Speaker 1: Pushkin. Angela, you don't know what a crossover is? Did
Speaker 1: you google it? Well? I did have to google it.
Speaker 1: The Simpsons did a crossover with twenty four. That's amazing.
Speaker 1: I think I get it, though, it's like the Dorito's
Speaker 1: Taco Bell mashup thing. The most horrifying new one of
Speaker 1: these is Hines just did this crazy new thing where
Speaker 1: they're doing all these weird Mayo ketchups and stuff. But
Speaker 1: they did Oreo Mayo ketchup. What sounds terrible, But this
Speaker 1: will not be terrible because today we are doing a
Speaker 1: cognitive science mashup of the two best cognitive science podcasts
Speaker 1: out there, Let's be Real, Laurie Santo's from The Happiness Lab,
Speaker 1: along with Angela Duckworth from No Stupid Questions, and we
Speaker 1: are using this No Stupid Questions format that my usual partner,
Speaker 1: Stephen Dubner, and I like so much, which is that
Speaker 1: one of us asked a question of the other and
Speaker 1: then we just have a rambling conversation. I'm in for
Speaker 1: the rambling conver station. That's usually what we have together
Speaker 1: when we meet up. Angela, let's do it. Thank the
Speaker 1: Lord that you're here, God, but I'm Angela Duckworth and
Speaker 1: this is Laurie Santos and you're listening to No Stupid
Speaker 1: Questions meets the Happiness Lab today on the show. Why
Speaker 1: do we mirror the accents and mannerisms of the people
Speaker 1: we meet? Monkey A observes monkey be do something different
Speaker 1: with a banana. I don't know if that's stereotyping. They
Speaker 1: do like bananas. Totally true. Also, why can happiness seem
Speaker 1: so elusive even when things are going well? Holy Schmoley,
Speaker 1: this is the best life I could possibly living. Why
Speaker 1: am I not at ten out of ten on happiness?
Speaker 1: I think you have the first question for me? Correct?
Speaker 1: I do? And this comes from a listener named Sabika
Speaker 1: Shavan who hails from Qatar and is a graduate student there.
Speaker 1: This question is as follows. I have a question about
Speaker 1: mimicking the mannerisms of people we meet, especially in our
Speaker 1: multicultural environments. Often in conversations with people with very market
Speaker 1: accents different from my own, I find my own accent
Speaker 1: taking on nuances of theirs or interjecting typical expressions from
Speaker 1: their language culture. Is this a typically observed behavior? And
Speaker 1: on the flip side, are there many whose accents and
Speaker 1: mannerisms never change regardless of who they speak to, and
Speaker 1: a reason why some do and some don't. Laurie, I
Speaker 1: love this question. I am so vibing with it, Sabika.
Speaker 1: That is me. I spent two years in Oxford and
Speaker 1: I ended up speaking almost involuntarily with this faux British
Speaker 1: posh accent. And I am from southern New Jersey, so
Speaker 1: I should not be doing that. Does this happen to
Speaker 1: you too? Oh my gosh. I moved to the UK
Speaker 1: when I was in graduate school, and I too took
Speaker 1: on not just like a British accent, the most painful
Speaker 1: British mannerisms, like what like if you told me something shocking,
Speaker 1: you did like, oh my gosh, Lorie, I just went
Speaker 1: to the pub and I had like eight points. I
Speaker 1: would respond to that with the phrase you walk. And
Speaker 1: I brought that back to the US for like a year,
Speaker 1: and my friends were like, stop. It'd be one thing
Speaker 1: if you just talked with a fake British accent would
Speaker 1: be bad enough, but the fact that you're you wall
Speaker 1: all the time just terrible. Wait, you knew this and
Speaker 1: you still did it right. It wasn't an affectation that
Speaker 1: you were doing in an iranic Brooklyn way. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I think you know this angela about me. But I
Speaker 1: grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and had what, to
Speaker 1: the uninitiated would sound like a terrible Boston accent. You
Speaker 1: were from Boston, you'd know it was a new Beefit accent,
Speaker 1: just like Pokya kad havid yad. Basically, I couldn't say are,
Speaker 1: to the point that I actually lost a research assistant
Speaker 1: position my freshman year in college. So I started out
Speaker 1: my freshman year working in Steve Coslin's lab with Kevin Oxner,
Speaker 1: who's a professor at Columbia. He was doing some study
Speaker 1: where he just needed a female voice to say letters,
Speaker 1: and so I started recording these letters like hey b C.
Speaker 1: And then I got to q awe and he was like, well,
Speaker 1: you can't say awe. You have to say R. I
Speaker 1: was physically incapable of doing that except sounding like a pirate.
Speaker 1: I was like ah, and he was like, no, it's
Speaker 1: just our anyway. So now you notice that in my
Speaker 1: perfect podcast speak, I can say are. But the reason
Speaker 1: I think that happened was that I ended up my
Speaker 1: freshman year being paired with a roommate from New Orleans,
Speaker 1: who also had an incredibly thick, this time Southern accent. Somehow,
Speaker 1: again perfectly unconsciously, we took on each other's vocal cadences
Speaker 1: to the point that by our senior year. This is
Speaker 1: back when your college room would have a single phone
Speaker 1: that someone would call and you wouldn't know who had
Speaker 1: picked up except by their voice. And in fact, people
Speaker 1: couldn't tell me and my roommate Catherine apart by our
Speaker 1: senior year because our voices had converged so much. You
Speaker 1: took her rs. Did she lose hers? She stopped saying
Speaker 1: y'all as much. In fact, we both picked up another
Speaker 1: expression from our Pittsburgh roommate, which was yins. I like
Speaker 1: that because you guys is apparently an offensive, gender, presumptuous,
Speaker 1: possibly hostile sounding appellation. So my own students tell me,
Speaker 1: I think ian's and y'all are better. But the beauty
Speaker 1: is we just do this naturally. In fact, this is
Speaker 1: an evolved part of human cognition. Researchers call this behavioral contagion.
