0:15

Pushkin. I

0:19

was driving home late at night after

0:21

spending the night in Seattle, and as I was

0:23

coming over a bridge back into

0:26

Tacoma, a little dog run out

0:28

in front of my car. I did exactly what

0:30

most people do when this happens, and I now

0:32

know you shouldn't do, which as I swerved to try to avoid

0:34

hitting it, and the result of both

0:37

swerving and then ultimately hitting it anyway, was

0:40

that my car was sent into a sort

0:42

of a fishtail and then a spin across

0:45

the freeway. This is Abbey Marsh.

0:48

She was only nineteen years old when the events

0:50

in this story took place. When the

0:52

car finally came to a stop, it was in the fast

0:54

lane of the freeway, just past the crest

0:57

of this bridge i'd been crossing, which

0:59

meant that I was invisible to the oncoming traffic.

1:02

Unfortunately, they were quite visible to me because my car

1:04

was now facing backward into the oncoming traffic

1:07

and the engine on a car sort of sputtered

1:09

to a halt, and

1:12

I didn't have a phone, and I had no

1:14

way of escaping because this bridge didn't have any

1:16

shoulders on it, so there was nowhere

1:18

to go even if I were to get out of the car, and I

1:20

just panicked. I couldn't

1:23

get the car to her back on And I

1:25

was feeling every time one of these trucks

1:28

or semis past me, the whole car would shutter if

1:30

they went by, like ushit.

1:32

Now, what am I gonna do? Like I like, you

1:35

know, your mind is sort of stuttering through

1:37

the different options. And do I get

1:39

out of the car? Do I stay in the car? If I get out of

1:41

the car, I was risking car hitting me. But

1:43

then if I stayed in the car, I was definitely going to get hit

1:45

eventually, because these cars that were coming over

1:47

the crest were swerving barely in time. Who avoid

1:50

me? There? Abby was

1:52

a teenager, all alone and

1:55

trapped on the freeway, confronting what

1:57

seemed like certain death, And it was just

1:59

the sense of futility and

2:02

blankness. It was awful. But

2:05

what happened next propelled Abby on

2:07

a totally new journey, a journey that would

2:09

bring her face to face with the worst

2:11

and best parts of human nature, and

2:14

one that has allowed her to unlock a counterintuitive

2:17

secret to what makes life happier and

2:19

a bit more worth living. Our

2:25

minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy.

2:28

But what if our minds are wrong? What if

2:30

our minds are lying to us, leading us

2:32

away from what will really make us happy. The

2:35

good news is that understanding the science of the mind

2:37

can point us all back in the right direction.

2:40

You're listening to the Happiness Lab of doctor

2:42

Laurie Santos.

2:48

Abby Marsh was trapped in her disabled

2:50

sub in the dark, facing

2:52

the wrong way on the highway. She

2:55

watched in terror as oncoming traffic swerved

2:57

by. She needed a miracle.

3:00

It's funny because you know, I don't believe

3:02

in guardian angels, and in fact, it frustrates

3:04

me when people refer to very alterwistic people

3:06

as angels, because I feel like it's sort of takes

3:09

away from how compassionate real live

3:12

human beings can be. You know, you don't

3:14

have to be supernatural to help somebody else. But

3:16

it did have that sense of just he just

3:19

appeared out of nowhere. Abby

3:21

looked over to see that a complete stranger was

3:23

knocking calmly on her passenger side door. My

3:26

memory of him is that he was wearing a

3:28

suit and a lot of gold jewelry and

3:31

sunglasses. It was the middle of the night, that

3:33

made no sense, but he said, you looked like you could do

3:35

some help, and I said, yeah,

3:37

I think I could. And he

3:40

ran around the front of my car into

3:42

the traffic, got into the driver's seat, and

3:45

then he got the car back started

3:48

again and got just back across

3:50

the road and parked us behind his car.

3:52

I was shaking, and I'm sure it was gray, and

3:54

I fell awful, and he said, you don't look so good. Do you

3:56

need me to follow you to make sure you get home? Okay?

