April 27, 2020 • 29 mins
We talk a lot about psychopaths - but rarely discuss their polar opposites, super altruists. These are people who go to extreme lengths to help others - even though their acts of kindness might cost them time, money or expose them to physical danger. These folk are also happier than the rest of us.
A super altruist once saved the life of psychology professor Abigail Marsh - so she devoted her career to understanding what drives these amazing and happy people and how we call all learn to be more like them.
For an even deeper dive into the research we talk about in the show visit happinesslab.fm
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. I was driving home late at night after spending
the night in Seattle, and as I was coming over
a bridge back into Tacoma, a little dog run out
in front of my car. I did exactly what most
people do when this happens, and I now know you
shouldn't do, which as I swerved to try to avoid
hitting it, and the result of both swerving and then
(00:38):
ultimately hitting it anyway, was that my car was sent
into a sort of a fishtail and then a spin
across the freeway. This is Abbey Marsh. She was only
nineteen years old when the events in this story took place.
When the car finally came to a stop, it was
in the fast lane of the freeway, just past the
crest of this bridge i'd been crossing, which meant that
(00:59):
I was invisible to the oncoming traffic. Unfortunately, they were
quite visible to me because my car was now facing
backward into the oncoming traffic and the engine on a
car sort of sputtered to a halt, and I didn't
have a phone, and I had no way of escaping
because this bridge didn't have any shoulders on it, so
there was nowhere to go even if I were to
(01:19):
get out of the car, and I just panicked. I
couldn't get the car to her back on And I
was feeling every time one of these trucks or semis
past me, the whole car would shutter if they went by,
like ushit. Now, what am I gonna do? Like I like,
you know, your mind is sort of stuttering through the
different options. And do I get out of the car?
(01:39):
Do I stay in the car? If I get out
of the car, I was risking car hitting me. But
then if I stayed in the car, I was definitely
going to get hit eventually, because these cars that were
coming over the crest were swerving barely in time. Who
avoid me? There? Abby was a teenager, all alone and
trapped on the freeway, confronting what seemed like certain death,
And it was just the sense of futility and blankness.
(02:03):
It was awful. But what happened next propelled Abby on
a totally new journey, a journey that would bring her
face to face with the worst and best parts of
human nature, and one that has allowed her to unlock
a counterintuitive secret to what makes life happier and a
bit more worth living. Our minds are constantly telling us
(02:27):
what to do to be happy. But what if our
minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us,
leading us away from what will really make us happy.
The good news is that understanding the science of the
mind can point us all back in the right direction.
You're listening to the Happiness Lab of doctor Laurie Santos.
(02:48):
Abby Marsh was trapped in her disabled sub in the dark,
facing the wrong way on the highway. She watched in
terror as oncoming traffic swerved by. She needed a miracle.
It's funny because you know, I don't believe in guardian angels,
and in fact, it frustrates me when people refer to
very alterwistic people as angels, because I feel like it's
(03:08):
sort of takes away from how compassionate real live human
beings can be. You know, you don't have to be
supernatural to help somebody else. But it did have that
sense of just he just appeared out of nowhere. Abby
looked over to see that a complete stranger was knocking
calmly on her passenger side door. My memory of him
is that he was wearing a suit and a lot
(03:29):
of gold jewelry and sunglasses. It was the middle of
the night, that made no sense, but he said, you
looked like you could do some help, and I said, yeah,
I think I could. And he ran around the front
of my car into the traffic, got into the driver's seat,
and then he got the car back started again and
got just back across the road and parked us behind
(03:51):
his car. I was shaking, and I'm sure it was gray,
and I fell awful, and he said, you don't look
so good. Do you need me to follow you to
make sure you get home? Okay? I was like, no, no no, no,
I'll be fine. I'll be fine. I'm pretty sure. I
didn't say thank you. And he's like, okay, you take
care of yourself, and he got out of my car,
back into his own and disappeared. Abbey has spent a
lot of time wondering about the man that rescued her
(04:12):
and the reasons behind his actions. The instant practically he
saw in my car. He must have pulled over and
then run across five milnes of freeway traffic in the
dark to get to me. Why would somebody do that?
Why would somebody do that? What was that moment that
happened inside this other person's head that I owe my
life too? What's interesting to me is that just knowing
that people do it sort of semantically, you know, you
(04:34):
read about it in a newspaper, is you can sort
of be like, oh, that's interesting, but there's something about
it happening to you. Real human being made this choice
to save my life, even though he risked being killed himself,
to make you want to understand it, and the fact
that we don't really have good explanations for why somebody
would do something like this. In fact, it defies a
lot of conventional wisdom about human motivation. You know, all
(04:56):
humans being fundamentally selfish, that's something many people believe, and
so what could be more interesting than a concrete fact
that defies a lot of established ideas. But Abbey wasn't
content to just sit and wonder why her savior chose
to help her. She decided to get to the bottom
of his actions. Scientifically, I'm not sure how often these
motivations that drive us are clear in the moment, but
(05:17):
in retrospect, it's very clear that my research took a
very distinct track since then. Abby is now a professor
in the Department of Psychology and the Interdisciplinary Program in
Neuroscience at Georgetown she's a world expert and how we
process other people's emotions. I started studying how we respond
to other people's fear initially, so why it is that
(05:40):
the site of somebody who's frightens elicits caring responses and
people who see it. But that's a really difficult question
to study in the lab because you know you can't
ethically induce extreme fear in people, and it's really hard
to measure people's behavior when it comes to things like
altruism in the lab in a way that doesn't make
them do what you want them to do. So Abby
(06:00):
decided to employ a common psychology research logic. If you
want to understand a concept, one of the better ways
to do that is to find a population to people
who were missing the thing you're interested in and try
to understand what makes him different, and hopefully that will
help understand where that process you're interested and comes from,
which led Abbey to explore the nature of altruistic actions
(06:22):
using a seemingly strange population psychopaths. We had known for
a while, and sciences and known for a while that
people who are psychopathic don't respond normally to the site
of other people's fear, which even the idea of other
people's fear. And one of my favorite examples of this
comes from a story of my colleagues of fighting was
telling name she was testing a bunch of psychopathic adult
(06:45):
inmates on their ability to recognize other people's facial expressions,
and one psychopathic inmate she was testing was particularly about
it recognizing other people's fear so bad he missed every
single fearful expression she showed him. But he knew he
was doing badly because he got to the last fearful
expression in the set and he's like, you know, I
don't know what that expression is called, but I know
(07:06):
that's what people look like right before you stab them.
