisingly powerful. I never expected my mother
would respond this way. It is your mother, and you
are underestimating how uplifted she'll be when you actually express
(32:20):
your true beliefs to her, even small compliments. I was
on the train coming in this morning, my morning commute.
I got onto the platform in Philosmore, where we lived.
There was a woman standing there who had a shacket
like this is like a jacket shirt sort of thing
that I thought my wife would love that. That looks
really nice. So I went up to her and I
(32:41):
told her I love that jacket, and I think my
wife would love it. Can you just tell me where
you got it from? Right? And she was. She just
beamed instantly when I told her how great this looked
and shared with it and I found it on the
way in and sh she'll be getting it for Christmas.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Jen, don't listen, don't listen.
Speaker 4 (33:02):
No, Well, it doesn't always have to be a surprise.
But what's interesting is that we often have these barriers.
We think it'll be awkward to give this compliment, and
we find people just tend to be off about that.
It's more positive for the recipient that we think it'll be.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
This kind of reminds me of another domain that I
think we can help others that we often forget. And
it comes from an experience I had recently. So a
good friend of mine, I think someone you know, Nick
Jason Mitchell. He and his wife just had another baby
and I found this out and I was thinking, like, oh,
I want to help, Maybe I should kick some food
or something, but I wasn't really sure how to do it.
(33:37):
And what another friend of ours did, which was amazing,
was she set up kind of a meal train. So
she emailed all of Jason's friends and was like, hey,
here's the dates, here's what they like, you know, here's
you know, bring it. And this friend was really helpful
to me because I was sitting there thinking like, oh,
I want to do something, but I kind of didn't
have the permission or the structure. I think this is
something else we can do a lot. Right, if you
(33:59):
have a cause and need set up the structure, email
your friends and say here's how you're going to do it.
Here's how much money, here's how you can help.
Speaker 4 (34:06):
We can think about intervening on these barriers and too way.
One is at the personal level. What is it that
I can do to overcome some of these barriers a
little more wisely in cases where the barrier is kind
of misplaced, so you know, that would involve you figuring
out what is the right thing to do or what
is the thing I'm comfortable doing right. That's an individual
level intervention. But the other thing that is actually more
(34:28):
effective at scale is a system level intervention. These are
sometimes called S level interventions by psychologists having to do
with a system level. And that's what your friend did
is set up a context that overcame this barrier. I'm
not sure what to do. I'm not sure how to
do it right, Those are barriers to doing kind things.
Overcame that barrier for a lot of you and allowed
(34:49):
people to contribute here. I did something like that with
these barriers in mind a couple of years ago, when
one of our staff members here at the University of
Chicago was going through a cancer scare of her own.
We set up a gratitude chain, and so we set
up for a few months at a time and extended
it for a few few months. More people were on
(35:10):
call just to write something that they were grateful to
this person. For this person is amazing. People have no
shortage of things to be grateful for towards her. But
what that meant is that she got a gratitude letter
every day spread out over time. She keeps them now
on a scrapbook, and we had way more people express
their gratitude and appreciation to this person than would have otherwise.
(35:33):
Because you're right, we set up this kind of permission
structure for people to do it, and that was very effective.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
So we could to talk about one last barrier that
I know for me winds up impeding more than i'd
like my ability to do kind actions for other peoples.
And that's the barrier of time, right, you know, even
in this case with this good friend of mine had
a baby, I was like, oh, man, I want to
do something. I want to get a onesie bag something.
And I went back into my calendar and it kind
of went away.
Speaker 4 (35:57):
Right.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
I looked at like, when can I actually go over
and visit him? I just didn't have any time, And
so any helpful strategies for how to kind of fight
the sort of time famine that we all face that
gets in the way of us doing nice stuff for others.
Speaker 4 (36:08):
Two ways I would think about this. One is to
remind yourself of the concept, the psychological concept of affordances,
which is that any given situation has a variety of
different possible outcomes. So a lot of different ways as
could go. So our interview could have gone in many
different directions. Here, my commute in on the train this
morning could have gone in many different directions. My day,
(36:30):
you know, I'm walking from the elevator to my office.
I could do different things in that. Right, There are opportunities.
If you start keeping an eye out for opportunities for connection,
things will pop up that don't require any more effort
from you, don't require any more time, they're just sitting there.
It's low hanging fruit on the tree you just hadn't
seen before, and you start spotting things. So, for instance,
(36:52):
on the train ride in this morning, I spotted this
woman wearing this really nice shacket, and it just I
knew I should say, hey, that looks fantastic, right, And
I came into the building this morning, there's a guy
wearing a really nice suit, and I just thought to
compliment on them that he looked really sharp.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
Acts.
Speaker 4 (37:09):
When you start looking for them, they don't require more time.
You're already doing something anyway, don't require any more energy.
They're like freebies almost and you just don't see them otherwise,
And once you start looking for them, you see more
of them. So that's one thing, is to start paying attention.
The second is to disassociate your sense that the positive
reaction to kindness is a function of how much you do,
(37:33):
how hard it is for you to do, how much
effort you put into this thing, and that's just not
quite true, right. So a charity like give directly has
positive impact on people that make it easy to give
money that really matters for folks. It's not hard and
has a huge impact on them and our daily lives.
The little things we can do for others around us
(37:54):
are the things that really have an outsized influence. So
when you're thinking about what you can do for Jason,
you're thinking, oh, I got to put a lot of
effort into it, right, and oh that's hard, and thinking
that he'll appreciate it more when it's really effortful. No,
he just would like lasagna on a Thursday night, eight right,
And it doesn't matter whether you cooked at yourself and
(38:14):
mailed it. It just would you know, you just want
to make So when we think that something requires a
lot of effort, that can often be a barrier and
we won't do it. Once you start to realize that
that's not required. Just getting the thing done. Just doing
the thing is what really matters. Too often, then I
think it frees you up a little bit. We just
had a teaching assistant of mine from last spring, calf Fredrickson,
(38:37):
and his wife just had a baby as well, and
I wanted to send them something, but it was hard
to get the card and you know, get the thing
mailed to me and I'll wrap it and send it.