Speaker 1: This is the kind of thing that you see in animals,
Speaker 1: you know, classic cases. If you watch fish, they tend
Speaker 1: to school around and it looks like they're all kind
Speaker 1: of copying each other's behavior. There's some lovely work by
Speaker 1: this guy Ian Cousin, who does all these detailed mathematical
Speaker 1: network analyses of how fish school around. But the upshot
Speaker 1: is they're just soaking up each other's behavior quite naturally.
Speaker 1: How do you know that they are really mimicking each
Speaker 1: other as opposed to all responding to the same little
Speaker 1: piece of floating kelp. He does these incredibly detailed Matthew
Speaker 1: things that I'm not going to be able to pull
Speaker 1: up on the fly. He can actually do some predictive
Speaker 1: coding based on one fish's behavior about what's going to
Speaker 1: happen with the schooling, and so it really does seem
Speaker 1: to be behavioral contagion. But you don't need to look
Speaker 1: to fish. This is something that we do quite naturally.
Speaker 1: One of the most famous examples of this came from
Speaker 1: my colleague here at Yale, John Barge and his colleague
Speaker 1: Tanya Chartrand. They found out about this effect that they
Speaker 1: called the chameleon effect, well labeled because it's cases where
Speaker 1: people just chameleonly copy other people's behavior. What's an example.
Speaker 1: They had subjects get interviewed by a scary experimenter. So
Speaker 1: there's just like, high status person, do you think you're
Speaker 1: being interviewed by? And what the experimenter did, unbeknownst to
Speaker 1: the subjects was just occasionally take on strange movements, so
Speaker 1: she would touch her face or put her arm in
Speaker 1: a particular way, or cross her legs. And what you
Speaker 1: find is that as they're being interviewed, they unconsciously copy
Speaker 1: all these behaviors. So as the experimenters touching her face,
Speaker 1: they touched their face more. As she's foldening her legs,
Speaker 1: they pull their legs more, again totally unconsciously. And their
Speaker 1: later work shows that this happens more in the high
Speaker 1: status direction, so you're more likely to unconsciously copy the
Speaker 1: high status people, maybe just because you're watching them more. Honestly.
Speaker 1: This is the classic work of Albandura also right, where
Speaker 1: the little children who watch an adult take a toy
Speaker 1: like a bobo doll and beat it with a hammer.
Speaker 1: Then when entering a room with a bobo doll just
Speaker 1: like they saw, they will walk over and start beating
Speaker 1: it with a hammer, whereas Bandara points out, they don't
Speaker 1: do that in a control condition where they have not
Speaker 1: seen an adult model this, So I guess the question
Speaker 1: I'm asking is, is the phenomenon that you're describing different
Speaker 1: from modeling or basically the same. It's probably the mechanism
Speaker 1: that leads to this kind of stuff. I mean, you
Speaker 1: know this well. In cognitive science, we often don't know
Speaker 1: the basic mechanisms that lead to other stuff down the line.
Speaker 1: And there's lots of hypotheses that things like behavioral contagient
Speaker 1: lead to lots of nasty stuff. In fact, mandura is
Speaker 1: about people beating up a bobo doll. But there's evidence
Speaker 1: from people like Francesca Gino and Dan Arielli that behavioral
Speaker 1: contagient can lead to some truly unethical behavior in some
Speaker 1: contexts lying, cheating, stealing, and worse. Exactly, the Dan Ailee
Speaker 1: francescan you know cheating study is fantastic. So they bring
Speaker 1: these subjects into the lab college students and give them
Speaker 1: a super super hard math test. It's basically impossible. And
Speaker 1: so if you're a subject, you're experience and like, oh
Speaker 1: my god, this is terrible. I'm never going to finish this.
Speaker 1: And then you watch one subject raise their hand immediately
Speaker 1: like two seconds into the experiment and say, yeah, I'm done.
Speaker 1: What can I do. And the experiments like, if you're
Speaker 1: done well, you can just shred your answers so no
Speaker 1: one sees them and will pay you. And so if
Speaker 1: you're the subject, you think you wait a minute, They're
Speaker 1: not even going to check that I did them. They're
Speaker 1: just going to shred it. And what Arielli and colleagues
Speaker 1: find is you're more likely to cheat on these problems
Speaker 1: if you see somebody else cheating. But the neat thing
Speaker 1: is that it's not just if you see somebody else cheating,
Speaker 1: it actually has to be somebody that relates to you.
