Stumbling on Happiness with Daniel Gilbert

Thanks testing good I'm attached to my podium and my normal routine is to be running around the stage so I'm going to try very hard to stand in one place and I hope you can at least hear if you can't see thanks so much for being here what a big crowd it's the fourth of July and every fourth of July the New York Times reprints the Declaration of Independence and one of my guilty pleasures is I get up early in the morning on the 4th of July I get a big cup of coffee and I read the Declaration of Independence I've never admitted this in public before but I feel like I ought to be confessional theam the phrase is of course that stick with me and the idea is that stick with me are the ones introduced early on and the very first sentences where we read that it's self-evident that people have some inalienable rights and they are life liberty and then ding my eyes light up the pursuit of happiness and it occurs to me when I read this that the founding fathers thought that the pursuit of happiness was very difficult but not particularly complicated there was nothing very mysterious about it there was no secret of happiness I mean after all for most of human history life was nasty short and brutish people got up in the morning and they basically tried not to die you know food was scarce a day of labor was long your children probably wouldn't live into adulthood everybody knew exactly what happiness was happiness is what happens when you get exactly what you're aiming for and that never happens in this lifetime well this theory turns out gets put to a test because in the blink of an eye in historical time we undergo three revolutions the Agricultural Revolution the Industrial Revolution the technological revolution and all of a sudden for the very first time in the history of our planet large populations of people on earth have everything they want or at least everything they could possibly need and guess what they're not happy there goes the theory it can't be the case that happiness is just the result of getting what you were aiming for because when people get what they're aiming for they don't seem to be particularly happy the conclusion is very clear it must be that we're aiming for the wrong things now how can that possibly be well the answer to this question requires that you understand something very unique about human beings one of the things that makes us an animal different from all the others with which we share the planet every animal learns from experience that starts with one celled animals all the way up they all learn from experience and that's good but it's a problem because experience can be expensive right you have a close encounter of the feline kind and you learn not to do it again if you survive trial and error is a good way to learn but it has a cost and the cost is error right now human beings have learned to do something different something no other animal does at least to the extent we do it about two million years ago nature decided trial and error wasn't good enough for us and so it undertook a complete architectural overhaul of the human skull it pushed your head forward not to keep your hat on but because your brain tripled in size in two million years most of this growth is centered on a particular part of the brain called the frontal lobe so question what does a frontal lobe do that made Nature think it was so important that you have a big fat one that it actually rearranged the way your skull well the frontal lobe does a lot of things but one of the most important things it does is it lets you imagine that's why you are able to know without actually whipping up a batch that raw steak banana split is not a good thing right the guys at Ben & Jerry's didn't make this try it and go error you can close your eyes and simulate the experience now it's kind of cute when you're talking about ice cream but think about this adaptation this means that you are the only animal on the planet that learns from mistakes you never made should I stick my finger in the pencil sharpener ooh bad idea that is a miracle that you can actually know that without trying it just like pilots use flight simulators to see what it will be like to be in a plane this part of your brain is a life simulator and it allows you to sim late decisions before you actually take them that's the good news the bad news is its new and it's still in beta testing we have the ability to imagine but imagination has limits the life simulator fails and it fails in very predictable ways study after study in the last two decades has shown that people make a systematic series of errors when they try to predict not what will happen in the future but how they will feel about it here's an example now some of you are professors almost all of you know professors and so you know that the career course of a professor is that you work for a little while as an assistant professor and then after X number of years they give you one of two hats either you don't get tenure and you go spend your life going cheese no cheese or you get tenure and you wear the Pampas you have to listen to me every time I talk at okay now here's the question which group of people ends up happier well if you ask assistant professors these questions would you be happier in your life if you get tenure or if you don't they give you the obvious answers not I'm a scientist so I'm not going to just Yap to you about ideas I'm going to try to marinate you and data but I'll try to show it kindly here's a study in which assistant professors are asked to predict their happiness in the first five years after the tenure decision and they think this is a one item IQ question right this of course I'm going to be much happier if I get it than if I don't what's the reality well here's how happy people are after the tenure decision in the first five years and this is a statistically non significant difference in other words it doesn't matter their happiness will be exactly the same I should mention by the way that however the tenure decision goes everybody is happier than assistant professors but the point is they're not happier they're not happier if they get tenure then now if you find this unbelievable I don't mean the day it happens I'm talking about how their lives play out over the next couple of years this is a failure of the life simulator and this pattern of data is seen in study after study after study whether it's about trivial things like how will you feel if somebody gives you a compliment two really important things like how will you feel if you get a trick a kidney transplant the pattern of data is very clear and the only question is why