So instead I just send it through Amazon. Now that's
not as nice. It's not as personal, but I got
it done right, and that's what I try to focus
on more, is just getting it done.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
And I think this is really powerful because it's also
an active kindness to yourself. I know, sometimes when I'm
trying to do something kind, I'm so focused on that
competence piece that you talked about before that I'm like
beating myself up and I'm not doing it right. I
mean I had this even when I was making the
food for Jason, like what kind of food should I make?
Seems like Chili's really easy? But is that not cool?
And it's like, no, just be kind to yourself. What
(39:20):
matters is the act you can kind of give yourself
some grace that it doesn't have to be perfect. It's
still actually going to have more impact than you think exactly.
Speaker 4 (39:27):
The difference between good and really good is small. It
can sometimes require a huge amount of investment on your
side with very little impact on the recipient side. So
do the thing that you can do that is good
enough because it'll likely be great for the recipient.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
So any last minute advice on this giving Tuesday of
what people can do to be happier themselves and make
the world a better place.
Speaker 4 (39:50):
So I think probably two things, opportunities for kindness and
forgiving are all around us. They're just everywhere in our
day to day lives, and they don't have to be
big things. One of the most influential findings for me
from research on happiness and wellbeing is how important just
repeated act are. We've talked before, happiness is like a
(40:12):
leaky tire. You pump it up and you feel good
for a little bit, and then it leaks back down
and you pump it back, and that means you got
to keep doing it, keep repeating it right, And turns
out the amount of uplift or pumping up you get
and others get from an act of kindness isn't as
dependent on how big the act is as you might imagine, right,
And so I think we can really enrich our lives
(40:34):
if we realize if we just keep an eye out
for the low hanging fruit around us, that's a good
way to keep kindness kind of sustainable because there's just
so many In addition to the big things we might do,
the rational effective things we might do, there are also
so many little uplifting things we can do expressing kindness
expressing gratitude, giving compliments, saying all to people being civil
(40:57):
don't require a lot of effort, but keep that tire
pumped up in a way that keeps us and others
feeling good.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
I started the show by saying how much I like
Giving Tuesday. But Nick's right to point out that we
should really be trying to generosity a daily habit, not
just an annual thing. But Giving Tuesday is as good
a day as any to start that long term habit.
So if you have a dollar or two to spare,
why not start right this minute by making a donation
that can help people in need, the same way we
(41:23):
help the people of Kebobo last year.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
The work goes on the list of villages like Kibobo
is still long. I wish one day we don't have
to send clash transfers to people, but in the meantime
there is a need, then we need to continue to work.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
For twenty twenty four, we're teaming up with our friends
a Giving Multiplier to handle all your donations. So head
to giving Multiplier dot org slash happiness. That's Giving Multiplier
dot org slash happiness. On that site, you can send
money to villages like Kebobo via give directly while at
the same time directing money to a charity that's close
to your heart. What could those charities be well. This
(42:01):
show was sponsored by the twenty twenty four Subaru Share
the Love event. Subaru has a long track record of
supporting good causes, and while making this episode, I got
to learn about some of them. There's Meals on Wheels,
which brings nutrition and friendly visits to our seniors, The
National Park Foundation, which is helping all of us get
out in nature. There's Make a Wish, which is allowing
the dreams of ill children to come true. And the ASPCA,
(42:23):
which protects animals from cruelty while giving carring pet owners
the help they need. The point is there are lots
of groups out there doing good work, so head over
to giving multiplier dot org and donate what you can
that's giving multiplier dot org slash happiness. May your Giving
Tuesday donation be just the first step in exploring both
the good that you're able to do in the world
(42:45):
and the good that being kinder can do for you.
Happy Giving Tuesday everyone,
Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners, Welcome to an episode brought
to you by the twenty twenty four Subaru Share the
love of it and I'm pretty excited because today is
one of my favorite holidays, Giving Tuesday. Giving Tuesday is
the one day of the year that focuses on giving back,
(00:36):
whether that's gifting money to your favorite charity, checking in
on a friend, or doing a random act of kindness
for a stranger. Study after study shows that engaging in
actions like these can have a big impact on our happiness,
and that's the reason we tend to make a big
deal out of Giving Tuesday. We're at the Happiness Lab.
If you're a fan of the show, you'll remember that
each Giving Tuesday we offer listeners an opportunity to help
(00:59):
folks in need. In years past, we've partnered with groups
like giving multiplier dot org, a site that allows you
to donate not only to your favorite cause, but also
to a set of super effective charity is recommended by experts,
where every one of your dollars will do the most good.
Last year, we focused our efforts on just one of
these super effective charities. Give Directly. Give Directly strives to
(01:19):
end global poverty. Through a rather creative strategy, they find
a community in need and give every single member of
that community so much needed cash, no strings attached.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
What we do is we send about one thousand dollars
to each of the households in those villages.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
This is Gloria and Gibert give directly, his country director
in Rwanda, explaining where the donations usually go.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Ten percent of the money goes to busic needs, so
that would be food and the most essential items in
the house. Another twenty to twenty five percent goes to
house renovation, and that's usually a basic need. If you're
being rained on, you don't think straight and you don't
continue sending the children to school and so on and
so forth. And then the large portion, about seventy percent
(02:03):
usually goes towards productive investment. For example, if you buy
a goat here, that can turn into five votes within
three years, right, and that means true revenue for the family.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Gloria and her colleagues that give directly have found that
letting people make their own choices about these cash transfers
is incredibly cost effective, and the money doesn't just disappear,
It kickstarts the local economy, making everyone better off.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
The researcher keep directly demonstrate that you get a two
point five multiplier effect. So for every dollar that we sent,
you actually get an effect of two point five dollars
a circulating in the market.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
After learning about the effectiveness of cash transfers, I couldn't
wait to try them out. So last Giving Tuesday, I
invited Happiness Lab listeners to take part in one of
Give Directly It's projects, and we had a very ambitious goal.
