Speaker 1: Pushkin a Happiness Lab listeners, We're still putting the finishing
Speaker 1: touches on our next season of shows, a whole series
Speaker 1: addressing situations in which I the happiness Professor and flunking class.
Speaker 1: Our new season will be out on June third, but
Speaker 1: here's a quick sneak preview.
Speaker 2: Can you hear me now?
Speaker 1: I'm doctor Laurie Santos, and I'm devoting the new season
Speaker 1: of my podcast, The Happiness Lab to topics that are
Speaker 1: dear to my heart, with people dear to my heart,
Speaker 1: like my mom.
Speaker 3: Wait a minute, let me put the TV.
Speaker 1: I'll be finding out why I personally struggle so badly
Speaker 1: with perfectionism, stress, and even sitting still and doing nothing.
Speaker 1: But I feel like I'm bad at boredom because you're
Speaker 1: bad at boredom.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, I didn't do well with doing nothing.
Speaker 1: And once I find out why these things affect me
Speaker 1: so badly, I'm hoping to do something about it. So
Speaker 1: join me on my journey Wherever you get your podcasts,
Speaker 1: so be sure to stay tuned. But today I wanted
Speaker 1: to share an amazing episode of the Ted Interview podcast,
Speaker 1: which focuses on the work of my friend and close
Speaker 1: collaborator Liz Dunn, a psychology professor from the University of
Speaker 1: British Columbia. Liz has been a guest on The Happiness
Speaker 1: Lab a bunch, but in this episode, she'll take Chris
Speaker 1: Anderson from TED on a deep dive across her entire career,
Speaker 1: including some of her important work on how we can
Speaker 1: all become happier. I hope you like this episode and
Speaker 1: be sure to check out more editions of The Ted
Speaker 1: Interview show wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3: Hello everyone, I'm Chris Anderson. Welcome to The Ted Interview.
Speaker 3: This season, we're delving deep into the concept of generosity,
Speaker 3: which I've come to believe is the single most crucial
Speaker 3: idea that our modern world needs. It's an idea that
Speaker 3: I've spent the last three years thinking about and researching
Speaker 3: for a book titled Infectious Generosity. Now, Today's episode is
Speaker 3: a special one for two reasons. First of all, I'm
Speaker 3: sitting in front of a live audience at TED twenty
Speaker 3: twenty four. The audience is full of brilliant people and
Speaker 3: they will be helping co create this episode by asking
Speaker 3: questions part way through. And then secondly, our guest today
Speaker 3: she has played a catalytic role in developing my thinking
Speaker 3: about generosity. Her name is Elizabeth Dunn. She's a social
Speaker 3: psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, and apart
Speaker 3: from delivering a beautiful ted talk on the links between
Speaker 3: generosity and happiness, she also was involved in an experience
Speaker 3: which forced me to go ahead and write this book. Honestly,
Speaker 3: we will be talking about that shortly, but for now,
Speaker 3: please join me in welcoming Elizabeth Dunn. It's great to
Speaker 3: have you here.
Speaker 2: Oh, thank you for having me.
Speaker 3: Let's start by your sharing a little bit of your
Speaker 3: background and what drew you to the study of happiness,
Speaker 3: generosity and related Yeah.
Speaker 4: So, I have been studying happiness for over twenty years
Speaker 4: now as a social psychologist, and I got into studying
Speaker 4: generosity primarily because I wanted to understand what made people
Speaker 4: happy and specifically actually, when I got my first faculty
Speaker 4: job as a professor at the University of British Columbia,
Speaker 4: I started earning more money than I needed to stay
Speaker 4: alive for the first time in my life, and I
Speaker 4: was like, oh, I have disposable income. This is a
Speaker 4: novelty for me, you know, And so I wanted to
Speaker 4: understand how people could use money in order to enhance happiness,
Speaker 4: and I thought generosity might.
Speaker 2: Actually be a pretty good way to go.
Speaker 4: So we started running experiments, first, small experiments just here
Speaker 4: in Vancouver, and then built it out from there. So
Speaker 4: that's sort of where I started. And then my research
Speaker 4: has taken me in all kinds of different directions to
Speaker 4: try to understand what really matters for him and happiness.
Speaker 3: So typical experiment would be some students get given ten
Speaker 3: or twenty bucks untel to do different things with it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So in the first experiment we ever ran on
Speaker 4: this topic, we sent our research assistants out on campus
Speaker 4: at UBC armed with cash. We gave them five and
Speaker 4: twenty dollars bills. We had them literally walk up and
Speaker 4: hand them to people, and we either told each individual
Speaker 4: to spend this money to benefit themselves or to benefit others,
Speaker 4: and then we called them at the end of the day,
Speaker 4: found out how their day had been, asked them to
Speaker 4: complete measures of happiness. And what we discovered was that
Speaker 4: people felt happier at the end of the day when
Speaker 4: they'd been assigned, basically by the flip.
Speaker 2: Of a coin, to spend this money on.
Speaker 3: Others, and do you think they actually did spend it
Speaker 3: on this?
Speaker 4: You know, they give us pretty detailed reports of like
Speaker 4: exactly what they did, so yeah, I'm pretty confident.
Speaker 3: Give us some more headlines of big findings that have
Speaker 3: happened over the last decade or two.
Speaker 4: So another big finding for us was to show that
Speaker 4: this effect wasn't just limited to Vancouver to folks with
Speaker 4: a reasonable amount of disposable income. We wanted to try
Speaker 4: doing this in countries around the world. We explored this
Speaker 4: idea with the littlest humans, with toddlers, showing that even
Speaker 4: two year olds get joy from giving their resources to others.
Speaker 2: Toddlers don't really care about money.