3:59

I was like, no, no no, no, I'll be fine. I'll be fine.

4:01

I'm pretty sure. I didn't say thank you. And

4:03

he's like, okay, you take care of yourself, and he

4:06

got out of my car, back into his own and disappeared.

4:09

Abbey has spent a lot of time wondering about

4:11

the man that rescued her and the reasons behind

4:14

his actions. The instant practically

4:16

he saw in my car. He must have pulled

4:18

over and then run across five milnes of

4:20

freeway traffic in the dark to get to me. Why would

4:22

somebody do that? Why would somebody do that? What

4:24

was that moment that happened inside this other

4:27

person's head that I owe my life too? What's

4:29

interesting to me is that just knowing that

4:31

people do it sort of semantically, you know,

4:33

you read about it in a newspaper, is you can

4:36

sort of be like, oh, that's interesting, but there's

4:38

something about it happening to you. Real

4:40

human being made this choice to save

4:42

my life, even though he risked being killed

4:44

himself, to make you want to understand

4:47

it, and the fact that we don't really

4:49

have good explanations for why somebody would

4:51

do something like this. In fact, it defies a lot

4:53

of conventional wisdom about human motivation. You

4:55

know, all humans being fundamentally selfish,

4:57

that's something many people believe, and so what

4:59

could be more interesting than a concrete

5:01

fact that defies a lot of established

5:04

ideas. But Abbey wasn't content

5:06

to just sit and wonder why her savior chose to

5:08

help her. She decided to get to the bottom

5:10

of his actions. Scientifically, I'm

5:13

not sure how often these motivations

5:16

that drive us are clear in the moment, but in retrospect,

5:18

it's very clear that my research

5:20

took a very distinct track since then. Abby

5:23

is now a professor in the Department of Psychology

5:25

and the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience

5:28

at Georgetown she's a world expert

5:30

and how we process other people's emotions.

5:33

I started studying how

5:35

we respond to other people's fear initially,

5:38

so why it is that the site

5:40

of somebody who's frightens elicits

5:43

caring responses and people who see it. But

5:45

that's a really difficult question to study in the lab because

5:47

you know you can't ethically induce extreme

5:50

fear in people, and it's really hard to measure people's

5:53

behavior when it comes to things

5:55

like altruism in the lab in a way that doesn't make

5:58

them do what you want them to do. So

6:00

Abby decided to employ a common

6:02

psychology research logic. If

6:04

you want to understand a concept, one of

6:06

the better ways to do that is to find a

6:08

population to people who were missing the thing you're

6:10

interested in and try to understand what makes

6:12

him different, and hopefully that will help

6:14

understand where that process

6:17

you're interested and comes from, which led

6:19

Abbey to explore the nature of altruistic

6:22

actions using a seemingly strange

6:24

population psychopaths.

6:26

We had known for a while, and sciences

6:28

and known for a while that people who are psychopathic

6:31

don't respond normally to the

6:33

site of other people's fear, which even

6:35

the idea of other people's fear. And one

6:37

of my favorite examples of this comes

6:39

from a story of my colleagues of fighting

6:42

was telling name she was testing a bunch

6:44

of psychopathic adult inmates on their

6:46

ability to recognize other people's facial

6:48

expressions, and one psychopathic

6:51

inmate she was testing was particularly

6:53

about it recognizing other people's fear so

6:55

bad he missed every single fearful expression she showed

6:57

him. But he knew he was doing badly because

7:00

he got to the last fearful expression in the set

7:03

and he's like, you know, I don't know what that expression

7:05

is called, but I know that's what people look like right before

7:07

you stab them. I find

7:09

that so incredibly profound, because,

7:12

you know, here's a man who is imprisoned

7:14

because he does things that cause

7:16

other people to believe they're going to die, and

7:20

he's like, oh, yay, I know what they look like. You

7:22

know, I recognize that phase. But

7:24

he couldn't link it to the emotion fear.

7:26

He just he couldn't make sense

7:28

of that vivid,

7:31

you know, wide eyed, distressed

7:33

expression and understand the

7:35

emotional content behind it. Abby's

7:38

now done some elegant work exploring why psychopaths

7:41

have this problem recognizing others distress.

