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PROFESSOR: So we began just a few months ago with this goal
of trying to understand the scientific study of human
nature, how our mind operates, why we behave the way we do.
From the brain basis, how we see and hear the world, how we
think, how we feel, our predispositions to act in
certain ways, how we develop from infancy to adolescence to
adulthood, through the middle ages and into
old age, we all hope.
The remarkably odd things about human social
interactions, which are just amazing I think.
And the challenges that so many people face, with a
degree of vulnerability in these very kinds of abilities
and behaviors.
And so it's hard to know what to conclude on.
So I thought I would touch on two things.
One, sort of fun to think about, hard to know how to
think about scientifically.
And one, it probably matters to us all the time.
So let me talk about this.
So when we think about why we do things, how our brain is
organized, mind is organized, we know that we've evolved
over a long period of time, from other species.
And that many things in us reflect this evolutionary
history, cast into a modern, unimaginable world from the
viewpoint of biology.
But here we are, sort of creatures from the past living
in an incredibly accelerated, changing environment.
And so evolutionary psychology, people say, let's
try to identify why we have certain patterns of thoughts
and feelings, given the evolutionary history of our
minds and brains.
And I'll say a word about that.
It's tough in many ways though to have, as much as you
believe that's true, it's got to be true, it's very tough to
approach scientifically.
Because often, it comes down to people telling fun,
interesting, clever stories.
Very hard to test.
So we know it's a big part of who we are, in a deep sense
where we came from.
Very hard to test experimentally.
But I'll show you a couple examples where people have
probed this a bit.
And then another question is in the last decade, some
people have said, well so much of psychology seems to focus
on the negative, the harm we're willing to do, the
stereotypes we're willing to hold.
How about positive psychology?
How about thinking about what can we learn from psychology
to lead a better, happier, more meaningful life.
As I'm going to tell you about the core results about
research about happiness.
And some of them I think will surprise you.
Some of them, you'll tuck in the back of your mind maybe,
as you think about what will make you happy.
I mean we all want to be happy in a deep sense.
We don't know what's on the other side of this life.
But we know this is the one we have in our hands.
And so what can psychology suggest that might make you
think what's a path to happiness?
So we talked about throughout this course about the fragile
power of the human brain.
It endows us with an unbelievable capacity for
thought, sight, behavior, vulnerabilities at every
stage, from neurological injuries to
neuropsychiatric disorders.
And again, we know this all has grown through this Paul
MacLean triune brain idea, that within us are kind of a
version of reptilian brains, within us are simple mammalian
brains, and then finally the primate and
human expanded neocortex.
And so within us, it's almost as if we represent in a
certain sense, our species history, literally in your
brain, literally right now, in some complex way of
interactions.
With parts of the brain that have evolved modestly and
parts that evolved spectacularly in humans.
And the usual story, you're used to this in evolution, is
that our brains and minds evolved in nature.
And natural selection was the dominating part of the story.
Survival of the fittest for passing genes into the next
generation, that sort of all stories boil down to that.
And I'm going to tell you two specific examples.
One that surprised me and then one that's just sort of fun I
think in a silly way.
So the first one is attitudes towards race and sex.
And this can came up.
And then the second one is different attitudes in men and
women, who might have in terms of sex and procreation.
So let me focus on this for a moment.
In the last election, you may remember that there was a
long, grueling race across the primaries between Hillary
Clinton and Barack Obama.
And in many ways, this is a huge surprise in the United
States, because with such a history of racism and sexism,
the idea that the two leading candidates are a woman and an
African American, was just kind of an amazing thing.
As much as we had distance to go, that we
have come that far.
That these were the two candidates on the Democratic
side, who are competing state to state across the country,
one of whom would become the Democratic
nominee and the President.
And I got call from a reporter from the Boston Globe.
And he said, he was writing a story saying, which is the
worst problem these candidates faced, sexism or racism?
And many of us, and I'm no exception, our egos get turned
up when somebody from the press calls.
Because our name will be in the newspaper.
And we can show it to our friends and family.
And then they know we have a real job and somebody thinks
we know something.
You laugh.
And the graduate students, like their parents never
understand anything, except when their
name gets in the newspaper.
You know how that is, right?
So I thought, well, I'm going to say something really clever
and all the neuroscience and all the psychology I know,
either from my own research or for teaching this course.
I'll have something.
And I just had nothing to say.
I mean we can agree that racism is bad
and sexism is bad.
And it's kind of excellent that candidates are beating
those glass ceilings in the national leadership.
We know from research on things like the IAT test, that
you heard about, that both remain a problem.
Negative stereotypes of certain kinds remain in our
society to this day, across society.
So I was like, which is worst, terrible thing A or
terrible thing B?
And I had nothing to say.