why are we so bad looking into our own emotional futures and figuring out what will make us happy how happy will be and how long our happiness will last well I think there are four answers to this question there are four things that we fundamentally don't understand about human happiness four things that make all of us strangers to ourselves and what I'd like to do in my time today is tell you what they are my talk was titled the four answers because I grew up in a religious tradition where we have four questions I always thought it would be nice to have four answers today I'm going to give you some okay so point number one I want you to use your imagination right now to imagine buying a newspaper now I really mean it just take one second there's a newsstand to help you out just imagine buying a newspaper okay you all look like you're done yeah okay so what Bill did you pay with ten twenty what paper what day was it what was the headline did you fold it put it under your arm did you step backwards or forwards turn left or right okay none of you have answers this question did you even do what I asked yes you did you imagine buying a paper but what you did is a hallmark of imagination which is you imagine the central essential feature which is paper comes to me and you left out all the details imagination has to leave stuff out right it can't take as long to imagine something as it does to do it otherwise when somebody said imagine living in Chicago you'd be permanently sidelined that would be the rest of your life you um I'm in day 47 now wait I'm waking up for breakfast that's not what how imagination works imagination leaves stuff out but what does it leave out well it leaves out the in essential detail so if I say to you imagine going to the dentist this is the mental image you get somebody monkeying around in your mouth what you don't imagine almost certainly is parking the car or going through the new highlights for children in the office in the waiting room right those are the parts that seem in essential now thank you imagination for leaving out in essential details except and here's the problem in essential details matter all the thousands of little details that you don't imagine when you imagine actually end up affecting how happy or unhappy you are here I'll give you an example this is the state of California and if you do surveys and you ask Americans who don't live there would you be happier if you lived in California they give you a resounding yes oh yeah I'd be happier in California if US Californians are you happier than people who don't live in California go here we're happier the people who don't live in California they're all wrong there is actually no reliable correlation between living in California and Happiness why do we all make this mistake because living in California brings up this picture for almost all of us right beautiful people beautiful beaches here's what you don't imagine you don't imagine traffic you don't imagine earthquakes you don't imagine the fact that when you get there you have to have a job where you've got a mother-in-law you get the flu you get divorced you get a different mother-in-law all the stuff of real ordinary life happens in California and B know these things are important and they will affect your happiness but when somebody says we do like living in California you go Beach water beach water beach water that's imagination leaving out important stuff now it turns out that you can I can demonstrate to you that this is a key problem in people forecasting their hedonic or emotional reactions to future events because you can improve people's accuracy of imagination simply by asking them to imagine a few of the details they left out here's a very simple study football fans are asked how they're going to feel three days after a very very big important game between two teams that are arch rivals now one group is asked that we'll call this the narrow focus condition they're simply asked the question that you see up there how will you feel how happy you're unhappy on a scale from unhappy to happy how will you feel three days after your team wins or after your team loses another group of people are asked exactly this question but they're asked to do one thing first before you tell me how you're going to feel three days after this game is played tell me first the things you'll be doing and these are students and so they say things like well I guess I've got an exam between now and then oh there's a cool party I'm going to go to oh I've got to mow the lawn I'm going to call my sister the usual stuff people do in three days all the things that imagination normally leaves out let's look at the data on how accurate these people are in the narrow focus condition we see a pattern data we see every time we study these kinds of events mainly that the losers overestimate how happy uh how unhappy they're going to be in the winners overestimate how happy they're going to be hey hello it's a football game it's three days later it doesn't make a damn bit of difference but when people are predicting they think it'll matter these are any deviation from that line in the middle of the graft is in accuracy but look at the at the wide focus condition simply asking people the question tell me some things you'll be doing in those three days ameliorates this error makes people more accurate and predicting how they're going to feel three days after a football game so here's lesson number one what we don't imagine matters more than we imagine it does that's the essential point lesson number two answer number two I guess it's not much of a lesson let me introduce you to answer number two by introducing you to some people that I met in the pages of the New York Times here are some things that they that I they have to say I'm so much better off physically financially mentally in almost every way I don't have one minutes regret it was a glorious experience and I believe it turned out for the best who are these people what are they talking about well the first person is Jim Wright who in this audience actually there are going to be a few people who recognize him Jim Wright was the Speaker of the House of Representatives probably at the time the most powerful Democrat in the United States a young guy named Newt Gingrich caught him doing a shady book deal and he resigned in disgrace they catch up with Jim Wright decades later and ask him about his life and what he doesn't say as I resigned in disgrace what do you think I've got a terrible life no he says I'm so much better off physically financially mentally in an almost every other way what's unusual about this is what other ways are there I'm animal