We took one struggling village and vowed to raise enough
money to get every single household in that community out
of extreme poverty. Gloria's on the show to tell you
more about the community. We picked a place called Kibobo.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Sheboboy is remote, quite isolated village in Randa. It's that
the peripherse of Kigali, which is the capital. In general.
The population in Kiboboy is quite poor and lives under
a dollar a day.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
That's right, one dollar a day. The World Bank defines
extreme poverty as households that survive on less than two
dollars and fifteen cents a day. Before Happiness Lab listeners
stepped in, nearly everyone in Kebobo was in that dire position.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
What you would have in Kiboboy is very little access
to drinking water. This translates into long trips one hour
and more and by the time they bring back a
jerry cab full of water, they have to decide whether
to shower or to feed the children. Those are the
choices that these villagers are confronted with.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
Imagine having to walk for over an hour just to
get something safe to drink. These are the conditions that
Kebobo residents faced every day. They lack the home comforts
that so many of us take for granted.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Roofing is very poor, there's no flooring, and most of
the time sanitation is a problem, so you don't have
access to a lad train and you sleep on the floor.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
These are admittedly huge challenges, but Gift Directly has found
that a little kindness can go a long way towards
fixing things in a place like Cabobo.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
A dollar in Rwanda has way more value than a
dollar in the US. What it does here is it
transforms her family's life, it transforms a community's life.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
And that was our goal. I wanted to rally Happiness
Lab listeners like you to donate enough money to completely
transform the life of every single resident of Cabobo. That's
hundreds and hundreds of people. Now I knew my listeners
were a generous bunch, but could we really raise enough
money to help an entire village. The answer, of course
was yes, yes we could, and yes we did.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Gibobo has about te hundred and ninety three families and
each of them was able to receive a cash transfer
of about eleven hundred dollars. We are very grateful to
have received that gift, very generous and very impactful.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
I want to let that sink in for a second.
We helped every single family and the entire village of
Kebobo get a cash transfer of over one thousand dollars.
That is absolutely incredible. Take the effect it's had on
one Cobobo resident, Tails four. Here he is talking about
(05:28):
what life was like before we all donated. My name
is Tadus for we are a family of seven.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
Before receiving the transfers, we often had to go without
meals and it was heartbreaking when our little children are
for food and we had nothing to give them. After
receiving cash transfers, we bought our on land for farming,
I also bought a cow, which is truly valuable as
it provides both medic for our family and fertilizer for farming.
I'm hopeful that we will have a great harvest. My
(05:59):
son needed two hundred dollars to purchase a motorbike for work,
and now he's working as a moto taxi driver. Before
the transfers, I had very old and torne clothes and
I was not computed to meet other people. Are no
longer embarrassed to meet people or go to any event.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
He's a very proud man. He smiles all the time.
He looks good, he looks clean, his wife looks happy.
He's also managed to send his daughter and his two
grandchildren to school, and his daughter, particularly who couldn't access
school back then, is getting really good grades.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
And tell usforce family is not the only one to
experience such radical improvements.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
You have people who have medical debt. So another family,
the mother of the family very sick before we got there,
and they managed to clear about seven hundred dollars of that,
and the alternative to that would have been that they
sell the one little plot of land they were farming on.
So really, the cash transfers have come to save them
(06:58):
and still left them with extra allowing them to continue
on the better path that they would have not reached
if we hadn't been there.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Give Directly has continued studying the impact of our donation,
and Gloria says that many families found ways to spend
their money and purchases that will have a positive impact
on their families and communities for years to come.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
The households that we found under a dollar a day
are now ranging between two point five dollars a day
to three dollars a day today.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Wow, so they like literally double their triple their income.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Definitely. I'll give you another example. Most of the recipients
in kebobo bota cow. But in return from the cow,
you get five liters of milk a day, and you
can sell four liters of milk and you bring back
the one litter your children and your family, and that
provides for the nutritional input that so many families are lacking.
(07:52):
If that cow then has two paths over the span
of three years, you have saved the family.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
But Gloria also shared examples of families that made even
more creative investments, ones that I couldn't have imagined when
we began this project.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
So for example, there's a couple called Newland Alin and
it started the first pub in the village. And that
could be an atypical choice. Why would you spend the
money towards the pub. But what they explain is this
acts as a retail shop during the day so they
can make money and at the end of the day,
everybody gathers around them, they can serve drinks. And they've
(08:29):
described so much loughter, so much joy at the end
of the day, so much relaxation that happens, and that
was one of their objectives. They were like, how can
we get the community more together, so to say, And
now they are exploring the idea of a restaurant.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
You mentioned something about a mattress. Share that story with
me if you would.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
A mattress is considered luxury in Randi and you slip
on the floor. One of the first purchases is a
mattress and it costs you about sixty to seventy dollars
in Rwanda. But that's true luxury and most of the
families in Kibobo village have had that on their list
of purchases, said Beatrice, who lived there. That was purchased
(09:12):
number one, and they now confirmed that they sleep way
more comfortably than before. Beatrice was sick before, so that's
an extra layer of comfort that you have managed to
provide her.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
When we teamed up with Give Directly, I had a
guess about the kinds of things our money would be
spent on, stuff like when livestock, school books, and building repairs,
but I didn't know how our donations would actually feel
to the people on the receiving end. Talking to Gloria
had me beaming. I was so happy for Tilos four
and the other residents of Gobobo, and so proud of
us for sending whatever money we could. Hearing Gloria share
(09:46):
what we were able to accomplish was just incredible.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
The first thing you noticed when you're get in Gibobo
is how many people smile at you. That's the most
basic way of expressing the effect of what we are doing,
and before that it was a different feeling. And that's
the most powerful thing we can do in life, whether
it's giving cash, transfers or something else. It's all about
the love that you convey by sharing what you have.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
When I think about what we were able to do
in Cabobo, I'm brought to tears, But why don't we
do this more often? What gets in the way of
so many of us doing good in the world. We'll
find out when this special Giving Tuesday episode of the
Happiness Lab returns from the break Welcome Back. I wanted
(10:36):
to better understand what gets in the way of us
doing as much good as we can for others, So
I decided to ask an academic expert and a Happiness
Lab regular.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
I'm nickke Blame, a professor of behavioral science at the
University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, and I study
mind reading for a living, the inferences we make about
each other's thoughts and beliefs and attitudes, and mostly about
how we screw that up and misunderstand each other in
lots of different ways.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
My first question for Nick was why giving to others
makes us feel so good. One answer, he said, comes
from a psychological concept known as self determination theory.
