Prof. Dan Gilbert -- The Science of Happiness: What Your Mother Didn't Tell You

ladies and gentlemen please give a warm welcome to Professor Dan Gilbert we get that work Oh magic wonderful what a pleasure to be here with you I was recently introduced somebody said professor Gilbert is going to talk about the world's oldest question what is the secret of happiness I found that to be very odd because this is not an old question this is an extraordinarily new question the idea that happiness might be a secret look for most of human history life was in the words of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes nasty short and brutish life was short health was poor food was scarce most of your children wouldn't live to adulthood and basically you got up in the morning and you tried not to die that was the to-do list for the day and then there were three revolutions there was an agricultural revolution there was an industrial revolution there was a technological revolution and for the first time in the history of the world large populations of people on earth have everything they could possibly want certainly everything they need now our ancestors knew what happiness was happiness is what happens when you get what you want and that never happens on earth in this lifetime and yet now we have populations of people who do have everything they want and guess what they're not all perfectly happy so this is what Huxley called the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact it can't be that happiness is simply what happens when you get what you want because people get what they want and they're not always happy how is that possible how can you get what you're aiming for and not be happy when you get it the answer is you could be aiming for the wrong things and indeed we do aim for the wrong things and there are two main reasons why one is our imaginations fail us and I'm not going to talk about that today the other thing is we get a lot of bad advice a lot of bad advice we're all citizens of Nations were members of families and we are surrounded by bartenders and taxi drivers and aunts and uncles and yentas and grandmothers and rabbis and priests and philosophers and talk-show hosts all of whom know exactly what we need to do to be happy and they're very happy to tell us these are three advertisements that were from the year I was born these are not comedy these are real advertisements that gave my mother advice about how to be happy and how to make me happy smoke for pleasure today start your children on Cola early and then of course TV happiness shared by the whole family now these look funny to us now because we know this was impossibly bad advice all of this advice was terrible advice for how to have a happy healthy family life or child what I want to suggest to you is that a lot of the advice that we get today about what makes people happy is right but lots of it is wrong and it is the job of science to distinguish between the two luckily I think for all of us in the last 10 to 20 years psychologists economists even neuroscientists have gotten interested in the question of happiness and they are using exactly the same experimental and statistical tools that we as scientists used to answer questions like what causes cancer what causes butterflies to migrate what claw causes global warming to answer the question what causes happiness and I thought in the short amount of time I had with you I would give you a little insight into what they found now this is my mother and my mother it turns out she gave me lots of advice don't wear a beard it hides your beautiful face wear clean underwear so if you get hit by a car the doctor will know you're from a good family some of you have heard this advice but she gave me three main pieces of advice about how to be a happy person and have a happy life and it turns out I thought it was Jewish mothers said this it turns out it's mothers from Africa to India give their children essentially these three pieces of advice first of all find a nice girl and settle down wouldn't hurt if she were Jewish second find a job that is meaningful and fulfilling it wouldn't hurt if you were comfortable and third have children wouldn't hurt if it were soon now you probably all heard these three pieces of advice from your mom if you didn't then she probably isn't really your mother and you should check the question is was my mom right or was she wrong about these three things the answer is yes she was right and she was wrong and we now know what thing she was right and what things she was wrong about so let me just go through these three how about marriage how many people here think marriage causes happiness ma'am you're not allowed to raise your husband's hand that isn't fair okay so the minority of you think marriage causes happiness many of you think marriage is a sign of happiness if you're happy and you're in love then you get married but marriage doesn't actually make you happy well let's examine the facts the first brute fact is that married people are happier than unmarried people unmarried people are divorced they're widowed but they're also single there even people who are cohabiting and living together and if you look closely at the differences between married and unmarried people you'd understand why married people live longer marry people are healthier married people make more money per capita married people have more sex and rapport enjoying it more virtually everything you could imagine might make a person happy married people seem to have more of now it could be that you see data like these because marriage makes people happy the other possibility is happy people get married both hypotheses turn out to be true it is true that marry that happy people do better on the marriage market who wants to marry or when you can marry Piglet right you want somebody who smiles when they wake up in the morning but it also looks like marriage causes happiness so here's a typical pattern of findings if you look at people's happiness before and after the wedding you see that as people approach the wedding day they're getting happier and happier right after the wedding there's a honeymoon period in which their happiness keeps rising and then happiness starts to fall but notice that at least six years out it hasn't come back to its initial baseline does it ever yes there's some argument different data sets show different numbers for and five years six years ten years twelve years okay let's not quibble about numbers it looks like marriage buys you some reasonable amount of time of increased happiness now since marriage seems to buy you some increase in happiness you would expect divorce to make you unhappy and you would be quite wrong about that because for both men and women divorce is also a source of happiness now you might say how do I put these two facts together does this suggest I just should just keep getting married and then divorced and then married and getting divorced and accrue happiness with each new transition know what these two facts suggest is