e mineral east vegetable e I'm he's got him alright he's better off in every possible way okay here's the second guy from the newspaper his name is Maurice Beckham and you've never heard of him Maurice Beckham was a 78 year old man who uttered these words upon being released from prison in Louisiana he had spent most of his life there for having the audacity to fight back against the Ku Klux Klansmen who had tried to lynch him and after spending I believe he was in prison for forty-five years he's released and somebody says gee Maurice how was it and he says I don't have one minutes regret it was a glorious experience okay not it was okay met some nice guys the food was all right there was a gym it was a glorious experience it's a reward we usually really reserved for like a religious experience okay third guy is a person you've never heard of but you should have heard of Harry Langerman it turned out for the best what's Harry talking about well Harry in the I think 1940's had an idea he wanted to open a restaurant so he went to his brothers an investment banker and he said will you bankroll me and he said you idiot you don't know anything about restaurants Harry had to admit that was true so he got in his car and he drove from the east coast to the west coast studying restaurants by stopping and eating in them guess to the west coast he pulls into a little hamburger stand owned by these guys named the McDonald's brothers he tries the burgers goes this is an idea can i franchise this restaurant they say sure we want three thousand dollars for the franchise Harry goes back to New York this is all in the article asked his brother and his brothers famous words quoted here are you idiot no one eats hamburgers he won't give him the money about six months Ray Kroc gets the money and becomes four time the richest man in America what happens to Harry a middle-level manager for the Black Angus restaurant chain what does he have to say screw my brother no no people do eat hamburgers now it turned out for the best just one more these are for guys most everyone recognizes three of them in us with white and our beers recognize all four these are the Beatles the original Beatles Paul John George and well where's Ringo well that's their original drummer Pete best and as you know Pete best ended up getting flung out of the Beatles and they found Ringo on a tour and became the world's most famous a popular music group what does Pete best say about all this well he says I'm happier than I would have been with the Beatles if you even play a musical instrument contemplate what he is saying here okay I am happier than I would have been being a member of the all-time most important and it's not like he gave up music and went into the restaurant business he's a session drummer okay but he's happier than he would have been with the Beatles here's the question are these people crazy answer no they are not crazy at all they are doing exactly what brains are beautifully designed to do and I'm going to show you the trick this is called a neck newb named after the Swiss crystallographer in 1832 who designed it and most of you have seen this lovely optical illusion it's a cube that is an ambiguous object which is to say there are two ways to interpret this drawing and if you stare at it you will see that you're looking at a box and you feel like you're looking in and all sudden it goes pink and it seems to just pop and it lays on its side that's because it can actually be read by your brain either way here I'll help you up by passing bars through it if you're not seeing the illusion this usually helps ping ping woo right okay so this is cheaper than drugs and if you've got nothing to do on a Friday night you can basically sit around and watch this thing pop back and forth and what will happen is it will just flip flop flip flop for the rest of eternity till you get tired and basically fall on the shrubbery now if I reward you for seeing it one way rather than the other something as simple as hey every time it's on its side you tell me and you go side top side top and every time you go side I go mmm-hmm I give you a little subtle reward guess what happens in about two minutes you can't flip the cube you can no longer see it from the top position because I've been rewarding your brain for seeing it on the side position this tells us something important it's not just the brain resolves ambiguity the brain exploits ambiguity the human brain is designed to go shopping among the many ways in which it can interpret an ambiguous figure and pick the one that feels best all other things being equal it turns out that it's hard to draw an ambiguous figure but almost every event you experience in life has plenty of ambiguity is resigning from the house losing your job or is it gaining new freedom flip flop flip flop is going to prison losing your freedom or being forced into a spiritual journey flip flop flip flop is losing the gig above being one of the Beatles losing an opportunity to make history or is it gaining family happiness flip flop flip flop that's what our brains are good at they are designed to find the best way to see things now what's amazing about this because I don't think I've told you anything you probably don't already suspect from spending a few decades among the human beings on the planet what's so amazing about this is people don't know that they will do this with ambiguous events even moments before they do it watch this let me talk to you for a moment about the I'll show you a study on the experience rejection an experience nobody likes and virtually all of us have had we've all been in the position of having others tell us we're not going to give you what you want we don't like you we don't accept you you can't be part of the fun now oftentimes rejection is ambiguous you ask somebody for a date they say no why did that happen could be that I'm no good flip-flop could be she just did an anti-semite flip-flop could be that I'm not handsome flip-flop could be that she is gay flip-flop look right and it's not too hard to go on you know I found the gay anti-semite at the ideas festival what was I to do that's ambiguous rejection but there's also unambiguous rejection for example when everybody turns you down for a date or something else right as my mother would have said you know they can't all be crazy there's something wrong with you indeed okay so here's the question now if you knew that your brain could exploit ambiguity and you do know that you would know that if you were to come into my laboratory and I set up a situation in which you were rejected by one person or by many people which would make you feel worse yes being