Speaker 1: Pushkin a Happiness Lab Listeners, what you're about to hear
Speaker 1: will probably sound a little bit different than our usual episodes.
Speaker 1: That's because I recorded this show not alone in my
Speaker 1: tiny podcast closet at home, but in a huge auditorium
Speaker 1: packed with people.
Speaker 2: Hello, Hello, Hello, This is so cool everyone.
Speaker 1: That's right, You're about to hear our first ever Happiness
Speaker 1: Lab live. The event was held early in April at
Speaker 1: the Arts in the Armory Theater in Somerville, Massachusetts, just
Speaker 1: outside of Boston. I'm a Massachusetts girl.
Speaker 2: Myself grew up in New Bedford, just down the way
Speaker 2: New Bedford. Folks in the house.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The listeners who came to the event got to
Speaker 1: experience a top secret sneak preview of one of our
Speaker 1: upcoming seasons. Ann had a chance to take part in
Speaker 1: a live Q and A after the show. But what
Speaker 1: You're about to Hear was the main event of the night.
Speaker 1: I did a live interview all about a happiness topic
Speaker 1: that I struggle with a lot myself, the question of
Speaker 1: how we can be nicer to our future selves. The
Speaker 1: happiness we experience in the next few days, weeks, and
Speaker 1: months often relies on the decisions that we make today.
Speaker 1: But if you're like me, you may struggle with treating
Speaker 1: your future self as nicely as you should. Maybe you
Speaker 1: sign your future self up for way too many projects
Speaker 1: or commitments, or maybe current you doesn't get the rest
Speaker 1: or breaks or exercise you need for future you to
Speaker 1: feel good. In this special live episode, we explore why
Speaker 1: our brains sometimes allow us to treat our future selves
Speaker 1: like crap, and what we can do in the present
Speaker 1: to make our future a happier place. And we get
Speaker 1: to explore all these questions with a scholar that I
Speaker 1: regard as one of the most special of our special guests.
Speaker 1: Excited to introduce my Happiness Lab Live guest Jason Mitchell.
Speaker 1: Jason is a professor's psychology at Harvard University. He did
Speaker 1: his undergraduate and master's degrees at Yale University. After the
Speaker 1: time at Yale, he came to Cambridge in the late
Speaker 1: nineties to do his PhD in psychology at Harvard, where
Speaker 1: he had the honor of being in the same incoming.
Speaker 2: Graduate class as yours.
Speaker 1: Truly, after finishing his PhD, Jason stuck around to become
Speaker 1: a professor here, where he had the important distinction of
Speaker 1: teaching not only intro to psych psych one, but also
Speaker 1: their new course on well Being the Science of Happiness,
Speaker 1: which covers a lot of the same topics that I
Speaker 1: do in my psychology in the Good Life Class. Jason
Speaker 1: is an amazing scholar and teacher. He's also my former
Speaker 1: roommate on two different continents. He is one of the smartest,
Speaker 1: funniest people I know, and he is one of my
Speaker 1: oldest and dearest friends. And I'm so excited that I
Speaker 1: get to introduce him to you on our first Happiness
Speaker 1: Lab Live event ever. So please put your hands together
Speaker 1: and give a warm Happiness Lab Live welcome to Jason Mitchell.
Speaker 3: Favor. This is a great audience.
Speaker 2: I know they're right.
Speaker 1: I hope you feel warmly welcomed. So, Jason, my having
Speaker 1: as Lab listeners, are used to hearing from happiness scholars
Speaker 1: who are also my friends. I bring a lot of
Speaker 1: them on the podcast. But you have the distinction of
Speaker 1: knowing me longer than any of my former Happiness Lab guests,
Speaker 1: and like honestly most people in my life, my husband's
Speaker 1: out there, and you actually have known me longer than
Speaker 1: I have known my husband, And so why don't you
Speaker 1: start by telling our friendship origin story, And with the
Speaker 1: magic of podcasting, if you say anything embarrassed that I
Speaker 1: don't agree with, you'll hear it.
Speaker 2: But then what edit? But yeah, what's our origin story?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Our origin story in my mind has two parts, both
Speaker 4: of which begin with questionable decisions of twenty.
Speaker 3: One year old Laurie twenty year old Jason.
Speaker 1: We're going to be editing a lot of I can
Speaker 1: tell her again.
Speaker 4: So in the first part we had, we were both
Speaker 4: undergraduates at different institutions, and we were visiting the University
Speaker 4: of California, Berkeley for interview weekend. We were both applying
Speaker 4: for graduate school there, and on the last day of
Speaker 4: this visit, the agenda was mainly supposed to be fun,
Speaker 4: and it centered around some volleyball tournament.
Speaker 1: I think it was faculty student faculty.
Speaker 4: Versus student volleyball. And as you know, I'm not the
Speaker 4: least athletic person, but it turns out I can't play
Speaker 4: any sport that involves a round ball, and so you
Speaker 4: and I decided we would, instead of doing this, play
Speaker 4: hooky and explore the Bay Area. I think it was
Speaker 4: the first time either of us had been in California,
Speaker 4: and we were twenty one we were both so excited
Speaker 4: about all this freedom and this opportunity to do something
Speaker 4: on our own. So he's on the whole day, just
Speaker 4: kind of wandering around.
Speaker 1: What Jess is not convying is we didn't tell anyone
Speaker 1: we decided to do this. We just left and only
Speaker 1: later did we find out that the faculty and students were.
Speaker 2: Like where did those two people go?
Speaker 4: Like, yeah, they're actually quite worried about it. So then
Speaker 4: fast forward a couple months later, we had both decided
Speaker 4: to come to Harvard. And again I'm not sure what
Speaker 4: I was thinking, obviously not thinking, but I woke up
Speaker 4: one morning in July real I had no plan for housing,
Speaker 4: like where was I going to live when I moved
Speaker 4: in six weeks? And I didn't know a single person
Speaker 4: in Cambridge except for you. So I remember writing a
Speaker 4: panicked email saying, do you know anybody who's looking for
Speaker 4: a roommate?