I find that so incredibly profound, because, you know, here's
a man who is imprisoned because he does things that
cause other people to believe they're going to die, and
he's like, oh, yay, I know what they look like.
You know, I recognize that phase. But he couldn't link
it to the emotion fear. He just he couldn't make
(07:28):
sense of that vivid, you know, wide eyed, distressed expression
and understand the emotional content behind it. Abby's now done
some elegant work exploring why psychopaths have this problem recognizing
others distress. We found that there's a structure in their
brain called the amgala that doesn't seem to respond normally
(07:48):
to other people's fear, whereas in most people, this particular
structure seems to be very active in response to somebody's fear,
and that seems to help you interpret that emotion, and
people who are psychopathic just show no response at all.
But the biggest idea that came from Abbey's work on
the brains of psychopaths was an insight that eventually led
her back to the question she first started asking on
that highway many years ago. We have understood now for
(08:12):
a while that psychopathy is not a sort of cluster
of individuals that's qualitatively different from everybody else. It's a spectrum.
And so there are people who are highly highly psychopathic
and people who are only moderately psychopathic, and then those
traits vary continuously throughout the population. And what it's interesting
about that fact is it suggests that there must be
(08:34):
such a thing as an anti psychopath. So if most
of us are sort of moderately compassionate, and we've got
psychopaths on one end who have no compassion, Well, there
must be a mirror image of that people who are
unusually compassionate, And I got to thinking about what that
might look like. What would it look like to be
anti psychopathic? Are they, for example, the kind of people
who would run into oncoming traffic to save a complete stranger.
(08:57):
Could they be the key to understanding why some people
are willing to lose everything to help others. After the
break you'll hear more about these so called anti psychopaths
and how they are unusual choices, demons straight what you
can personally do to become a little bit happier. The
Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. I started
(09:25):
out thinking it would be fun too, and you know,
edifying to study people who were heroic rescuers, like the
man who saved my life. But at the time it
wasn't at all clear how I would find them. After
exploring the brains of psychopathic killers, researcher Abbey Marsh wanted
to understand the minds of the polar opposite side of
the psychological spectrum. It's not an easy thing to put
(09:45):
like an ad in the newspaper for have you ever
saved a stranger's life? And risk your own. It wasn't
aware of any way to recruit them, and so I
thought about, well, there are other ways to save lives
that involve significant risk and sacrifice, and at the time,
a number of articles and a book could come out
about altruistic kidney donors. People who give away a kidney
to save the life of a stranger and ende renal failure.
(10:07):
Patience and end stage renal failure often wait three to
five years to get a kidney from a deceased donor.
Living kidney donors, people who are willing to give up
one of their two functioning kidneys, can cut down on
the weight time for the nearly one hundred thousand people
who are on that wait list. The donation procedure is
more straightforward than you might think. Most donors return to
(10:27):
their usual activities in a few weeks. But like all surgeries,
kidney donations come with at least some risk of serious complications,
things like blood clots, infection, or even death. And I thought,
you know, if anything is altruistic, it is that it
is this very significant decision to give away of an
(10:48):
internal organ, invital internal organ, to save the life of
somebody that you've never met. And in most cases have
been picked off a list for you. So it struck
me that if anything could be considered antipsychopathic, gets the
decision to give a kidney to a stranger. So Abby
harder target group kidney donors, but at the time it
was a pretty exclusive club. There are only a few
(11:08):
thousand in the entire country who'd gone through that invasive procedure.
Meaningful results in scientific studies require having as many test
subjects as possible, and so Abby was a bit worried
that she wouldn't be able to find enough donors. In
spite of the odds, she put an ad on an
organ transplant list Serve, have you ever donated a kidney
to a stranger? If so, a researcher at Georgetown is
(11:29):
interested in connecting a study with you. Abby reasonably assumed
that she'd never find enough participants from such an absolutely
tiny pool of potential recruits. I have this vivid memory
of sitting down and being like, oh, I wonder if
anybody's responded to my ads for kidney downers, and opening
up by laptop and my inbox was just flooded with
new messages, many with all caps subject things from altars
(11:51):
to kidney downers who were just very excited to be
taking part in my research. You know, I would love
to be your guinea pig. Please sign me up. Abby
was immediately shocked by this population's generosity. Hundreds of them
were ready to fly to her lab at a moment's notice,
and once they got there, they were happy to go
to great lengths to be helpful. And consider it, working
with lots of different populations over the years, it can
(12:13):
be a real trick to just get people to come
in and to come in on time. And the first
three altruistic kidney donors we brought in and they come
in from all over the country, and they were staying
in a hotel just a few blocks from the campus
where we were going to be scanning them, and they
were so worried about not being late to their brain
scans that they came three hours early the first camp.
(12:35):
It's like unheard of, and they ended up getting lost
in the bowels of the university hospital and almost ended
up breaking through a fire door to get to the
camp center and setting off alarms all over the hospital
because again they were so incredibly concerned about not being late.
Abby also found that her kidney donors were unusually humble.
They didn't like her hypothesis that they were in any
(12:57):
way special or at the extreme end of some goodness spectrum.
A number of them very kindly told me that they
were happy to participate in the study. They were happy
to help out, but they were pretty sure that I
was barking at the wrong tree. The idea that there
was anything different about them at all was just wrong.
They're not unusually altruistic, they're not unusually compassionate. They're just
like anybody else. They happen to be in the right
(13:18):
place at the right time, which is not how anybody
else talks about people who give kidneys to strangers. But
their real sense of humility has been really striking, just
an unwillingness to think of themselves as better than anybody else.
Of course, Abbey's results showed that kidney donors were wrong.
They were different, at least when it came to their brains.
(13:40):
Abbey used neuroimaging techniques to measure the size of the
donors amygdalas, that same brain structure involved in processing fear,
the very same part that was significantly smaller than average
in psychopaths. It turns out that her kidney donors also
had peculiar amygdala's, but they were eight percent larger than
those of average people. Now, it could be that her
(14:02):
donors were just born that way, but it was also
possible that performing acts of kindness over time had caused
the enlargement, like a muscle responding to exercise. Whatever the reason,
these extreme ultruists had ambigdalas that indeed looked like the
polar opposite of what she'd seen in her malicious criminals.