7:44

We found that there's a structure in their brain called

7:46

the amgala that doesn't seem to respond normally

7:48

to other people's fear, whereas in most people,

7:50

this particular structure seems to be very active

7:53

in response to somebody's fear, and that seems

7:55

to help you interpret that emotion, and people who

7:57

are psychopathic just show no response at all.

7:59

But the biggest idea that came from Abbey's work

8:01

on the brains of psychopaths was an insight

8:04

that eventually led her back to the question she

8:06

first started asking on that highway

8:08

many years ago. We have

8:11

understood now for a while that psychopathy

8:14

is not a sort of cluster of individuals

8:17

that's qualitatively different

8:20

from everybody else. It's a spectrum. And so

8:22

there are people who are highly highly

8:24

psychopathic and people who are only moderately psychopathic,

8:26

and then those traits vary continuously

8:29

throughout the population. And what it's interesting

8:31

about that fact is it suggests that there

8:34

must be such a thing as an anti psychopath. So

8:36

if most of us are sort of moderately compassionate,

8:39

and we've got psychopaths on one end who have no compassion,

8:41

Well, there must be a mirror

8:43

image of that people who are unusually compassionate,

8:46

And I got to thinking about what that might look

8:48

like. What would it look like to be

8:50

anti psychopathic? Are they, for example,

8:53

the kind of people who would run into oncoming

8:55

traffic to save a complete stranger. Could

8:57

they be the key to understanding why some people

9:00

are willing to lose everything to help others.

9:03

After the break you'll hear more about

9:05

these so called anti psychopaths and

9:07

how they are unusual choices, demons straight what

9:09

you can personally do to become a little

9:11

bit happier. The Happiness Lab

9:13

will be back in a moment. I

9:25

started out thinking it would be fun too, and

9:27

you know, edifying to study people who

9:29

were heroic rescuers, like the man who saved

9:31

my life. But at the time it wasn't at

9:34

all clear how I would find them. After

9:36

exploring the brains of psychopathic killers, researcher

9:38

Abbey Marsh wanted to understand the minds of

9:40

the polar opposite side of the psychological

9:43

spectrum. It's not an

9:45

easy thing to put like an ad in the newspaper for have you ever

9:47

saved a stranger's life? And risk your own. It wasn't

9:49

aware of any way to recruit them, and so

9:51

I thought about, well, there are other ways to save lives

9:54

that involve significant risk and sacrifice,

9:56

and at the time, a number of articles

9:59

and a book could come out about altruistic

10:01

kidney donors. People who give away a kidney

10:03

to save the life of a stranger and ende

10:06

renal failure. Patience and end stage renal

10:08

failure often wait three to five years

10:10

to get a kidney from a deceased donor. Living

10:13

kidney donors, people who are willing to give

10:15

up one of their two functioning kidneys, can

10:18

cut down on the weight time for the nearly one hundred

10:20

thousand people who are on that wait list.

10:23

The donation procedure is more straightforward than

10:25

you might think. Most donors return to

10:27

their usual activities in a few weeks. But

10:30

like all surgeries, kidney donations

10:32

come with at least some risk of serious

10:34

complications, things like blood clots,

10:36

infection, or even death. And

10:38

I thought, you know, if anything is

10:40

altruistic, it is that it

10:43

is this very significant

10:45

decision to give away of an

10:48

internal organ, invital internal organ,

10:50

to save the life of somebody that you've never met.

10:53

And in most cases have been picked off a list for you.

10:55

So it struck me that if anything

10:57

could be considered antipsychopathic, gets

10:59

the decision to give a kidney to a stranger. So

11:02

Abby harder target group kidney donors,

11:04

but at the time it was a pretty exclusive club.

11:07

There are only a few thousand in the entire

11:09

country who'd gone through that invasive procedure.