rejected by many people would make you feel worse than being rejected by one oh you're all so smart how come people and experiments not to dumb people say like Oh Harvard students how come they don't know this about themselves very simple experiment we bring subjects into our laboratory we create a model business and they want a job in our model business it involves tasting ice cream and making up funny names for it we tell them they have to do a job interview and that they're going to be judged by we tell half of them by a single judge and the other half by a whole panel of judges a whole panel of judges as long as one of them likes you you'll get the job but if they unanimously agree you're too stupid to taste ice cream why then you don't get the job with me everybody's applying and they're getting judged by the one or by the many we asked them to predict how they're gonna feel if they don't get the job and then guess what we do we don't hire any of them we reject everyone and we measure how they really feel this is a very short version of a very long experiment here's what they predict they predict just what you would have predicted if I'd asked for a show of hands I'm sorry this is I'm showing you first the actual data that what they're show what you're seeing here I'm gonna rewind and start my whole talk over your weekend crap what I'm showing you here are the actual data guess what people feel much better when they are rejected by one than when they are rejected by many but here's what they predicted they predicted they would feel miserable no matter what when you ask a college student how will you feel if you don't get the job they just go bad really bad rejection sucks it'll hurt what they don't do is preview that beautiful trick their brain will play the moment they rejected the book I didn't get the job now what does one person know exactly flip-flop flip-flop the lesson in this study and in studies like it is this we can't foresee what we'll see once we are seeing it I didn't read that very well we can't foresee what we will see once we're seeing it in other words we can't look ahead and see that we will rationalize adapt and exploit ambiguity and see the world differently later than we do now I don't know of anybody who's ever done a systematic study of people who've been left standing at the altar but I'm willing right now to put $1,000 of my money on the follow I'll make the following prediction if you ask those people to respond was it the best day of your life or the worst day of your life Moore will say it was the best day of their life if you ask anybody about to get married if you get left standing at the altar today will it be the best day of their life or the worst day of your life you will flip that result very clearly that my friends is what lesson number two is about answer number three okay this is a this is what we technically call in visual psychology a gray bar now if you look at this bar you'll see it's equally gray on both sides but I'm going to put a different colored background behind it keep watching it in Zingo acute optical illusion one the bar looks dark and the other end of the bar looks light why well duh your eye is comparing the foreground to the background and against a dark background the foreground looks lighter against the light background the foreground looks darker this is called a contrast effect a simultaneous visual contrast it turns out that contrast comparing one things change when you compare them to other things is true every level of our experience here's one with which you're familiar retailers have known about the contrast effect much longer than psychologists have and they have used it for well probably millennia to bear you the spare you the undue burden of a heavy wallet I want you to imagine that you are coming to my house for dinner your mother raised you right you're bringing me wine you go to your local wine shop and these are the wines on sale they range from I think it says $8 to $51 which one will you buy well studies are very clear we know which one you're going to buy first of all you're not going to buy the $8 bottle of wine because you don't want to look cheap second you're not going to buy the $51 bottle of wine because you are cheap what you're going to do is buy the $27 bottle of wine that's why your retailer keeps on hand something he calls an aspirational item right it's a bottle of wine that no one in your neighborhood can afford it sits there it gathers dust it's supposed to it's never meant to be sold it's only function is to make sure that when people who are on their way to my house come in they buy the $33.00 bottle rather than the 27 this is simply the contrast effect it's very clear that 33 looks cheaper in the context of 147 then it looked in the context of 51 okay contrast effects also are a very important part of our predictions about happiness so these are real data if you ask people which of these two jobs getting out of college which of these two jobs will make you happier the one where you are in 100k and everybody else earns 110 or the one where you are in 90 K and everyone else earns 80 and what college students tell you is I would be happier with the one where I actually make significantly less money but I make more money than other people is that true I mean they're banking on the car they're paying $10,000 for a contrast effect will they get it well some studies suggest not and this is where we're closing in on lesson number three here's the simplest experiment any Harvard student ever got paid five bucks to come to my lab and do you come to the lab you sit down and there's a tray with some potato chips on it and you were asked exactly two questions first predict for me how much you're going to enjoy eating these potato chips second they eat them how much did you enjoy eating these potato chips third thank you here's your money go home goodbye that is the whole experiment now there's one thing we don't tell them which is that we conduct this experiment in one of two rooms in one room there are some items sitting at the edge of the table that happened to all be chocolate and if you can't remember back that far college students like potato chips but they consider chocolate to be the single best thing you can put in your mouth without asking permission they love chocolate okay so these people are making these predictions about potato chips and eating them while there is a better food at the far end of the table in another room what we call the spam room there are there are items at the end of the table that college students say that they hate these are things like spam sardines canned salmon there's even if you looked