Abby had finally identified a population of anti psychopaths, which
(14:24):
was a pretty cool result for a budding neuroscientist. But
the most important thing about studying this new population for
Abby wasn't just that she had discovered a completely new,
nearly atypical population. The ultruistic kidney donors finally gave Abbey
the opportunity to pose the question that had puzzled her
for decades, The question she wanted to ask her highway savior.
(14:44):
Why would somebody do that? Why did her rescuer choose
to save her? Abby conducted interview after interview, asking what
was going through your head when you decided to help
someone in such an extreme way. The most common answer
I get to the question is it just hit me
like a bolt of lightning. I've found out that there
are people who were dying from kidney failure. There's one
(15:05):
hundred thousand of them on the waiting lists, and most
of us can of a kidney away and be none
the worse for wear for it. And I thought, I'll
do that. I mean, there is no decision process I
think is the interesting thing. Like, it's not a hemming
and hawing process for really almost anybody I've talked to,
it's just so, well, you can do this. Somebody's life
is gonna be saved. I'll do it. At first glance,
(15:26):
this sort of answer fits with Abby's initial hypothesis that
there had to be something fundamentally different about people who
would risk their lives for strangers without a moment's thought.
But if that were the case, her results wouldn't be
as relevant for all of you, and so I wouldn't
be talking about them here on the Happiness lab. As
Abby probe more deeply, she realized that this couldn't be
(15:47):
the whole story. As she heard more about her participants' lives,
she realized that many of them got to this act
of kidney donation through lots of smaller acts of generosity.
Nobody goes from sort of ground zero to donate a
kidney almost always. The people we've worked with are long
time blood donors, platelet donors, some have been marrow donors.
(16:07):
Many of them work in tier positions, rescue animals, foster children.
They've all done things in the past that involved giving
of themselves to help other people. Abbey realized that many
of her kidney donors wound up getting to what seemed
like an extreme altruistic choice through lots of baby steps,
smaller nice actions, the kinds of things that lots of
(16:28):
us do or could easily do. Over time, the donors
recognize that performing these smaller acts of kindness felt well,
kind of nice. The sense that I get is that
they have had the wonderful opportunity to discover how rewarding
that is, what a sense of joy and happiness it
gives you to help other people. And it's just like
any other reinforcement process. You sort of work your way up.
(16:49):
You're like, well, that was so rewarding. What else could
I do? If donating blood is good, I guess donating
marrows even better. If donating kidney is good. I guess
donating a piece of my liver is even better. And
I now have several kidney donors I've worked with who've
also donated a portion of their liver. As she heard
from more interviewees, Abbey's Big Savior on the Highway puzzle
started to become Clearerultists did what they did because they
(17:11):
had learned a simple yet counterintuitive principle of human motivation.
Doing nice things for other people feels really good, even
in cases where it's a bit costly. Helping others can
provide a big spike to our well being. Altruistic kidney
donors just take the usual wellbeing spite we all experience
to an extreme. It's therefore no surprise that they tend
(17:32):
to be a really happy group on average. It's a
universal response I get from them. They are so glad
that they made the decision to donate. They do it
one hundred more times. If they could do one hundred
more times. It's one of the best things that they
ever did, and it gives them this sense of joy
that sticks with them as far as I can tell forever.
Some of the people I've worked with donated close to
(17:53):
twenty years ago. Now, and it doesn't ever seem to
go away, that sense of vicarious joy of having been
able to do this thing for somebody else. I've had
many interviews and in tears as people are describing the
after effects of their nation and hearing that the child
who would receive their kidney like days after donnation, he
(18:13):
was making plans to go to the beach and camping
for like the first time. He'd never been able to
do these things. And like the kidney donors sabbing relating this,
and I'm sabbing relating this, it's incredibly profound. As Abby
heard more of these stories and saw the incredible joy
that her subjects experienced, she started to think that her
extreme subjects might be onto something important, something that the
rest of us could learn from. Two. If you want
(18:36):
to make a good decision about bringing joy and meaning
in a sense of connectedness into your own life, helping
people is clearly the way to do it. Abby started
to realize that all of us can benefit from doing
nice things for others, even if we're not yet ready
to give up a body part to a stranger. We
all have our own ways that we can make the
lives of other people better. You know, donating kidney is
(18:59):
one way, but it's certainly not the only way. But
as Abby right, I mean, it's clear that her donors
get a huge happiness boost from their generous act. But
can the average person really become happier by making a
small sacrifice to aid a stranger? Can shifting your focus
to helping other people really be a strategy for improving
well being? And if there is a path to becoming
(19:20):
a happy altruist, is there a step along that path
that you could take today? The Happiness Lab will be
right back. When we think of small, everyday things we
can do to boost our mood, we often think of
(19:41):
the idea of pampering ourselves. And whenever I think of
personal pampering, I'm reminded of one of my favorite seams
from the TV show Parks and Recreation. Once a year,
Donna and I spend a day treating ourselves. What do
we treat ourselves to? Clothes, treat yourself, treat yourself, massage,
treat yourself, mimosa, treat yourself, fine leather goods. Treat yourself.
(20:02):
It's the best day of the year, the best day
of the year when we want to be happier. We
think it's time to spoil ourselves, or, in the popular
parlance of parks wreck, I've got three words for you,
Yo sill. On the show Tom and Donna observed treat
yourself day every October thirteenth. It's now become a cultural phenomenon,
so much so that Rheta, the actress who plays Donna,
(20:23):
can't post a photo of a cocktail or a purse
on Instagram without some fan telling her to go ahead
and treat yourself. But it's a strategy, right. Should we
be treating ourselves to feel happier or are we missing
other more powerful opportunities to boost our moods? You know,
I don't think treating ourselves is a terrible idea, like
spending money on ourselves can be good. This is Liz Done,
(20:46):
a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia an
author of the book Happy Money, The Science of Happier Spending.
It's just that this idea of that spending money on
somebody else could actually be helpful, I think is especially
easy to overlook because I think we do just get
focused on ourselves. Liz studies the cases where our so
called treat yourself. Intuitions can lead us astray, especially when
(21:09):
it comes to spending our disposable income. I first got
interested in this idea, like, not because I was especially
interested in generosity, but because I was interested in money.
So I managed to make it through my twenties without
ever holding a real job. At twenty seven, I got
my first real job and they actually started paying me,
and I was like, oh wow, Like, what do I
(21:29):
do with all of this money? Like this is more
money than I need to survive, you know, and what
do I do with it? I was surprised at the
time by how little research there was on this topic.