Speaker 1: And so they manipulated this in a cute way. They're
Speaker 1: doing this stuff at Duke University. So the Duke students
Speaker 1: are there in this study, and the person that raises
Speaker 1: their hand and cheats is in a Duke University sweatshirt. Now,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, cheating goes up a lot. But
Speaker 1: if the person's in an UNC sweatshirt, who are like
Speaker 1: the lose from the other school, Now all of a
Speaker 1: sudden people are like, oh my god, I'm not going
Speaker 1: to cheat, and it actually reinforces moral behavior. And so
Speaker 1: this is another thing we know about behavioral contagion, which
Speaker 1: is kind of weird. We're more likely to contagiously pick
Speaker 1: up on the behaviors of people who we see as
Speaker 1: our in group members, who we see as high status,
Speaker 1: who we pay attention to. So I wanted to ask
Speaker 1: you what you thought about mirror neurons. I, as more
Speaker 1: or as an outsiders as literature, have only read articles
Speaker 1: about these specialized neurons that if I see you doing
Speaker 1: a particular action, they are lighting up in my brain
Speaker 1: as if I were doing the same action. So A,
Speaker 1: is that an accurate description of mirror neurons? And B
Speaker 1: what up with mirror neurons? Lorie, I'm kind of not
Speaker 1: a fan of mirror neurons. I'll be totally honest. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of hype a brown mirror neurons, but what
Speaker 1: they actually do might not be as cool as we
Speaker 1: sometimes think. Basically, these were discovered in monkeys in a
Speaker 1: very famous set of experiments back in the early nineties
Speaker 1: where monkeys were watching humans engaging in these actions, and
Speaker 1: areas of the monkey motor cortex the spot that would
Speaker 1: fire if they were grabbing for something. When they are
Speaker 1: watching these humans grabbing for something, they tended to fire it.
Speaker 1: So it seems super cool, like, oh my gosh, the
Speaker 1: same neuron in me that fires when I reach fires
Speaker 1: when I see you reach. Maybe neurons are the code
Speaker 1: for empathy. Maybe these neurons are the seat of our
Speaker 1: perspective taking all the stuff. What we know about them
Speaker 1: is they only exist in motor cortex, so it's for
Speaker 1: very specific motoric movements like grabbing and reaching. There's a
Speaker 1: couple mirror neurons in other spots. There's some that might
Speaker 1: be in the tension region, so for igs turning and
Speaker 1: stuff like that, but not as rich as you'd think.
Speaker 1: And I think there is some argument that human beings
Speaker 1: are unique in their ability to learn through observation, whereas
Speaker 1: a dog or even a chimpanzee can't do it, or
Speaker 1: at least can't do it as well, Which is kind
Speaker 1: of right, because the mirror neurons were mostly found in monkeys.
Speaker 1: In terms of learning by observation, animals do do that,
Speaker 1: but what they don't learn by is imitation. Like I
Speaker 1: see you behave in this very specific sequence, and I
Speaker 1: copy all of those very mechanical behaviors perfectly. That's literally
Speaker 1: what monkeys don't do. Wait, what do monkeys do? So
Speaker 1: monkey a observes monkey bee do something different with a banana.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's stereotyping. They do like bananas.
Speaker 1: Totally true. Okay, good, I'm glad that holds up. Anyway,
Speaker 1: What does happen if it's not imitation, what is it?
Speaker 1: Here's one study that looked at this. This is not
Speaker 1: with monkeys, but with chimpanzees. For our listeners out there,
Speaker 1: pet peeve of people who work with primates monkeys, not chimpanzees.
Speaker 1: Chimpanzees actually eat monkeys, so totally different. What it's like
Speaker 1: saying a human is a tuna fish sandwich or something.
Speaker 1: So with chimpanzees, they have this task where there's a
Speaker 1: bunch of food outside of some enclosure and chimp has
Speaker 1: to use a tool to get it. They give a
Speaker 1: chimp a rake basically where you could try to use
Speaker 1: a rake with the times down like we'd normally rake leaves,
Speaker 1: but if they're tiny pieces of food, that works sort
Speaker 1: of but not super well because the food goes through
Speaker 1: the times. Whereas if you flip the rake over and
Speaker 1: you have that part of the rake that's flat, you
Speaker 1: can scoop the food up more effectively. So they show
Speaker 1: kids this behavior, and what you find is the kid
Speaker 1: will copy whatever the human does, whereas if you do
Speaker 1: the same thing with chimpanzees, they don't necessarily fully copy
Speaker 1: what the human does. They realize like, oh, I can
Speaker 1: use a rake to try to get the food, and
Speaker 1: then they try and error it. So they're kind of
Speaker 1: copying the fact that you're using this tool and you
Speaker 1: can do it. But what they're not copying is the
Speaker 1: perfect actions that go with it. It sounds smarter, doesn't
Speaker 1: It sound a little bit more evolved as it were?
Speaker 1: It is smarter. Yeah. In fact, there's a wonderful bias
Speaker 1: that is perhaps human unique bias. We have some evidence
Speaker 1: that you don't see it in primates or in dogs,
Speaker 1: which is called overimitation, this idea that we imitate too much.
Speaker 1: If you see somebody doing something that's inefficient or in
Speaker 1: the case of this Arielli study we talked about bad
Speaker 1: or like immoral, you inadvertently copy it. Anyway. Have you
Speaker 1: read the studies of Christine Leguere, this developmental psychology work
Speaker 1: on children imitating others? Yeah, and she finds with over imitation,
Speaker 1: but part of it seems to be automatic, but part
Speaker 1: of it seems to be because this kind of behavioral
Speaker 1: contigient is our way of showing hey, I'm in the
Speaker 1: group like you. And this gets to another way that
Speaker 1: you could think about switching accents in particular, this idea
Speaker 1: of code switching. So code switching is if you're a
Speaker 1: member of a minority group and you're in a majority
Speaker 1: group situation, you sort of switch your behavior around to
Speaker 1: match what the majority group is doing, which is sometimes
Speaker 1: considered not a great thing, but arguably, as you're pointing out,
Speaker 1: is adaptive totally. If I look back at my own accent, switching,
Speaker 1: my new beefit accent wasn't going to necessarily work super
Speaker 1: well in IVY League classes. That wasn't the way these
Speaker 1: high status, higher class people talked. It's no secret that
Speaker 1: my accent switched more towards a IVY League vernacular English. Right,
Speaker 1: So we were both in England, which was a higher
Speaker 1: status accent, one could argue, certainly than my native South Jersey.