Speaker 4: We worked with toddler gold specifically goldfish crackers, and so
Speaker 4: you know, we've explored this idea in a number of
Speaker 4: different ways. We've also looked at other aspects that matter
Speaker 4: for happiness. In a project that grew out of a
Speaker 4: collaboration at TED, we've been examining how to increase social
Speaker 4: connections by bringing together architects and software engineers to figure
Speaker 4: out how we can design physical spaces to bring people
Speaker 4: together in positive ways. So I've done all kinds of
Speaker 4: different things, But along the way, happiness has been sort
Speaker 4: of my north star.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think your team wrote a paper connected
Speaker 3: to a giant Gallup survey that was done once asking
Speaker 3: more than tw hundred thousand people across the world about
Speaker 3: their happiness levels. Can you say a bit of yeah.
Speaker 4: So, In taking advantage of really amazing data collected by Gallop,
Speaker 4: what we discovered was that around the world, people who
Speaker 4: had donated money to charity in the past month reported
Speaker 4: greater happiness than those who didn't.
Speaker 2: And this wasn't a small effect.
Speaker 4: In fact, when we really dug into the data, what
Speaker 4: we saw was that spending donating money to charity was
Speaker 4: basically equivalent to a doubling of household income in terms
Speaker 4: of its relationship with happiness.
Speaker 3: People work their whole year to try to justify it.
Speaker 3: Maybe if I could just get twenty percent more income,
Speaker 3: that's what would make all the difference to me in
Speaker 3: my family. Doubling of income rarely happens to most people.
Speaker 3: It's like it's not quite winning the lottery, but it's close.
Speaker 3: And yet on the face of it, just committing to
Speaker 3: being generous to charities could actually deliver the same life
Speaker 3: happiness that seems so implausible. Can that really be true?
Speaker 4: Well, first off, you know, in that particular study, it's
Speaker 4: important recognize it's just a correlation, right, So people who
Speaker 4: give money to charity are happier than people who do not, right,
Speaker 4: And you can imagine that people who are getting to
Speaker 4: charity might differ in all kinds of ways. And we
Speaker 4: do our best as scientists to try to control for
Speaker 4: the obvious ones like income, and that relationship still holds.
Speaker 4: But I wouldn't presume that it's entirely causal, that it's
Speaker 4: just about spending money on others leading to happiness. Now
Speaker 4: that said, it is still fascinating, you know when we
Speaker 4: see this relationship emerge in experimental work as well, so
Speaker 4: we know there is this causal relationship, and yet it
Speaker 4: doesn't seem like people are always aware of it.
Speaker 3: So it's a bit like the riddle about marriage and happiness,
Speaker 3: Like all the stats show that on average marriage people
Speaker 3: tend to be happier, But it did the marriage cause it?
Speaker 3: Or is it that the happier people get married because
Speaker 3: no one wants to marry us that'll get well, yeah.
Speaker 4: And you know, the really interesting thing with marriage is
Speaker 4: that the best longitudinal studies on this.
Speaker 2: Where you follow the same people over.
Speaker 4: Time, suggest that people do get happier when they get married,
Speaker 4: but that boost and happiness last two years.
Speaker 2: Now that's an average.
Speaker 4: Individuals vary, So like if you went to your friend's
Speaker 4: wedding two years ago, you don't need to send a little,
Speaker 4: you know, condolence note. But certainly that's the sort of
Speaker 4: fundamental force that we as happiness researchers are working against.
Speaker 4: This thing called hedonic adaptation or whatever wonderful thing we have,
Speaker 4: we adapt to it. So it's super exciting to walk
Speaker 4: down the aisle. It's less exciting to walk down and
Speaker 4: see your spouse at the breakfast table.
Speaker 3: One thing I've learned about you, Liz, is that you
Speaker 3: have all the skepticism that you would hopeful from a scientist,
Speaker 3: and recently you've been involved in work trying to address
Speaker 3: what's been this crisis in social science that all these
Speaker 3: weird and wild experiments that were reported, some of them
Speaker 3: didn't replicate. Talk about the work you've been doing recently
Speaker 3: about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so this is really important, and I think it's
Speaker 4: something that many people who are interested in psychology and
Speaker 4: behavioral science don't realize is that there's really been a
Speaker 4: revolution in behavioral science over the past decade where we
Speaker 4: came to realize that some of the really neat, exciting
Speaker 4: effects that some of you might have.
Speaker 2: Heard about just don't replicate.
Speaker 4: And so my lab has been involved, along with many
Speaker 4: other people in my field, in trying to change that,
Speaker 4: trying to create a more replicable, reliable, robust science. And
Speaker 4: so one of the big things that we've been involved
Speaker 4: in doing is pre registering our studies. So I'm going
Speaker 4: to get a little nerdy for a second, but I
Speaker 4: promise it's going to be worth it because it's super important.
Speaker 4: So in science sometimes it's like we throw a bunch
Speaker 4: of darts against the wall and then we draw the
Speaker 4: bullseye on afterward and say, hey, look we found what
Speaker 4: we expected to find, right, And there's an obvious problem
Speaker 4: with that because you don't know how many darts we
Speaker 4: actually shot. And so this is a problem not just
Speaker 4: for our psychology certainly, not just for happiness research, for
Speaker 4: really all of quantitative science. And so now what we're
Speaker 4: trying to do is pre register our studies and say
Speaker 4: up front, we're going to call our shot ahead of
Speaker 4: time and say this is what I'm going to do.
Speaker 4: This is how I'm going to test it, and I'm
Speaker 4: going to prove myself wrong that shot doesn't land. And
Speaker 4: so one thing that I've been doing is going and
Speaker 4: trying to reassess the happiness literature, in particular to try
Speaker 4: to understand, you know, how good does it look when
Speaker 4: we apply these newer approaches. Another really key piece is
Speaker 4: using larger samples. So if you look at some of
Speaker 4: the older psychology studies out there, they'll often have a
Speaker 4: teeny tiny number of participants, and this can leave us
Speaker 4: with a situation where those effects don't actually replicate.
Speaker 2: You can get.
Speaker 4: Little weird, fluky findings when you only study small numbers
Speaker 4: of people. So increasingly in my field, we're using much
Speaker 4: larger sample sizes, and that gives us much more reliable conclusions.
Speaker 3: And your work found that actually quite a large percentage
Speaker 3: of some of the earlier work probably.