And then a newspaper article came out and said, oh,
according to evolutionary psychologists, and I was not
included, because I nothing to say.
This was very sad.
They said well, really Hillary Clinton faces the harder path.
Because in their mind, sexism is built into our species.
Because the whole idea of how we procreate, how men and
women relate in species and investments, that's deep in
us, all through evolution.
Whereas racism is culturally specific and malleable.
There's countries where one group is picked on.
There's countries where another group is picked on.
There's changes in societies.
That's a changeable thing.
This is a tougher thing to change, was their
interpretation.
I thought well, that sounds good.
And it might even be true.
It's like a lot of evolutionary psychology, a
good possibility, a better answer by infinitely far than
I could give.
But who knows?
And then this one study came out, that's kind of curious.
So this is a study of children with Williams syndrome, a rare
disorder, but very studied in both human genetics and human
psychology.
And partly, it's interesting.
These are the unusual facial features of
these kinds of children.
They're born this way.
And it's caused by deletion of 26 genes from the long arm of
chromosome 7.
It's one of the most purely defined and specific genetic
developmental disorders in humans.
So it's really drawn the interest of geneticists.
Because it's a disorder that's really very linked to a very
specific part of the human genome always.
Distinctive, what they call elfin facial features,
developmentally delayed language skills.
And maybe the most curious and charming element is unusually
cheerful demeanor and ease with strangers.
These are the children who will walk up to strangers and
talk your ear off and not be afraid of anybody or anything.
To an extent that's charming, can get you in trouble with
the world being the way it is.
It's sometimes contrasted with autism.
Because individual with autism find social interactions
sometimes laborious, difficult, mysterious.
These individuals find it delightful, nonstop.
You get tired sometimes of talking to such children,
because they're ready to go infinitely in terms of social
interaction.
And there's been some study that they have atypical
amygdala function and lack of fear response there.
So that's the background about Williams syndrome.
And then somebody did a IAT study.
This was in France.
But its been replicated since.
That shows that for these children with Williams
syndrome, they still have a gender IAT effect.
That is for example, they're willing to consider women less
likely to be good at science and math,
which we know is silly.
But that's the stereotype.
But they showed no racial IAT effect.
And they had control participants who showed both.
So now, there's still interpretation.
But all of sudden, it's as if this is deeper in the brain.
And maybe this is learned.
And these children aren't learning this one.
But they can't stop this one.
So a suggestion that there is something true about this
evolutionary psychology thing.
And that maybe the hardest thing for us to change deep
down, because of the fundamental sexual relations
in procreation.
That's a hard thing for us to work our head around, without
being thoughtful and careful about it.
So here's an experiment that was used to demonstrate.
So what's the usual story?
The usual story in evolution is people on average, not
everybody of course, wants to have kids.
Because that's how they pass their genes down.
And who has a lot of investment per kid, in however
way you look it?
Women.
For women it's, just the first part is nine months.
And then the immediate support.
For men, how long is the minimal contribution?
15 seconds.
OK, well 15 minutes.
It varies.
But you know.
So there's a theory that if the thing you cared about was
just getting us your genes down
there as much as possible.
Was it Wilt Chamberlain, the former basketball player, who
said he had slept with 1,000 women.
That he would be like the champion example in men.
And with women, it's you can't do a 1,000 nine-month cycles.
So that for men, if that was the only thing in
life, and it's not.
But here's the experiment they did.
We couldn't have an IRB approve this.
But this was done at a university.
And they said, we're going to show you an
experiment like this.
And this is meant to be kind of silly.
But this is how evolutionary
psychology, things are expressed.
And it's kind of funny, I think.
We'll see.
So what they would do is they pick take an attractive man
and an attractive woman.
They were the confederates.
And they would approach a student leaving the library, a
random student.
And here's the responder, who is a woman.
Imagine yourself as women now, for those of you who are
woman, leaving a library, kind of late at night, not too
threatening.
But somebody walks up to you and says, I've noticed you in
the library a few times.
You seem very nice.
Do you think there's any chance we could get together
for a date sometime?
What percentage of women said yes?
In this study, 50%.
Do you think that's high?
Let's pretend it was a better approach
than what I just said.
I tried to make it low key and nice, a
low key, nice approach.
For other women, the same male confederate walks up and says,
I've noticed you in library.
You seem very nice.
What do you about going back to my apartment and having
some coffee?
We'll take turns then.
Women, what do you think is the number?
We start with 50.
What?
20.
I noticed you in the library.
You seem very nice.
I think there's something compatible between us.
What do you think about going back to my apartment and
having sex right now?
See finally, the course gets super practical.
I'm not saying it.
This is just one study.
Now, we reverse the roles.
Men, you get ready, all right?
An attractive woman walks up to you and says, I noticed in
the library.
You seem very friendly.
We seem to be compatible.