that marriage makes people happy but happy marriage makes people really happy that is when marriages are bad we get relief from getting out of them but when they are good we seem to get an extra benefit from staying in them what about money doesn't I won't even ask you does money make you happy I did a television show where I stood on Boston Common big park and asked passers-by sir do you think money can buy happiness and almost to the person I get the responses back like you know from a Hallmark greeting card oh no money can't buy happiness no true happiness comes from and then they name their favorite thing God love children wouldn't give okay well they're all wrong money absolutely clearly buys happiness here's a very here here is a very typical curve for the relationship between money and happiness notice two things there is no point at which getting richer makes you sadder no point on the curve okay each dollar buys more happiness but notice another thing somewhere on this curve it gets harder and harder to get happiness out of money there's what statisticians call an inflection point a point where the curve starts to flatten it never flattens completely but it gets pretty flat it's harder to get more happiness out of money where is that magical point a hundred million dollars a year five hundred million again studies differ but probably somewhere between forty and seventy thousand dollars per year and you can do the translation into shekels if you need to it's not a bad salary but it's certainly not a king's salary the question about curves like this and this is a very well replicated phenomenon the question is why is money just inherently the kind of thing that once you have enough you've got enough and there's just nothing more you can do with it is it is it like pancakes you eat one it's great - it's fantastic three you're starting to get full by five you don't want any more that's one theory the other possibility is that if money doesn't continue to make you happy then you're not spending it right and in a sense that must be true because money is the ability to do almost anything a human being could want to do so why shouldn't it keep increasing your happiness one answer is that people do lots of the wrong things with money I'll give you just one example from some research of mine I don't have much time so I won't go into detail but this is a study in which we actually measure how happy people are as they are going about a variety of daily activities and you can see here working commuting watching television talking having sex resting you can ask me later how do you know how happy they are when they're having sex we know we actually know okay now here's data that won't surprise you people like having sex more than going to work big discovery right headline of tomorrow's paper of course we liked having sex more than going to work and talking is more fun than commuting everybody knows this but here's the interesting data point here's how happy people are when they're resting about as happy as they are when they're working and not even as happy as when they're just watching television now the reason I bring this first of all we know why this happens when people are rest are resting when they're doing nothing their minds wander and when their minds wander they generally wander to bad things right you rarely your mind doesn't wandered all the wonderful things that will happen to you it wanders - that funny rash that you're gonna have to go discuss with your doctor soon so resting and doing nothing doesn't seem to be very pleasant but what's interesting is if you ask people imagine you won the lottery and you suddenly had millions of dollars what would you do their answers are usually some form of rest right they why I would go to the Hawaiian Islands and just lay in a hammock and look up at the blue sky wrong answer you should you should watch TV and talk during sex put those things together you have happiness but resting wrong thing to do we know a lot of things about how you should and shouldn't spend money so for example a number of studies suggest that people get more happiness buying experiences than material goods better to go on a vacation and have nothing to show for it but memories than to buy a new car that's a great deal of fun until it starts to rust in the driveway and you ultimately try to sell it to a neighbor spending money on other people rather than yourself I'm not giving you a sermon I'm not telling you to be altruists I'm telling you that if you were a completely selfish human being who wants to increase his or her own happiness you might try buying coffee for the person and back of you when you go to the coffee shop next time instead of buying a double latte for yourself because no matter what coffee you buy for yourself you will enjoy it for a brief amount of time but when you buy coffee suddenly altruistically for the person and back of you you know they'll break down weeping and thanking you and you'll have a story to tell all day I think the data are fairly convincing that spending on others brings you more happiness in some circumstances than spending on yourself finally a number of studies suggest that you know if you ask people what would you do with a million dollars they name the thing it what they really ought to do is name a hundred thousand things that they would do because happiness turns out to depend less on the size of the joy you get then on the number of Joy's you get per day when I first went to Harvard I thought there would be untold Joy's about being a professor at Harvard I would have this I would have that I would do all of these things it never occurred to me that the great joy would be walking to work and walking home every single day it's not a big joy it's a little joy but it reliably happens two times every day seven days a week okay last but not least children now in colloquial English children are called bundles of joy so this should be a very easy one you know maybe money makes you happy maybe marriage makes you happy but who here is the heartless person who could look at a little baby and not get a big smile a mega-hit of happiness certainly the data have something to say about this and what they tell us reliably is that oops people with children are not as happy as people without them and people whose children actually live with them are the least happy people we know now again this could be because children make you unhappy the other possibility is that unhappy people are that unhappy people have children right maybe if you're really happy you just travel the world but if you're unhappy and there's a big hole in your life you try to make babies to fill it I think it's a dumb theory but these data don't rule it out these data kind of do follow the same people over time and here's a typical pattern of happiness before and after the birth of the first child now here's what my mom says happens you have a baby it makes your life happy here's what the data say you have a baby and your happiness decreases it decreases for men it