Speaker 4 (11:06):
This theory proposes we have kind of three basic motivations
or needs. One is relatedness connectedness, another is competency feeling
like we are capable agents we can do things effectively
in the world. And autonomy that we feel like we're
responsible for this thing. And kindness, particularly when it's effective,
(11:28):
really hits all three of these in a major, major way.
So it's going right to the sweet spot of what
motivates us. Kindness connects us with others. When you do
something positive or somebody else and you can see that
it had a positive impact, that pokes right on that
relatedness motive and satisfies it really well, particularly when it's
(11:48):
a stranger, when it's somebody you're not already connected to,
when you do something really powerful for them that creates
a connection that wasn't there before. That's powerful. It's also
showing your competency that you are able to do something
really powerful for somebody else when you put your mind
to it, sometimes big, sometimes relatively small, and when you
(12:09):
feel responsible for that, when you feel more competent as
a result of that, when you try to do something
kind and it is effective, that tends to feel great.
And most often our efforts to be kind are effective.
When you pass along a compliment to somebody, when you
get somebody a bed when they need it, that works,
That works, and so that really hits the competency button
(12:32):
as well. And then when you're choosing to do this
when you're the one who's decided to initiate this action
and you feel responsible for it. That hits the autonomy button.
So it really hits the trifecta. I think of our
motivations when we're doing kind things for other people.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
I was totally miscalibrated on just how nice it would feel.
And this is something that I know you've studied a lot,
just like kind of how bad our miscalibrations are. You've
used this term under sociality. What's that?
Speaker 4 (12:59):
Yes, So, undersociality is a concept we used to describe
a broad set of empirical results we find where it seems,
as far as we can tell, we might not be
social enough for our own wellbeing. And part of that stems,
I think from the very experience that you had, which
is just underestimating how positive your act will feel for
(13:20):
somebody else, how much of a positive impact you might
be able to have on somebody else by reaching out
and doing this act of kindness. So with your give
directly campaign, typically when we you know, when we give
money to a charity, we don't necessarily see the outcome.
We don't see how much good we're actually doing for
somebody else, and it can be easy then to underestimate
just how much good is actually being done. You got
(13:42):
to see it directly, the positive impact you were having
on somebody else, and so that was big. The other thing, though,
that I think we seem to miss when we are
doing kind things for other people is that a kind
act does two things for the recipient. On the one hand,
there is some objective thing that we have done for them,
(14:02):
so getting somebody a mattress that they can sleep on
when they didn't have one, allowing somebody to go to
school when they could, and those things are objective outcomes
that matter. But in addition, a kind act also conveys
relational connection to the recipient. It makes them feel connected
to somebody else, It makes them realize somebody cares about them,
(14:23):
It makes them feel seen. That is a profound expression
of warmth to reach out to do something positive for
somebody else, and warmth is one of the things that
we value most in other people. And when somebody is
kind to us, that just feels great because it was kind.
So a recipient gets two things. One is the thing
(14:43):
that you're giving. But the thing we really seem to
undervalue or underestimate is the positive impact that just the
act itself, the expression of warmth, will have on somebody else.
You did really big things with all of your listeners
for this community in Rwanda, really big things. But in
our daily lives, even small things that we do for
other people around us that are easy to do, that
(15:04):
are everyday habits we can take on tend to have
a surprisingly positive impact because we think the positive impact
is going to come from just the thing that we're doing,
and it does, but it also comes from the fact
that we have been kind to them as well, and
that's something that we don't seem to anticipate.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
And you've done all these clever studies to show just
how systematically we underestimate the value that comes from these
two things together. And one of my favorite studies that
you've looked at was in the context of giving away
hot chocolate. So explain this hot chocolate study.
Speaker 4 (15:32):
Yeah, So this was a very simple, at least conceptually
simple thing that we asked people to do in Chicago.
Wasn't bagos a little thing? We went to downtown Chicago,
So if you visited our fair windy city, you will
notice that right smack dab, downtown is a massive park
and there's a skating rink down there, and it's a
very popular spot in the winter time, and there is
(15:52):
a kiosk right next to it that happens to sell
hot chocolate. It gets cold here in the winter, and
it's hard to think of something that feels warmer, both
literally and figuratively on a cold day than getting hot chocolate.
And so what we had people do was in our experiments,
if they were interest in parts, we walked up to
them and we told them, congratulations, you're in this experiment.
(16:13):
We are today giving you a free cup of hot chocolate.
Now you can keep it for yourself if you'd like to.