Would you be willing to have a date with me some time?
AUDIENCE: 100%.
PROFESSOR: Would you be willing, the woman says to the
man, to go back to my apartment with me right now?
All right, you know where this going.
An attractive woman walks up to the man.
And she says, would you go back to my apartment to have
sex with me this very minute?
The guys got things to do.
You now, he can't--
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
PROFESSOR: What is the citation for this?
Let me get that.
I heard it in a talk.
And I saw the numbers.
The numbers are correct.
I have to say when this was presented, there was some
murmuring, because maybe it wasn't quite IRB-approved.
I heard it from a good source.
I'll get that for you.
It's in your notes.
So evolutionary psychology, whatever, it's kind of fun.
But it's hard to know where it gets you.
But it's definitely fun to talk about.
So happiness research.
So for a long time, from ancient philosophy to the
founding of the US and everything, people said, the
objective of life, as we choose it, Aristotle, for
itself, and never for any other reason.
And one of the most amazing phrases in the Declaration of
independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal, that they are endowed
by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among
these are life and liberty." Well, that we would think
would be obvious things, now.
But this amazing thing, "and the pursuit of Happiness."
As important as life itself and liberty itself, the
pursuit of happiness.
And I think we know that in our own lives, as we relate to
other people, as we pursue careers, as we do things,
where we put our limited lifetime resources, time and
effort, we all want to end up in a deep way to be happy and
make the choices to get there.
So we can think on average, you could think in your head
what makes you happy, what makes you want unhappy?
And a standard list might be, people
definitely want to be healthy.
Nobody minds being wealthy.
We'll talk about that.
It never hurts to get a new car, a new TV,
or new stuff, right?
What makes you unhappy?
Physical injury, emotional injury.
I mean that would be kind of standard.
Now, how do you measure happiness?
And this is the part where you get us into the funniness of
psychology.
So you have with you a questionnaire, which is one of
the most widely used measures of happiness.
So I'll just give you a moment to look at it.
You could fill it out for yourself.
We're not going to collect it.
And you may even want to or whatever.
But just to get a feeling of this.
And you could say--
oh, sorry.
Anybody else who didn't get it, that we
could help you with?
A few hands over here.
Oh, thank you.
Again, let me say whoever did this amazing display is maybe
super happy.
So you're ahead of me.
Thank you.
So it's measured in life value.
You ask the person like basically, how happy are you?
And we have a tendency to be suspicious of just asking
people straight on.
Because if we ask them straight on, would you say
this line is as big as this line, if three
other people said that?
You'd say, no, not me.
If you say, would you zap somebody until you think
they're dead in another room?
You'd say no, not me.
So we're very suspicious about what people say they will do
and what they really do.
But for happiness research, it's hard to beat that.
Here's another one.
You can circle the happiness that represents you.
Because what's the better question, what's the more
objective measure to decide that somebody's happy, a brain
image, a blood test?
We don't have a better thing than the person's own
statement about their sense of happiness.
All the way back to a Roman philosopher, "The happy man is
not he who seems thus to others, but who seems thus to
himself." We don't know of a better way to ask you if
you're happy, than to ask if you're happy.
So it's not the most satisfying kind of objective,
scientific measure.
But maybe it's the life we lead anywhere.
We decide if we're happy or not, in some sense.
So if you ask people on average how happy they are,
2/3 of the people will put themselves here, almost
everybody above average.
A few people report that they're consistently unhappy.
And I'm going to come back to this, but the thing that
struck happiness researchers, surprisingly modest
influences, and I'm going to touch this up a little bit
with a research study, of social status, income, gender,
or ethnicity.
A number of things that you could have thought would touch
that, surprisingly don't touch it, or in very limited ways.
But I'll tell you a little bit about those limited ways.
So on a seven-point scale, the average is 4 or a 5.
College students, 4.9.
Older people, happier.
We've talk about that before.
Ironically, even though older people probably face more
challenges in various ways and limited life spans, they seem
happier by self-report.
One argument that income has little relationship is this
kind of a graph, that looks at the average income in the US
from 1930 to 1991.
So here's this increase, that's not going up anymore.
But it was in the last century.
And self-reported happiness.
And you can see that at some point, it goes up, but then it
flattens out.
So the general thought analysis, I'll show you a
little bit more detail, is, not much money or in current
situations, poverty, does strike down
people's sense of happiness.
But once you get above some threshold, and of course, what
that threshold is varies in so many ways depending on who you
are and what you expect, but once you get above some
threshold, that's not the biggest part
of the story anymore.
And that's pretty much a general finding.
They've done all kinds of surveys about
happiness across countries.
It's a really interesting thing about happiness
research, it's more powerful than you can imagine in
grabbing hold of the minds of many people in public policy.
Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard, has
written a book suggesting that happiness research ought to be
the basis of public policies by the government.
That if know what makes people happy, short of giving
everybody $1 million every year, why wouldn't you tweak
every policy, even if people don't think it will make them
happy, but you know from research it will?
And then here's a world map, where they surveyed people all
over the place.
The darker the color, the more people
reported themselves happy.
Now, this is very tricky.
Because now you're in full scale, there's things like
poverty, but there's also things like cultural emphases.
In the US, we talk a lot about happiness.
That concept is less prevalent in many other cultures,
relatively speaking.
So it's hard to know how much is the culture, how much is
the actual per capita income relevant.
But people are pursuing these things.
And they are finding roughly--
the most recent one, that again in countries where
there's a lot of poverty, it's less than in countries where
you start to have higher incomes.
So poverty is still associated with less happiness.
And you can guess that is reasonable.
And then more studies like this,
again about that direction.
So early on, people said that income has
nothing to do with happiness.
And that seems not quite right, especially at the lower
end of poverty.
Now, Dan Kahneman, the Nobel Laureate, a psychologist at
Princeton, has spent the last few years talking about what
he calls the focusing illusion.
And let me tell you what that is.
It's basically this, when thinking about one topic, it
could be income, could be graduate school admissions.
Like whatever the topic is, fairness, whatever the topic
is, when you're thinking about that one topic, people tend to
attribute more importance to that topic than it really has.
They think it accounts for more of what goes in the world
when they're focused on it.
And you see this all the time in political discussions.
Like it's all the deficit.
If we just fix the deficit, everything works.
It's all raising taxes.
If we just do this.
People fixate on one thing.
And then that's the answer to the whole problem.
That all the time, never mind political debates where things
might be staged, but even in one's own
personal life, that happens.
Let me give you an example of how they
showed that to be true.
They have people rate their happiness, just like you have.
And then they ask them, and these were, how many dates for
the single people, how many dates in the last month?
And they get no correlation between self-rated happiness
and how many dates you've had in the last month.
Now they were reverse for some people,
the order of questions.
How many dates have you had in the last month and now rate
your happiness.
And they get a positive correlation.
The more dates you had, the happier your report yourself.
Well, for people who are dating, on average, that's a
measure, like getting out there and meeting people.
It's an average of succeeding in some path
you want to be on.
So when you just thought about this, you said, whoa, if I had
no dates this past month, I must be pretty miserable.
I'm pretty unhappy.
I'm thinking about that.
And all the other elements of your life that contribute to
happiness, because you just focused on that.
You just focused on that because the question was
asked, recede disproportionately, compared
to the actual importance.
If you go the other way around, how happy you are, and
you ask this, there's no correlation, because you're
not thinking about this one thing and weighting your
overall happiness by this one question or dimension.
Does that make sense?
So the order is the whole story.
That people, when they think about a topic and then think
of how happy or meaningful it is, they overvalue that topic,
because they just focused in their
minds on this one dimension.
So getting back to this issue of income and how that goes
with happiness, here's what they did, the same thing
again, by asking a specific question and then asking your
general impression, the same idea.
So they said, how bad was your mood the previous day?
So there's a specific question about mood.
Now, how much time do you think people with various
income levels are in a bad mood?
And they picked for example, people making less than
$20,000 or people making more than $100,000.
These people who just answered this question said, gee--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: I don't see anything.
That's right.
Thank you very much.
The cool thing is now that they're making
videos of these lectures.
We have so many applicants to be your peers in
the years to come.
It's going to be unbelievable.
So you guys are great.
So they said it was about 32% more bad mood, if you were
making less or more.
If you asked people making how much, it's only a 12%
difference.
It matters, but only a third as much.
Because you just got them thinking about
being in a bad mood.
So now they over attribute income for daily happiness.
And here's a kind of interesting thing.
And it's a trade-off.
And it gets us to what is it in your life
that makes you happy.
So people making over $100,000 spend about 20% more time on--
I've got this reversed.
So people making over $100,000 spend more time--
I'll fix the slide up.
Sorry.
Spend more time on doing things that they report as
being kind of stressful, work, pressure shopping for the
family, pressured childcare situations, what they call
obligatory tasks.
And people who make less money, spend considerably more
time doing things that everybody considers fun when
they're doing it, socializing, or watching TV that you like.
So you can see it's kind of weird.
It's a little bit of where you put your time and what counts
for you to feel happy about something.
Everybody's in pretty much agreement, like you've heard
about almost everything, twin studies suggest, the set point
of happiness, where you rate yourself as always
super-happy, moderately happy, or somewhat grumpy, seems to
be about between 15% and 80% heritable.
It's as if a piece of us is born to be super-happy, medium
happy, or chronically grumpy.
There's not a better or worse way to be, right?
So that people will call this a set point.