Speaker 4: Wasn't that valid, right, I mean, we don't know for
Speaker 4: sure which studies would fail to replicate, but we found
Speaker 4: we looked at some of the most widely reported ideas
Speaker 4: about happiness in the media, So we looked at strategies
Speaker 4: like getting out in nature, practicing, meditation and mindfulness as
Speaker 4: well as exercise very popular strategies for promoting happiness, and
Speaker 4: we found that ninety five percent of those experiments really did.
Speaker 2: Not meet our current standards.
Speaker 4: It doesn't mean that those things, like if you're super
Speaker 4: into meditation or exercise, I'm not saying like, give those
Speaker 4: things up and just watch Netflix because whatever.
Speaker 2: Like those things.
Speaker 4: There's good reasons to believe those strategies should work. But
Speaker 4: it's just remarkable that we don't actually have the kind
Speaker 4: of evidence that we would consider the kind of modern
Speaker 4: gold standard to support them.
Speaker 3: I mean, that seems like really important social science to do.
Speaker 3: I mean, as someone who loves being in nature, I
Speaker 3: would really like to know that my impression that it
Speaker 3: brings happiness wasn't just my imagination.
Speaker 4: Right, And I mean you may know, right, Like one
Speaker 4: of the wonderful things about happiness is that you can
Speaker 4: experiment on yourself, right, and you can see, hey, does this.
Speaker 2: Make me happy? And that's great.
Speaker 4: So if you find being in nature makes you happy,
Speaker 4: then do it. But if we want to make broader
Speaker 4: recommendations and really push forward policies and stuff, we want
Speaker 4: to know what has the most reliable and the biggest
Speaker 4: effects for the most people. It turns out that if
Speaker 4: you do little things like you say, oh, let me
Speaker 4: analyze the data a little bit differently, let me control
Speaker 4: for gender. These people seemed like they weren't really paying attention.
Speaker 4: I'm going to cut them from my study. Then you
Speaker 4: can quickly actually create an effect where none really exists.
Speaker 4: And that is what we are trying to change. And
Speaker 4: I think where our field has come so far over
Speaker 4: the past decade.
Speaker 3: So wearing your full skeptical hat, you and I we
Speaker 3: had a conversation in twenty twenty about a crazy idea
Speaker 3: that happened because there was a donor in the tech
Speaker 3: community who wanted to give away a million dollars and
Speaker 3: to do some social science in the process. Talk about
Speaker 3: what happened.
Speaker 4: This was like the coolest phone call I've ever gotten,
Speaker 4: where Chris called me and said, you know, I've got
Speaker 4: this interesting opportunity. Is this something that your lab would
Speaker 4: like to study where we could potentially I think initially
Speaker 4: that we would give ten thousand US dollars to one
Speaker 4: hundred people in multiple countries around the world and study
Speaker 4: what happened. And I was blown away. I was very
Speaker 4: excited I was like, count me in. And then we
Speaker 4: got to talking more and we thought it would be
Speaker 4: interesting to vary, you know, to have a couple of
Speaker 4: different conditions or groups. So give these groups some different
Speaker 4: instructions and be able to test what kind of difference
Speaker 4: that made. And so we thought, well, maybe we could
Speaker 4: take that hundred people and split it into two groups
Speaker 4: of fifty. And that's where I gave you, like a
Speaker 4: born lecture on statistics and how like, when you have
Speaker 4: fifty people per group, it's actually not necessarily enough to
Speaker 4: detect these effects in a really reliable way. So I said,
Speaker 4: is there any way we could have two groups of
Speaker 4: one hundred people? You know, it would two million dollars
Speaker 4: be possible? And I let me tell you, as somebody
Speaker 4: who like applies to academic funding agencies, I just expected
Speaker 4: the answer to be no. But I was like, ah,
Speaker 4: you might might as well mention this, and you can.
Speaker 3: This is the tech community is full of surprises. It
Speaker 3: really is full of surprises. And I'm so, but also
Speaker 3: be careful what proposal you put to Liz done. But
Speaker 3: so yeah, so ended up being two hundred people getting
Speaker 3: ten thousand dollars each. That was the plan. How did
Speaker 3: you structure the ex.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so we had one group of one hundred people
Speaker 4: who were told to share their participation in this experiment publicly.
Speaker 4: So they were told to share this with their social
Speaker 4: networks on Twitter at the time, now x, and then
Speaker 4: we told the other one hundred to just keep this
Speaker 4: on the download. You know, you can tell a couple
Speaker 4: close friends and family if you need to, but basically
Speaker 4: keep this news private. And so this allowed us to
Speaker 4: look at whether sharing this news publicly would make a
Speaker 4: difference for how people spent the money or how they
Speaker 4: felt about it. And also, in one of our early conversations,
Speaker 4: I said, you know what would be really great is
Speaker 4: if we could have a control group of people that
Speaker 4: don't get any money and we could study them all
Speaker 4: along the way. And you were like, okay, Liz, yeah,
Speaker 4: sure we can do that too. So we had this
Speaker 4: control group of folks that were chosen at random. So,
Speaker 4: after recruiting people making sure they qualify, we randomly assign
Speaker 4: people to either get this money, share it publicly, get
Speaker 4: this money, keep it, keep this news private, or not
Speaker 4: get any money, but complete all of our surveys and
Speaker 4: get a small fee for completing the surveys.
Speaker 3: And specifically what they were told is that this money
Speaker 3: was up to them as to how they could spend it.
Speaker 3: First all, when they were recruited, because I got to
Speaker 3: play a role in recruiting people, and we basically I
Speaker 3: put out a tweet saying, Hey, do you want to
Speaker 3: participate in an interesting experiment? Could be stressful, could be
Speaker 3: potentially life changing, will take quite a bit of time,
Speaker 3: what do you think? But with no mention of money.
Speaker 3: So we got people not knowing really what they were
Speaker 3: signing up for. And then when we told them they
Speaker 3: were getting ten thousand dollars, like, some of them were like, oh,
Speaker 3: it's a scam.