But what we'd really like you to do is to
look around and find somebody here and give that cup
of hot chocolate away to them. And this was our ticket,
and so they weren't giving away an actual cup of
hot chocolate. They were giving away this ticket that just
turned out to be easier experimentally if they were willing,
(16:35):
and nearly everybody was. A few people gave it to
their mostly girlfriends sitting next to them, but most people
gave it away to somebody else overwhelmingly before we then
went up and bought the cup of hot chocolate and
went out and gave it to their recipient. We asked
them to anticipate how's the recipient going to feel about this,
positive or negative they're going to feel on a couple
of different measures. We then went and got the cup
(16:57):
of hot chocolate. We gave it to the recipient. We
told them that somebody here in the park decided to
give this to you today as an act of kindness,
and they reported how it actually made them feel. Now
it's important to understand is every listener here on this
podcast can appreciate that that would feel pretty good to receive,
and our givers anticipated that they knew that it would
(17:19):
be pretty positive, but it turned out it was even
more positive than that for the recipient. And what we
learned in subsequent experiments that the part that they seemed
to be missing wasn't that they would like a cup
of hot chocolate. When we gave a cup of hot
chocolate away as a prize that they won as part
of the experiment, the givers thought that the recipients would
(17:41):
like that just as much as getting the cup of
hot chocolate. As an active kindness. It didn't matter how
they got the gift, what mattered was that they got
the hot chocolate. The recipients, however, they felt better when
they got the hot cup of hot chocolate as an
active kindness than when they won the hot cup of
hot chocolate in a lottery because the cup of hot
chocolate when it was an act of kindness was nice
because it was hot chocolate. A plus, it had this
(18:04):
added dose of kindness to it that made it feel
even a little better. And that's what our givers missed,
was that the kindness would make it feel even better.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
And you've also found in some of your studies that
this is like, not just true in the sort of
experimental set up with the hot chocolate, it's also true
just in these really straightforward acts of kindness that people
come up with on their own. Are people also miscalibrated
where it's kind of their choice about what act to
give and it's less experimentally induced.
Speaker 4 (18:29):
Absolutely they are. We find this consistently as well when
we just let people choose an active kindness that they
could do. So one of the ways I do this
is with my MBA students here at the University of Chicago.
I asked them to go out into the world and
do some active kindness for somebody, They just keep their
eyes out. Sometimes they plan it, sometimes it's spontaneous. Sometimes
(18:51):
they're big things, sometimes they're tiny little things. Sometimes folks
will say I held a door for somebody else, which is,
you know, a little bit of a stretch for an
active kindness.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
They're mva is they get to start smiling.
Speaker 4 (19:03):
They're busy people, right, Yeah, they're starting somewhere. So when
we let them just choose it, and then when we
reach out to the recipient of that, we find that
the recipients also value that act of kindness more than
the givers anticipated. We find it across the board.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
And so this is a so called prosociality paradox. We're
kind of consistently undervaluing like how much our act would
mean to other people. And I kind of when we
talked about one of the reasons that is right, we
underestimate the warmth. I think, particularly in this give directly case,
there seems to be something else that's going on, which
is sort of a funny framing effect, which is like
when I think of like donating five bucks, it's like, well,
(19:41):
it's not that helpful for me. It's a cup of coffee.
But when I look at how that money help the
people in Cobobo. It's like enormous, right, this is allowing
people to like completely change their lives around.
Speaker 4 (19:50):
Yeah, So I think, to go back to what we
were talking about just a moment before, when we do
some active kindness for somebody else, we're focused on the
thing that we're doing, the act that we're engaging in,
what we're giving somebody, what that means to us. Right
as a giver, we can't but evaluate the world from
our own unique egocentric perspective on it. So when we
(20:12):
in the United States think of five dollars, we think
about what that means to us, when we think about
the effort we had to go through and giving this
money away. It was super easy, It wasn't that hard.
It just doesn't seem like a big thing to us.
But to a recipient of that, if they're in a
more precarious spot in their life, five dollars isn't five
(20:33):
dollars to us. It's five dollars to them. And that
currency exchange is big. And so when you go across
perspective gaps like that, particularly one that goes in that direction,
we're likely to think this is a much smaller material
benefit to the recipient than it actually is.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
I mean, I think this is true in the financial
situation with this particular case of to give directly, but
I think just in kind acts that we can engage
in with the people around us that I imagine that
perspective taking bias comes in in a different way, which
is like, you know, say I have a friend who's struggling,
who's really a need, who's had a bad day in
a bad way. When I'm simulating what it would feel
like for me to reach out, I'm like, well, it's
(21:09):
not going to matter because I'm not the one who's
in a bad way. But if she's in a bad way,
then maybe I'm missing something. This is something we also
see in some research.
Speaker 4 (21:17):
Absolutely, so we've conducted a bunch of experiments on expressions
of support. Right, so this simple thing, you know somebody's
going through a hard time, you reach out to them
to express your support. It can often be hard for
us to reach out to people at those times, because
again we're thinking about our act in terms of its
objective features. What am I going to do for you,
Laurie when you are in a tough situation To actually
(21:40):
change the situation you're in to actually make you feel
better when you've lost the spouse or when you're sick
in some way. But what the recipient values, again is
not just the objective act. Somebody has just been diagnosed
with some bad health condition. You're not going to remedy
that health condition. You're not. That can often be a
barrier to reaching out because we think that's what we
(22:01):
have to do. That's not necessarily what the recipient values. Remember,
the recipient values the relational connection just like we do.
That's the part we can often miss. So psychologists in
lots of different ways, from simple text messages to reaching
out with a letter, which is what we've done in
some of our experiments. We find that people underestimate how
positively someone will respond when you just reach out to them,
(22:24):
tell them something even as simple as small as hey,
I'm thinking of you.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
And this is something that I think we get wrong.
In a different case, another way that we can sort
of boost this relational connection, which is in some ways
by asking for help. Right when I need help with
something and I'm like, oh, I don't want to burden anybody.
I'm kind of in my own headspace about it. But
to someone who with whom I ask for help, that
kind of feels really nice. And you've done some lovely
work showing that we don't ask for help enough. Right.
Speaker 4 (22:48):
Yeah, But I'm going to turn the tables on here
a little bit. Oh now, I'm going to turn the
spotlight on you.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Turn the spotlight on me. Well, you'll find out what
that means when The Happiness Lab returns in a moment.