Liz Comb the literature to figure out the best way
to spend our money to feel happier, and all the
existing studies seem to point in the same direction. The
science shows that treating ourselves doesn't make us as happy
(21:50):
as treating other people, and that result is not just
true for extremely altruistic people like Abby's kidney donors, even
when we look in pretty diverse regions of the world.
In fact, in all seven major regions of the world,
we find this relationship whereby people who donate money to
charity are happier than those who don't. So I thought, well, okay,
would we actually get more of kind of happiness being
(22:12):
for our buck by spending on others than by spending
on ourselves. Listen, our colleagues decided to test this in
a rather simple experiment. They walked up to people on
the street and handed them twenty dollars. We asked them
to spend it by the end of the day, but
with a catch. So we told half the people they
had to spend it on themselves, and we told half
the people they had to spend it to benefit others.
(22:34):
Imagine for a second that you're a subject in this study.
You just got twenty bucks out of the blue, and
you're asked to spend it. What would feel better spending
that money on a nice free meal or a shiny
manicure for yourself, or using that same amount of money
to help someone else. If you're like Liz's subjects, you
probably think the treat yourself condition would feel better. In fact,
(22:57):
Liz asked over a hundred people to predict which condition
they would prefer, and about two thirds of them went
with the treat yourself option. But what did Liz find
when people really spent that cash windfall. People were in
a better mood at the end of the day when
they'd been asked to spend this money on other people
rather than on themselves. The simple act of spending twenty
(23:17):
dollars on another person was enough to significantly raise people's
well being levels. But Liz has found that the same
effect holds for smaller amounts of money too. Her team
tested a different group of subjects. They were given only
five dollars to spend on themselves or someone else. This
second group showed exactly the same effect as those who
were given more cash. You don't necessarily have to be
(23:38):
spending crazy amounts of money on others, even like say
five dollars, or even just two dollars, and shifting it
towards using that money to benefit other people does seem
to provide this detectable benefit for moods. Listener colleagues have
now replicated the same effect in people all over the world,
in Canada, India, Uganda, and even remote villages on the
(24:00):
island of Vanawatu. The results are always the same for
rich and for poor people. One study of South African
subjects found that people who are happier spending money on
others even when they report not having enough money to
buy food for their families in the last year. But
what's most impressive is that Liz has shown that generosity
doesn't just feel good in adulthood. We started to wonder, like,
(24:22):
you know, is this a fundamental part of human nature?
So my student lair Acting and I teamed up with
Kylie Hamlin, who's a developmental psychologist, and we brought toddlers
just under the age of two into the lab. Now,
of course, toddlers don't really care about money, so we
worked with like the closest thing to toddler gold which
of course is goldfish crackers, And so we gave these
(24:43):
little kids windfall of goldfish for themselves, as well as
a chance to give some of those goldfish away to
a puppet named Monkey. The researchers watched how many goldfish
crackers kids gave away, and then they coded their facial
expressions to see how happy toddlers seemed afterwards. What we
see in the study is that even children under the
age of two seem to exhibit pleasure from giving their
(25:04):
resources away. Counterintuitively, the kids smiled more and see much
happier after losing a bunch of their goldfish crackers. It's
kind of just reassuring, Like as many problems as we
have in the world right now, it's like the tiny
humans are starting out with this proclivity to derive joy
from giving their stuff away. That to me, I don't know,
(25:27):
it makes me optimistic again about the world. What's less optimistic, though,
is that we adults don't realize that doing nice things
for others feel so good that it can have such
a positive impact on our mood. I mean, I definitely
want to be happier, but I haven't given away a
really significant chuck of my income, let alone a kidney.
(25:47):
I bet you haven't either. Our lying minds keep saying
treat yourself, which means we tend not to even take
baby steps towards kindness nearly as much as we could.
It's so interesting because I think on a broad level,
people totally recognize that this is the case, and I
get postcards and emails and stuff from people saying why
(26:11):
did you, as a scientist, need to waste your time
showing this Where people are just saying like, oh, we
already knew this from like the Bible or from like,
you know, what our parents taught us. And I think
you know, on a broad level, people recognize that generosity
feels good. I think what they miss is that, you know,
when they're looking at how to spend the twenty dollars
(26:31):
in their pocket, that's where they make the error. So
it's like, in this moment, with this like piece of
extra money in my hand, it doesn't maybe occur to
me to spend it on something else, or you know,
it feels much more tempting to use it to benefit
myself rather than to spend it on others. And again,
(26:53):
I think we forget that, like, oh, I could buy
a slightly less expensive car and then have a lot
of money left over to use to help other people
in my life or donate to charity or whatever. And
I think you know, that's where the error creeps in,
is that we've kind of get that we would actually
benefit from using the money less on ourselves and more
on other people. So if you really want to treat
(27:16):
yourself to a happier day, give up something to benefit
another person. You can start with money, just give up
a dollar or two, But if you're strapped for cash,
you can also give up time, like letting someone cut
in front of you in line at the grocery store.
It could even be a small service like helping a
neighbor clear off the snow, or maybe taking the time
to rate and review your favorite podcast. And doing nice
(27:39):
things for others doesn't just boost your mood, it also
makes the person who received your kind actions a little
happier too. And that's a kind of tip I most
love sharing on this podcast, one that lets my listeners
selfishly bump up their own happiness in a way that
also helps to make the world a better, more empathic place.
And who knows, maybe you won't be satisfied with the
(28:00):
small act of donating two dollars here or five bucks there.
Maybe you'll also graduate from those baby steps to the
kind of selfless acts that lead to a huge, huge,
long standing boost and well being, ones that really really
help people. Maybe you'll even save the life of another person,
A person like Abby stuck on the highway alone, embraced
(28:22):
for what could have been certain death, a moment that
has stayed with her for decades. It just stuck with me,
the fact that I owe my life to the stranger
who is willing to risk his to save me. I'm
hoping that your altruistic Savior is out there somewhere. If
he's listening right now, what would you say. That's a
big one. But you know, if he's out there listening today,
(28:42):
and I just want to say how profoundly grateful I
am for the beautiful thing that you did and the
opportunities you've given me, and I hope to do your
tremendous act of bravery justice. The Happiness Lab is co
(29:12):
written and produced by Ryan Dilley with the help of
Pete Naton. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver,
with additional scoring, mixing and mastering by Evan Viola. The
show was edited by Sophie mckibbon and fact checked by
Joseph Fridman. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Carlie mcgliorre Heather Fame,
Julia Barton, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanik, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent,
(29:34):
Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by
Pushkin Industries and by me, Doctor Laurie Santos
Pushkin. I was driving home late at night after spending
the night in Seattle, and as I was coming over
a bridge back into Tacoma, a little dog run out
in front of my car. I did exactly what most
people do when this happens, and I now know you
shouldn't do, which as I swerved to try to avoid
hitting it, and the result of both swerving and then
(00:38):
ultimately hitting it anyway, was that my car was sent
into a sort of a fishtail and then a spin
across the freeway. This is Abbey Marsh. She was only
nineteen years old when the events in this story took place.