Speaker 4: And I think that was one of the biggest challenges, right,
Speaker 4: because if you go to the spam folder of your
Speaker 4: inbox right now, you can probably find an offer like this, right,
Speaker 4: So we had to I think one of the biggest
Speaker 4: challenges was convincing people was real. And so you made
Speaker 4: a great video of yourself, just like kind of a
Speaker 4: low production video explaining to people what was happening. And
Speaker 4: I think that was really important and kind of convincing
Speaker 4: people like, no, for real, We're going to send you
Speaker 4: ten thousand dollars The.
Speaker 3: Only real strings attached then was that they just had
Speaker 3: to report back to us how to fill out a
Speaker 3: survey every few months.
Speaker 4: Basically once yeah, every month for three months, and then
Speaker 4: again at.
Speaker 2: A six month mark.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Right. So what did we discover?
Speaker 4: Well, we learned a lot from this experiment, and I
Speaker 4: just want to say one of the really beautiful things
Speaker 4: about this whole experience was that we were able to
Speaker 4: conduct this experiment at a scale that I never would
Speaker 4: have thought was possible, and the donors were so committed
Speaker 4: to doing the science really carefully too, and so we
Speaker 4: were able to address several long standing fundamental questions in
Speaker 4: behavioral science. And I think the one that was probably
Speaker 4: the core question that we started with was how would
Speaker 4: people spend this money and would they use it in
Speaker 4: ways that benefited others? I think one of the remarkable
Speaker 4: findings from this study was that people used the majority
Speaker 4: of this money, over six thousand dollars of the ten
Speaker 4: thousand dollars windfall, in ways that benefited other people.
Speaker 2: Now, we were.
Speaker 4: Defining benefiting other people in a broad way, as you know,
Speaker 4: any way that was you know, it could be anything
Speaker 4: from taking friends out for dinner to making a donation
Speaker 4: to charity, to treating a loved one to something special.
Speaker 4: So perhaps in that sense, it's not so surprising that
Speaker 4: that number was big. But even when we look at
Speaker 4: a much narrower definition, we look just at charitable donations,
Speaker 4: we still found that people spent almost seventeen hundred dollars
Speaker 4: on average just on charitable donations.
Speaker 2: And you know that that kind of blew me away.
Speaker 3: In general, people I think, on average, spend two or
Speaker 3: three or four percent at most of their income on charity,
Speaker 3: and that's a massive increase. So what's going on there?
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, I think one important component here is
Speaker 4: that it was a gift, right, So it wasn't like
Speaker 4: people earned this money per se. It wasn't something that
Speaker 4: they were expecting. It began with an active generosity by
Speaker 4: the donors. And I think that's still very interesting, right,
Speaker 4: that one powerful act of generosity, and in some cases
Speaker 4: the kinds of donations that people were making could themselves
Speaker 4: create other opportunities, could have these incredible ripple effects into
Speaker 4: some of the communities.
Speaker 2: To me, that was one piece of it that was
Speaker 2: just so powerful.
Speaker 3: Was there a difference in the behavior between people who
Speaker 3: on social media proudly boasting of the amount that they
Speaker 3: were giving away to those who were keeping in private.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so we expected that there would be a difference.
Speaker 4: We thought people who were sharing this publicly would spend
Speaker 4: more on others. If everyone knows you've got this money
Speaker 4: and whatever, you can imagine, you would spend it more generously.
Speaker 4: We pre registered that prediction, so we set up front, Hey,
Speaker 4: this is what we think we're going to find this,
Speaker 4: how we're going to test it.
Speaker 2: And we were wrong.
Speaker 4: So we found that it did not matter whether people
Speaker 4: publicly sharing this information or not. Either way, we found
Speaker 4: these very high levels of generosity, which you could call
Speaker 4: a field experiment, but I call like a beautiful testament
Speaker 4: to humanity that like, even when they're spending choice is private,
Speaker 4: they still chose to spend the majority of the money
Speaker 4: in ways that benefited others.
Speaker 3: So it really was this was a response to generosity.
Speaker 3: It wasn't an attempt to boost reputation. It seemed.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean we can't. Of course, it's possible that
Speaker 4: some people were you know, taking friends out for dinner
Speaker 4: and in a way that can have reputational benefits. So
Speaker 4: we can almost never erase reputation. And that's part of it.
Speaker 4: And something that I love in your book is that
Speaker 4: you say, you know, it's not necessarily bad if people
Speaker 4: are engaging in generous behavior to enhance their reputations, Like,
Speaker 4: what a wonderful feature of humanity, that that's something a
Speaker 4: way that we would want to increase our enhance our reputation.
Speaker 4: But yet we designed what we felt was a very
Speaker 4: powerful manipulation of reputational concerns and it did not matter.
Speaker 2: So that tells us to me.
Speaker 4: My takeaway from that is that you know, perhaps reputational
Speaker 4: concerns are not a necessary or driving force behind generosity.
Speaker 3: And have you heard from other social scientists that they
Speaker 3: view that this is a contribution to the science.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we've gotten an amazing response to this from the
Speaker 4: scientific community, and I think because we had the opportunity
Speaker 4: to scale this up, to have this diverse, worldwide sample,
Speaker 4: to work with amounts of money that are deeply meaningful.
Speaker 4: So for folks who were in lower income countries who participated,
Speaker 4: we were essentially doubling their annual income with this gift.
Speaker 2: So it was a huge amount of money.
Speaker 4: In contrast the kinds of experiments my lab has done
Speaker 4: throughout my career are usually more on the order of
Speaker 4: ten dollars, and so one might say, well, sure people
Speaker 4: feel happy when they give away a few dollars, but
Speaker 4: they don't really care.
Speaker 2: And so this shows us with.
Speaker 4: Very large amounts of money people are giving a lot
Speaker 4: and as well, I'm sure talk about more getting a
Speaker 4: lot of joy from it.
Speaker 3: So talk about the first pape you published.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So.
Speaker 4: Chris started out, of course with this interest in how
Speaker 4: generously are people going to spend the money?
Speaker 2: And I wanted to know the answer to that too.