11:12

Meaningful results in scientific studies require

11:14

having as many test subjects as possible, and

11:17

so Abby was a bit worried that she wouldn't be able

11:19

to find enough donors. In spite

11:21

of the odds, she put an ad on an organ

11:23

transplant list Serve, have you ever donated

11:26

a kidney to a stranger? If so, a researcher

11:28

at Georgetown is interested in connecting

11:30

a study with you. Abby reasonably assumed

11:32

that she'd never find enough participants

11:34

from such an absolutely tiny pool

11:36

of potential recruits. I have this

11:38

vivid memory of sitting down and being like, oh,

11:40

I wonder if anybody's responded to my ads

11:43

for kidney downers, and opening up by laptop

11:45

and my inbox was just flooded with new messages,

11:48

many with all caps subject

11:50

things from altars to kidney downers

11:52

who were just very excited to be

11:54

taking part in my research. You know, I would love to be your

11:56

guinea pig. Please sign me up. Abby was

11:58

immediately shocked by this population's generosity.

12:01

Hundreds of them were ready to fly to her lab

12:04

at a moment's notice, and once they

12:06

got there, they were happy to go to great

12:08

lengths to be helpful. And consider it,

12:11

working with lots of different populations

12:13

over the years, it can be a real trick to just get people

12:15

to come in and to come in on time. And

12:17

the first three altruistic kidney

12:19

donors we brought in and they come in from all over the country, and

12:21

they were staying in a hotel just a few

12:23

blocks from the campus where we were going to be

12:25

scanning them, and they were

12:27

so worried about not being

12:29

late to their brain scans that they came

12:32

three hours early the first

12:34

camp. It's like unheard of, and

12:37

they ended up getting lost in the bowels of the

12:39

university hospital and almost

12:41

ended up breaking through a fire door to

12:44

get to the camp center and setting off alarms

12:46

all over the hospital because again they were so incredibly

12:49

concerned about not being late. Abby

12:51

also found that her kidney donors were unusually

12:54

humble. They didn't like her hypothesis

12:56

that they were in any way special or at the

12:58

extreme end of some goodness spectrum.

13:01

A number of them very kindly told

13:03

me that they were happy to participate in the study.

13:05

They were happy to help out, but they were pretty sure

13:07

that I was barking at the wrong tree. The

13:10

idea that there was anything different about them at

13:12

all was just wrong. They're not unusually altruistic,

13:14

they're not unusually compassionate. They're just like anybody

13:16

else. They happen to be in the right place at the

13:18

right time, which is not how anybody

13:21

else talks about people who give kidneys

13:23

to strangers. But their real sense

13:25

of humility has been really striking,

13:28

just an unwillingness

13:30

to think of themselves as better than anybody else.

13:33

Of course, Abbey's results showed that

13:35

kidney donors were wrong. They were

13:38

different, at least when it came to their brains.

13:40

Abbey used neuroimaging techniques to

13:42

measure the size of the donors amygdalas,

13:45

that same brain structure involved in processing

13:47

fear, the very same part

13:49

that was significantly smaller than average

13:51

in psychopaths. It turns out

13:53

that her kidney donors also had peculiar

13:56

amygdala's, but they were eight percent

13:58

larger than those of average people. Now,

14:01

it could be that her donors were just born that way,

14:03

but it was also possible that performing acts

14:06

of kindness over time had caused the enlargement,

14:09

like a muscle responding to exercise. Whatever

14:12

the reason, these extreme ultruists

14:14

had ambigdalas that indeed looked like the polar

14:16

opposite of what she'd seen in her malicious criminals.

14:19

Abby had finally identified a

14:21

population of anti psychopaths, which

14:24

was a pretty cool result for a budding neuroscientist.

14:27

But the most important thing about studying this new population

14:29

for Abby wasn't just that she had discovered

14:31

a completely new, nearly atypical population.

14:35

The ultruistic kidney donors finally

14:37

gave Abbey the opportunity to pose

14:39

the question that had puzzled her for decades,

14:41

The question she wanted to ask her highway savior.

14:44

Why would somebody do that? Why

14:46

did her rescuer choose to save her? Abby

14:50

conducted interview after interview, asking

14:53

what was going through your head when you decided

14:55

to help someone in such an extreme way.