Speaker 1: So I start speaking a faux British accent. But if
Speaker 1: a British scholar for whatever reason, came to southern New
Speaker 1: Jersey and had to spend a summer down the shore,
Speaker 1: they would not adopt the local vernacular right, That would
Speaker 1: be the prediction because of the status. Status is part
Speaker 1: of it, for sure, but I think also just functionally
Speaker 1: getting the inside scoop and seeming like you belong and
Speaker 1: you're like an insider at that place. So my prediction
Speaker 1: is brit might do it less in southern New Jersey
Speaker 1: than this Southern New Jersey, or would do it in
Speaker 1: the UK, but they would to a certain extent. And
Speaker 1: this is the reason that again I have lost sadly
Speaker 1: at my New Bedford accent until I go back to
Speaker 1: New Bedford for a couple of days and then I
Speaker 1: all of a sudden sound like I've been there my
Speaker 1: whole life. I want to hear a New Bedford happiness lab.
Speaker 1: I think you should do it full on and maybe
Speaker 1: you could record it there another time it happens. Maybe
Speaker 1: you got this too when you were in the UK.
Speaker 1: Is when I'm drunk, those more automatic accents come back.
Speaker 1: It's weird. I haven't been drunk since I was eighteen.
Speaker 1: But that is probably a different question. So I'll have
Speaker 1: to actually get data on that and come back to you.
Speaker 1: There's an experiment we could do. Angela. Okay, so now
Speaker 1: I get to ask a question right, which is so cool.
Speaker 1: We don't normally do this on the Happiness Lab. You
Speaker 1: need another person to be hanging out with, that's true,
Speaker 1: You're welcome anytime on Happiness Lab. Angela, thank you. But
Speaker 1: here's question number two. Amelia asks why is it that
Speaker 1: so many people are restless or unsatisfied even in terrific
Speaker 1: or satisfying circumstances. Her context is that she's in a
Speaker 1: really lovely place with lots of supportive and happy colleagues.
Speaker 1: She's exceeded all these expectations she's had for herself professionally,
Speaker 1: but still finds herself looking around at other opportunities, kind
Speaker 1: of feeling unhappy, thinking she should switching. And then she
Speaker 1: goes on to ask why can't I just wait it out?
Speaker 1: Why the need for change? Maybe at some level people
Speaker 1: don't want to be happy? What is the deal? Scientifically?
Speaker 1: This is such a great question. I think it is
Speaker 1: timely because, as we both were very sad to know
Speaker 1: a Dener, the scientist who arguably more than anyone, put
Speaker 1: the scientific study of happiness on the map. He passed
Speaker 1: away very recently, So I feel like this question is
Speaker 1: a way also for us to honor the great Ed Dener,
Speaker 1: who is amazing and who stuff we talk about all
Speaker 1: the time on the Happiness Lab. So I will begin
Speaker 1: by saying that I had this experience myself. I remember
Speaker 1: when I was I think eighteen years old writing to
Speaker 1: Dear Abbey, saying how unhappy I was. There were extending circumstances.
Speaker 1: Mostly I was an adolescent. So that's partly your job
Speaker 1: as adolescent to be unhappy with your circumstances. Wait, wait, wait, wait,
Speaker 1: time out. You actually wrote to Dear Abbey, legit wrote
Speaker 1: to Dear Abbey. Yes, who was the nineteen eighties. So
Speaker 1: I wrote a letter, put it in an envelope, licked it,
Speaker 1: sealed it, put a stamp on it, and mailed it away.
Speaker 1: And what my letter said was more or less that
Speaker 1: I felt like I had a perfect life. I had
Speaker 1: just gotten into college, I know, was going to Harvard,
Speaker 1: so I was getting lots of praise from my Asian family.
Speaker 1: And my boyfriend at the time was somebody I thought
Speaker 1: I would spend maybe the rest of my life with.
Speaker 1: And I had a wonderful best friend, and all these
Speaker 1: great things were happening to me. And there was this
Speaker 1: contrast from the objective awesomeness of my life and my
Speaker 1: unst I was just like, I'm not happy, Abby, what's
Speaker 1: wrong with me? What did Abby say? She said to
Speaker 1: go see a therapist. Go see a therapist. Art for
Speaker 1: excellent words of advice. But I was very disappointed at
Speaker 1: the time. And you know what, Laurie, I wish I
Speaker 1: had listened to her, because it took me a couple
Speaker 1: more decades to realize that I'm in the state of
Speaker 1: mind where I'm so unhappy I need to write a
Speaker 1: letter to a stranger to ask them for help. Then,
Speaker 1: really what I should do? Let's go see a therapist.
Speaker 1: But there are times where you just look around at
Speaker 1: your life in any objective sense, you realize, holy shmoley,
Speaker 1: this is the best life I could possibly be living,
Speaker 1: and you have this gnawing sense of dissatisfactor, like, why
Speaker 1: am I not a ten out of ten on happiness? Now?