When the car finally came to a stop, it was
in the fast lane of the freeway, just past the
crest of this bridge i'd been crossing, which meant that
(00:59):
I was invisible to the oncoming traffic. Unfortunately, they were
quite visible to me because my car was now facing
backward into the oncoming traffic and the engine on a
car sort of sputtered to a halt, and I didn't
have a phone, and I had no way of escaping
because this bridge didn't have any shoulders on it, so
there was nowhere to go even if I were to
(01:19):
get out of the car, and I just panicked. I
couldn't get the car to her back on And I
was feeling every time one of these trucks or semis
past me, the whole car would shutter if they went by,
like ushit. Now, what am I gonna do? Like I like,
you know, your mind is sort of stuttering through the
different options. And do I get out of the car?
(01:39):
Do I stay in the car? If I get out
of the car, I was risking car hitting me. But
then if I stayed in the car, I was definitely
going to get hit eventually, because these cars that were
coming over the crest were swerving barely in time. Who
avoid me? There? Abby was a teenager, all alone and
trapped on the freeway, confronting what seemed like certain death,
And it was just the sense of futility and blankness.
(02:03):
It was awful. But what happened next propelled Abby on
a totally new journey, a journey that would bring her
face to face with the worst and best parts of
human nature, and one that has allowed her to unlock
a counterintuitive secret to what makes life happier and a
bit more worth living. Our minds are constantly telling us
(02:27):
what to do to be happy. But what if our
minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us,
leading us away from what will really make us happy.
The good news is that understanding the science of the
mind can point us all back in the right direction.
You're listening to the Happiness Lab of doctor Laurie Santos.
(02:48):
Abby Marsh was trapped in her disabled sub in the dark,
facing the wrong way on the highway. She watched in
terror as oncoming traffic swerved by. She needed a miracle.
It's funny because you know, I don't believe in guardian angels,
and in fact, it frustrates me when people refer to
very alterwistic people as angels, because I feel like it's
(03:08):
sort of takes away from how compassionate real live human
beings can be. You know, you don't have to be
supernatural to help somebody else. But it did have that
sense of just he just appeared out of nowhere. Abby
looked over to see that a complete stranger was knocking
calmly on her passenger side door. My memory of him
is that he was wearing a suit and a lot
(03:29):
of gold jewelry and sunglasses. It was the middle of
the night, that made no sense, but he said, you
looked like you could do some help, and I said, yeah,
I think I could. And he ran around the front
of my car into the traffic, got into the driver's seat,
and then he got the car back started again and
got just back across the road and parked us behind
(03:51):
his car. I was shaking, and I'm sure it was gray,
and I fell awful, and he said, you don't look
so good. Do you need me to follow you to
make sure you get home? Okay? I was like, no, no no, no,
I'll be fine. I'll be fine. I'm pretty sure. I
didn't say thank you. And he's like, okay, you take
care of yourself, and he got out of my car,
back into his own and disappeared. Abbey has spent a
lot of time wondering about the man that rescued her
(04:12):
and the reasons behind his actions. The instant practically he
saw in my car. He must have pulled over and
then run across five milnes of freeway traffic in the
dark to get to me. Why would somebody do that?
Why would somebody do that? What was that moment that
happened inside this other person's head that I owe my
life too? What's interesting to me is that just knowing
that people do it sort of semantically, you know, you
(04:34):
read about it in a newspaper, is you can sort
of be like, oh, that's interesting, but there's something about
it happening to you. Real human being made this choice
to save my life, even though he risked being killed himself,
to make you want to understand it, and the fact
that we don't really have good explanations for why somebody
would do something like this. In fact, it defies a
lot of conventional wisdom about human motivation. You know, all
(04:56):
humans being fundamentally selfish, that's something many people believe, and
so what could be more interesting than a concrete fact
that defies a lot of established ideas. But Abbey wasn't
content to just sit and wonder why her savior chose
to help her. She decided to get to the bottom
of his actions. Scientifically, I'm not sure how often these
motivations that drive us are clear in the moment, but
(05:17):
in retrospect, it's very clear that my research took a
very distinct track since then. Abby is now a professor
in the Department of Psychology and the Interdisciplinary Program in
Neuroscience at Georgetown she's a world expert and how we
process other people's emotions. I started studying how we respond
to other people's fear initially, so why it is that
(05:40):
the site of somebody who's frightens elicits caring responses and
people who see it. But that's a really difficult question
to study in the lab because you know you can't
ethically induce extreme fear in people, and it's really hard
to measure people's behavior when it comes to things like
altruism in the lab in a way that doesn't make
them do what you want them to do. So Abby
(06:00):
decided to employ a common psychology research logic. If you
want to understand a concept, one of the better ways
to do that is to find a population to people
who were missing the thing you're interested in and try
to understand what makes him different, and hopefully that will
help understand where that process you're interested and comes from,
which led Abbey to explore the nature of altruistic actions
(06:22):
using a seemingly strange population psychopaths. We had known for
a while, and sciences and known for a while that
people who are psychopathic don't respond normally to the site
of other people's fear, which even the idea of other
people's fear. And one of my favorite examples of this
comes from a story of my colleagues of fighting was
telling name she was testing a bunch of psychopathic adult
(06:45):
inmates on their ability to recognize other people's facial expressions,
and one psychopathic inmate she was testing was particularly about
it recognizing other people's fear so bad he missed every
single fearful expression she showed him. But he knew he
was doing badly because he got to the last fearful
expression in the set and he's like, you know, I
don't know what that expression is called, but I know
(07:06):
that's what people look like right before you stab them.
I find that so incredibly profound, because, you know, here's
a man who is imprisoned because he does things that
cause other people to believe they're going to die, and
he's like, oh, yay, I know what they look like.