14:57

The most common answer I get to the question is

14:59

it just hit me like a bolt of lightning. I've

15:02

found out that there are people who were dying from

15:04

kidney failure. There's one hundred thousand of them

15:06

on the waiting lists, and most of us

15:08

can of a kidney away and be none the worse

15:11

for wear for it. And I thought, I'll do that. I

15:13

mean, there is no decision process I

15:15

think is the interesting thing. Like, it's not a hemming

15:17

and hawing process for really almost anybody

15:19

I've talked to, it's just so, well, you

15:22

can do this. Somebody's life is gonna be saved.

15:24

I'll do it. At first glance, this sort

15:26

of answer fits with Abby's initial hypothesis

15:29

that there had to be something fundamentally

15:31

different about people who would risk their lives

15:33

for strangers without a moment's thought.

15:36

But if that were the case, her results wouldn't

15:39

be as relevant for all of you, and so I wouldn't

15:41

be talking about them here on the Happiness lab. As

15:44

Abby probe more deeply, she realized

15:46

that this couldn't be the whole story. As

15:48

she heard more about her participants' lives,

15:51

she realized that many of them got to this

15:53

act of kidney donation through lots

15:55

of smaller acts of generosity. Nobody

15:57

goes from sort of ground zero to donate a kidney

16:00

almost always. The people we've worked with

16:03

are long time blood donors,

16:05

platelet donors, some have been marrow donors.

16:07

Many of them work in tier positions,

16:10

rescue animals, foster children.

16:12

They've all done things in the

16:15

past that involved giving of themselves

16:17

to help other people. Abbey realized that

16:19

many of her kidney donors wound up getting

16:21

to what seemed like an extreme altruistic choice

16:24

through lots of baby steps, smaller

16:26

nice actions, the kinds of things that lots

16:28

of us do or could easily do. Over

16:31

time, the donors recognize that performing

16:33

these smaller acts of kindness felt well,

16:35

kind of nice. The sense that I get

16:38

is that they have had the wonderful opportunity

16:40

to discover how rewarding that is, what a sense

16:43

of joy and happiness it gives you to help

16:45

other people. And it's just like any

16:47

other reinforcement process. You sort of work your way

16:49

up. You're like, well, that was so rewarding. What else

16:51

could I do? If donating blood is good, I guess

16:53

donating marrows even better. If donating kidney

16:56

is good. I guess donating a piece of my liver is even better.

16:58

And I now have several kidney donors I've worked with who've

17:00

also donated a portion of their liver. As

17:02

she heard from more interviewees, Abbey's

17:05

Big Savior on the Highway puzzle started

17:07

to become Clearerultists

17:09

did what they did because they had learned a

17:11

simple yet counterintuitive principle

17:13

of human motivation. Doing nice

17:16

things for other people feels really

17:18

good, even in cases where it's a

17:20

bit costly. Helping others can

17:22

provide a big spike to our well being. Altruistic

17:25

kidney donors just take the usual wellbeing

17:27

spite we all experience to an extreme.

17:30

It's therefore no surprise that they tend to be a

17:33

really happy group on average. It's

17:35

a universal response I get

17:37

from them. They are so

17:39

glad that they made the decision to donate. They do it

17:41

one hundred more times. If they could do one hundred more times.

17:43

It's one of the best things that they ever did, and

17:46

it gives them this sense of joy

17:48

that sticks with them as far as I can tell forever.

17:51

Some of the people I've worked with donated

17:53

close to twenty years ago. Now, and it doesn't

17:55

ever seem to go away, that sense

17:59

of vicarious joy of having been

18:01

able to do this thing for somebody else. I've

18:03

had many interviews and in tears

18:05

as people are describing the after

18:08

effects of their nation and hearing that the child

18:10

who would receive their kidney like days

18:12

after donnation, he was making plans to go

18:15

to the beach and camping for like the first time.