Speaker 1: I want to start our scientific discussion of this with
Speaker 1: this very famous idea of the hedonic treadmill, which I
Speaker 1: know you've probably already discussed on your podcast. Am I
Speaker 1: write on that? Yeah? We had a fantastic guest on
Speaker 1: to talk about the hedonic treadmill, Clay Cockerell. He's a
Speaker 1: wealth psychologist, so he's a mental health professional for the
Speaker 1: point zero zero one percent. First off, that's telling right
Speaker 1: that we have to have mental health professionals for the
Speaker 1: point zero zero one percent. You think these people would
Speaker 1: be like, they're not so happy that they're like, no,
Speaker 1: I'm good. Yeah, they need him, and the problems he
Speaker 1: sees and his patients are just I mean, if you're
Speaker 1: not in the point zero zero one percent, you kind
Speaker 1: of get a little bit schadenfreude because they're things like
Speaker 1: I don't know where to park my yacht and you're like, well, dude,
Speaker 1: maybe if you don't have a yacht. But the point is,
Speaker 1: these ostensibly objectively terrific circumstances don't always feel terrific, and
Speaker 1: that is the hedonic treadmill. We kind of just get
Speaker 1: used to stuff. So if you have something objectively awesome happen,
Speaker 1: you notice and you feel that it is good, and
Speaker 1: it affects your happiness for a short while, but then
Speaker 1: you kind of just get used to it. And that's
Speaker 1: the idea of treadmill. You like, keep running and running,
Speaker 1: you stay in the same place. But I think we
Speaker 1: would both agree that there is to some extent, a
Speaker 1: phenomenon by which, through either things that we do intentionally
Speaker 1: or unconsciously, we do come back from either extreme like
Speaker 1: too happy or the opposite. The flip side is that
Speaker 1: we also get used to circumstances that are pretty awful.
Speaker 1: They don't continue to affect our psychology as bad as
Speaker 1: when they first happen. So you break up or you
Speaker 1: lose a job, those things for a while and they
Speaker 1: feel like they're going to suck forever. I think that's
Speaker 1: one of the fascinating things about emotions. When you're in
Speaker 1: the middle of one, like when you're anxious or lonely
Speaker 1: or extremely sad, you can't really see around the corner,
Speaker 1: even if intellectually you realize like, oh, yeah, I've been
Speaker 1: in this kind of place before and I've seen things
Speaker 1: get better. But doesn't feel that way in any visceral sense.
Speaker 1: But though we would agree with that, I think one
Speaker 1: of the nuances here that is important to underscore is
Speaker 1: that the returning to the set point isn't always exactly
Speaker 1: to where you were before. So the famous nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: eight study of accident victims who became paraplegics, it's often
Speaker 1: described as follow them long enough, you see that they
Speaker 1: come back to where they were before their accident, but
Speaker 1: sadly not quite. Yes, they adapt to donically, but not
Speaker 1: all the way back on average to where they were before. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there's a few cases like that where adaptation isn't perfect.
Speaker 1: I think another one is in the context of unemployment.
Speaker 1: That's another case where you go down a little bit. Actually,
Speaker 1: one that's the opposite is divorce. You have a hit
Speaker 1: to your happiness when you first get divorced, but you
Speaker 1: actually pop up past baseline. This is the thing about
Speaker 1: these happiness set points. They're not perfect. Sometimes you go
Speaker 1: at tency bit down or a tency bit up in
Speaker 1: the good cases. But the point is that moves. It's
Speaker 1: not like this person's going to break up with me
Speaker 1: and I'm stuck there forever. It has to move. Let's
Speaker 1: talk about coming down from the highs people do. At
Speaker 1: least a lot of us walk around basically shooting for
Speaker 1: the ten out of ten, Like why can't I be
Speaker 1: a ten out of ten every day? Is there something
Speaker 1: we can say about the adaptiveness of not living life
Speaker 1: at the extreme end of like everything is great when
Speaker 1: you think about the extreme end. This reminds me not
Speaker 1: of a scientific tip but a philosophical one. Aristotle thought
Speaker 1: that virtue was living in the middle. You know, if
Speaker 1: you're shooting to be brave, you don't want to be
Speaker 1: like the bravest dude as such that you're reckless, But
Speaker 1: you also don't want to be cowardly, And so there's
Speaker 1: something to be said for this with happiness too. Happiness
Speaker 1: is going to be elusive if you're constantly analyzing do
Speaker 1: I have it yet? Do I have yet? Do I
Speaker 1: have it yet? We really want to get to a
Speaker 1: point where we're feeling grateful, noticing the good stuff in
Speaker 1: our lives, doing everything we can to savor what we have.
Speaker 1: But pushing, pushing, pushing might not necessarily be the best
Speaker 1: thing for your happiness anyway. I have long pondered this
Speaker 1: Aristotle golden mean idea, in part because the things I study,
Speaker 1: like self control or grit, people always ask can you
Speaker 1: be too self controlled? What if you're too gritty? What's
Speaker 1: the dark side of excessive grit? And when I think
Speaker 1: about what Aristotle saying, I'm a little confused. What is
Speaker 1: the deeper reason why something in between the extremes is,
Speaker 1: as a rule better not just in the case of
Speaker 1: bravery and cowardice, but as a general truth about human nature.
Speaker 1: And I wonder whether there is some cost to being
Speaker 1: at the ten out of ten which makes us not
Speaker 1: want to be there all the time. Well, I think
Speaker 1: one is if you were always at a ten out
Speaker 1: of ten and you never change, you wouldn't notice any change.