Speaker 4: But I was like, this experiment can answer a lot
Speaker 4: of fascinating questions. And one thing that I wanted to
Speaker 4: know just how much happiness can two million dollars buy
Speaker 4: when it's distributed across a large, diverse group of people,
Speaker 4: as opposed to concentrated in the hands of one affluent couple.
Speaker 4: And so, in a paper that is entitled Wealth Redistribution
Speaker 4: Promotes Happiness, we demonstrate and quantify just how much happiness
Speaker 4: two million dollars can buy. And one of the things
Speaker 4: that we demonstrate is that by giving this money away
Speaker 4: to this diverse group of people, this couple provided two
Speaker 4: hundred and twenty five times as much happiness as they
Speaker 4: could possibly have found for themselves from this money.
Speaker 3: And that's an incredible number and wonderful when you think
Speaker 3: about it, feminine, it's kind of obvious. I mean, when
Speaker 3: someone's rich, how much happier can a bit of extra
Speaker 3: money actually make them? Not much? But when it shared out,
Speaker 3: we know that that can make a lot of difference
Speaker 3: to a lot of people. I've just been hit so
Speaker 3: many times since thinking about this work and writing the
Speaker 3: book of just how big a deal it is that
Speaker 3: generosity is fundamentally asymmetric. This is a really really exciting
Speaker 3: feature about things that we normally think of the world
Speaker 3: in zero some terms. You know, the reason people don't
Speaker 3: give is because of loss, a version you don't want
Speaker 3: to give away you lose it. It feels like you know,
Speaker 3: you're gain my loss, no thank you. But actually there
Speaker 3: are so many circumstances when that is not the case.
Speaker 3: There's so much inequality in the world, and that money
Speaker 3: is sitting there, and the cost to the richer person
Speaker 3: literally is pretty low. And in fact, you could argue
Speaker 3: and and in fact some of the other days you've
Speaker 3: shown is that the actual act of generosity doesn't cost
Speaker 3: them any happiness either it actually boosts their happiness. And
Speaker 3: so it's this kind of thinking which which really gave
Speaker 3: me no choice but to write this book. And if
Speaker 3: there was a culture of generosity, everyone benefits in the
Speaker 3: most amazing way, and we're all connected, and so it
Speaker 3: should be easier to do this than ever. So, so,
Speaker 3: how on earth is it that we're actually experiencing being
Speaker 3: in a world that's getting meaner?
Speaker 4: Well, you know, I don't know if we are living
Speaker 4: in a world that's getting meaner. I think that, you know,
Speaker 4: we have that perception, but I think one thing that
Speaker 4: we've been seeing already just this week at TED so
Speaker 4: far is how much of that may be an illusion
Speaker 4: and how much good really is happening. And that's one
Speaker 4: thing that I love about this experiment is that it
Speaker 4: really highlights, like when we did the science very carefully
Speaker 4: and tracked exactly what happened, you know, we were discovering
Speaker 4: that people were spending this money in ways that benefited others,
Speaker 4: paying this.
Speaker 2: Act of generosity forward.
Speaker 4: And so I actually, especially after doing this experiment, I
Speaker 4: feel pretty good about humanity's potential for goodness.
Speaker 3: So part of the riddle is that we are filtering
Speaker 3: the stories we tell each other about humanity in a
Speaker 3: way that's very destructive. Social media algorithms are probably helping
Speaker 3: with this, and that when you actually pull the camera
Speaker 3: back and look for actual data about what's happening in
Speaker 3: the world, really different pictures can amaze. And certainly what
Speaker 3: you know in doing research for this book, my brilliant
Speaker 3: researcher is actually here, Kate. Kate Honey spent a couple
Speaker 3: of years researching and looking for stories under the radar,
Speaker 3: and there are so many stories of people doing kind
Speaker 3: things that create these amazing ripple effects. Are they on
Speaker 3: your news feed? They are not. And so it's tragic
Speaker 3: because there's a saying we are shaped by the stories
Speaker 3: we tell ourselves. There's evidence for this.
Speaker 4: Yes, that's right, And I think it can also be
Speaker 4: a kind of self reinforcing cycle where if we feel
Speaker 4: like the world is this terrible place where nobody's doing
Speaker 4: anything good, then why should I step up and do
Speaker 4: something positive? And so I think flipping that script is
Speaker 4: incredibly important.
Speaker 3: Well, one of the joyful things was that after the
Speaker 3: experiment was done and the science was sort of locked down,
Speaker 3: I got to write to some of the people who'd
Speaker 3: participated because they'd told us, you know, what they're done,
Speaker 3: and I got to ask them, why did you do that?
Speaker 3: And it was an amazing consistent picture that came back.
Speaker 3: People often use the same language. A typical thing that
Speaker 3: people said, and this surprised me was I felt seen,
Speaker 3: you know, the act this is weird to me, like
Speaker 3: being given ten thousand dollars by a stranger on the internet.
Speaker 3: They felt I felt seen, and I felt like I
Speaker 3: needed to let other people feel seen the way I
Speaker 3: had felt seen. So this was quite a powerful, you know,
Speaker 3: biological thing that really surprised me. But several of them said,
Speaker 3: if I'd won this money in a lottery, I wouldn't
Speaker 3: have behaved this way.
Speaker 4: Well, and that's a really interesting hypothesis, right, So is
Speaker 4: it the case, you know, that they wouldn't have been
Speaker 4: so generous had we described the source of the money differently?
Speaker 4: And I think you and I had a conversation after
Speaker 4: we'd collected the data, after we'd run the experiment, and
Speaker 4: you said, I wish we'd, you know, had this other
Speaker 4: condition where we told people the money was, you know,
Speaker 4: from a lottery or if they'd earned it or something.
Speaker 2: And I was like, welcome to being a scientist.
Speaker 4: This is the experience you always have after you run
Speaker 4: the experiment, you wish.
Speaker 2: You want the next thing.
Speaker 4: But that's also the beautiful thing about sciences that were
Speaker 4: each each question we try to answer propels us toward
Speaker 4: the next one. And I think that's a really, really
Speaker 4: fascinating one that you know, if anyone wants to donate
Speaker 4: two million dollars, I'd love to pursue.