Speaker 3: And as it.
Speaker 4: Happened, you guys, you and Lucy and Kate were one
Speaker 4: person short for an apartment in Cambridge, and so I
Speaker 4: became the fourth person and we put out.
Speaker 2: Student's story and.
Speaker 1: That was a very tame version. We won't have to
Speaker 1: add any of that out of the podcast, And so
Speaker 1: our origin story started when you decided to come to
Speaker 1: Harvard for graduate school. And one of the reasons you
Speaker 1: did that was that at the time, Harvard was this
Speaker 1: burgeoning department that was studying something that was really cool
Speaker 1: in the late nineties, this field called cognitive neuroscience, which
Speaker 1: sounds like a mouthful. What is cognitive neuroscience and why
Speaker 1: were you so excited about it?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it is a mouthful, So cognitive neuroscience. So let's
Speaker 4: think about the different two different parts of that term.
Speaker 4: Psychologists use the word cognition or cognitive process to refer
Speaker 4: to kind of the recipe that the mind is using
Speaker 4: to create our understanding of the world around us and
Speaker 4: our thoughts and feelings.
Speaker 3: So if you think about what a.
Speaker 4: Recipe is, if you were baking, for example, you would
Speaker 4: take pretty simple ingredients, say eggs, flour, water, sugar, and
Speaker 4: then combine them in some way to create cakes and
Speaker 4: cookies and croissants. Cognitive psychologists are interested in the same.
Speaker 3: Sorts of issues.
Speaker 4: How do we take very rudimentary thoughts or rudimentary perceptions
Speaker 4: and turn those into the complex behaviors that humans engage in. So,
Speaker 4: if you think right now, your ears receiving a bunch
Speaker 4: of very rudimentary signals, just some air coming in, and
Speaker 4: somehow your brain is taking that signal and turning it
Speaker 4: into an understanding of the words that I'm saying and
Speaker 4: the meaning behind my words. So what's emerged from this
Speaker 4: way of thinking is to think about the mind as
Speaker 4: a kind of complex machine.
Speaker 3: But think about it.
Speaker 4: If you were just to encounter some machine and you
Speaker 4: didn't know how it worked. You know, if I got
Speaker 4: some mit folks or some here in the audience I
Speaker 4: see and said, you know, I've got this new machine.
Speaker 4: I don't know how it works. Can you help me
Speaker 4: onderstand it? They'd probably spend some time poking and prodding
Speaker 4: and seeing what kinds of behavior and engaged in. But
Speaker 4: eventually they'd want to open it up. They'd really want
Speaker 4: to see how it was built, where the wires went.
Speaker 4: And that's true for cognitive neuroscience. The neuroscience part is
Speaker 4: our desire to see, well, how is the actual hardware?
Speaker 4: Giving rise to this recipe.
Speaker 1: And at the time in the nineties that you started,
Speaker 1: you know, this was a really exciting time for actually
Speaker 1: doing that, for actually looking at the hardware in a
Speaker 1: way that it probably hadn't been ever before in human.
Speaker 4: History, right, Yeah, So before the nineties, there was really
Speaker 4: only three ways that you could understand how the brain worked.
Speaker 4: One was to look at what other animals' brains did
Speaker 4: by doing research on mice or monkeys, which, you know,
Speaker 4: you kind of hope that our brains work the same way,
Speaker 4: and people were a little queasy of doing that kind
Speaker 4: of work. You could look at individuals who were undergoing
Speaker 4: surgery for other reasons. For example, they might have brain
Speaker 4: tumors or epilepsy, and while their skulls were open, you
Speaker 4: could actually poke and prod their brains and see what
Speaker 4: kind of behavior that elicited. And the third way was
Speaker 4: to wait for individuals who had naturally occurring damage, people
Speaker 4: who might have, say a stroke that selectively damage one
Speaker 4: part of the brain. Starting in the late eighties, mainly
Speaker 4: for medical purposes, researchers began to develop techniques that would
Speaker 4: allow us to actually look at the living, healthy brain
Speaker 4: as it was doing anything we asked individuals to do.
Speaker 4: And this was really a revolution within psychology.
Speaker 1: And so tell me a little bit about what that
Speaker 1: felt like being like a nerdy, you know, post college
Speaker 1: student twenty one year old who gets to like, actually
Speaker 1: study what brains are doing in real time.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: In many of our experiments, we ask subjects to perform
Speaker 4: some basic kinds of tasks and we're able to see
Speaker 4: not in real time, but pretty close sort of how
Speaker 4: their brain is actually giving rise to language, to thoughts,
Speaker 4: to our ability to understand other people. And to me,
Speaker 4: it feels like one of the most intimate things you
Speaker 4: can do, actually see inside at people's thoughts.
Speaker 1: And so, when you had this intimate tool to look
Speaker 1: at how people were thinking and how their cognition was working,
Speaker 1: you decided to study a particular topic, and it turns
Speaker 1: out a topic that brains are pretty good at. You
Speaker 1: decided to study how brains make sense of other minds.
Speaker 1: Why were you so excited about how brains make sense
Speaker 1: of other minds?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I recall at the time that every one of my
Speaker 4: advisors said this was a crazy idea. They said, you
Speaker 4: can't possibly hope to look and find specific brain regions
Speaker 4: that are involved in something so complicated as social interaction.
Speaker 4: What you'll find is just some mess of thousands of
Speaker 4: brain regions all participating in this ability. But instead we
Speaker 4: found something quite different. So, starting around the turn of
Speaker 4: the century, we found that very specific brain regions seem
Speaker 4: to be important for human social abilities. When I'm, for example,
Speaker 4: interacting with you right now and making sense of your
Speaker 4: questions or trying to come up with words that you
Speaker 4: will understand, I'm involved in a very elaborate, complex understanding
Speaker 4: of what your mind is doing and how I'm able
Speaker 4: to affect your mind through my words or through my actions.
Speaker 4: And this turns out to be a fascinating aspect of
Speaker 4: the kinds of things humans can accomplish and.