Speaker 1: And I think this actually gets to Amelia's question. She's
Speaker 1: asking why the need for change. The need for change
Speaker 1: is that we don't notice our absolute objective status. We
Speaker 1: only notice when we change from it. People who live
Speaker 1: in southern California don't appreciate the weather because it's just
Speaker 1: perfect all the time. But when you live in the Northeast,
Speaker 1: you get enough sucky days that all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: when it's sunny out, you're like, oh my gosh, it's
Speaker 1: sunny in eighty Thank you, you know, whatever divinity you're
Speaker 1: praying to. The other thing is, I think you're totally
Speaker 1: right on the cost. Sometimes, if you're pushing happiness too much,
Speaker 1: that can be costly, and I think we see that
Speaker 1: in the context of clinical disorders like mania. Those people
Speaker 1: would report I'm ten out of ten on a happiness scale,
Speaker 1: but they're gambling and wrecking their car and hurting their
Speaker 1: family and things like that. And so I think the
Speaker 1: Aristotle might not have been perfect with the middle Road,
Speaker 1: but he was onto something and something I think he
Speaker 1: was onto. It's most relevant to Amelia gets back to
Speaker 1: this idea of the power of change. When we're just
Speaker 1: consistently we kind of don't notice it. The consequence of
Speaker 1: that is what Danny Counterman and Amos Tversky referred to
Speaker 1: as diminishing sensitivity. We can get small changes that objectively
Speaker 1: feel good, but we just don't notice them, which is
Speaker 1: sort of sad. The example I give my students is
Speaker 1: I try to be hit right, like I try to
Speaker 1: know what a crossover is and know all the new songs.
Speaker 1: And there's this DJ College song called All I Do
Speaker 1: is Win. Do you know this song? No, of course
Speaker 1: I don't sell it. It's like all I do is win, win, win,
Speaker 1: No matter what the ideas, he just wins all the time.
Speaker 1: And I tell my students that is like a crappy
Speaker 1: way to live a life, because if you're literally winning
Speaker 1: all the time, you don't actually notice the subtle changes.
Speaker 1: What is the optimal design, then, of a good life?
Speaker 1: Maybe it's just ninety nine great days and one really
Speaker 1: bad one to make you appreciate the rest of the
Speaker 1: ninety nine. What do you think? I think about this
Speaker 1: one a lot. What you want to do is maximize
Speaker 1: the change somehow, and it's optimal if that change is
Speaker 1: going in a positive direction, but you actually want it
Speaker 1: to go down sometimes because another feature of this diminishing
Speaker 1: sensitivity I mentioned Danny Koneman and Amos diversity. It comes
Speaker 1: from their famous idea about prospect theory, which is this
Speaker 1: idea that we don't evaluate prospects or things in our
Speaker 1: lives in terms of absolute values. We've recognized them and
Speaker 1: represent them in terms of changes. You know, if I
Speaker 1: was like Angela, right now, the happiness Lab is going
Speaker 1: to give you one million dollars, you'd be like, that's amazing.
Speaker 1: But if I was like, right now, the happiness Lab
Speaker 1: is going to give you two million dollars, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's better, but you're not like twice as happy, and
Speaker 1: so that is diminishing sensitivity, and that sucks. It means
Speaker 1: for you to get that extra happiness benefit from the
Speaker 1: extra million in the two million, you would have wanted
Speaker 1: to go back to baseline first, so it feels like
Speaker 1: two separate gains instead of one big gain. That's another
Speaker 1: reason not to obsess about being at ten exactly. You
Speaker 1: think going from nine to ten is going to be
Speaker 1: just as good as going from eight to nine or
Speaker 1: seven to eight, But according to diminishing returns, like, eh,
Speaker 1: it's better, not much better as it was to go
Speaker 1: from seven to eight. That gives us some hints about
Speaker 1: how to do it better. Right, So one is split
Speaker 1: your gains. You don't want two million at once, you
Speaker 1: want one million and then come back a couple months
Speaker 1: later and get another million. This is something I actually
Speaker 1: try to do. How how do you do it? Sometimes
Speaker 1: my husband and I will have a date night and
Speaker 1: we're like, all right, we're gonna see the movie we
Speaker 1: really wanted and get the dinner we really wanted and
Speaker 1: get ice cream too. And it's like, wait, let's do
Speaker 1: the nice dinner and then do the ice cream tomorrow.
Speaker 1: A really stupid way I do this is sometimes when
Speaker 1: I'm buying stuff. This is not very ecologically savvy, so
Speaker 1: maybe this is not helping with my climate change goals,
Speaker 1: But you know what it's like, you get the package
Speaker 1: of a bunch of stuff, that you bought on Amazon.
Speaker 1: It's not as fun as if you got the shirt
Speaker 1: one day and then the next day you got the
Speaker 1: shoes and you're like, oh yeah, so you split your gains.
Speaker 1: I have a proposal that may or may not have
Speaker 1: as severe consequences getting two Amazon packages. You know, vacations
Speaker 1: are something that I don't know how to take very well.
Speaker 1: But according to the principles we've been discussing, rather than
Speaker 1: taking seven days off and cramming in all of your
Speaker 1: dinners out and your extra desserts and your walks around
Speaker 1: whatever city you're in with ice coffe, that would be
Speaker 1: my preferred vacation. Why don't we have seven three day weekends.
Speaker 1: I think that that could result in a massive global
Speaker 1: gain in happiness without any obvious downside. I love it.
Speaker 1: My other tip on this, I don't know if you
Speaker 1: like Hostess cupcakes. I'm from Billions. We have Tasty cakes. Oh.
Speaker 1: I think tasty cakes are similar, But the key to
Speaker 1: the Hostess cupcake is that you get two of them. Like,
Speaker 1: Hostess could have made that much chocolate cakiness in a
Speaker 1: single big cupcake, but if you got that cupcake, you
Speaker 1: just plowed through it. They had the insight to break
Speaker 1: those up, and like what happens? Because you eat the
Speaker 1: first one, you wait, and then you come back to it.