closely at the slide you would see there is such a thing as kin haggis you can get sheep intestine in a can and by god we've got a can of it in the lab okay so here's the question how do these rooms that they're in affect the predictions they make and the experiences they have well look how they affect the predictions dramatically if you are asked to predict how much you like you're going to like potato chips while you're in a spam room you say oh god I'm gonna love them and if you were asked the same question in a chocolate room you go it'll be good but not so much is that true no because once you put Creek correctly greasy fried salty potato in your mouth it doesn't matter what you're not eating right once you are chewing potato chips you'll like them or you don't but you're not going wow man this is so not spam mmm god this is really not talk no you're going potato potato potato potato potato you're enjoying the experience as much as you will and you are not making the comparison that you yourself thirty seconds before said you were going to make it turns out that this is true an area after area of life we think we are constantly going to be saying if I marry her I'll spend my whole life going why didn't I marry her I buy this house I'll always be thinking about the house I didn't buy and the truth is people rarely think about the things they didn't do or didn't happen to them now I know you're going well maybe some people don't but I know I do and I'm gonna guess that you're wrong you're suffering from the refrigerator light illusion you remember when you were a kid you thought the refrigerator light was always on because every time you check it's on the truth you now know is it's always off except when you check it turns out that whenever you ask yourself the question am i thinking about something other than what I'm doing right now the answer is yes yes just now you are now starting to think about something you're not doing the problem is nobody's ever keeping track of all the times you're not keeping track when psychologists keep track of how often you have thoughts like I could have had a v-8 it turns out it's almost never a few of you at some point in this talk have already said I could have been watching the parade but you probably thought it once for a moment and then came right back to me many of you have never left very few of you have spent the whole time going I don't know he's not Madeleine Albright she's just not Madeleine Albright's just not Madeleine Albright okay the point is that we are in the here and now a lot more than we realize in the future we're going to be living in the present we will not be looking back so much on our past okay so the last answer has nothing to do with imagination because I have talked as though we are this guy staring into a crystal ball it is our duty to somehow close our eyes and use this new part of our brain to figure out what we will like how happy will be but that ignores the fact that every one of us lives in a society we are surrounded by grandmothers and rabbis and uncles and dear Abbey's and taxi drivers and bartenders all sorts of people who are very happy to do the imagining for us and tell us exactly where happiness is to be found we are the inheritors of huge amounts of cultural wisdom about happiness even if you didn't have a frontal lobe you'd know the things that are supposed to make you happy because your mother would have told you are the things that our culture whispers in our ear about the sources of happiness right or are they wrong well it turns out over the last decade or two psychologists economists and neuroscientists have been trying to find out the validity of our cultural wisdom I thought I would just give you a few highlights of what those studies show this is my mom in my mom probably like a lot of your mom's told you that there are at least three important things if you wanted to be happy they were marriage money and children now she didn't give me the bullet list she said something more like you really should find a nice girl and settle down it wouldn't hurt if she was Jewish you really should find a good job you like it wouldn't hurt if you were comfortable and you should really have children it wouldn't hurt if it was soon okay I don't know you probably had a mother who said basically these things to you was my mom right about any of this all of this some of this the answer it turns out is yes let me start at the beginning with marriage so how many people here think that marriage has been established to be a cause of happiness okay I see a man who's raising his wife is raising his hand okay either most of you are scared or most of you are just wrong because it turns out marriage is an extremely good predictor of happiness married people are much happier than unmarried people and by unmarried I don't just mean not yet married but uh you're divorced widowed single living together all of those groups are not as happy as married people and why should they be because anything you could measure that you would think would be related to happiness married people win they make more money per capita they are healthier they eat better they have sex more often they enjoy it more yes they enjoy it more now I see heads shaking fight you should not do that not in public it turns out one economist recently computed did shadow pricing and computed how much more money you would have to earn every year to equal the happiness you get from being married and answers' a hundred thousand dollars for the average person who makes less than a hundred thousand dollars this is a big big benefit I should say by the way that marriage turns out to be a much better predictor of happiness for men than for women everybody gets something on a marriage men really get something on a marriage which you know conflicts with the idea they get dragged to the altar kicking and screaming and then they get almost all the good um now what you might say is yeah but these these kinds of data we can't tell if happiness if marriage makes you happy you're happy this makes you married right it might be the happy people do better on the marriage market guess what they do but both of these things are true we know like looking at longitudinal data if you follow the same people over time and you look at their happiness before and after wedding what do you see as they're getting close to the wedding they're going to wedding wedding wedding happy happy happy they're getting happier and happier they get married they have a honeymoon and then their happiness starts to retreat but what it doesn't do is go back to where they were before they even plan to get married so marriage seems my