Speaker 1: One of the most important things for human happiness, right
Speaker 1: because all the things you're talking about, whether you're connecting
Speaker 1: with language or making sense of my behavior, like this
Speaker 1: is really part and parcel of what we do, and
Speaker 1: we're socially connecting, which, as you know, is really super
Speaker 1: important for happiness. But it turns out that the brain
Speaker 1: doesn't just do this, It kind of does this like
Speaker 1: on default too. This was something that neuroscientists also discovered.
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, So it turns out that the story of
Speaker 4: the brain regions that are involved in social thought actually
Speaker 4: comes from multiple directions. So there were a group of
Speaker 4: individuals like us who were looking at what does the
Speaker 4: brain do when it's talking to another person or thinking
Speaker 4: about another person's mind. And we found this set of
Speaker 4: brain regions. I won't go into all the details, but
Speaker 4: one of them is called the medial prefrontal cortex, and
Speaker 4: it's sort of in line with your nose, just behind
Speaker 4: your forehead. Another group of researchers who really weren't fundamentally
Speaker 4: interested in psychology at all, were just interesting in the
Speaker 4: question about whether all brain regions were sort of equally hungry,
Speaker 4: that is, did they use the same amount of oxygen
Speaker 4: and glucose as they were doing their thing, or were
Speaker 4: some sort of more efficient than others. And what they
Speaker 4: found was that it turns out that, yeah, brain regions
Speaker 4: really vary in sort of how active they are how
Speaker 4: much they require feeding. If you rank order the brain
Speaker 4: regions from the most hungry, the ones that are kind
Speaker 4: of always on, to the ones that are at least
Speaker 4: likely to be on, you find at the very top
Speaker 4: of the list the same regions that are involved in
Speaker 4: social interaction. So one interpretation of this is that humans
Speaker 4: by default have brains that are interested in other people
Speaker 4: that we sort of lock on. We're sort of primed
Speaker 4: to think about and interact with.
Speaker 1: Others, but your work specifically, it started to show that
Speaker 1: our brains don't think about all people the same way
Speaker 1: that we use different brain mechanisms to think about different
Speaker 1: kinds of people. So tell me a little bit about
Speaker 1: this work.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 4: So one of the questions that people within social psychology
Speaker 4: you're interested in is how humans make sense of the
Speaker 4: behavior of other people. So, for example, imagine that right now,
Speaker 4: Laurie jumped up ran off stage. So of course I
Speaker 4: would look at that and think to myself, well, there
Speaker 4: goes Laurie. But I wouldn't stop there, right. I would
Speaker 4: absolutely and you would too. You would absolutely want to
Speaker 4: try to understand why she had just engaged in this behavior, right,
Speaker 4: So I can come up with some ideas. Maybe you're
Speaker 4: angry about something, or maybe a spider just fell from
Speaker 4: the raptors. Maybe you really have to go to the bathroom.
Speaker 4: So that act of trying to understand why you are
Speaker 4: doing something requires me to make reference or understand something
Speaker 4: about your mental states. What are you thinking right now,
Speaker 4: what are you feeling right now? What are your goals
Speaker 4: and intentions as you're engaging in this behavior. So researchers
Speaker 4: in the field refer to this often as theory of mind,
Speaker 4: that what humans do when they make sense of each
Speaker 4: other's behavior is try to make sense of what their
Speaker 4: thoughts and feelings are. So one of the questions that
Speaker 4: immediately comes to mind is how do I make sense
Speaker 4: of someone else's thoughts and feelings. I've never seen one
Speaker 4: of your feelings directly. I can't peer into your head
Speaker 4: right now, but I'm not completely flummixed by what's going
Speaker 4: on inside your mind. And there's something very perverse about
Speaker 4: the way humans are doing this, because, in a sense,
Speaker 4: I've taken a relatively simple behavior, you getting up and leaving,
Speaker 4: and I'm trying to make sense of that in terms
Speaker 4: of things that are clearly way more complex and that
Speaker 4: I have no immediate access to.
Speaker 3: But here's the trick.
Speaker 4: I've never seen one of your feelings kind of experienced
Speaker 4: those directly, but I have experienced feelings directly in my
Speaker 4: own head about myself, my own thoughts and feelings and
Speaker 4: other mental states.
Speaker 3: So one of the tricks.
Speaker 4: That the brain can use in making sense of other
Speaker 4: people is to start with their own predictions about how
Speaker 4: they would respond in such a situation. What would it
Speaker 4: take for me to get up and walk off the stage.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: Maybe I wouldn't do it if I just had to
Speaker 4: go to the bathroom, right, that would be embarrassing. But
Speaker 4: I might if, for example, a snake fell from the rafters.
Speaker 4: And so maybe I begin to narrow in on what
Speaker 4: you're thinking when you're doing that by using myself as
Speaker 4: a kind of starting point. But here's the caveat here.
Speaker 4: In order to do that, I have to think that
Speaker 4: you and I are governed by similar kinds of rules,
Speaker 4: that you and I are going to respond in similar
Speaker 4: ways given the same kinds of situations. So, in a sense,
Speaker 4: to use myself as a proxy for you requires kind
Speaker 4: of assumption that we're a similar kind of person. It
Speaker 4: turns out that the brain respects that difference. When we've
Speaker 4: looked at how the brain responds to thinking about similar others,
Speaker 4: we actually find it very hard to differentiate that act
Speaker 4: from simply asking a subject to think about themselves. In contrast,
Speaker 4: if the person's dissimilar from me, maybe they have very
Speaker 4: different political values or come from a very different cultural background,
Speaker 4: the brain will engage in very different kinds of processing
Speaker 4: and trying to make sense of what is going on
Speaker 4: inside that person's head.
Speaker 1: So it's literally using different brain tissue to think about
Speaker 1: someone who's kind of different than you, a stranger than
Speaker 1: you would to think about yourself.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So the two things that I think are interesting
Speaker 4: is that it's hard to tell the difference between thinking
Speaker 4: about oneself thinking about similar others, and that we then
Speaker 4: cordon off we've used different kinds of recipes when we
Speaker 4: think about people who are not like us.