decreases for women women seem to get a little bit of a bump from the little bump as they're approaching birth and just thereafter but pretty soon they join their partners down in the valley of despair now I'm kidding they're not in the valley of despair but their happiness has gone down and reliably stays down for quite a long time I know this is hard to believe it would it's you know you think these data must be wrong so I'll show you some data collected by a rather well-known scientist professor Kahneman one of his studies they followed about 800 women around and found out how happy they were as they were going about normal everyday activities and you won't be surprised to find that women are awfully happy when they're with their friends they are happy when they're eating they're not that happy when they're doing housework grocery shopping isn't that good and the big question is how happy are they when they're with their own children and the answer is they're extremely not happy that is not statistically distinguished ibly different than actually cleaning the toilet in the house okay now I know you find this to be slightly amusing but wildly counterintuitive science asks us to believe data not intuition if you believe your intuition then you believe the earth is flat because everywhere you look it looks flat and yet we get this picture from outer space and we go WOW maybe the world isn't the way it appears to me what I want to suggest to you is the kind of data that psychologists an economists and neuroscientists collect about human happiness is sort of a view of human happiness from outer space it's a dispassionate view of who's happy and who's not taken simply by Counting smiles and counting heads and the data are pretty clear if you are an extraterrestrial watching from another planet you would conclude the humans that have little humans around them don't seem quite as happy as the humans that don't now I don't think that's a very disputable fact but I think what's interesting is that none of us really believes it everybody here's thinking has something wrong with the way they did those studies I can't be right come on my kids they're the greatest source of happiness in my life well I'm a dad I'm even a grandparent and I feel exactly the same way so the interesting question is why do we all have a intuition that is entirely at odds with the data and I'm going to suggest in closing there are three answers to this question three reasons why we believe children make us happy even though the data suggests this isn't true the three reasons are Armani socks heroin and baseball so I could take questions now and I will unpack these for you so this is a pair of cashmere socks I don't own cashmere socks you have to be in a different income bracket than I have to buy cashmere socks because cashmere socks cost over $100 a pair but here's something I know about cashmere socks if I could be induced to buy a pair at first I would feel like the biggest idiot in the world but then I would put them on and I would start walking and I start saying things like oh wait a minute oh oh now I'm getting it oh my god is like walking on angel's wings this is amazing my god I finally see the light and I would start telling other people you've got to buy some cashmere socks why do I know this because a basic law of economics is people pay a lot for things they love a basic law of psychology is people love a lot the things they pay for the more you can make somebody pay the more they will love the thing they bought what does that sound like children yes children of course you pay for them in money from dental work to college tuition but you pay for them in blood and sweat and tears and hair you pay for them in every way they are hard work sacrificing for them is built into our DNA what kind of idiot would you be to do that if they didn't make you happy and so you have them and you say wow I'm up all night but oh wait a minute I think I get it yes children and you have to have some too there are even some data suggesting this is true bring parents into a laboratory and have them read one of two kinds of magazine articles one magazine article talks all about the benefits of having children how much joy they will bring you how they'll care for you in your old age another magazine article talks only about the costs of having children how expensive it will be how much time and energy and money they will drain from you after reading these magazine articles parents are asked a simple question how much do you enjoy spending time with your kids and what's the answer well you might expect that after reading about how costly children are you would decide maybe you don't like yours very much but in fact exactly the opposite is true when you remind parents of how costly children are they report enjoying their time with them even more why oh you just have to have some to see if you had them you'd know it's just it's really hard to explain but you've gotta buy a pair okay so one reason we think that our children bring us a lot of happiness is because they don't now heroin it would be you you hear people say the heroin is a great source of human misery and there is a way in which it is but there's a way in which it isn't I don't know about you but I've had back surgery so I've had the opiates morphine Demerol they're great no misery no no Nirvana heaven joy bliss just about the best feeling I've ever had so how can heroin be a source of misery when every time you take it you feel great well one answer is that heroin makes you feel so good that it will crowd out every other source of pleasure in your life you will stop working you will stop interacting with your family you'll stop paying for your house you will stop brushing your teeth you will just go sit in a corner anywhere you can and take heroin because that thing is so good now the heroin itself will make you feel good but the net effect of heroin to ruin your life what does that sound like yeah okay so you look at a little baby and it's a little bit like a heroin hi oh joy oh joy oh joy oh joy and the little baby is a heroin hi but the little baby will stop you from doing all the things that were slightly less highs like Oh going to the movie seeing your friends having sex bathing regularly devoting yourself to your job reading books you name it the list is long children crowd out the other pleasures of life because they're just so demanding they take so much from us so the net effect of children is that your net happiness can go down even though every time you look at that child you go webui would go above your budget I once had a woman come up out of the audience after I talked about children happiness and she's a professor Gilbert my child is my greatest source of joy to which I said when you have one source of joy it is by definition your greatest source of joy and this is true not entirely but it's not a bad summary of life for many parents now finally baseball so are Israelis obsessed with baseball or is it only Americans and Japanese okay well this is going to be hard