mom was right about does seem to be a cause of happiness what about money my mother wasn't particularly materialistic but she just didn't think it would hurt to be comfortable was she right well there's a lot of data on happiness and wealth and there are two facts that seem very very robust that seem to come out no matter how you measure it and they are these the first is the fact that economists refer to as diminishing marginal utility which for the rest of us simply means a little money matters a lot in a lot of money matters a little the first dollar you earned is going to make a big big difference the next dollar just a little less and by the time you are earning your millionth dollar it's just not mattering much now note the curve never goes down it doesn't look like oops I hit the point where I've got too damn much money but what does happen is very soon earning more dollars isn't giving you much of a boost what is this inflection point there's arguments about it some people think it's as high as a hundred thousand a year some is low 40,000 dollars a year it's nowhere near what you might have imagined being millions of dollars per year so now an economist who I want showed this graph to an economist he said you know it always occurred to me that money doesn't make you happier he's not spending it right that actually may be true it might not be an inviolable law of nature that the curve has to go like that it might just be that people who are accumulating huge amounts of wealth are not doing with it what they could do with it to make themselves happier so a nice example almost everybody who starts to make a lot of money moves out of a city and buys a big house error error or people adapt very quickly to the square footage of their house a bigger house makes you happy for about a minute commuting makes you unhappy every day because it's a new different kind of hell commuting is a very negative negative correlative happiness do not trade a mile for another square foot it's almost always a bad deal but when people get up on that curve that's exactly what they do what else do they do well they keep their money and studies show that in fact people can get a lot more happiness from spending it on others than spending it on themselves simple this just came out in science this year a beautiful little study you bring students into the laboratory you hand them 20 bucks and you go go outside go out and spend this come back in an hour half of them you say buy yourself something nice the others you have to give it away you measure how happy they are when they come back it's a wildly big effect the people who gave it away are just beaming look it's $20 this guy was really great he looked at me and he smiles so Fanta yeah I got a I got a new pen it's cool right so we may be doing the wrong things with money no I told you there were two facts about money to know the first is that a little buys you a lot and a lot buys you a little the second fact about money that we know is nicely illustrated by these data here's real income in the United States over 30 years you all know this Americans have gotten richer and richer in real dollars here's happiness over 30 years nada nothing has changed now if money buys you some happiness shouldn't that line at least be going up well it turns out it's not absolute dollars that makes people happy it's relative dollars it's not how one economist put it nicely the best predictor of a man's happiness is not as salary it's his salary by his brother-in-law salary yes it's not how much money you are making it's how much more money you are making than other people relative dollars are the better predictor of happiness what this suggests is that we are all on a treadmill that is every time all of us get a dollar it makes no difference because we're in the same position I'm running after the guy who makes just a little bit more than me wishing for what he had and every time I get $100,000 extra then so does he and damn it on in the same darn place so the suggestion I guess from these data is that probably you should start hanging out with poorer people okay so last children well this is an easy one right what do we call children we refer to them as a bundle of joy and if you look at the data the data are very very clear people with children are much less happy than people with them now this is an accumulation I want you to know this is not a study I did in my lab we're talking about Great Britain panel survey we're talking about almost all of the data economists and sociologists have plowed through in America Canada Western Europe over the last 25 years in study after study you see that either children have no effect or they have a small negative effect I do not know of a single study showing that people with children are happier than people without them now one possibility you might say is but maybe happy people just don't have kids right people are really just so delighted with life and themselves they go off and they play and so it might be that people are sorting themselves into these categories based on their happiness well first of all wouldn't it be a little odd that they choose to be parents but they're more miserable when their children are little than when they're big those are both groups of people but anyway here's the way you test that hypothesis you look at longitudinal data here are longitudinal data these are that is these are the same people followed over time before and after the birth of their child now just to give my mom a moment here's what she predicts my mom says you go along in life it's fine and then you have a child like you and everything's better and it stays better was my mom right well my mom sure was right about some of it until she was wrong those are what longitudinal data unhappiness look like people are pretty happy and they really look forward to the baby and then the bay becomes and Happiness plummets I'll give you just one more piece of data because I know these are hard data to believe this is a study published about two years ago in science the really the very best scientific journal in the world published by a Nobel laureate and in this study about a thousand women are followed around electronically as they go about their day and the researchers collect two pieces of data one how happy are they at different moments in their day and two what are they doing and this allows the researchers to say how happy are women when they're doing this and how happy are they when they're doing that and here's some of the things that women are doing when they report being very happy when they happen to be talking to their friends or they happen to be eating ok source is