Welcome back to our special Giving Tuesday episode of The
Happiness Lab. Before the break, I asked kindness expert Nick
(23:17):
Epley why we don't ask for help as much as
we should. But before answering my question, Nick wanted to
flip the script a bit.
Speaker 4 (23:23):
I'll tell you about my research in a minute, but
I'll tell you about a personal experience to your listeners. So,
last year, my daughter, Sion, our daughter, was diagnosed with
ovarian cancer. And that's a very scary thing to have
a teenage daughter diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She had the
best medical care in the world. She's in wonderful shape
(23:44):
right now. Everything is great, But that was a very
hard time. It was a very hard time for us.
And when we were in the hospital, you will remember
I reached out to you because we are big fans
of yours, Sione and my wife Jen in particular, we
reached out to you because I knew that because of
(24:05):
who you are, I knew that you would be able
to do something for her her that would just really
lift her up. Wouldn't cure of ovarian cancer, but it
would lift her up in a time when she really
need to be uplifted. And you sent us T shirts
which we still wear today. You sent us Happiness Lab mugs,
(24:27):
which we still drink coffee from today. The most amazing,
most amazing thing you did one day you were you
were given a talk in Boston, a live a live
talk I remember, and uh you. You had the audience
(24:51):
give a shout out to see you on held up
your phone and had them call out, get well soon
to see on.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
I got a message for you.
Speaker 4 (25:06):
We're all thinking of you with the Happiness lif And
that was just so powerful. It was so powerful for
us and so uplifting for her. And I knew. I knew,
just because I've seen ten thousand data points and this
kind of stuff, I knew that this was something that
you would be able to do that would not be
(25:26):
a huge amount of effort for you. But that would
have such a meaningful impact on my daughter because she
would feel seen and uplifted by a celebrity even in
our lives. And that was just really really huge. And
I am certain you underestimated just how meaningful that was.
This morning, when I left the house and told CeON
(25:49):
and Jen, my daughter and wife, that I was going
to be doing this podcast, they just smiles all around. Oh,
we love Laurie say hello. That just stands out for
us like a beacon. And I think the important.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
Well before you say the important part. I mean, it's
so incredible to hear you tell the story and you
know you had a little thanks over email, but I'm
watching you almost tear up explaining the story. And two
things from my side. Right First, I had no idea
it impacted you and see On that much. I mean,
if I had guess, I'm like, oh, it was probably
cool to get the video or to get the T shirts.
I had no idea you'd still be thinking about it,
you'd still remember it, that you'd still be using the mugs. Right, So,
(26:27):
completely underestimated the value to you. But on my end,
I thought it was so when you reached out and
I got that email about Seon. I thought, not excited,
it's not the right word, but I felt so touch
that you shared that with me. It seemed like such
a personal thing about your family. I knew we're friends
and colleagues and you've been on the show, but it
just made me feel so much more connected to you,
to know you much more personally, and that felt so
(26:49):
nice to kind of feel like you were willing to
share that with me, And I was super excited to
be able to do that, you know, like to me,
you know, the Happiness lab t shirts didn't feel like
a big deal, you know, even the part about like,
you know, having our live audience do that. But it
was just fun for me, and honestly, it was fun
for the folks at the live show. I think if
I had to pick, you know, one of the best
moments of that live show, they kind of enjoyed most,
(27:09):
Like you know, streaming for ceone. So it's kind of
off in two ways, right. It's like, you didn't realize
the value that I would get from engaging in helping you,
and I didn't realize, you know, even now, the value
that you got out of that action, and we you
and I are both like the world, You're a world
extra on this. I'm the podcast, right, we should know
how to do this better.
Speaker 4 (27:28):
Yeah, well, I will say, I think to my credit,
at least I have learned the power that kindness can have,
particularly things that seem small and easy for somebody to do.
We also learned through our research that people tend to
underestimate how positively others respond when you reach out and
ask them for help, ask them to do things that
(27:48):
they can do, give them an opportunity to experience relational connection, competency,
and autonomy. I've actually come to think differently about asking
for help from other people when I need it, when
I think other people can really be helpful, I've come
to think of it as an act of selfishness because
I've deprived somebody else of the opportunity to feel good
and more connected to us by helping us in some way.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
And I think this is a really important point on
Giving Tuesday right, which is that we often think of
acts of kindness as giving something right. We have to
give money to this campaign to give directly, which is great,
but one of the things we can actually do to
help someone else is to let them help us. That
can be really important for anyone who's listening, who's feeling
like this giving Tuesday. I either don't have the finances
(28:33):
or I don't have the bandwidth to kind of do
what I would normally like to do. Sometimes asking for
help can be that gift back. It's a way to
sort of give to other people too. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (28:41):
So it turns out that when people, for instance, ask
for advice, there's some interesting research on this, they think
they're going to be seen as not very competent. But
in fact, when you ask somebody for advice, I mean,
think about how you feel when you actually give what
you think is helpful advice to somebody else. That makes
feel good you're helping somebody else. That's an example of
how we can ask for help when we need it
(29:03):
in ways that are beneficial both to us and of
the person giving us. And I think you're right. We
think of this often as as zero sum. I'm giving
in your getting, and there's a zero sum nature to this,
but that's not the way kindness actually works psychologically. It
can uplift both sides, particularly when we do kindness or
we seek kindness in a way that's authentic, that has
(29:24):
good intentions at heart, that's what tends to be uplifting.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
So we just talked about ways that you can ask
for help, and that's kind of participating in giving Tuesday,
even though it doesn't feel like it because you might,
in some sense even be getting monetary stuff from other people.
Are there other ways that we can kind of give
to others that don't cost us any money.