So of course things happen on a day-to-day basis, on a
moment-to-moment basis, that push you up or down in
happiness, of course.
You'll get good news, you get bad new, you have fearful
things, joyful things coming up.
But the idea is that people tend to get back pretty fast
to the set point, their level, whatever that is, of chronic,
constant happiness.
And this is kind of an amazing finding.
So let's take a look at that and add one more point.
So here's extroverts by personality measures and
introverts.
And extroverts report themselves as being happier.
That's a set point example, a personality thing that seems
to go over time.
But they share the bumpiness of the week.
Here's how happy they are on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday
whoa, weekend approaching, and the misery of Sunday, when the
weekend is over.
So you can see in both things, of course they're responding
to the work week cycle of heavy work, anticipation of
the weekend, the weekend itself, and anticipation of
the work day.
Both groups do.
But the set points seem to be a little bit different, the
chronic, constant level.
Now, there's been a bunch of ideas about a question about
whether people can be too happy.
Can a person be too happy?
And here's what they find.
That if they had take people who say, I'm super, super,
super happy, and you ask them what's going on their life
that makes some super, super happy?
Those people often report that it's close relations to other
people and often, good deeds or volunteer work, is the
thing that's making them super, super happy.
A little less happy on average, but still pretty
happy, are people who have higher incomes, higher
education, and more political participation.
So look at these two things.
And you could say in your own life, but all these things
will matter.
But which is the model of success for you in your heart,
the human relations and doing good or the sort of income,
education, active in your world thing?
And it's not one is better than other.
It's not you have to choose one or the other.
But it seems like people will tend to focus more
on one or the other.
All these things are matter.
But, where you put your heart.
It's easier.
Or you end up doing this, if you're on the
most extensive happy.
So maybe if you want somebody to do a certain thing for you,
you don't want them to be so happy. they have to a little
bit grumbling about stuff.
If you think the world is perfect, you're not going to
fight for political change.
So what makes us happy?
And it turns out in interesting ways, it's more
complicated than you think.
And so it's worth thinking about, because your first
intuitions might not pan out.
So here's an example.
But I want to tell you this, I'll remind you of this again.
And then switch to every day one.
So one part of happiness is that when we reconstruct what
made us happy, what made us happy growing up as a child;
what made as happy as an adolescent in high school;
what made us happy last year, last month, last week, that's
all out of memory.
That's not the current moment of joy or frustration.
That's your sense of what was it all about.
Where was I in terms of happiness?
And so Kahneman again did this work looking at pain ratings
during a dental procedure.
And he said, what determines your memory for
how painful it was?
And the two values were the peak of the pain and the
ending intensity.
So that if you added a little extra pain at the end, people
actually rated the whole session in
memory as less painful.
You add some mild pain at the end, rate it as painful, but
because it was mild, because the last number that goes in
their algorithm in their mind is the strength at the end,
and the other number seems to be the peak, he could predict
pretty well how you would rate the painfulness
of the entire session.
So this shows you that in many ways, our minds construct our
definitions of happiness.
They're not simply our sensory experience.
And here is a thing you could think about for a moment.
Many of have had jobs or something.
You haven't had, most of you, a long work period on a
consistent basis, most of you I'm guessing.
But think about are you happier at work or vacation?
So if you ask most people are you happier at work or
vacation, most people will say vacation.
That's why I work 50 or 51 weeks of the year to have that
awesome vacation.
If they do a study where you carry a beeper on you and they
beep you every once in a while, unexpectedly, and say,
OK, one to seven, how happy are you?
And some days you're at the office and some days you're on
your vacation, what happens?
You report yourself happier at work, on average.
So that's amazing.
Why do we have vacations at all?
Not to be miserable.
I mean could you imagine an ad that said come to our hotel,
you'll be less miserable than another
hotel on your vacation.
That wouldn't work.
What do think is going on here?
This is the finding.
What's going on here in the interpretation is, when we
think ahead about a vacation or when we reconstruct in our
mind, there's some things about it that make
us like it a lot.
When we're on the vacation, and you may know this, and I
think part of it is the anticipation of vacation
sometimes, what happens?
The hotel wasn't so good.
You got that food poisoning that ruined the whole trip.
Your brother or sister were really a nuisance.
Your parents were a drag.
Your parents can't understand why you were so sulky.
It's was like you didn't have the space to separate out and
get yourself all sorted out.
I had that too as a kid.
I mean sometimes whatever little conflicts you had at
home seem to get exaggerated when you're jammed in
together, for long periods in cars or
rooms or tents or whatever.
And then you go that home and in a couple weeks you go man,
that was an awesome vacation.
I'll never forget it.
It means so much to me.
And it's not that you're faking it.
You really feel that.
Otherwise, you wouldn't get ready for the next vacation,
the next year.