Speaker 1: And this, it turns out I has some interesting consequences
Speaker 1: for how we think about strangers and kind of the
Speaker 1: mistakes we make. And one of those mistakes psychologists referred
Speaker 1: to as the fundamental attributioner. What's the fundamental attributioner? How
Speaker 1: does it work?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: The fundamental attributioner is a idea that social psychologists have
Speaker 4: been exploring since the seventies, and really it goes something
Speaker 4: like this. If you, as an audience are listening to
Speaker 4: us or watching us, it's very easy to think about
Speaker 4: us as in this moment and what you can actually
Speaker 4: see about us right now. So it's very easy to
Speaker 4: think about us as professionals as we're aerodyite we you know,
Speaker 4: to the extent that we are.
Speaker 2: That's the first time but.
Speaker 4: Think about what you never see. You never see us
Speaker 4: at a party, for example, or you don't see me
Speaker 4: playing with my kids and being silly with them. So
Speaker 4: it's hard for you to see all the ways in
Speaker 4: which I might be different in very different contexts. Right
Speaker 4: All that looms large to you is this thin slice
Speaker 4: of my behavior right now. And it turns out humans
Speaker 4: have a very hard time using or understanding how situations,
Speaker 4: how the environments we find ourselves in the contexts we
Speaker 4: in habit, how those things constrain and produce our behavior.
Speaker 4: We call this the fundamental attribution error because one of
Speaker 4: the things that I might want to do is I'm
Speaker 4: looking at people's behavior or trying to make sense of them,
Speaker 4: is to figure out is this person doing this because
Speaker 4: that's who she really is deep down inside, She's just
Speaker 4: a really curious, smart person. Or is she doing this
Speaker 4: because the situation calls for this behavior right now? Now, Remember,
Speaker 4: just a minute ago, I said that humans have brains
Speaker 4: that are sort of by default looking to think about
Speaker 4: other people's mental states. So one of the consequences of
Speaker 4: having a brain like that is humans tend to latch
Speaker 4: on to mental states. As the explanation for why people
Speaker 4: do what they do. They're doing this because they're a jerk,
Speaker 4: or they're doing this because they just are a very
Speaker 4: funny person. And what we find difficult to understand, what
Speaker 4: remains relatively invisible to us, is all the ways in
Speaker 4: which situations might produce certain kinds of behaviors as we're
Speaker 4: moving through the world.
Speaker 1: But this means that we sometimes wind up short changing
Speaker 1: people because we can recognize those situations when it comes
Speaker 1: to ourselves.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: I'll use an example that sometimes comes up on the podcast.
Speaker 1: I have a borderline road ragie tendency. But I don't
Speaker 1: think of that as a tendency in myself. I'm not
Speaker 1: like a masshole or anything. I just happen to sometimes
Speaker 1: be in situations where I really need to merge and
Speaker 1: I'm in a hurry. As a fact occurred this morning
Speaker 1: when I was driving to Assembly Square. I was trying
Speaker 1: to merge in and I was in a hurry. Yet
Speaker 1: a podcast to get to I'm not a bad person.
Speaker 1: I was just in a situation, but there was somebody
Speaker 1: else merging in at the same time I was, and
Speaker 1: that person was a masshole, like they were in the
Speaker 1: same situation I was, but you see the fundamental attribution
Speaker 1: Eerra at work. Right. It's allowing me to kind of
Speaker 1: short change the people around me because I don't think
Speaker 1: of what could be affecting them beyond what's going on
Speaker 1: in their mental states and their personality. I just assume
Speaker 1: they're a jerk or their X, Y and Z. Right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So I think in many cases the context or
Speaker 4: the environment can serve as a kind of mitigating factor,
Speaker 4: and because those mitigating factors are invisible, we instead attribute
Speaker 4: people's behavior to their mental states or who they are
Speaker 4: deep down inside, and that can often have negative consequences
Speaker 4: for exactly the reasons that you're suggesting.
Speaker 1: And so it's obvious that these consequences apply to our
Speaker 1: social connection, right, because we might not be connecting with
Speaker 1: people in the way that we should. But what's unexpected
Speaker 1: is that it also causes problems for how we connect
Speaker 1: with ourself because this tendency of the brain to misunderstand
Speaker 1: and mispredict.
Speaker 2: Others also applies to ourselves.
Speaker 1: In some situations. When we get back from the break,
Speaker 1: we'll learn how our brains turn our future selves into strangers.
Speaker 1: Jason will explain why that causes big problems for our
Speaker 1: happiness also hear some strategies we can use to understand
Speaker 1: our future.
Speaker 2: Selves a little bit better.
Speaker 1: The Happiness Lab will be right back, Jason. So we're
Speaker 1: talking about how we sometimes screw over our future selves,
Speaker 1: and I wanted you to start with the story of
Speaker 1: procrastination that you sometimes share with your students.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So it turns out I'm in the middle of procrastinating
Speaker 4: on multiple things. I'll just mention too. One of them
Speaker 4: is I'm procrastinating on my taxes. So I'm not alone.
Speaker 4: It is the beginning of April. Taxes are due in
Speaker 4: just a couple of weeks, and yet the IRS tells
Speaker 4: us that about a third of Americans don't submit their
Speaker 4: taxes until the very last day.
Speaker 3: So here I am.
Speaker 4: I've had since January to do this, but I keep
Speaker 4: putting it off. And someone just before the show said, well,
Speaker 4: that's kind of ridiculous. If you hate doing it so much,
Speaker 4: why didn't you just hire someone to do it for you?
Speaker 4: And I thought, oh, yeah, that's ridiculous. There are people
Speaker 4: who are professionals who get paid to do this, and
Speaker 4: I could have asked someone else to do it for me.
Speaker 4: So maybe that was a kind of procrastination that.
Speaker 3: I didn't need to engage in. But I'm also procrastinating.