Speaker 4 (29:43):
So the biggest ways to do this are in psychological
self affirming sorts of ways. And I think the two
that at least we've studied in our research that are
the clearest examples of this involve psychological acts of kindness,
where we express our appreciation to somebody else, either in
the form of gratitude or in the form of compliments.
(30:04):
Those are cases where you're not exchanging money. If I
tell you that I like the necklace here wearing today,
or that I'm so grateful for the kindness you showed
us when we were going through a hard time, I'm
not exchanging anything of objective value there. But what I'm
doing is I am uplifting you in some way. I'm
affirming you as a positive person when I'm feeling it.
(30:28):
What's interesting to me is that in many cases, when
we feel these emotions, when we feel appreciation of gratitude
for somebody else, when we have a kind thought about
somebody else, we're a little nervous to share it, right,
We're a little reluctant to send it out. One of
my good friends in the field and somebody you know well,
Jillian Sanstrom who's in the UK, just ran a demonstration
(30:51):
in her class there in the UK where she had
people write gratitude letters, gave them an opportunity to send it.
Even when they wrote it, most people didn't send a letter.
They were nervous, right. We've seen that in our research
as well. We had people in one experiment generate compliments
to send us somebody else. In the experiment, we gave
them a two minute window to send it in the
(31:13):
experiment like they had already generated. It wasn't hard. They
just had to send it out. And most people didn't
send along the compliment. They were waiting for the right
time or something. It was awkward at the moment. There
were yet other barriers, right, And those barriers are interesting
to me. We find in our work that with both
appreciation and compliments, people think it'll have a less positive
(31:35):
impact on the recipient than it actually does. In the
cases of expressing gratitude, these are folks who typically know
each other very well, been together for a long time,
or this is a person they've been very close to
for a long time, and yet even with that, they
still think it'll be weird for somebody to receive this
letter out of the blue. I do this in my
MBA class every year, and every year I get stories
(31:57):
from my letter writers that they just couldn't believe. Notes
back saying, dude, don't send this to me at work.
I can't sit here and cry at my desk. Right
really really powerful, surprisingly powerful. I never expected my mother
would respond this way. It is your mother, and you
are underestimating how uplifted she'll be when you actually express
(32:20):
your true beliefs to her, even small compliments. I was
on the train coming in this morning, my morning commute.
I got onto the platform in Philosmore, where we lived.
There was a woman standing there who had a shacket
like this is like a jacket shirt sort of thing
that I thought my wife would love that. That looks
really nice. So I went up to her and I
(32:41):
told her I love that jacket, and I think my
wife would love it. Can you just tell me where
you got it from? Right? And she was. She just
beamed instantly when I told her how great this looked
and shared with it and I found it on the
way in and sh she'll be getting it for Christmas.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Jen, don't listen, don't listen.
Speaker 4 (33:02):
No, Well, it doesn't always have to be a surprise.
But what's interesting is that we often have these barriers.
We think it'll be awkward to give this compliment, and
we find people just tend to be off about that.
It's more positive for the recipient that we think it'll be.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
This kind of reminds me of another domain that I
think we can help others that we often forget. And
it comes from an experience I had recently. So a
good friend of mine, I think someone you know, Nick
Jason Mitchell. He and his wife just had another baby
and I found this out and I was thinking, like, oh,
I want to help, Maybe I should kick some food
or something, but I wasn't really sure how to do it.
(33:37):
And what another friend of ours did, which was amazing,
was she set up kind of a meal train. So
she emailed all of Jason's friends and was like, hey,
here's the dates, here's what they like, you know, here's
you know, bring it. And this friend was really helpful
to me because I was sitting there thinking like, oh,
I want to do something, but I kind of didn't
have the permission or the structure. I think this is
something else we can do a lot. Right, if you
(33:59):
have a cause and need set up the structure, email
your friends and say here's how you're going to do it.
Here's how much money, here's how you can help.
Speaker 4 (34:06):
We can think about intervening on these barriers and too way.
One is at the personal level. What is it that
I can do to overcome some of these barriers a
little more wisely in cases where the barrier is kind
of misplaced, so you know, that would involve you figuring
out what is the right thing to do or what
is the thing I'm comfortable doing right. That's an individual
level intervention. But the other thing that is actually more
(34:28):
effective at scale is a system level intervention. These are
sometimes called S level interventions by psychologists having to do
with a system level. And that's what your friend did
is set up a context that overcame this barrier. I'm
not sure what to do. I'm not sure how to
do it right, Those are barriers to doing kind things.
Overcame that barrier for a lot of you and allowed
(34:49):
people to contribute here. I did something like that with
these barriers in mind a couple of years ago, when
one of our staff members here at the University of
Chicago was going through a cancer scare of her own.
We set up a gratitude chain, and so we set
up for a few months at a time and extended
it for a few few months. More people were on
(35:10):
call just to write something that they were grateful to
this person. For this person is amazing. People have no
shortage of things to be grateful for towards her. But
what that meant is that she got a gratitude letter
every day spread out over time. She keeps them now
on a scrapbook, and we had way more people express
their gratitude and appreciation to this person than would have otherwise.
(35:33):
Because you're right, we set up this kind of permission
structure for people to do it, and that was very effective.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
So we could to talk about one last barrier that
I know for me winds up impeding more than i'd
like my ability to do kind actions for other peoples.
And that's the barrier of time, right, you know, even
in this case with this good friend of mine had
a baby, I was like, oh, man, I want to
do something. I want to get a onesie bag something.
And I went back into my calendar and it kind
of went away.
Speaker 4 (35:57):
Right.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
I looked at like, when can I actually go over
and visit him? I just didn't have any time, And
so any helpful strategies for how to kind of fight
the sort of time famine that we all face that
gets in the way of us doing nice stuff for others.
Speaker 4 (36:08):
Two ways I would think about this. One is to
remind yourself of the concept, the psychological concept of affordances,
which is that any given situation has a variety of
different possible outcomes. So a lot of different ways as
could go. So our interview could have gone in many
different directions. Here, my commute in on the train this
morning could have gone in many different directions. My day,
(36:30):
you know, I'm walking from the elevator to my office.