You know, I recognize that phase. But he couldn't link
it to the emotion fear. He just he couldn't make
(07:28):
sense of that vivid, you know, wide eyed, distressed expression
and understand the emotional content behind it. Abby's now done
some elegant work exploring why psychopaths have this problem recognizing
others distress. We found that there's a structure in their
brain called the amgala that doesn't seem to respond normally
(07:48):
to other people's fear, whereas in most people, this particular
structure seems to be very active in response to somebody's fear,
and that seems to help you interpret that emotion, and
people who are psychopathic just show no response at all.
But the biggest idea that came from Abbey's work on
the brains of psychopaths was an insight that eventually led
her back to the question she first started asking on
that highway many years ago. We have understood now for
(08:12):
a while that psychopathy is not a sort of cluster
of individuals that's qualitatively different from everybody else. It's a spectrum.
And so there are people who are highly highly psychopathic
and people who are only moderately psychopathic, and then those
traits vary continuously throughout the population. And what it's interesting
about that fact is it suggests that there must be
(08:34):
such a thing as an anti psychopath. So if most
of us are sort of moderately compassionate, and we've got
psychopaths on one end who have no compassion, Well, there
must be a mirror image of that people who are
unusually compassionate, And I got to thinking about what that
might look like. What would it look like to be
anti psychopathic? Are they, for example, the kind of people
who would run into oncoming traffic to save a complete stranger.
(08:57):
Could they be the key to understanding why some people
are willing to lose everything to help others. After the
break you'll hear more about these so called anti psychopaths
and how they are unusual choices, demons straight what you
can personally do to become a little bit happier. The
Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. I started
(09:25):
out thinking it would be fun too, and you know,
edifying to study people who were heroic rescuers, like the
man who saved my life. But at the time it
wasn't at all clear how I would find them. After
exploring the brains of psychopathic killers, researcher Abbey Marsh wanted
to understand the minds of the polar opposite side of
the psychological spectrum. It's not an easy thing to put
(09:45):
like an ad in the newspaper for have you ever
saved a stranger's life? And risk your own. It wasn't
aware of any way to recruit them, and so I
thought about, well, there are other ways to save lives
that involve significant risk and sacrifice, and at the time,
a number of articles and a book could come out
about altruistic kidney donors. People who give away a kidney
to save the life of a stranger and ende renal failure.
(10:07):
Patience and end stage renal failure often wait three to
five years to get a kidney from a deceased donor.
Living kidney donors, people who are willing to give up
one of their two functioning kidneys, can cut down on
the weight time for the nearly one hundred thousand people
who are on that wait list. The donation procedure is
more straightforward than you might think. Most donors return to
(10:27):
their usual activities in a few weeks. But like all surgeries,
kidney donations come with at least some risk of serious complications,
things like blood clots, infection, or even death. And I thought,
you know, if anything is altruistic, it is that it
is this very significant decision to give away of an
(10:48):
internal organ, invital internal organ, to save the life of
somebody that you've never met. And in most cases have
been picked off a list for you. So it struck
me that if anything could be considered antipsychopathic, gets the
decision to give a kidney to a stranger. So Abby
harder target group kidney donors, but at the time it
was a pretty exclusive club. There are only a few
(11:08):
thousand in the entire country who'd gone through that invasive procedure.
Meaningful results in scientific studies require having as many test
subjects as possible, and so Abby was a bit worried
that she wouldn't be able to find enough donors. In
spite of the odds, she put an ad on an
organ transplant list Serve, have you ever donated a kidney
to a stranger? If so, a researcher at Georgetown is
(11:29):
interested in connecting a study with you. Abby reasonably assumed
that she'd never find enough participants from such an absolutely
tiny pool of potential recruits. I have this vivid memory
of sitting down and being like, oh, I wonder if
anybody's responded to my ads for kidney downers, and opening
up by laptop and my inbox was just flooded with
new messages, many with all caps subject things from altars
(11:51):
to kidney downers who were just very excited to be
taking part in my research. You know, I would love
to be your guinea pig. Please sign me up. Abby
was immediately shocked by this population's generosity. Hundreds of them
were ready to fly to her lab at a moment's notice,
and once they got there, they were happy to go
to great lengths to be helpful. And consider it, working
with lots of different populations over the years, it can
(12:13):
be a real trick to just get people to come
in and to come in on time. And the first
three altruistic kidney donors we brought in and they come
in from all over the country, and they were staying
in a hotel just a few blocks from the campus
where we were going to be scanning them, and they
were so worried about not being late to their brain
scans that they came three hours early the first camp.
(12:35):
It's like unheard of, and they ended up getting lost
in the bowels of the university hospital and almost ended
up breaking through a fire door to get to the
camp center and setting off alarms all over the hospital
because again they were so incredibly concerned about not being late.
Abby also found that her kidney donors were unusually humble.
They didn't like her hypothesis that they were in any
(12:57):
way special or at the extreme end of some goodness spectrum.
A number of them very kindly told me that they
were happy to participate in the study. They were happy
to help out, but they were pretty sure that I
was barking at the wrong tree. The idea that there
was anything different about them at all was just wrong.
They're not unusually altruistic, they're not unusually compassionate. They're just
like anybody else. They happen to be in the right
(13:18):
place at the right time, which is not how anybody
else talks about people who give kidneys to strangers. But
their real sense of humility has been really striking, just
an unwillingness to think of themselves as better than anybody else.
Of course, Abbey's results showed that kidney donors were wrong.
They were different, at least when it came to their brains.
(13:40):
Abbey used neuroimaging techniques to measure the size of the
donors amygdalas, that same brain structure involved in processing fear,
the very same part that was significantly smaller than average
in psychopaths. It turns out that her kidney donors also
had peculiar amygdala's, but they were eight percent larger than
those of average people. Now, it could be that her
(14:02):
donors were just born that way, but it was also
possible that performing acts of kindness over time had caused
the enlargement, like a muscle responding to exercise. Whatever the reason,
these extreme ultruists had ambigdalas that indeed looked like the
polar opposite of what she'd seen in her malicious criminals.
Abby had finally identified a population of anti psychopaths, which
(14:24):
was a pretty cool result for a budding neuroscientist. But
the most important thing about studying this new population for
Abby wasn't just that she had discovered a completely new,
nearly atypical population. The ultruistic kidney donors finally gave Abbey
the opportunity to pose the question that had puzzled her
for decades, The question she wanted to ask her highway savior.