Speaker 4: I have been for about a year now on starting
Speaker 4: to get in better shape because of the kids, I
Speaker 4: would need to get up pretty early in the morning,
Speaker 4: and pretty much at the beginning of every month, I
Speaker 4: tell myself, this is what I'm going to do, and
Speaker 4: then somehow the month comes and goes and I haven't
Speaker 4: done it, and part of me thinks that, well, the
Speaker 4: problem is that, unlike taxes, there isn't someone else I
Speaker 4: can hand this off to, right like I can't just
Speaker 4: ask someone else to exercise for me and reap the benefits.
Speaker 4: Except I realized recently that there is there is someone
Speaker 4: else I can ask to do this, and it's future Jason.
Speaker 4: Because I definitely don't want to get up tomorrow morning
Speaker 4: to exercise, but I can ask Monday Jason to be
Speaker 4: that person to do that. And in a sense, this
Speaker 4: is what we mean when we talk about procrastination, this
Speaker 4: way in which we offload the things that we're not
Speaker 4: crazy about doing now to our future selves, thinking that
Speaker 4: they will want to do it more, prefer to do it,
Speaker 4: or at least be less miserable in accomplishing those things
Speaker 4: even though we ourselves know that we don't want to
Speaker 4: do them right right now.
Speaker 1: And so as my friend, you know, I fall prey
Speaker 1: to this all the time, but despite the fact that
Speaker 1: I have experience with it personally, from a psychological perspective,
Speaker 1: it should be really weird that we want to offload
Speaker 1: this crappy stuff onto our future selves, that we kind
Speaker 1: of think of our future selves as this other person.
Speaker 2: That we can offload stuff onto.
Speaker 1: But your work has really shown that when we look
Speaker 1: in the brain, we get some hints about why we
Speaker 1: do that so easily.
Speaker 4: Remember before we talked about how the brain seems to
Speaker 4: differentiate between thinking about similar others and dissimilar others. So
Speaker 4: one question you can ask is, how do we think
Speaker 4: about our future self? How do I think about Jason
Speaker 4: in a month from now. It turns out that very
Speaker 4: often we think about our future self not as us,
Speaker 4: not in the same breath or the same way that
Speaker 4: we think about our current self, because we don't use
Speaker 4: the same brain regions in many cases to think about
Speaker 4: what the likes, dislikes, goals of our future self are
Speaker 4: going to be.
Speaker 1: And that's kind of terrible because it means we're really
Speaker 1: treating our future self like a complete stranger, and that
Speaker 1: kind of is where a lot of the miseries of
Speaker 1: life come up, right.
Speaker 4: That's right, So we seem to have this very strange
Speaker 4: theory about who our future self is going to be.
Speaker 4: We tend to think that our future self is going
Speaker 4: to be the kind of guy who doesn't.
Speaker 3: Mind getting up early.
Speaker 4: Going for a run on a twenty five degree dark
Speaker 4: morning in Boston. On the one hand, we think of
Speaker 4: our future self as this sort of aspirational self, this
Speaker 4: person who's going to have fixed all of the problems
Speaker 4: that currently plague us. On the other hand, we also
Speaker 4: think about our future self as somebody who's not particularly
Speaker 4: turbed by all that much. We tend to think that
Speaker 4: our future selves not going to mind that trip to
Speaker 4: the dentist as much as we ourselves would mind that.
Speaker 3: Trip to the dentist.
Speaker 4: He's also not going to enjoy things nearly as much
Speaker 4: as we would enjoy things. If I'm given a choice
Speaker 4: between having some delicious cake right now or an even
Speaker 4: better one this time next week, screw that future guy.
Speaker 4: He's not going to enjoy that dessert nearly as much
Speaker 4: as I'm going to enjoy it right now. And so
Speaker 4: we tend to make these decisions that favor our current
Speaker 4: self in part because we just simply have the wrong
Speaker 4: theories about who we're going to be in the future.
Speaker 1: So one of the consequences of seeing our future selves
Speaker 1: as strangers is that even though we like to think
Speaker 1: of ourselves as nice people, we sometimes kind of treat
Speaker 1: strangers like crap, and that sort of means we end
Speaker 1: up treating.
Speaker 2: Our future selves like crap too.
Speaker 1: I know this was something that researcher Emily Pronan and
Speaker 1: her colleagues had looked at. Do you want to explain
Speaker 1: this study?
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is one of my favorite and most diabolical
Speaker 4: studies in the field. So Emily is a professor at Princeton.
Speaker 4: She and I were actually in the same class in college.
Speaker 4: And what Emily did was present her subjects with a
Speaker 4: very unpalatable set of choices. She mixed together this concoction
Speaker 4: of I think it was soy, sauce and ketchup and
Speaker 4: water and then asked her subjects, how much of this would.
Speaker 3: You be willing to drink for me?
Speaker 4: For science and subjects, take a look at this, smell
Speaker 4: it your good sports. They say about three tablespoons or so, right,
Speaker 4: so not all that much. Then she asked another question.
Speaker 4: She said, well, look, we really do need this for science.
Speaker 4: So suppose for the next subject, if you had to
Speaker 4: decide how much that person was going to drink of it,
Speaker 4: and they, without missing a bead, say yeah, that person's fine,
Speaker 4: but let's give him half a cup. So people are
Speaker 4: not being very nice to this other stranger. But here's
Speaker 4: the most amazing part. She also asked some subjects, suppose
Speaker 4: you were to come back to the lab in a
Speaker 4: month and I asked you to commit now to drinking
Speaker 4: some amount of this how much do you think you'd
Speaker 4: be willing to drink? And what they say is half
Speaker 4: a cup. My future self will be perfectly fine with
Speaker 4: doing that, just like that stranger would, as if you
Speaker 4: think to yourself, yeah, I'm not going to be bothered
Speaker 4: by that.
Speaker 1: And this problematic theory of this kind of ideal future
Speaker 1: self who's like super rational like it comes with other
Speaker 1: biases as well, And one of these is one that
Speaker 1: your Harvard colleague Dan Gilbert talks about as a future
Speaker 1: and hedonia. What is future and hedonia?