18:17

He'd never been able to do these things. And like the

18:19

kidney donors sabbing relating this, and I'm sabbing

18:22

relating this, it's incredibly profound. As

18:24

Abby heard more of these stories and saw

18:26

the incredible joy that her subjects experienced,

18:29

she started to think that her extreme subjects might

18:31

be onto something important, something

18:33

that the rest of us could learn from. Two. If

18:36

you want to make a good decision about bringing

18:39

joy and meaning in a sense of connectedness

18:41

into your own life, helping people is clearly

18:43

the way to do it. Abby started to

18:45

realize that all of us can benefit

18:47

from doing nice things for others, even

18:50

if we're not yet ready to give up a body part

18:52

to a stranger. We all have our

18:54

own ways that we can make the lives of other people

18:56

better. You know, donating kidney is

18:59

one way, but it's certainly not the only way. But

19:01

as Abby right, I mean, it's clear

19:03

that her donors get a huge happiness

19:05

boost from their generous act. But

19:07

can the average person really become happier

19:10

by making a small sacrifice to aid a

19:12

stranger? Can shifting your focus

19:14

to helping other people really be a strategy

19:17

for improving well being? And

19:19

if there is a path to becoming a happy altruist,

19:22

is there a step along that path that you

19:24

could take today? The

19:26

Happiness Lab will be right back. When

19:37

we think of small, everyday things we can do to

19:39

boost our mood, we often think of the

19:41

idea of pampering ourselves. And

19:43

whenever I think of personal pampering, I'm

19:45

reminded of one of my favorite seams from the TV

19:48

show Parks and Recreation. Once a year, Donna

19:50

and I spend a day treating ourselves. What

19:52

do we treat ourselves to? Clothes, treat

19:55

yourself, treat yourself, massage,

19:57

treat yourself, mimosa, treat yourself,

19:59

fine leather goods. Treat yourself.

20:02

It's the best day of the year, the best

20:04

day of the year when we want to be happier.

20:06

We think it's time to spoil ourselves, or,

20:09

in the popular parlance of parks wreck, I've

20:12

got three words for you, Yo sill.

20:14

On the show Tom and Donna observed treat yourself

20:17

day every October thirteenth. It's

20:19

now become a cultural phenomenon, so

20:21

much so that Rheta, the actress who plays Donna,

20:23

can't post a photo of a cocktail or a purse

20:26

on Instagram without some fan telling

20:28

her to go ahead and treat yourself. But

20:31

it's a strategy, right. Should we be

20:33

treating ourselves to feel happier or

20:35

are we missing other more powerful opportunities

20:38

to boost our moods? You

20:40

know, I don't think treating ourselves is a terrible

20:42

idea, like spending money on ourselves can

20:44

be good. This is Liz Done, a psychology

20:47

professor at the University of British Columbia

20:49

an author of the book Happy Money, The

20:52

Science of Happier Spending. It's just

20:54

that this idea of that spending money on somebody

20:56

else could actually be helpful, I think is

20:58

especially easy to overlook because

21:00

I think we do just get focused on ourselves.

21:03

Liz studies the cases where our so called treat

21:05

yourself. Intuitions can lead us astray,

21:08

especially when it comes to spending our disposable

21:10

income. I first got interested in this idea,

21:12

like, not because I was especially interested

21:15

in generosity, but because I was interested

21:17

in money. So I

21:19

managed to make it through my twenties

21:21

without ever holding a real job.

21:23

At twenty seven, I got my first real

21:26

job and they actually started paying me, and I was

21:28

like, oh wow, Like, what do I do with all of this

21:30

money? Like this is more money than I need to survive,

21:32

you know, and what do I do with it?

21:35

I was surprised at the time by how little

21:37

research there was on this topic. Liz

21:39

Comb the literature to figure out the best way to

21:41

spend our money to feel happier, and

21:43

all the existing studies seem to point in the same direction.

21:46

The science shows that treating ourselves doesn't

21:49

make us as happy as treating other

21:51

people, and that result is not just true

21:53

for extremely altruistic people like Abby's

21:56

kidney donors, even when we look in

21:58

pretty diverse regions of the world. In

22:00

fact, in all seven major regions of the world,

22:02

we find this relationship whereby

22:04

people who donate money to charity are

22:06

happier than those who don't. So I thought, well,

22:09

okay, would we actually get more of kind

22:11

of happiness being for our buck by

22:13

spending on others than by spending on ourselves.