Speaker 1: You're kind of at baseline again. You get more happiness. Wow,
Speaker 1: you think that the Hostess people really had behavioral science stuff.
Speaker 1: They read prospect theory. They're like, wait a minute, this
Speaker 1: is why people like the mini black and white cookies
Speaker 1: better than the one huge black and white cookie. You
Speaker 1: can pause in between them, and you go back to
Speaker 1: happiness baseline, no cookie, and then you're like, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: another cookie, and then spike backup. I don't know how
Speaker 1: many people, by the way, eat the one Hostess or
Speaker 1: Tasty cake. In the Tasty Cake version, there's no white
Speaker 1: squirly line across the top, but it's basically the same cupcake.
Speaker 1: But there's two, right, there is two. And I do
Speaker 1: think spacing out our gains could be helpful, just as
Speaker 1: you recommend, and maybe just reframing the inevitable bad days
Speaker 1: as like, I mean, here's a trivial example. Last night
Speaker 1: I made Casha, you know, the buckwheat thing. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I followed the recipe to the letter because had a friend.
Speaker 1: She's like, I'm gonna call my grandmother, We're going to
Speaker 1: get this exactly right. And then I left the pot
Speaker 1: on the stove, not even thinking, and it just burned
Speaker 1: to a crisp and it was horrible and both mushy
Speaker 1: and burned at the same time, which I didn't think
Speaker 1: was physically possible. So that was a bad experience. I
Speaker 1: grieved a bit. But maybe if I reframe that as
Speaker 1: hooray for the burned casha, now to make the next
Speaker 1: non burnt batch all that much more delicious and appreciate
Speaker 1: it totally. And in fact, this gets back to a
Speaker 1: different form of ancient wisdom. This was exactly the strategy
Speaker 1: that the Stoics had. So the Stoics thought you should
Speaker 1: every morning do what they call negative visualization. You wake
Speaker 1: up and you say, my Kasha is going to get burned,
Speaker 1: my husband's gonna leave me, I'm going to lose my job,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna trip and break my leg. You don't ruminate
Speaker 1: on that forever, but you do that as little kind
Speaker 1: of five to him in meditation, and you go to
Speaker 1: your day and you're like, oh my gosh, my Kasha
Speaker 1: didn't burn today. So the Stoics were really into this
Speaker 1: idea that you don't necessarily have to have the change
Speaker 1: to notice the change. You could just imagine the change,
Speaker 1: and it gives you a lot of gratitude for the
Speaker 1: stuff you have. One technique I used in some of
Speaker 1: my talkses I look out in the audience and I say,
Speaker 1: all of you people who have kids, imagine whatever the
Speaker 1: last time you saw them was, that was the last time.
Speaker 1: It's over. You're never going to see them again. Any ideas.
Speaker 1: The next time you hug your kids, you're going to
Speaker 1: hug them much more tightly. You didn't have to have
Speaker 1: a horrible thing happen to them. The reference point didn't
Speaker 1: have to change in a bad way for you get
Speaker 1: the appreciation. I had a shutter. I just had to say, Laurie,
Speaker 1: that was rough. But now you're going to be so
Speaker 1: nice to your kids today. Yeah, even if they're annoying,
Speaker 1: you'd be like, but I'm so happy they're alive. Like,
Speaker 1: thank the Lord that you're here. Okay, you have given
Speaker 1: us one thing you could do. You could wake up
Speaker 1: and think of three bad things and they are just imaginary,
Speaker 1: and then the whole rest of your day is going
Speaker 1: to go better. But I recall the study that you
Speaker 1: and I did wake up and think of three good things, right,
Speaker 1: the classic gratitude exercise. These are opposite recommendations. So should
Speaker 1: people wake up and think of three good things or
Speaker 1: should they wake up and think of three bad things?
Speaker 1: I'm going to vote for the three good things. I
Speaker 1: did this as I usually do this morning, and I
Speaker 1: actually thought about the Kasha. Thank god the house didn't
Speaker 1: burn down because I did discover the pot of burning
Speaker 1: buckwheat in time to prevent a fire. Yay. And then
Speaker 1: I thought of a couple of other things. My daughter
Speaker 1: got home safely. I really love this collaborator and built
Speaker 1: in is a contrast to the counterfactual, like my could
Speaker 1: be a jerk, but they're not, and my daughter are
Speaker 1: goold have not gotten home safely. So maybe the stoics
Speaker 1: had a good idea, but I think it's improved upon
Speaker 1: by this much more positive experience of thinking about three
Speaker 1: good things. To be fair, I think that's what the
Speaker 1: stoics mean. They don't mean like, oh my god, my
Speaker 1: house is going to burn out. They think you should
Speaker 1: do that because immediately afterwards you're going to think about
Speaker 1: the positive thing too. You're gonna be grateful for your kids,
Speaker 1: leaving the stuff on the floor because you had that
Speaker 1: moment of thinking about what it could be like to
Speaker 1: not have kids at all. I think naturally, in the
Speaker 1: way the stokes are talking about them, they focus on
Speaker 1: the negative side, but they're hoping you're going to get
Speaker 1: to the blessings really fast. And I think the negative
Speaker 1: side is important when you're feeling really down, Like the
Speaker 1: example of breaking your like because I'm clumpsy, this actually
Speaker 1: happens to me with reasonable frequency, Like I recently broke
Speaker 1: my knee. You literally mean this happens too with frequency.
Speaker 1: You injure yourself in a serious way. Yeah, this was
Speaker 1: the second time I'd broken the same kneecap when I
Speaker 1: fell on it. Oh my god, Laurie, it's terrible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was like, whoa is me? I broke my knee cap?