to explain all right so I live in Boston my team is the Red Sox we don't care if they win we only care if they beat the New York Yankees it's a great baseball rivalry now if I were to go to the ballpark to watch a game between my team and their archrival and for nine innings that's how long a baseball game lasts nothing happens it's called a no-hitter right nobody hits the ball okay baseball works like this man stands there tries down getting so many blank looks I will move right along I watched this game that is a no-hitter and then at the very end of the game my guy comes up and he swings the bat he hits the ball out of the park and we win one to nothing now when I go home my wife will say how was the game and I will say oh it was fantastic you should have seen that ball sailing over the left field fence it was a marvelous moment and we won that's the wrong answer the right answer to her question how was the game is it was remarkably boring it was dull it was three excruciating hours of watching nothing happen that ended in a single transcendent moment when we killed our rivals now here's why that's important one of the things we know about human memory again thanks to professor Kahneman is that the way people remember episodes is by their highest peak and their final moments so I'm remembering this three-hour baseball game as great when actually it was a crummy time with a single great moment that's a day with a five-year-old most of the day is spent saying not now not yet don't hit your brother I already told you no we're not buying it if you do that again we're going home it's a it's a big no-hitter and then there's these moments you know just when you think I'm leaving the stadium I don't want to stay any longer the five-year-old looks up at you with chocolate ice cream on her face and says I love you because you're the bestest daddy who ever lived yeah grand slam home run of the heart and at the end of the day when my wife says to me how was the day I go oh it was wonderful no it wasn't wonderful it really wasn't it was a very bad day punctuated by an extraordinary transcendent moment children bring us moments of joy this is my opinion I speak only as a parent that are kind of unparalleled by anything maybe even heroin but those moments are rare most of the time were just working hard if we were to count all the moments we spent with a child and add up the amount of happiness we got over the moments we would find that basically we like doing everything else more than being with our kids just like scientists find when they do exactly that but if you ask a parent what the parent will remember is that for all of that hard tedious work there were transcendent moments that made it all worthwhile now I came here to tell you that marriage makes you happy for a little while and you can probably nod and say that's true came here to tell you money makes you happy though it could make you a lot happier if you knew how to spend it and you say that's true and then I came to tell you children basically don't make you happy and you're thinking that guy doesn't know what he's talking about how did that guy ever get a job at Harvard I want to suggest to you that you may have misunderstood I did not say that your children don't make you happy I didn't say you don't love them and that's what many people will have heard me say consider a number of things first the data I have shown you our data for people on average you're not average right you've come to this conference you are already in the top 2% on a number of dimensions if you are thinking this is not my experience you may well be right it may not be your experience but please don't privilege your experience and think that the way children feel for you is the way they feel for most people in the world our business is going out and talking to the other 98% of the human race and what we find is they don't all agree with you second I didn't say don't have children I don't say you'd be happier if you didn't have them remember what I said was available with them don't use much any less valuable time shilling the field that does she mean and then if you didn't have children who tried not working we should do random assignment exactly method nice way McClane she warned him that I you look at him that hello has nearly - you I didn't make the mother kamli initially watch it all your China shame she would see me as being have them she would see maneuver kind of seems guillotine my fiendish llama vanishing shot simulating the end lame nigger decreased this time I thought I would meet you tomorrow she sees the election led Malaya Maharaja go Mohammed Abu Salim Adel Shibata McLean here the hippo hot normally in this cinema class or team actually Chandra I haven't I've been saying something bad about you and your mail mashallah I like him I'm gonna leave now I'm suddenly much more Kevin Elvis loved you like no look truly know it's moving that we know that the gap another gang Tom Ocean especially in a really large so exotic Vinod mr. Emoto meeting a few animals you know they should have looked it up before I came what that means it was that it has something to do with the way we parent children right it doesn't have to be the case that our children don't bring us happiness it just happens to be the case just as money would make you happy if you could spend it right maybe children would make us happy if we parented them correctly so the burden is not on children to be easier to take care of maybe the burden is on us to figure out why we're not letting something that could be a great source of happiness in our lives be that source finally before you resist the claim that children don't make you happy consider the possibility that it's actually the best thing about you that the best thing about us as a species is that we are willing to sacrifice for people we love even though they don't make a smile all the time even though they are hard work maybe it is the most noble thing about our species if they made us happy we would just be investing in another selfish pleasure maybe the fact they don't tells us something wonderful about ourselves so marriage well yes if it's a good one money yes but little buys a lot and a lot only buys a little bit more and children nothing not so much at least that's not the day to say now what's the moral of this story I think the moral of the story is probably something like I think I probably hit the bottom unpopularity in Jerusalem I may as well go this far don't trust your mother she loves you she means well but the only story she can tell you about happiness or from her life and the story she's heard science has now gotten into the business of happiness and it can shed light on the facts it can't tell us what we should value but it can certainly tell us which of the decisions we make are and are not most likely to lead to happiness it's the place we go for information about wealth it's the place we go for information about health I'd like to suggest it is a place to go for information about the secret of happiness thank you