a pleasure here's they're less happy when they're grocery shopping and really not very happy when they're doing housework so this is the question how happy are they when they're with their children well it turns out that they're pretty I'm about somewhere near vacuuming that's right that's right they are less happy when they're with their kids in any shape way or form than when they're shopping for groceries okay now we laugh i I see you're amused by this but I know in your heart of hearts you don't believe it because most of you are parents and you are thinking yourself my children are my greatest source of joy and so before I totally explode your myth I just want to go on record as saying I am related to this other ball looking guy here that is my son he is one of my greatest sources of joy and I only say one of because now I've got two grandchildren who are even greater sources of joy because they're twice as cute and much less work for me I don't hate kids I love kids I have a kid but what we know is that science asked us to believe things that conflict with our intuition right I don't see a black hole I cannot see gravity what are you talking about germs show me germs science tells us that sometimes our eyes fool us and our intuitions are wrong when science gives you data that says your intuitions are wrong you don't say well let's find some data that support my intuitions you say why aren't well if you worked in the Bush administration that is what you do but otherwise you say otherwise you say how can I make sense of the fact that the data tell me a truth about the world that doesn't see to be the way it feels I think it is incumbent on us not just to say children don't seem to be a source of happiness but to explain why every one of us thinks that's just absurd I have three hypotheses about why we all believe something that data suggests are wrong this is the view these data I've given you are the view of happiness from outer space here's my three answers I think that the reason we all believe that children are a great source of happiness when the data say otherwise are our money socks heroin and baseball let me explain Armani socks no I don't know if anyone here this is actually a crowd where we might have somebody wearing Armani socks so forgive me if you're that person but if you were to go buy a pair of Armani socks almost surely sometime in the next two weeks you will be telling somebody how great they are go oh my god you I know they're two hundred fifty bucks a pair but you've never walked on a cloud like you walk on with these and feel like dancing I feel like skipping you will be telling others how great they are now it could be because our Monty Sox are great but it could be because you just paid a lot of money for them that's right basic law of economics we pay a lot of money when things are valuable basic law of psychology we value things a lot when we pay a lot of money for them the more we pay for them the more we value them the more people suffer for anything the more valuable it is the more they love it gee what does that sound like yes it sounds like raising children we give them our hearts we give them our blood our sweat in our tears what kinds of morons would we be if they weren't making us happy of course they must make me happy why would I be doing this giving up all that other stuff if they weren't one reason I think we believe that our children are a great source of happiness and joy is that we'd be very foolish to have had them we think if they aren't second heroine now everybody knows that heroin is a great source of human misery wrong it isn't heroin is actually a great source of joy anybody ever had a narcotic surely you've probably not illegally but you've been in the hospital right the lumbar went out and they gave you the morphine and you went never let it stop god yes that's because heroin is actually a huge source of pleasure and joy the reason it creates human misery isn't because heroin makes you feel bad it's because it makes you feel so good that you give up every other source of pleasure you stop washing bathing brushing your teeth you don't go to work you give up your family you just basically walk around trying to get more heroin the problem with heroin isn't it makes you feel sad it's that it makes you feel so good that it crowds out every other source of joy and thereby lowers your average happiness what does that sound like yes it sounds like children it's not that children are when you see your child you think I'm not having a good time it's that children require so much particularly at certain points in their lifecycle that they crowd out all the other pleasures yes I've got a baby I no longer have sex with my spouse I don't see a play I don't go to a restaurant I can barely find time to in you name it so when people say professor Gilbert you know you're talking about my child's my greatest source of joy I say yes when you have one it's your greatest that's right and that's what parenthood is okay it's not you know I guess what I'm saying is that even if the company of a child was nothing but a joy they require so much company that's really the point okay third oh no I want to make one more point about heroin so I say that I've said that they crowd out other sources of joy I already showed you marriage is a huge source of happiness in people's lives this is marital satisfaction over the lifespan you're looking at thousands of data points this is a very typical finding people start out getting married and they're happy because that's why they got married in the first place and then it basically just goes to hell and marital happiness goes down down down down as they have children as the children are growing up and then it starts to recover why well if you could get close enough to that slide you'd see the children are leaving home my father is a biologist and he you know he's always asked as a biologist whenever he discusses the issue of human abortion and he's asked professor Gilbert where does when does life really begin and he says you know when the dog dies and the kids leave home that's his standard joke but actual I don't know about the dog dying but it turns out to be true of the children leaving people report some of the greatest happiness in their life when they're empty you're the only known symptom of s empty nest syndrome was made up by journalists right B it's not a DSM category the only known symptom is smiling people are going yeah yeah kids are odd that's really rough yeah okay um there is I should say though there's a little bit of controversy about this line some data don't show as much recovery as this sorry okay uh yes so they crowd us