So what this suggests is, in ourselves, really there's at
least two ways, or two minds, thinking about happiness.
One is a moment to moment happiness.
That's real.
And one is a sort of big picture,
what is my life about.
And I feel like my life about is going to interesting places
with people I care about.
That's a vacation.
It's not that people are hypocritical.
It's that in them there's these different dimensions of
happiness that are tapped by different moments of thought.
Happiness researchers, their most controversial topic,
because they can explain almost everything in the story
I just told you, is children.
So you talk to parents.
And over 33% will say the single biggest thing that's
the joy in their life is having children or
grandchildren.
That's a very common thing.
You could say you're surprised it's not more.
But still, it's a lot.
It's the single biggest thing.
And I think people really mostly believe that
when they say that.
If you have people keep a day-to-day diary, the
moment-to-moment source of happiness, and they rate one
to seven, everything they just did, so it's kind of fresh in
their memory, childcare is rated just over housework,
below sex, socializing with friends, watching TV, praying,
eating, and cooking.
Because again, it's this weirdness of like, oh, he's
not doing his homework or we're afraid she's doing
something or little kids are just running around, not doing
what you ask them to do.
And it's so frustrating because you can't get them.
So happiness researchers don't understand why people have
children at all.
They can't explain it.
There's a lot of effort going on to come
up with some formula.
And again, it's not that people will tell you oh, we
can't believe we had kids.
How stupid was that?
They say and they feel, it is a phenomenal source of
happiness for them.
It's just when you ask them, how about five minutes ago?
They go, no.
Why did he talk that way?
Why doesn't he or she listen to me?
Why don't they clean the room ever?
They're 25 years old.
They could make their bed.
Or whatever.
So it's really interesting, these two different dimensions
of happiness.
So this idea that within us there's multiple selves, the
moment to moment self, that's real.
The big picture, what is my life about?
That's real.
They're not always perfectly aligned.
In the US, the moment to moment happiness, in a recent
study, increases until about $75,000.
Of course, it's an average.
Depending on what you need to buy, that number will move.
But then it tops out on average.
But the big picture, emotional well-being, but overall
satisfaction keeps going up with income.
Now, you have to be very careful on these.
These are all correlations.
Everything I've told you just about is a correlation.
So when you say overall satisfaction, sort of big
picture sense of life goes up with income, is
it really the income?
What else could it be?
Is it literally the size of your paycheck?
Does it have to be that?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: Do you think it might be what kind of job
you're doing?
PROFESSOR: It might be the kind of job
you're doing, on average.
And we know there's phenomenally important jobs
that are underpaid in this country.
We know that.
But there's a lot of jobs that are kind of fun to have, that
are decently paid.
Doctors, lawyers, scientists, a lot of people find those
jobs to be pretty fulfilling and pretty decently paid.
And there's other ones as well.
All kinds of jobs are decently paid, that can be fulfilling.
So it's not necessarily that it's just about literally
three more dollars and you're three more dollars happy.
So these correlations are very tricky.
But again, the sense that moment to moment tops out at
somewhere here, well above poverty.
But then, big picture keeps going up somewhere.
So think for a moment if you can, just for a moment think
about yourselves five or 10 years from now.
And when you think, if you can, just for one moment
specifically imagine in your mind what you might be doing
five or 10 years from now.
And put your hand up if you thought of
something pretty positive.
A hope.
Put your hand up now if you thought of
something kind of negative.
Some of you, oh boy.
Most people, our roots claim, they think about positive
things in the future, other than fumbling or failing.
So how good are people at predicting what
will make them happy?
How good are people at predicting
will make them happy?
What people call affective forecasting.
So I'll give you two examples.
One that's closer to my life and one
might apply to everybody.
Actually, I'll tell you a word about this.
This is a funny story.
If I don't get tenure, I will be sad.
If I get tenure, I will be happy.
So you know what tenure basically is.
You're given a position, a faculty position, for a
lifetime, unless you do something really horrible.
So you can't be fired no matter what you do almost.
You get a lot of freedom from that.
So on the other hand, what happens if you don't get
tenure somewhere?
Do you know what happens?
It's not so pleasant, I could tell you.
It's not the end of the world at all.
But let me just tell you what know going in.
What you know going in is your colleagues are going to meet,
they're going vote.
They're going to say no.
Which kind of hurts because you've been
there five or six years.
And then you have to leave town.
OK, you don't have to leave town.
There could be another university nearby.
But usually because we're so super specialized in our
fields, you have to leave town and go somewhere else.
And you have to tell your parents, I didn't get tenure.
And you have to tell your friends, I didn't get tenure.
And all your friends who you know from work, will go, oh,
I'm sorry you didn't get tenure.
For a year, everybody you meet with goes, I'm sorry you
didn't get tenure.