(14:44):
Why would somebody do that? Why did her rescuer choose
to save her? Abby conducted interview after interview, asking what
was going through your head when you decided to help
someone in such an extreme way. The most common answer
I get to the question is it just hit me
like a bolt of lightning. I've found out that there
are people who were dying from kidney failure. There's one
(15:05):
hundred thousand of them on the waiting lists, and most
of us can of a kidney away and be none
the worse for wear for it. And I thought, I'll
do that. I mean, there is no decision process I
think is the interesting thing. Like, it's not a hemming
and hawing process for really almost anybody I've talked to,
it's just so, well, you can do this. Somebody's life
is gonna be saved. I'll do it. At first glance,
(15:26):
this sort of answer fits with Abby's initial hypothesis that
there had to be something fundamentally different about people who
would risk their lives for strangers without a moment's thought.
But if that were the case, her results wouldn't be
as relevant for all of you, and so I wouldn't
be talking about them here on the Happiness lab. As
Abby probe more deeply, she realized that this couldn't be
(15:47):
the whole story. As she heard more about her participants' lives,
she realized that many of them got to this act
of kidney donation through lots of smaller acts of generosity.
Nobody goes from sort of ground zero to donate a
kidney almost always. The people we've worked with are long
time blood donors, platelet donors, some have been marrow donors.
(16:07):
Many of them work in tier positions, rescue animals, foster children.
They've all done things in the past that involved giving
of themselves to help other people. Abbey realized that many
of her kidney donors wound up getting to what seemed
like an extreme altruistic choice through lots of baby steps,
smaller nice actions, the kinds of things that lots of
(16:28):
us do or could easily do. Over time, the donors
recognize that performing these smaller acts of kindness felt well,
kind of nice. The sense that I get is that
they have had the wonderful opportunity to discover how rewarding
that is, what a sense of joy and happiness it
gives you to help other people. And it's just like
any other reinforcement process. You sort of work your way up.
(16:49):
You're like, well, that was so rewarding. What else could
I do? If donating blood is good, I guess donating
marrows even better. If donating kidney is good. I guess
donating a piece of my liver is even better. And
I now have several kidney donors I've worked with who've
also donated a portion of their liver. As she heard
from more interviewees, Abbey's Big Savior on the Highway puzzle
started to become Clearerultists did what they did because they
(17:11):
had learned a simple yet counterintuitive principle of human motivation.
Doing nice things for other people feels really good, even
in cases where it's a bit costly. Helping others can
provide a big spike to our well being. Altruistic kidney
donors just take the usual wellbeing spite we all experience
to an extreme. It's therefore no surprise that they tend
(17:32):
to be a really happy group on average. It's a
universal response I get from them. They are so glad
that they made the decision to donate. They do it
one hundred more times. If they could do one hundred
more times. It's one of the best things that they
ever did, and it gives them this sense of joy
that sticks with them as far as I can tell forever.
Some of the people I've worked with donated close to
(17:53):
twenty years ago. Now, and it doesn't ever seem to
go away, that sense of vicarious joy of having been
able to do this thing for somebody else. I've had
many interviews and in tears as people are describing the
after effects of their nation and hearing that the child
who would receive their kidney like days after donnation, he
(18:13):
was making plans to go to the beach and camping
for like the first time. He'd never been able to
do these things. And like the kidney donors sabbing relating this,
and I'm sabbing relating this, it's incredibly profound. As Abby
heard more of these stories and saw the incredible joy
that her subjects experienced, she started to think that her
extreme subjects might be onto something important, something that the
rest of us could learn from. Two. If you want
(18:36):
to make a good decision about bringing joy and meaning
in a sense of connectedness into your own life, helping
people is clearly the way to do it. Abby started
to realize that all of us can benefit from doing
nice things for others, even if we're not yet ready
to give up a body part to a stranger. We
all have our own ways that we can make the
lives of other people better. You know, donating kidney is
(18:59):
one way, but it's certainly not the only way. But
as Abby right, I mean, it's clear that her donors
get a huge happiness boost from their generous act. But
can the average person really become happier by making a
small sacrifice to aid a stranger? Can shifting your focus
to helping other people really be a strategy for improving
well being? And if there is a path to becoming
(19:20):
a happy altruist, is there a step along that path
that you could take today? The Happiness Lab will be
right back. When we think of small, everyday things we
can do to boost our mood, we often think of
(19:41):
the idea of pampering ourselves. And whenever I think of
personal pampering, I'm reminded of one of my favorite seams
from the TV show Parks and Recreation. Once a year,
Donna and I spend a day treating ourselves. What do
we treat ourselves to? Clothes, treat yourself, treat yourself, massage,
treat yourself, mimosa, treat yourself, fine leather goods. Treat yourself.
(20:02):
It's the best day of the year, the best day
of the year when we want to be happier. We
think it's time to spoil ourselves, or, in the popular
parlance of parks wreck, I've got three words for you,
Yo sill. On the show Tom and Donna observed treat
yourself day every October thirteenth. It's now become a cultural phenomenon,
so much so that Rheta, the actress who plays Donna,
(20:23):
can't post a photo of a cocktail or a purse
on Instagram without some fan telling her to go ahead
and treat yourself. But it's a strategy, right. Should we
be treating ourselves to feel happier or are we missing
other more powerful opportunities to boost our moods? You know,
I don't think treating ourselves is a terrible idea, like
spending money on ourselves can be good. This is Liz Done,
(20:46):
a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia an
author of the book Happy Money, The Science of Happier Spending.
It's just that this idea of that spending money on
somebody else could actually be helpful, I think is especially
easy to overlook because I think we do just get
focused on ourselves. Liz studies the cases where our so
called treat yourself. Intuitions can lead us astray, especially when
(21:09):
it comes to spending our disposable income. I first got
interested in this idea, like, not because I was especially
interested in generosity, but because I was interested in money.
So I managed to make it through my twenties without
ever holding a real job. At twenty seven, I got
my first real job and they actually started paying me,
and I was like, oh wow, Like, what do I
(21:29):
do with all of this money? Like this is more
money than I need to survive, you know, and what
do I do with it? I was surprised at the
time by how little research there was on this topic.
Liz Comb the literature to figure out the best way
to spend our money to feel happier, and all the
existing studies seem to point in the same direction. The
science shows that treating ourselves doesn't make us as happy
(21:50):
as treating other people, and that result is not just
true for extremely altruistic people like Abby's kidney donors, even
when we look in pretty diverse regions of the world.