Channel: PresidentialConf

Views: 463,137

Rating: 4.6322732 out of 5

Keywords: Tomrrow 2013, #tomorrow13, Israeli Presidential Conference, Shimon Peres

Id: BwQFSc9mHyA

Length: 30min 5sec (1805 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 23 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/susanstohellcat]

This psychologist played a role in me being CF! I was leaning toward it anyway, but he did an interview on... I think it was the Colbert Report; he talked about how marriage makes you happy but kids make you less happy. And that touched on something I had always suspected: that kids are, above all, a pain in the ass. Parents might say their kids make them happy on balance, but from day to day, their lives are as stressful and restricted as they always seem from the outside. I really like the explanatory work that Gilbert has done to account for the contradiction.

[u/onionsulphur]

Nice to have an answer to the question so often asked around here: why are parents so keen for everyone else to breed?

[u/haveIeverdonesucha]

the kids talk starts at 12.50

[u/Joseph-Joestar]

Should be a sticky here.

[u/mellydizzle]

Aside from the minute toward the end with the translator talking over the speaker, this is an excellent summary I think everyone should hear before they consider having children. Yet another case of science proving facts > feels.

"When you have one source of joy, it is by definition your greatest source of joy."

[u/ShadowWood273]

...Well that explains a bit

[u/bebusca]

Just confirming what was already known.

[u/lizcoles]

True Dat