Speaker 4: Yeah, we think about our future self as being a
Speaker 4: kind of spock like character who's not going to have
Speaker 4: high highs or low lows. My spock like future self
Speaker 4: will just very stoically drink the half cup of tomato
Speaker 4: soy water mix and be perfectly okay with it. So
Speaker 4: in Dan's work, subjects are asked, hey, if you were
Speaker 4: to find twenty dollars right now, how good would that
Speaker 4: feel to you? Scale from one to nine, and subjects
Speaker 4: not surprisingly say, hey, that sounds pretty good. Maybe it's
Speaker 4: a seven out of nine to find twenty bucks. Then
Speaker 4: he asks other subjects, how would it feel to your
Speaker 4: future self if your future self found twenty dollars in
Speaker 4: three months time? Imagine that you find twenty dollars, How
Speaker 4: exciting is that going to be to you? And what
Speaker 4: subjects say is it'll be about a five five and
Speaker 4: a half. What a strange thing, right as if your
Speaker 4: future self is incapable and willing to experience the same
Speaker 4: highs that you know that you yourself right now would experience.
Speaker 1: So that's one way that we get our future selves wrong.
Speaker 1: We assume that they're this like spock like, truly ideal
Speaker 1: moral actor. But there's a second way that we get
Speaker 1: our future self wrong, which gets back to this idea
Speaker 1: of the fundamental attribution error that we talked about earlier,
Speaker 1: which is that we don't understand the extent to which
Speaker 1: our future selves are really affected by the situation. We
Speaker 1: also don't give them the benefit of the doubt, and
Speaker 1: the same way we kind of don't do that for strangers.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: So, one of the things that I think is most
Speaker 4: difficult about making decisions for your future self is that
Speaker 4: it's very hard to imagine in our mind's eye what
Speaker 4: all of the situational constraints on our future self might
Speaker 4: look like.
Speaker 3: We're bad at that.
Speaker 4: When we think about other people, we don't see the
Speaker 4: fact that your merging because you made a mistake. We
Speaker 4: just think that you're the kind of person who barges
Speaker 4: in in traffic, And I think we do something like
Speaker 4: that when we think about our future self. We don't
Speaker 4: think about all the ways in which we're going to
Speaker 4: be busy this time next month, or all the ways
Speaker 4: in which we'll be tired at the end of the day.
Speaker 4: And so we can very easily commit ourselves to things
Speaker 4: that we might even enjoy without taking into account the
Speaker 4: various ways that situations will conspire against us.
Speaker 1: And this could have some funny consequences that folks like
Speaker 1: economists study, right, even in the purchases that we make
Speaker 1: over time, that's right.
Speaker 4: So one of my favorite studies is looking at individuals
Speaker 4: who are at a grocery store just about to do
Speaker 4: their shopping for the week.
Speaker 3: And at the end of when individuals are in line.
Speaker 4: About to buy their groceries, the experimenters come over and
Speaker 4: they basically just more or less way how much the
Speaker 4: person is buying, and they ask the person another question,
Speaker 4: when was the last time how to meal?
Speaker 3: And it turns out that individuals who've.
Speaker 4: Gone to the supermarket hungry buy more food for the
Speaker 4: whole week than individuals who've gone having recently eaten. As
Speaker 4: if we have trouble putting aside our own current state
Speaker 4: of hunger in this instance, in order to make proper
Speaker 4: decisions for our future self. This is also reminiscent of
Speaker 4: studies that economists have done looking at seasonal variation in
Speaker 4: the kinds of houses people buy and the kinds of
Speaker 4: cars they buy. So, what kind of cars do you
Speaker 4: think people buy in the summer? They buy convertibles. There's
Speaker 4: a much higher rate of people buying convertibles in the summer,
Speaker 4: even in places like New England where there are approximately
Speaker 4: ten days a year when it makes sense to use
Speaker 4: a convertible. Likewise, if a house has a pool, it's
Speaker 4: much more likely to sell and to sell at a
Speaker 4: higher price if it's marketed in the summer. In both cases,
Speaker 4: people are imagining all the amazing things that they're going
Speaker 4: to do with that pool and all the amazing pool
Speaker 4: rides they're going to take in that convertible without thinking
Speaker 4: about the long periods of time when they're not.
Speaker 3: Going to be able to use those features.
Speaker 1: And one of the worst ways that we kind of
Speaker 1: screw over our future self and this kind of mistake
Speaker 1: about paying attention to the situations that are going to
Speaker 1: present themselves inevitably, is when we think about the amount
Speaker 1: of time that our future selves have. This is something
Speaker 1: that researcher gal Zuberman talks about as future time slack.
Speaker 1: What's future time slack?
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 4: So in the same way that we tend to think
Speaker 4: about our future selves as having it all together, being
Speaker 4: the kind of person who's going to want to exercise,
Speaker 4: we also tend to think that our future self is
Speaker 4: going to have a lot more free time than they
Speaker 4: actually do.
Speaker 3: Now. One reason for this makes sense.
Speaker 4: If you look at your calendar for April of next year,
Speaker 4: chances are it looks pretty empty.
Speaker 3: So if somebody asks you, for.
Speaker 4: Example, to be on their podcast live and a show
Speaker 4: in Summerville, do you think, sure, of course I'm going
Speaker 4: to of course I'm going to have a great time
Speaker 4: doing that. I'm going to have plenty of time this
Speaker 4: week to enjoy that. Now, of course, what actually happens
Speaker 4: is that as April of next year rolls around, your
Speaker 4: calendar gets more and more full, as it always does,
Speaker 4: and so when that actual event comes up, you're just
Speaker 4: as busy at that time than you would be if
Speaker 4: it was happening right now.
Speaker 1: And so we get our future selves wrong because we
Speaker 1: think of them as this ideal actor. We get our
Speaker 1: future selves wrong because we're not taking into account the situation.