So you just don't want that.
Well, it's a moment I mean.
None of us want it.
So everybody says, I'd rather get tenure than not.
Would you rather win the lottery, than not?
Sure
Happiness researchers love these things.
So it turns out for a couple of years after you don't get
tenure, and all the negativity, and leaving town,
and getting another job, and by the way, some people have
not gotten tenure and become amazing superstars, so the
tenure process is often incorrect in its evaluation.
But two years later, no difference in
happiness at all.
It doesn't really matter in the long run.
Winning the lottery, a year or two later,
no difference either.
There's a whole research field that runs out the minute
somebody wins a big lottery.
And I had a bit of experience on this, [INAUDIBLE]
somebody working in my brother's house won the single
largest lottery, at that time, prize ever, for an individual
lottery winner in the United States.
It's been exceeded since.
It was something like $187 million.
And she was definitely pretty happy.
And she's been I have to say remarkably wise since then, in
how she's used the money.
And been a very stable person, kind of.
But there's equal number of stories of people who get into
huge trouble.
Actually, the most amazing story, it's sort of silly to
share, but I have a relatively short lecture.
This was in the news.
Because you know with the lottery they say, whoever wins
this will win the single largest--
there's a huge number of tickets sold.
And some guy, a taxi driver at the airport, because all the
news outlets wanted to cover this.
And they were trying.
Who won?
They knew that there was a winner.
They didn't know who it was.
And a taxi driver at the airport supposedly said, I won
the lottery.
I won the lottery.
Now, we knew he didn't, because we knew this person
had won it.
But all the news channels were running after this person,
because other cabdrivers thought he said that.
And then apparently, all the people he owed money were
hunting him down.
And he had to hire a lawyer to sort of fight off people.
And so he was really miserable.
And it was really sad, weird thing to be the lottery winner
who didn't get the lottery, but everybody thought you did.
And there's other stories in towns, these are amazing
stories if you follow it, where they know somebody won
the lottery in the town.
But the person doesn't have to come forward.
And then you get all this weird stuff, because other
people start to guess who really has a ton of money
amongst them.
And they have wrong guesses.
And they go and say like, my mother needs medical surgery.
Won't you help me?
And the person doesn't have the money or maybe that one
does, but most don't.
There's only one.
And so the whole town gets into huge fights and misery
because they are assuming that somebody could do amazing
things for everybody, but they're just being mean
in not doing it.
And 90% of their guesses of who that is are wrong.
More than you want to know about lotteries.
But I can tell you that on average, a year or two later,
no difference.
So it's amazing.
You would think that would make my life,
if I won the lottery.
And probably it does in terms of plasma TVs.
But in terms of self-rated happiness, no difference.
And here's a more amazing thing in certain way, although
if you talk to patients, not as amazing.
If you have a unexpected accident leading to
quadriplegia or paraplegia, so you really can't get around,
return to typical ratings of happiness in three months.
So we're incredibly unable to predict, because we would have
all kinds of ideas about how long these would brutalize our
sense of happiness.
And we're wrong, wrong, wrong.
We don't know how to predict what will make us happy.
And some people call this hedonic
adaptation or a set point.
That you go back to your set point over
an incredible range.
You do respond.
But you go back to it over an incredible
range of life outcomes.
So there's a small experiment compared to these things, but
a controlled experiment.
Dan Gilbert at Harvard, who's done amazing work in this
area, he had Harvard students in a photography class choose
their two favorite pictures from the entire class.
And they were told they have to give one to their teacher
and they can keep one.
And there were two conditions.
In one condition, once they gave that picture to their
teacher, that was it.
In the other condition, they could change the
picture in a few days.
Now, you know in all this course, every time you think
A, go opposite B, right?
But if you weren't an amazingly sophisticated
psychologist at this point, if you were just a person on the
street, which do you think would sound better, having no
choice or having the possibility of exchanging the
picture, if you want to, in a couple of days?
It's a choice.
We like choice, right?
No.
The people who are happier are the people who say once hand
me the picture, that's to me.
These people are standing around going, I don't know.
I don't know.
Where am I going to be happier, this
picture or that picture?
I don't know.
I can't tell.
Also once it's an irrevocable choice, what amazing human
thing comes into play that helps us feel
good about our lives?
Cognitive dissonance.
Did I pick the right picture?
That teachers is a sucker.
I thought they were the two best.
But the one that teacher took, oh, that was pretty bad.
I can't believe how lucky I am that irrevocably I ended up
with this picture.
The person who has days to do this, they can't let cognitive
dissonance come in and fix up their choice.
The paradox of choice, why choices can be painful.
So again, we like choice.
I like choice.
There's an experiment.
People say, you go into a typical big grocery store, 285
cookie choices, 13 sports drinks, 75 ice teas, 200
channels and more, on cable.