Speaker 1: This sucks. And then I actually went back to the
Speaker 1: stoics because I know I needed hardcore people who are
Speaker 1: going to help me with this. And I read a
Speaker 1: book by this current practicing stoic, Bill Urvine, and he
Speaker 1: went through like, let's talk about some cases that you
Speaker 1: could have. He's like, you could be a shut in.
Speaker 1: These are people who have some sort of accident happen
Speaker 1: who are fully conscious but so paralyzed that they can't
Speaker 1: move any part of their body. They have to like
Speaker 1: blink an eye to communicate with people. And I was like, okay, well,
Speaker 1: at least I don't have that. But sometimes if you
Speaker 1: get the right negative visualization, you're like, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: I can actually be grateful for the broken knee too,
Speaker 1: because at least it's not X, Y and Z. And
Speaker 1: I think this is a nice way to solve Amelia's problem.
Speaker 1: You don't necessarily have to get the change from your
Speaker 1: real actions. You can make your current reference points seem
Speaker 1: good just through these imaginations. Do you think that would
Speaker 1: change Amelia's set point? Do you think that if she
Speaker 1: chronically were comparing her pretty awesome life. She says, she
Speaker 1: is a lovely department. She's doing really well. If you
Speaker 1: regularly did these mental counterfactuals, that she would be enduringly happier.
Speaker 1: You know, if every morning she could have the counterfactual
Speaker 1: of what if I didn't have this lovely, supportive job
Speaker 1: with my interesting colleagues, As she mentions, what if my
Speaker 1: colleagues suck that bumps up the appreciation you have, It
Speaker 1: breaks your heat on a adaptation. So I actually do
Speaker 1: think it would be kind of a nice strategy. I
Speaker 1: think we need Amelia to agree to be a pilot
Speaker 1: subject in a study with only one subject. So, Laurie,
Speaker 1: you want Amelia to wake up every day for a
Speaker 1: week and what think of three bad things of the
Speaker 1: things she loves about her life and her job. Imagine
Speaker 1: that those weren't there. I would propose the second week
Speaker 1: be that she tried the three good things exercise, and
Speaker 1: after a month we could all get together and find
Speaker 1: out which week was better. I want a third condition
Speaker 1: where she does both, where she imagines the bad thing
Speaker 1: and then thinks, oh my gosh, I am so lucky
Speaker 1: to have these colleagues because I think if you just
Speaker 1: do bad then it could be And to be fair
Speaker 1: to the stoics, that's not really what they meant. Okay,
Speaker 1: now we need six weeks of your life, Amelia, right,
Speaker 1: love it to be continued. The Happiness Lab is co
Speaker 1: written and produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was
Speaker 1: composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering
Speaker 1: by Evan Viola. That Happiness Lab is brought to you
Speaker 1: by Pushkin Industries. Any doctor Laurie Santos No Stupid Questions
Speaker 1: as part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes
Speaker 1: Freakonomics Radio People I mostly Admire and Freakonomics MD. This
Speaker 1: episode was produced by me, Rebecca Lee Douglas for our
Speaker 1: Happiness Lab listeners who are new to No Stupid Questions.
Speaker 1: This is the time in the show where I do
Speaker 1: a quick fact check of the conversations. Early on in
Speaker 1: the episode, Laurie and Angela say that they're horrified by
Speaker 1: the idea of heinz Oreo mayonnaise. I'm sure they will
Speaker 1: be thrilled to hear that this is not, in fact
Speaker 1: a real product. In June of twenty twenty one, the
Speaker 1: Instagram account doctor Photograph posted a convincing photo of may
Speaker 1: Oreo sauce that immediately went viral, but the image was
Speaker 1: later proven to be altered. For those who are disappointed
Speaker 1: that this crossover product doesn't actually exist, fret notot plenty
Speaker 1: of other hind mashups are actually real. The company now
Speaker 1: produces Mayo Chup, a combination of mayonnaise and ketchup, Mayo
Speaker 1: must a mix of mayonnaise and mustard, and Cranch, a
Speaker 1: blend of Ketchup, and Ranch, among others. Later, Angela and
Speaker 1: Laurie discuss recently deceased psychologist Albert Bendora's seminal Bobo Doll experiment.
Speaker 1: I was unfamiliar with the concept of a bobo doll,
Speaker 1: and I surmised that many listeners would be as well.
Speaker 1: I found that the toy isn't really a doll at all,
Speaker 1: but rather a large, inflatable plastic clown with a heavy,
Speaker 1: rounded bottom. When it's pushed over, the clown temporarily wobbles,
Speaker 1: but quickly bounces back to center, making it a perfect
Speaker 1: toy for children and adults to beat up in Bendora's experiments. Finally,
Speaker 1: Angela says that Tasty cakes, like Hostess cupcakes, come two
Speaker 1: to a package. Standard Tasty Cake boxes do include six
Speaker 1: packs of two cupcakes, but you can also opt for
Speaker 1: a single package of three cupcakes. Either way, if you
Speaker 1: have the self restraint, you can still enjoy the happiness
Speaker 1: that comes with more dessert later that day. That's it
Speaker 1: for the fact check. No Stupid Questions is produced by
Speaker 1: Freakonomics Radio and Stitcher. Our staff includes Alison Craiglowe, Greg Rippin,
Speaker 1: James Foster, Joel Meyer, Trisha Bobita, Emma Terrell, Lyric Bowtitch,
Speaker 1: Jasmine Clinger and Jacob Clementi.