I could do different things in that. Right, There are opportunities.
If you start keeping an eye out for opportunities for connection,
things will pop up that don't require any more effort
from you, don't require any more time, they're just sitting there.
It's low hanging fruit on the tree you just hadn't
seen before, and you start spotting things. So, for instance,
(36:52):
on the train ride in this morning, I spotted this
woman wearing this really nice shacket, and it just I
knew I should say, hey, that looks fantastic, right, And
I came into the building this morning, there's a guy
wearing a really nice suit, and I just thought to
compliment on them that he looked really sharp.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
Acts.
Speaker 4 (37:09):
When you start looking for them, they don't require more time.
You're already doing something anyway, don't require any more energy.
They're like freebies almost and you just don't see them otherwise,
And once you start looking for them, you see more
of them. So that's one thing, is to start paying attention.
The second is to disassociate your sense that the positive
reaction to kindness is a function of how much you do,
(37:33):
how hard it is for you to do, how much
effort you put into this thing, and that's just not
quite true, right. So a charity like give directly has
positive impact on people that make it easy to give
money that really matters for folks. It's not hard and
has a huge impact on them and our daily lives.
The little things we can do for others around us
(37:54):
are the things that really have an outsized influence. So
when you're thinking about what you can do for Jason,
you're thinking, oh, I got to put a lot of
effort into it, right, and oh that's hard, and thinking
that he'll appreciate it more when it's really effortful. No,
he just would like lasagna on a Thursday night, eight right,
And it doesn't matter whether you cooked at yourself and
(38:14):
mailed it. It just would you know, you just want
to make So when we think that something requires a
lot of effort, that can often be a barrier and
we won't do it. Once you start to realize that
that's not required. Just getting the thing done. Just doing
the thing is what really matters. Too often, then I
think it frees you up a little bit. We just
had a teaching assistant of mine from last spring, calf Fredrickson,
(38:37):
and his wife just had a baby as well, and
I wanted to send them something, but it was hard
to get the card and you know, get the thing
mailed to me and I'll wrap it and send it.
So instead I just send it through Amazon. Now that's
not as nice. It's not as personal, but I got
it done right, and that's what I try to focus
on more, is just getting it done.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
And I think this is really powerful because it's also
an active kindness to yourself. I know, sometimes when I'm
trying to do something kind, I'm so focused on that
competence piece that you talked about before that I'm like
beating myself up and I'm not doing it right. I
mean I had this even when I was making the
food for Jason, like what kind of food should I make?
Seems like Chili's really easy? But is that not cool?
And it's like, no, just be kind to yourself. What
(39:20):
matters is the act you can kind of give yourself
some grace that it doesn't have to be perfect. It's
still actually going to have more impact than you think exactly.
Speaker 4 (39:27):
The difference between good and really good is small. It
can sometimes require a huge amount of investment on your
side with very little impact on the recipient side. So
do the thing that you can do that is good
enough because it'll likely be great for the recipient.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
So any last minute advice on this giving Tuesday of
what people can do to be happier themselves and make
the world a better place.
Speaker 4 (39:50):
So I think probably two things, opportunities for kindness and
forgiving are all around us. They're just everywhere in our
day to day lives, and they don't have to be
big things. One of the most influential findings for me
from research on happiness and wellbeing is how important just
repeated act are. We've talked before, happiness is like a
(40:12):
leaky tire. You pump it up and you feel good
for a little bit, and then it leaks back down
and you pump it back, and that means you got
to keep doing it, keep repeating it right, And turns
out the amount of uplift or pumping up you get
and others get from an act of kindness isn't as
dependent on how big the act is as you might imagine, right,
And so I think we can really enrich our lives
(40:34):
if we realize if we just keep an eye out
for the low hanging fruit around us, that's a good
way to keep kindness kind of sustainable because there's just
so many In addition to the big things we might do,
the rational effective things we might do, there are also
so many little uplifting things we can do expressing kindness
expressing gratitude, giving compliments, saying all to people being civil
(40:57):
don't require a lot of effort, but keep that tire
pumped up in a way that keeps us and others
feeling good.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
I started the show by saying how much I like
Giving Tuesday. But Nick's right to point out that we
should really be trying to generosity a daily habit, not
just an annual thing. But Giving Tuesday is as good
a day as any to start that long term habit.
So if you have a dollar or two to spare,
why not start right this minute by making a donation
that can help people in need, the same way we
(41:23):
help the people of Kebobo last year.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
The work goes on the list of villages like Kibobo
is still long. I wish one day we don't have
to send clash transfers to people, but in the meantime
there is a need, then we need to continue to work.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
For twenty twenty four, we're teaming up with our friends
a Giving Multiplier to handle all your donations. So head
to giving Multiplier dot org slash happiness. That's Giving Multiplier
dot org slash happiness. On that site, you can send
money to villages like Kebobo via give directly while at
the same time directing money to a charity that's close
to your heart. What could those charities be well. This
(42:01):
show was sponsored by the twenty twenty four Subaru Share
the Love event. Subaru has a long track record of
supporting good causes, and while making this episode, I got
to learn about some of them. There's Meals on Wheels,
which brings nutrition and friendly visits to our seniors, The
National Park Foundation, which is helping all of us get
out in nature. There's Make a Wish, which is allowing
the dreams of ill children to come true. And the ASPCA,
(42:23):
which protects animals from cruelty while giving carring pet owners
the help they need. The point is there are lots
of groups out there doing good work, so head over
to giving multiplier dot org and donate what you can
that's giving multiplier dot org slash happiness. May your Giving
Tuesday donation be just the first step in exploring both
the good that you're able to do in the world
(42:45):
and the good that being kinder can do for you.
Happy Giving Tuesday everyone,
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