Speaker 3: But there was there's a third payper you're working on.
Speaker 3: Tell us about that one.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So in the paper that we're currently writing up,
Speaker 4: so you all are among the first to hear about it.
Speaker 4: We were looking at the choices that people made about
Speaker 4: how to spend the money in terms of the implications
Speaker 4: for their own happiness. So we painstakingly coded each and
Speaker 4: every spending description to assess how people had spent the money.
Speaker 4: So we placed each purchase into seventeen different possible categories,
Speaker 4: ranging from paying for utility bills, buying durable goods, buying
Speaker 4: purchases that would save you time, all kinds of different things.
Speaker 4: And then we looked at how much happiness each purchase
Speaker 4: provided participants. And so what we discovered is that out
Speaker 4: of all seventeen categories. The type of spending that provided
Speaker 4: the highest level of happiness was in fact, making charitable donations,
Speaker 4: so it confirmed what we had seen in previous research,
Speaker 4: but with much larger spending amounts. If you're curious what
Speaker 4: some of the others were. Second place was buying experiences,
Speaker 4: so you know, going on trips, going out for special meals.
Speaker 4: These also provided a lot of happiness. One that hasn't
Speaker 4: popped up in previous research, but that we discovered in
Speaker 4: this study produced particularly high levels of happiness was spending
Speaker 4: money on education.
Speaker 2: And as a professor, I like that one.
Speaker 3: This one thing I'm puzzled by is that, I mean,
Speaker 3: in one level, it makes sense why being generous would
Speaker 3: bring happiness with it. If you think from an evolutionary perspective,
Speaker 3: you would want there to be a reward for cooperative
Speaker 3: behavior because there's obviously, you know, the belief is that
Speaker 3: species that learn to cooperate get benefit from it, and
Speaker 3: so you need that reward to do it. And yet,
Speaker 3: unlike with other types of happiness, it doesn't seem to
Speaker 3: be advertised. So if I'm hungry, I know that if
Speaker 3: I eat, I will feel better, and you can say
Speaker 3: the same for most other sort of obvious sort of
Speaker 3: biological urges. But on this one, I think a lot
Speaker 3: of people don't know that they're going to be happy.
Speaker 3: It becomes a matter of sort of wisdom passed down
Speaker 3: by the elders in your community or something like that,
Speaker 3: or something that you eventually discover. Why do you think
Speaker 3: that is hidden?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think it's actually surprisingly difficult for
Speaker 4: people to figure out what makes them happy.
Speaker 2: For one thing.
Speaker 4: You know, we can notice that we feel happy after
Speaker 4: you know, helping a friend engaging in some active generosity,
Speaker 4: but we might say, oh, it's because you know, my
Speaker 4: friend was in this particular situation and I'm glad that
Speaker 4: I was able to help her out with that. But
Speaker 4: we don't necessarily make the right broader inference of like
Speaker 4: this is about generosity as a whole. And I think
Speaker 4: there's also just a lot of smoke screens in our
Speaker 4: society where that's not necessarily the message that we hear.
Speaker 4: Although it's interesting because I have gotten, you know, letters
Speaker 4: from people saying, why did we need you as a
Speaker 4: social scientist to tell us that giving makes us happy?
Speaker 4: This is something that is you know, taught to us
Speaker 4: in religious traditions, by grandparents and so forth. So those
Speaker 4: messages are out there. But I think it's really interesting
Speaker 4: the point you make about, you know, feeling hungry, because
Speaker 4: I think it's when people are in the moment that
Speaker 4: they don't necessarily realize, oh, this is the best thing
Speaker 4: that I could do with this money is use it
Speaker 4: to benefit somebody else. And in fact, we've run studies
Speaker 4: where we say, hey, we can give you money and
Speaker 4: want you to tell us what would make you the happiest,
Speaker 4: and they don't tend to think of using it to
Speaker 4: benefit others. So's there does seem to be something about
Speaker 4: money in particular that puts people in this mindset of
Speaker 4: looking out for themselves, and so that that may actually
Speaker 4: serve to distract us from this broader knowledge that we
Speaker 4: have maybe picked up from important people and traditions in
Speaker 4: our life that may get lost when we're faced with that,
Speaker 4: you know wallet.
Speaker 3: In your wonderful ted talk, you said that generosity doesn't
Speaker 3: always bring happiness. What matters is how it's done, and
Speaker 3: that generosity that is done where there is direct contact,
Speaker 3: for example, with a person, when you can feel or
Speaker 3: see the human impact of it, works a lot better.
Speaker 3: In terms of bringing happiness. Could you say a bit
Speaker 3: more about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So I would say there's sort of three key
Speaker 4: ingredients that are pretty essential in turning generosity into happiness.
Speaker 4: So one is feeling a sense of connection ideally with it,
Speaker 4: you know, the individuals or the causing you are helping,
Speaker 4: having that actual In my case, for example, we were
Speaker 4: able to privately sponsor a family of Searian refugees to
Speaker 4: come to Vancouver, and we were literally picking them up
Speaker 4: at the airport and hugging them, and so that's like
Speaker 4: the ultimate form of contact. But even if you're a
Speaker 4: little bit more removed from that, feeling that sense of
Speaker 4: connection is critically important, and I think a lot of
Speaker 4: charitable giving opportunities don't offer that, and that there's this
Speaker 4: beautiful space for innovation and figuring out how to create that,
Speaker 4: particularly when we're giving to people far away. So connection
Speaker 4: is probably the number one. But also impact matters, so
Speaker 4: being able to really understand or at least vividly imagine
Speaker 4: how your generosity is making a difference.
Speaker 2: And finally, choice matters, So feeling that.
Speaker 4: You have a sense of choice, of autonomy of agency.
Speaker 4: There's no better way to rob people of the joy
Speaker 4: of giving than to back them into a corner and
Speaker 4: make them feel like they've been forced to give. And
Speaker 4: so I think, you know, we want to keep these
Speaker 4: ingredients in mind because ideally we are building a future
Speaker 4: that is filled with opportunities to give in these joyful
Speaker 4: ways that involve you know, connection, impact, and choice.