Speaker 1: We're not taking into account how much time they're really
Speaker 1: going to have. And all of this raises an important question,
Speaker 1: which is how do we overcome these biases so we
Speaker 1: can stop screwing over our future selves all the time?
Speaker 1: Are there strategies we can use to meet our future
Speaker 1: selves where they are when we get back from the break,
Speaker 1: Jason will share a few key strategies that we can
Speaker 1: use to better fight all these biases and simulate our
Speaker 1: future selves a little bit better so that future us
Speaker 1: can become.
Speaker 2: A friend rather than a stranger.
Speaker 5: The Happiness Lab We'll be right.
Speaker 1: So, Jason, I want you to help us fix all
Speaker 1: this stuff, and I want you to start with strategies
Speaker 1: that I know you use personally to overcome some of
Speaker 1: these biases, and one of them involves trying to get
Speaker 1: as close to your future self as possible by kind
Speaker 1: of bringing your present self there. One of my favorite
Speaker 1: strategies you use for this involves kind of simulating this
Speaker 1: question of do you want to do something tomorrow? Talk
Speaker 1: to me about how this strategy works.
Speaker 4: So, as we've been talking, it's very hard for me
Speaker 4: to actually simulate or imagine what my future self is
Speaker 4: going to be. Like humans seem, for whatever reason, to
Speaker 4: fall short when they try to imagine all the things
Speaker 4: that are going to impinge upon their future self or
Speaker 4: what kinds of thoughts and feelings and desires their future
Speaker 4: self is going to have. So one of the things
Speaker 4: that I do in my life is to say, look,
Speaker 4: I don't even need to worry about that particular question.
Speaker 4: What I should do instead is simply answer the question
Speaker 4: about whether I want to do something now. If somebody
Speaker 4: asks me, hey, can you attend this wedding next week?
Speaker 4: Do you want to take on this work project that's
Speaker 4: due in a few weeks. Rather than thinking is this
Speaker 4: going to be something that my future self is happy
Speaker 4: to do? I say to myself, if I had to
Speaker 4: do this right now, would it work for me? Would
Speaker 4: it be something that I get enjoyment out of? And
Speaker 4: very often the answer is no, I feel too busy
Speaker 4: to do that thing. I know that it's going to
Speaker 4: be stressful to try to finish out the semester and
Speaker 4: also go to this wedding. The fact of the matter
Speaker 4: is that if that's true for me now, it's very
Speaker 4: likely to be true for me in a month or
Speaker 4: this time next year. And so I can answer the
Speaker 4: question on behalf of my future self by simply answering
Speaker 4: it for myself now.
Speaker 1: And I love the strategy because it really fights this
Speaker 1: idea of future time slack that we had before. Because
Speaker 1: sometimes if I ask myself, do I want to do
Speaker 1: it now? Like it sounds fun, but I absolutely don't
Speaker 1: have any time to do it right now, and that
Speaker 1: can be the answer too.
Speaker 4: That's right, and you're right that if that's true right now,
Speaker 4: if you feel like you've not got the bandwidth to
Speaker 4: do this thing that would otherwise be fun, chances are
Speaker 4: that's also going to be true in a month or
Speaker 4: this time next year.
Speaker 2: So I don't like it though it doesn't feel like that,
Speaker 2: well it does. So that's one strategy I love.
Speaker 1: Another strategy we can use is sort of the power
Speaker 1: of language to better connect with our future self. And
Speaker 1: this just comes from the way that we can use
Speaker 1: language to connect with any stranger, even our future self.
Speaker 4: Right this first strategy is almost as you put it,
Speaker 4: sort of bringing yourself to the future, and you can
Speaker 4: also reverse the process by bringing the future to you.
Speaker 4: One of the things that we know from research on
Speaker 4: social interaction or social thought is that there's enormous power
Speaker 4: in putting yourself into the shoes of another person. So
Speaker 4: you mentioned before that we treat strangers or people who
Speaker 4: are dissimilar from us in very different ways than we
Speaker 4: treat ourselves and similar others. One way to fix that problem,
Speaker 4: or to change that is to simply ask subjects to
Speaker 4: spend five minutes writing a short little vignette from the
Speaker 4: perspective of that other person using first person pronouns.
Speaker 3: I did this.
Speaker 4: It happened to me, And that very act of simply
Speaker 4: seeing through the eyes of another person, using first person
Speaker 4: pronouns to really inhabit that person's experience seems to be
Speaker 4: sufficient to take somebody who's dissimilar and bring them into
Speaker 4: the orbit of similarity. Now I think that that's also
Speaker 4: possible when we treat another stranger our future self, rather
Speaker 4: than thinking about that person as me in the future,
Speaker 4: or a you or that guy, to really think about me.
Speaker 4: This is happening to me. This is my choice. I'm
Speaker 4: the person who's going to be experiencing these events, and
Speaker 4: my sense is that that very act of simply changing
Speaker 4: the pronouns that we use and describing our future selves
Speaker 4: might be sufficient for ameliorating some.
Speaker 3: Of these effects.
Speaker 1: This is one that I'm definitely going to use, because
Speaker 1: I really fall play to talking about my future self
Speaker 1: in the third person. I'm like, well, that's June Laurie's problem,
Speaker 1: Like June Laurie is going to have it together. But
Speaker 1: now I'm going to say that's my problem. How am
Speaker 1: I going to solve it instantly? Already just in my
Speaker 1: brain right now, it's like, oh wait, it's my problem,
Speaker 1: it's not some other strangers problem. I also think this
Speaker 1: is cool because it reflects the way that we can
Speaker 1: use language in the opposite way. So some of you
Speaker 1: might have heard our epid with Ethan Cross about how
Speaker 1: we can use language to kind of perspective take more right.
Speaker 1: Often when we're kind of ruminating, we're like, oh, I've
Speaker 1: got to do this, I've got to do this.
Speaker 2: But you can use the.
Speaker 1: Strategy of saying, Lari, how would you do this? Let's
Speaker 1: think about it, Lauria, how would you solve your problems?
Speaker 1: You go third person to try to get some perspective.