In fact, in all seven major regions of the world,
we find this relationship whereby people who donate money to
charity are happier than those who don't. So I thought, well, okay,
would we actually get more of kind of happiness being
(22:12):
for our buck by spending on others than by spending
on ourselves. Listen, our colleagues decided to test this in
a rather simple experiment. They walked up to people on
the street and handed them twenty dollars. We asked them
to spend it by the end of the day, but
with a catch. So we told half the people they
had to spend it on themselves, and we told half
the people they had to spend it to benefit others.
(22:34):
Imagine for a second that you're a subject in this study.
You just got twenty bucks out of the blue, and
you're asked to spend it. What would feel better spending
that money on a nice free meal or a shiny
manicure for yourself, or using that same amount of money
to help someone else. If you're like Liz's subjects, you
probably think the treat yourself condition would feel better. In fact,
(22:57):
Liz asked over a hundred people to predict which condition
they would prefer, and about two thirds of them went
with the treat yourself option. But what did Liz find
when people really spent that cash windfall. People were in
a better mood at the end of the day when
they'd been asked to spend this money on other people
rather than on themselves. The simple act of spending twenty
(23:17):
dollars on another person was enough to significantly raise people's
well being levels. But Liz has found that the same
effect holds for smaller amounts of money too. Her team
tested a different group of subjects. They were given only
five dollars to spend on themselves or someone else. This
second group showed exactly the same effect as those who
were given more cash. You don't necessarily have to be
(23:38):
spending crazy amounts of money on others, even like say
five dollars, or even just two dollars, and shifting it
towards using that money to benefit other people does seem
to provide this detectable benefit for moods. Listener colleagues have
now replicated the same effect in people all over the world,
in Canada, India, Uganda, and even remote villages on the
(24:00):
island of Vanawatu. The results are always the same for
rich and for poor people. One study of South African
subjects found that people who are happier spending money on
others even when they report not having enough money to
buy food for their families in the last year. But
what's most impressive is that Liz has shown that generosity
doesn't just feel good in adulthood. We started to wonder, like,
(24:22):
you know, is this a fundamental part of human nature?
So my student lair Acting and I teamed up with
Kylie Hamlin, who's a developmental psychologist, and we brought toddlers
just under the age of two into the lab. Now,
of course, toddlers don't really care about money, so we
worked with like the closest thing to toddler gold which
of course is goldfish crackers, And so we gave these
(24:43):
little kids windfall of goldfish for themselves, as well as
a chance to give some of those goldfish away to
a puppet named Monkey. The researchers watched how many goldfish
crackers kids gave away, and then they coded their facial
expressions to see how happy toddlers seemed afterwards. What we
see in the study is that even children under the
age of two seem to exhibit pleasure from giving their
(25:04):
resources away. Counterintuitively, the kids smiled more and see much
happier after losing a bunch of their goldfish crackers. It's
kind of just reassuring, Like as many problems as we
have in the world right now, it's like the tiny
humans are starting out with this proclivity to derive joy
from giving their stuff away. That to me, I don't know,
(25:27):
it makes me optimistic again about the world. What's less optimistic, though,
is that we adults don't realize that doing nice things
for others feel so good that it can have such
a positive impact on our mood. I mean, I definitely
want to be happier, but I haven't given away a
really significant chuck of my income, let alone a kidney.
(25:47):
I bet you haven't either. Our lying minds keep saying
treat yourself, which means we tend not to even take
baby steps towards kindness nearly as much as we could.
It's so interesting because I think on a broad level,
people totally recognize that this is the case, and I
get postcards and emails and stuff from people saying why
(26:11):
did you, as a scientist, need to waste your time
showing this Where people are just saying like, oh, we
already knew this from like the Bible or from like,
you know, what our parents taught us. And I think
you know, on a broad level, people recognize that generosity
feels good. I think what they miss is that, you know,
when they're looking at how to spend the twenty dollars
(26:31):
in their pocket, that's where they make the error. So
it's like, in this moment, with this like piece of
extra money in my hand, it doesn't maybe occur to
me to spend it on something else, or you know,
it feels much more tempting to use it to benefit
myself rather than to spend it on others. And again,
(26:53):
I think we forget that, like, oh, I could buy
a slightly less expensive car and then have a lot
of money left over to use to help other people
in my life or donate to charity or whatever. And
I think you know, that's where the error creeps in,
is that we've kind of get that we would actually
benefit from using the money less on ourselves and more
on other people. So if you really want to treat
(27:16):
yourself to a happier day, give up something to benefit
another person. You can start with money, just give up
a dollar or two, But if you're strapped for cash,
you can also give up time, like letting someone cut
in front of you in line at the grocery store.
It could even be a small service like helping a
neighbor clear off the snow, or maybe taking the time
to rate and review your favorite podcast. And doing nice
(27:39):
things for others doesn't just boost your mood, it also
makes the person who received your kind actions a little
happier too. And that's a kind of tip I most
love sharing on this podcast, one that lets my listeners
selfishly bump up their own happiness in a way that
also helps to make the world a better, more empathic place.
And who knows, maybe you won't be satisfied with the
(28:00):
small act of donating two dollars here or five bucks there.
Maybe you'll also graduate from those baby steps to the
kind of selfless acts that lead to a huge, huge,
long standing boost and well being, ones that really really
help people. Maybe you'll even save the life of another person,
A person like Abby stuck on the highway alone, embraced
(28:22):
for what could have been certain death, a moment that
has stayed with her for decades. It just stuck with me,
the fact that I owe my life to the stranger
who is willing to risk his to save me. I'm
hoping that your altruistic Savior is out there somewhere. If
he's listening right now, what would you say. That's a
big one. But you know, if he's out there listening today,
(28:42):
and I just want to say how profoundly grateful I
am for the beautiful thing that you did and the
opportunities you've given me, and I hope to do your
tremendous act of bravery justice. The Happiness Lab is co
(29:12):
written and produced by Ryan Dilley with the help of
Pete Naton. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver,
with additional scoring, mixing and mastering by Evan Viola. The
show was edited by Sophie mckibbon and fact checked by
Joseph Fridman. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Carlie mcgliorre Heather Fame,
Julia Barton, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanik, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent,
(29:34):
Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by
Pushkin Industries and by me, Doctor Laurie Santos
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