okay the last point I wanted to make was about baseball so I grew up in Chicago and big Cubs fan I live in Boston I love the Red Sox and if I were to go watch the Red Sox play the Yankees and it was a no-hitter and then in the bottom of the ninth Youkilis comes to bat and hits a home run and we win the game against those bastards if you asked me how was that game I would say it was amazing that actually isn't right a no-hitter is like watching grass grow it's the most boring thing you can do in a baseball park you will be eating hot dogs and reading the schedule backwards the reason I will think this was an amazing game is because it had an amazing moment and it turns out when you do research on human memory people remember episodes by peak moments what I'm remembering is that fantastic 30 seconds of the game and I'm forgetting the three hours of hell what does that sound like yes it's that's a day with a five-year-old isn't it no not yet not now we'll be there soon I already told you don't hit your brother and then just when you think you know there's no hits just one that they'll the four-year-old looks up and goes I love you daddy home run home run of the heart a transcendent moment that when you look back on it and you're tucking them in and go wasn't it a great day no actually if the psychologists have been following you they'd say you had 30 really good seconds the rest was not so good they can't really call that a good day but memories a wonderful thing so in a sense the children may not make us happy often but when they make us happy they may give us a transcendent kind of happiness that almost acts as an amnestic right it almost wipes out our memory for all the moments of drudgery that's the view of happiness from outer space that's what we know from looking at data on human beings now if my mom were here first of all she would have left long ago but if I gave her a chance I said mom ask some questions she would have said a few things first she would have said okay mr. smartypants if having them is bad let me tell you this not having them is worse my mom might be right the data don't rule out this possibility here our data I showed you from RIT I showed you this curve these are real people building up to having a baby and then they have it and their happiness goes down but it might be and we don't have these kinds of data here are hypothetical people who wanted kids but didn't get them it might be that they're less happy yes it might be children or hard work but we all want them by and large almost everybody does and they take a little of the joy out of life but not getting them would be worse nothing I've said is a prescription that says I guess I shouldn't have kids because we don't know what that yellow line really looks like my mother also would have reminded us that if children don't make you happy it might be your fault not theirs right it's easy to hear these data and go WOW little I wonder why did I even write maybe they are great potential sources of joy and as parents we somehow screw it up we somehow don't get all the joy out of them that we might remember what the Economist said about dollars if they're not making you happy you're spending it wrong well maybe if your children aren't making you happy you're parenting them wrong maybe you're doing things like you're way up on that dollar curve and you're chasing a few more instead instead of spending time with kids in the in a way that actually could bring you satisfaction and that sounds a little bit like I'm preaching here we don't know if that's true but my mom could be right that it's potentially true finally my mother would say you know life is about more than happiness now we could have a long discussion of this I actually think she's wrong I don't think it's about more than happiness I think that's exactly what it's about but here's the point science can't tell us whether life should be or shouldn't be about happiness that's not a factual question that's a moral question maybe the fact that children don't make us happy and that we have them anyway says something wonderful about it maybe that's actually our most noble trait that we will even sacrifice a little of our happiness to do something that we think meaning and is important the fourth lesson your mother doesn't know everything that's part of why you miss predict the future so I've talked to you about four answers I've given you four reasons why human beings don't always do a splendid job of knowing where their happiness lies of making the pursuit of happiness one that they can actually achieve it's because we what we don't imagine matters more than we imagine it does because we can't foresee what we will see once we're seeing it because in the future we'll live in the present and because your mother doesn't know everything now when somebody stands up here for 45 minutes or an hour I've lost count I'm sorry and basically shows you all the ways in which people make mistakes it has to occur to you yeah okay fine if we're all so stupid how do we get to the moon well I do study mistakes I study the mistakes people make and it's a fair enough question are people really hopelessly naive are people really stupid of course we're not stupid it's just that we're designed to pursue happiness we're not designed to find it nature doesn't give a damn if you're happy nature cares if you survive and reproduce it that means that if you want happiness you suddenly have to you somehow have to outmaneuver the survival and reproduction machine that is the three-pound meat loaf between your ears you have to come to understand what it is for what it does well and what it does badly you have to become skeptical of the things that it tells you I always love this line the comedian emo Philips he said you know I always thought the brain was the most amazing organ in the human body and then I thought wait who's telling me that yes exactly I really do think though that by understanding understanding how what happiness is but also understanding how we predict and mispredict it we do give ourselves the best chance of not stumbling upon I'm not stumbling on happiness but stumbling upon it I think my time should be up I'm certainly out of ideas and this is an idea fest so I'll stop there thank you

Channel: The Aspen Institute

Views: 29,923

Rating: 4.7746477 out of 5

Keywords: Aspen, Aspen Ideas Festival, Aspen Institute, Happiness, Daniel Gilbert, Harvard, Economics (Field Of Study), Stumbling On Happiness (Book), Marriage (Quotation Subject), Money (Quotation Subject), children, happy, being happy, joy

Id: 2EiV4-ClcIs

Length: 51min 4sec (3064 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 29 2015