Speaker 3: So help connect the dots here because that makes a
Speaker 3: lot of sense to me, But it also seems to
Speaker 3: contradict another piece of advice that feels important, which is
Speaker 3: that we want people to bring their minds to their giving.
Speaker 3: So much of you know, life is this battle between
Speaker 3: our instincts and then our reflective selves. And Paul Bloom,
Speaker 3: who's been on this podcast series, I wrote a book
Speaker 3: called Against Empathy where he was arguing that, you know,
Speaker 3: we have these powerful feelings of empathy. You see someone suffering,
Speaker 3: you want to help them, and quite possibly that does
Speaker 3: bring with it most happiness, but it may distract us
Speaker 3: from the wisest spending of money. So many people their
Speaker 3: charitable lives are limited to oh, I saw some need
Speaker 3: on TV of some disaster, and so I'll text the
Speaker 3: money there and then you forget about it. And part
Speaker 3: of what we want to argue for is for people
Speaker 3: to be reflective and almost strategic about their giving so
Speaker 3: that they can spend the money wisely. Now that may
Speaker 3: mean that that doesn't make them as happy because you're
Speaker 3: not triggering those instants out of human instinctive selves. How
Speaker 3: might we bridge and get the best of both worlds here?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think the key to bridging those worlds is
Speaker 4: to focus on impact. Because obviously impact is what matters
Speaker 4: when we're kind of thinking with our heads. But we
Speaker 4: also see in our research that people get a lot
Speaker 4: more joy from giving when they can see or vividly
Speaker 4: imagine the impact that they're having. And so I think
Speaker 4: making it possible for charities that really do have a
Speaker 4: genuine impact bringing that out in a way that potential
Speaker 4: donors can see it, understand it, vividly experience it. I
Speaker 4: think that is an opportunity where our heads and our
Speaker 4: hearts meet and can center around impact. That said, you
Speaker 4: mentioned you know, is this the wisest use.
Speaker 2: Of your money?
Speaker 4: And my favorite part of your book was arguing that
Speaker 4: maybe that's not the right question.
Speaker 2: Maybe we shouldn't be trying.
Speaker 4: For the wisest use of our charitable donation money or
Speaker 4: our pro social spending because that puts us in a trap.
Speaker 4: And I've experienced this myself where I'm like, I have
Speaker 4: to find the best charity doing X right, and then
Speaker 4: I don't get around to donating, or I just get
Speaker 4: in my head about it. And so I love your
Speaker 4: book for sort of freeing people to say, is this
Speaker 4: a good use of the money? And if the answer
Speaker 4: is yes, then maybe greenlight yourself to go ahead and donate.
Speaker 3: Yes. I like that. We have to really know ourselves
Speaker 3: and figure out one how to avoid that trap. Two
Speaker 3: how to feed some of those human instincts. So, say
Speaker 3: you discover make an intellectual conclusion that an organization is
Speaker 3: a wise one to support, don't just stop there. Give
Speaker 3: your humanness a chance to actually see the impact. So
Speaker 3: the statistics coming out of that group won't be enough,
Speaker 3: But maybe if you actually can meet and get to
Speaker 3: know some of the stories that are actually behind those statistics,
Speaker 3: and perhaps join a community of other people who are
Speaker 3: supporting them, that is the kind of thing that can
Speaker 3: carry you on and turn a sort of short term
Speaker 3: intellectual decision that's smart into an emotional thing that actually
Speaker 3: brings with it joy and habit making.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think for folks working in the nonprofit world,
Speaker 4: contemplating not just how can we get donors to give
Speaker 4: more money, but how can we make the experience of
Speaker 4: donation more joyful is potentially a way to tackle that
Speaker 4: question from a different perspective.
Speaker 3: Well, okay, so ted, audience, this is your turn. Now.
Speaker 3: If you have a question for Liz, please raise your hand,
Speaker 3: A microphone will come to you and we're going to
Speaker 3: get through as many as we can. Hi.
Speaker 2: Yes, Sarah.
Speaker 6: So I'm wondering is there a direct correlation between the
Speaker 6: amount of happiness and the amount of generosity? Do you
Speaker 6: get so much more money happiness out of giving a
Speaker 6: million versus out of giving a thousand, And what does
Speaker 6: that sort of racial look like.
Speaker 4: This is actually a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Certainly
Speaker 4: there is a relationship, and in fact there's a relationship.
Speaker 4: What we see in the data from the Mystery experiment
Speaker 4: is that just in general, people get more happiness from
Speaker 4: more expensive stuff. So like the more money they spent
Speaker 4: on a purchase, the more the higher they tend to
Speaker 4: rate it. Not perfectly in terms of happiness, but certainly
Speaker 4: that relationship is there.
Speaker 2: So I would say.
Speaker 4: Overall, larger amounts of money spent charitably do provide more happiness.
Speaker 4: And yet it is not at all like a perfect
Speaker 4: or super strong relationship, because people can also spend a
Speaker 4: pretty small amount of money but do so in a
Speaker 4: way that provides a ton of connection, a lot of
Speaker 4: impacts and the felt from really chosen and that can
Speaker 4: deliver a big boost in terms of happiness. So it's
Speaker 4: certainly not just like a dollar for dollar kind of relationship.
Speaker 4: And I will say too, I just want to mention
Speaker 4: there's more to discover in these data. And we have
Speaker 4: done a lot of work on our side to make
Speaker 4: these data.
Speaker 2: Accessible to researchers. So researchers need to come to us.
Speaker 4: We'll check their credentials and everything, but we think there
Speaker 4: are unanswered questions. So or if you are a scientist
Speaker 4: or a curious philanthropist and want to try to figure
Speaker 4: something out. One thing we've talked about is trying to
Speaker 4: make these data as much of a gift to the
Speaker 4: scientific community as we can by allowing people to use
Speaker 4: the data to answer their own questions.
Speaker 5: So I'm very nique, thank you for this. This is fascinating.