22:16

Listen, our colleagues decided to test this in a

22:18

rather simple experiment. They walked

22:20

up to people on the street and handed them twenty

22:22

dollars. We asked them to spend

22:24

it by the end of the day, but with a catch.

22:27

So we told half the people they had to spend it on

22:29

themselves, and we told half the people they had

22:31

to spend it to benefit others.

22:34

Imagine for a second that you're a subject in this study.

22:36

You just got twenty bucks out of the blue, and

22:39

you're asked to spend it. What would feel

22:41

better spending that money on

22:43

a nice free meal or a shiny manicure

22:45

for yourself, or using that same

22:48

amount of money to help someone else. If

22:50

you're like Liz's subjects, you probably

22:53

think the treat yourself condition would feel better. In

22:56

fact, Liz asked over a hundred

22:58

people to predict which condition they would prefer,

23:01

and about two thirds of them went with the treat

23:03

yourself option. But what

23:05

did Liz find when people really spent that

23:07

cash windfall. People were in a better mood

23:09

at the end of the day when they'd

23:12

been asked to spend this money on other people rather

23:14

than on themselves. The simple act

23:16

of spending twenty dollars on another person was

23:19

enough to significantly raise people's well being

23:21

levels. But Liz has found that the same effect

23:23

holds for smaller amounts of money too. Her

23:26

team tested a different group of subjects. They

23:28

were given only five dollars to spend on themselves

23:31

or someone else. This second group

23:33

showed exactly the same effect as

23:35

those who were given more cash. You don't necessarily

23:38

have to be spending crazy amounts

23:40

of money on others, even like say

23:43

five dollars, or even just two dollars, and

23:45

shifting it towards using that money to benefit

23:48

other people does seem to provide this detectable

23:50

benefit for moods. Listener colleagues

23:53

have now replicated the same effect in people

23:55

all over the world, in Canada, India,

23:58

Uganda, and even remote villages

24:00

on the island of Vanawatu. The

24:02

results are always the same for rich

24:04

and for poor people. One study

24:07

of South African subjects found that people

24:09

who are happier spending money on others

24:11

even when they report not having enough money

24:13

to buy food for their families in the last year.

24:16

But what's most impressive is that Liz

24:18

has shown that generosity doesn't just

24:20

feel good in adulthood. We started to wonder, like,

24:22

you know, is this a fundamental part of human nature?

24:25

So my student lair Acting and I teamed up

24:27

with Kylie Hamlin, who's a developmental psychologist,

24:29

and we brought toddlers just under the age

24:31

of two into the lab. Now, of course, toddlers

24:34

don't really care about money, so we worked

24:36

with like the closest thing to toddler

24:38

gold which of course is goldfish crackers,

24:41

And so we gave these little kids

24:43

windfall of goldfish for themselves, as

24:46

well as a chance to give some of those goldfish away

24:48

to a puppet named Monkey. The researchers

24:51

watched how many goldfish crackers kids

24:53

gave away, and then they coded their facial

24:55

expressions to see how happy toddlers

24:57

seemed afterwards. What we see in the study

24:59

is that even children under the age of two

25:01

seem to exhibit pleasure from giving

25:04

their resources away. Counterintuitively,

25:07

the kids smiled more and see much

25:09

happier after losing a bunch

25:11

of their goldfish crackers. It's kind of just reassuring,

25:14

Like as many problems as we have in the world right

25:16

now, it's like the tiny humans

25:19

are starting out with this proclivity

25:21

to derive joy from

25:23

giving their stuff away. That

25:26

to me, I don't know, it makes me optimistic

25:28

again about the world.