Speaker 1: This is the same thing, but it's the opposite. It's
Speaker 1: going first person to get some perspective on your future self.
Speaker 2: So I absolutely love this.
Speaker 1: But you've also argued that one of the things we
Speaker 1: need to do to make sure we're making good decisions
Speaker 1: even when we use these other techniques, is to know
Speaker 1: what our current preferences are, to make sure we're kind
Speaker 1: of aware of what we actually want right now, because
Speaker 1: this is another way we go wrong.
Speaker 2: We simulate it.
Speaker 1: Oh, our future self would like X Y and Z,
Speaker 1: because I like X, Y and Z, but we don't
Speaker 1: right now even actually like X Y and Z.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: I think human social life is very complicated, and maybe
Speaker 4: you've had the same experience. But I often find myself
Speaker 4: saying yes to things, not really because they're my own preferences,
Speaker 4: but because I'm interested in avoiding other social consequences that
Speaker 4: might come with saying no. So in a sense, this
Speaker 4: is though a way also of being unfair to our
Speaker 4: future self. There's some pain that's going to be associated
Speaker 4: with this. Either I can say no to someone right now,
Speaker 4: and that's going to feel awkward, and you know, I'm
Speaker 4: going to feel a little guilty.
Speaker 3: But if I don't.
Speaker 4: Say no, I can avoid that moment of awkwardness. But
Speaker 4: I'm going to commit my future self to some event
Speaker 4: that maybe he doesn't want to participate in a wedding
Speaker 4: or a job, a piece of your.
Speaker 2: Job, say podcast.
Speaker 1: And so I think I love this suggestion too, because
Speaker 1: it to do that well, I think you have to
Speaker 1: harness two strategies that we talk about a lot on
Speaker 1: the Happiness lab. So one of them is being a
Speaker 1: little bit more mindful. We have to actually know and
Speaker 1: notice what we like and what we don't like. So
Speaker 1: if we're saying yes to something because we kind of
Speaker 1: feel a little icky about saying no, or we feel
Speaker 1: like it's awkward to say no, that's a moment of
Speaker 1: mindfulness where we need to notice, Huh, I'm feeling a
Speaker 1: little like kind of regret right now, I'm feeling a
Speaker 1: little aversion. We need to acknowledge and notice that, which
Speaker 1: I think is powerful. But another strategy that we talk
Speaker 1: a lot about in the Happiness lab that's effective here
Speaker 1: is that that means that our current selves, which are
Speaker 1: hopefully making a good decision for our future selves, are
Speaker 1: kind of taking on something that feels a little tough,
Speaker 1: that like feels a little tricky or maybe too emotional.
Speaker 1: And so what are some strategies that we can use
Speaker 1: to help our present selves take on tough stuff, you know,
Speaker 1: make the future easier by making the present a little
Speaker 1: bit tougher.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a good way to put it. If there's
Speaker 4: some evenly distributed unpleasantness, it's probably better to get it
Speaker 4: out of the way now than to have to live
Speaker 4: with that unpleasantness over some long period of time. Right,
Speaker 4: you know, looking forward, what's the word dreading some event
Speaker 4: that's coming up. But you're right that that requires us
Speaker 4: to interrogate in the present how much we want or
Speaker 4: don't want to be doing something and what that's going
Speaker 4: to mean for our future well being.
Speaker 1: And there's a key way to do that, which is
Speaker 1: to find ways to allow those negative emotions. Right, I'm
Speaker 1: sitting down to my taxes and I hate this and
Speaker 1: I hate this, and I definitely hate it. But I
Speaker 1: can allow that, right, I can sit with this on comfort.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm procrastinating on something because I'm anxious about
Speaker 1: it and I'm scared. I can sit with that fear. Right.
Speaker 1: These are all techniques that we know we can engage in.
Speaker 1: We just need to do them in the moment to
Speaker 1: protect our future self. And So, Jason, knowing more how
Speaker 1: the brain works and why we sometimes get into these
Speaker 1: situations with our future selves, has that helped you to
Speaker 1: do a little bit better and not screw your future
Speaker 1: selves over as much?
Speaker 4: You'd be surprised at how at how hard it is
Speaker 4: to overcome these tendencies. I think, No, No, I wouldn't
Speaker 4: I think, even knowing about them, even studying them, we
Speaker 4: are built in a certain way that makes it very
Speaker 4: hard for us to take our future selves seriously. And
Speaker 4: I find that I constantly have to remind myself that
Speaker 4: I am in a relationship with my future self, that
Speaker 4: he has feelings too. I would like to think that
Speaker 4: I'm a friend, and so I think it's one of
Speaker 4: these aspects of life that we have to kind of
Speaker 4: constantly refresh and remind ourselves to do better with.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you for giving us all some strategies that
Speaker 1: we can use to help our future selves out.
Speaker 2: Please join me in Gan Gang, Jason Nicholl.
Speaker 1: We're fantastic talk. The Happiness Lab is co written and
Speaker 1: produced by Ryan Dilly and the amazing Courtney Guerano. Our
Speaker 1: show is mixed by Evan and Viola, and our fantastic
Speaker 1: music was provided by Zachary Silver.
Speaker 2: Special thanks to.
Speaker 1: The theme at our really great venue, the Arts and
Speaker 1: the Armory, and to our lead on site sound engineer
Speaker 1: Sarah Bruger and Big Big Thanks to our live studio audience.
Speaker 1: Happiness Lab would also like to thank Carrie Brody, Greta Cone,
Speaker 1: Eric Sandler, Carl Miguliore, Morgan Rattner, Jacob Weisberg, Ben Davis
Speaker 1: and Doug Singer at w E and the rest of
Speaker 1: the Pushkin drew. The Happiness Lab is brought to you
Speaker 1: by Pushkin Industries and by me, doctor Laurie Sandrows.
Speaker 2: Thank you all.
Speaker 1: That is end of Happiness Lab Lives.
Speaker 2: Thank you again for coming.
Speaker 5: Whoo woo