So they did an experiment in Palo Alto, Stanford's group,
in a gourmet food store.
They had exotic, high-quality jams.
And you could taste some jams.
And then get a coupon for $1 off if you buy the jam.
So a typical kind of thing you might see
sometimes in grocery stores.
And they would have you taste either six jams or up to 24.
Now, most people didn't do 24 jams.
Because you wouldn't want to have that many, even single
tastes of a jam.
But you'll try a few, at a table like this.
So first of all, here's the two tables.
Six jams or 24.
More shoppers came to the table of 24.
Well, you see 24 jams out there.
It's kind of impressive.
Like there's got be something I like there.
What's going on?
So more people are drawn to the big choice department.
Now when they get there, they only have about five jams.
These people have about six.
So it's about the same number of jams that you taste.
Big display, lots of choice.
Limited choice.
What happens in your actual behavior?
Well, at the six-jam table, 30% of the people
purchased the jam.
If there's a 24-jam table, only 3% made the purchases.
So what do you think happened?
We don't know for sure.
This is the actual behavior.
Exactly the opposite, more choices among jams led to less
purchases of jams.
What's your guess as to what happened?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: They people who liked [INAUDIBLE] with 24
jams, were in a jam.
PROFESSOR: Were what?
AUDIENCE: They're in a jam.
PROFESSOR: They're in a jam.
That's pretty good.
They were in a jam.
Yes.
And because what?
Because I tried five or six, it's all I could try.
But there's another 20 out there.
And they could be awesome beyond belief.
And I'm not going to commit.
Because there could be some awesome jam around the corner.
And I've only tried five or six.
So they're overwhelmed.
Instead of happily getting a jam, they're
jammed up as you said.
Ah, ah.
And they go, um, who can begin to figure out what's the right
jam for me.
It's just a way too big.
So all those choices make them less likely to make a
purchase than this.
Exactly the opposite of what might intuitively-- too many
choices are burdensome.
Calling plans.
I don't know if you've ever tried to compare calling plans
across phone services.
You sit down for a few moments and you just give up.
Maybe you don't.
Health insurance things, retirement plans.
You just get all these complicated menus.
And a lot of people just give up.
And they just go like, what's the cheapest?
What do most people do?
Because it's just too hard to figure out.
So when they do surveys of asking people what people
think will make them happy, these are
the most common answers.
If I get into a relationship or a marriage that I like.
If I have more flexibility at work.
Getting a baby, if that's what you want.
Losing weight, cure of a chronic disease, making more
money, having more time, advancing in beauty.
OK, this is the list.
It's not surprising list, right?
What would make you more happy?
And again, we know that happiness set
points are about 50%.
10% estimated the circumstances, like poverty.
Things that you can't help in your life.
Just can't help.
But happiness researchers are trying to make the case that
about 40% of our happiness depends on what
we choose to do.
So that's a big piece.
It's a big piece.
We can't help some things, in our genes or in our global
environment.
But it's almost half.
And these are estimates.
Maybe it's more.
But this is the current estimate.
And research, over and over again, shows that it's wrong
to think that happiness is found.
Like you get there.
And here I am, happy.
That it's changing in your circumstances.
I move in a city.
I get a promotion.
I meet another person.
That's the happiness.
And that you either have it or you don't.
I'm just a person who's not happy.
All these things, the objective evidence is against.
And here's what researchers find goes with, in experiments
and in correlations.
Here's their list, from an objective evidence as they can
get, in this kind of work.
Time nurturing relations with family and friends comes out
as the number one thing that plays out.
Expressing gratitude and helping others.
Whole experiments were if you just did something nice,
people feel awesome.
I heard a Berkeley psychologist say, just try to
feel unhappy after you just expressed
gratitude or helped somebody.
And you can't even do it.
I don't know if that's quite true.
But experiments have shown that when you have people
express gratitude or do something to help others,
their happiness ratings will zoom right up.
Practicing optimism about the future, savoring life in the
present, physical exercise, commitment to lifelong goals
and ambitions.
A sense that you have a path that make sense to you, as
opposed to sort of bumping around from opportunity and
opportunity.
And something about, having an approach to coping or
resilience when bad things happen.
I'm sure in some of your lives, heartbreaking, bad
things have happened.
Most of us get some of them.
Many of us get every day things that we struggle with.
And the path by which we deal with adversity, huge influence
on self-reported happiness.
So again, so this is my final slide.
And I hope that this course, you guys have made me happy
throughout this course.
I've have incredibly pleasurable lunches and
dinners and brunches with students from the course.
This is just stunning for me.
And it's really moving.
And I'm just very grateful to have had the chance to
introduce you to these ideas.
Have a OK exam period.
You have to get through that.
Bounce back and cope.
And have a great summer.
Thanks very much.