25:31

What's less optimistic, though, is that we adults

25:33

don't realize that doing nice things for

25:35

others feel so good that

25:37

it can have such a positive impact on our

25:39

mood. I mean, I definitely want to

25:41

be happier, but I haven't given away a

25:44

really significant chuck of my income, let

25:46

alone a kidney. I bet you haven't

25:48

either. Our lying minds keep

25:50

saying treat yourself, which means

25:53

we tend not to even take baby steps towards

25:55

kindness nearly as much as we could. It's

25:57

so interesting because I think on a broad

26:00

level, people totally recognize

26:02

that this is the case, and I

26:04

get postcards and emails

26:07

and stuff from people saying

26:10

why did you, as a scientist, need

26:12

to waste your time showing this Where

26:15

people are just saying like, oh, we already knew this from

26:17

like the Bible or from like, you

26:19

know, what our parents taught us. And I

26:22

think you know, on a broad level, people recognize

26:24

that generosity feels good. I

26:27

think what they miss is that, you

26:29

know, when they're looking at how to spend the twenty

26:31

dollars in their pocket, that's

26:34

where they make the error. So it's like,

26:36

in this moment, with this like

26:39

piece of extra money in my hand,

26:42

it doesn't maybe occur to me to

26:44

spend it on something else, or you

26:46

know, it feels much more tempting

26:49

to use it to benefit myself

26:51

rather than to spend it on others. And again, I

26:53

think we forget that, like, oh, I could buy

26:56

a slightly less expensive car

26:59

and then have a lot of money left over to

27:02

use to help other people in my life

27:04

or donate to charity or whatever. And

27:06

I think you know, that's where the error creeps in, is

27:08

that we've kind of get that we would actually

27:10

benefit from using the money less on ourselves

27:12

and more on other people. So

27:15

if you really want to treat yourself to a happier day,

27:17

give up something to benefit another person.

27:20

You can start with money, just give up a

27:22

dollar or two, But if you're strapped for cash,

27:25

you can also give up time, like

27:27

letting someone cut in front of you in line at

27:29

the grocery store. It could even be a small

27:31

service like helping a neighbor clear

27:34

off the snow, or maybe taking the time

27:36

to rate and review your favorite podcast. And

27:38

doing nice things for others doesn't just boost

27:40

your mood, it also makes the person

27:43

who received your kind actions a little happier

27:45

too. And that's a kind of tip I most

27:47

love sharing on this podcast, one

27:49

that lets my listeners selfishly bump up their

27:51

own happiness in a way that also

27:53

helps to make the world a better, more empathic

27:56

place. And who knows,

27:58

maybe you won't be satisfied with the small act

28:00

of donating two dollars here or five

28:02

bucks there. Maybe you'll

28:04

also graduate from those baby steps to

28:07

the kind of selfless acts that lead to a

28:09

huge, huge, long standing boost and well

28:11

being, ones that really really

28:13

help people. Maybe you'll even

28:15

save the life of another person, A

28:18

person like Abby stuck on the

28:20

highway alone, embraced for what could

28:22

have been certain death, a moment

28:24

that has stayed with her for decades. It

28:27

just stuck with me, the fact that I owe

28:29

my life to the stranger who is willing to risk

28:31

his to save me. I'm hoping that

28:33

your altruistic Savior is out there

28:35

somewhere. If he's listening right now, what would

28:37

you say. That's

28:39

a big one. But you know, if

28:41

he's out there listening today, and I

28:45

just want to say how profoundly

28:47

grateful I am for the

28:49

beautiful thing that you did and the opportunities

28:52

you've given me, and I

28:54

hope to do your

28:58

tremendous act of bravery justice.

29:11

The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by

29:13

Ryan Dilley with the help of Pete Naton. Our

29:15

original music was composed by Zachary Silver,

29:18

with additional scoring, mixing and mastering

29:20

by Evan Viola. The show was edited

29:22

by Sophie mckibbon and fact checked

29:24

by Joseph Fridman. Special thanks

29:26

to Mia LaBelle, Carlie mcgliorre Heather

29:29

Fame, Julia Barton, Maggie Taylor,

29:31

Maya Kanik, Jacob Weisberg, and

29:34

my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness

29:36

Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries

29:38

and by me, Doctor Laurie Santos