Speaker 5: So I work in the US, but I live in
Speaker 5: Europe and My question is to what extent does culture
Speaker 5: impact how generous we are, Because what I've seen is
Speaker 5: that in the US it's a very giving culture when
Speaker 5: it comes to making a check, supporting your local charity,
Speaker 5: donating your time. In Europe it's very, very different, and
Speaker 5: it's really hard to find local charities, not even for children.
Speaker 5: Or I tried to put something together for my daughter's school,
Speaker 5: and everybody was so shocked, you know, and I think
Speaker 5: they even doubted my intentions. It was really crazy. So
Speaker 5: I had a thought, and I'd love to know what
Speaker 5: you think. So in America we pay fewer taxes, really,
Speaker 5: and there isn't this social safety net. So maybe there's
Speaker 5: we have to do this because we have to fill
Speaker 5: the gaps, and maybe in Europe that's not the case
Speaker 5: and we pay a lot of taxes. That's a theory,
Speaker 5: but I think it's probably more complex than that.
Speaker 3: So what are your thoughts.
Speaker 4: I mean, certainly we see big cultural differences when you look,
Speaker 4: for example, in the Gallop World data that Chris mentioned,
Speaker 4: there are substantial differences between different countries in terms of
Speaker 4: how much people give to charity. I would say the
Speaker 4: fascinating thing in this particular experiment was that, you know,
Speaker 4: we had people from three lower income countries, so Kenya, Indonesia,
Speaker 4: and Brazil. For higher income countries the US, the UK, Australia,
Speaker 4: and Canada, and we didn't have enough people within each
Speaker 4: country to treat each country separately. But we compared the
Speaker 4: lower income countries with the higher income countries, and we
Speaker 4: expected that perhaps people in the higher income countries would
Speaker 4: spend more money on others because they have a lot
Speaker 4: more disposable income on average, but we didn't find that.
Speaker 4: We actually found people in the lower income countries spent
Speaker 4: just as much on others compared to those in the
Speaker 4: higher income countries.
Speaker 7: First of all, let me say I'm one hundred percent
Speaker 7: on giving. I'm a philanthropist. I worked with my local
Speaker 7: community foundations. The first challenging question I have is this is,
Speaker 7: since you're measuring happiness, I want to focus on that
Speaker 7: word because I want to talk about happiness versus joy.
Speaker 7: I noticed that you use those two terms I guess
Speaker 7: interchangeably too, and I'm going to ask you how you
Speaker 7: define happiness in order to measure happiness.
Speaker 4: Thank you for asking, ma, because it is helpful to
Speaker 4: clarify the definition. So we we define happiness as subjective
Speaker 4: well being. That's like the technical jargon y term if
Speaker 4: you want to google research in this area and broadly in.
Speaker 2: My field of social psychology, that is.
Speaker 4: The dominant way that we think about happiness. And so
Speaker 4: subjective well being has three core components. And so we
Speaker 4: have positive affect and that can include feelings like joy,
Speaker 4: although it's sort of it's very central. It's like capturing
Speaker 4: sort of the core elements of just feeling good. Basically,
Speaker 4: we have negative affect, and so we're looking, you know,
Speaker 4: just to be clear, even happy people experience negative emotions.
Speaker 4: Negative emotions are healthy and they're good, they're part of
Speaker 4: who we're meant to.
Speaker 2: Be as a species.
Speaker 4: But you know, very happy people tend to experience a
Speaker 4: lot more positive emotion than negative emotion on a typical day.
Speaker 4: And then the third component, which is really important is
Speaker 4: life satisfaction, and that is a more cognitive and valuative,
Speaker 4: more reflective judgment of like am I leading the kind
Speaker 4: of life that I want to have? And the remarkable
Speaker 4: thing about this experiment is that we saw substantial changes
Speaker 4: not only in positive emotions and negative emotions, but also
Speaker 4: in life satisfaction and in fact, when my lab reviewed
Speaker 4: all of the preregistered experiments that have ever been conducted
Speaker 4: on happiness, we found that this experiment had the largest
Speaker 4: impact on life satisfaction that's ever been found.
Speaker 3: So I think what the question is getting at is
Speaker 3: that we want to feel that there's a difference between
Speaker 3: the temporary pleasure of eating strawberry ice cream versus sort
Speaker 3: of the deeper life satisfaction or joy of that can
Speaker 3: come from giving. And I mean it does science support
Speaker 3: the fact that there's the form of happiness that you
Speaker 3: get from generosity. You know, it goes to that deeper happiness.
Speaker 3: It's longer lasting than just the sort of temporary positive
Speaker 3: effect that you might otherwise get.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean we see it in this work and
Speaker 4: in other studies. We see that the effects of generosity
Speaker 4: are pretty broad and robust. So we see them both
Speaker 4: in terms of this immediate increase in positive mood, but
Speaker 4: also over time, this seems to result in actual changes
Speaker 4: in people's satisfaction with their lives.
Speaker 8: When I'm giving, should I be giving a dollar a
Speaker 8: day to get my happiness or quarterly? What's a cadence?
Speaker 8: And then should I be paying attention to the percentage
Speaker 8: of my income or the percentage of the receiver's income, I.
Speaker 4: Would say, again, it's not so much about the exact
Speaker 4: number of dollars, but I would say looking for opportunities
Speaker 4: to give where you really feel a sense of the impact.
Speaker 3: In the book, I suggest to people who are well
Speaker 3: off that we could do worse than look at what
Speaker 3: the religious traditions are and the expectations are, which in
Speaker 3: Christianity and Judaism are ten percent of income and in
Speaker 3: Islam it's two and a half percent of net worth annually.
Speaker 3: And I say, if you really want to embrace the
Speaker 3: notion that as secular people many of us here at
Speaker 3: TA probably secular people, do we want omorle standards to
Speaker 3: be at least as high as those are the religions.
Speaker 3: If so, there's an argument that you should try and
Speaker 3: get to the position where you can commit to the
Speaker 3: hire of those two standards ten percent of income or
Speaker 3: two and a half percent of networth. What amazed me
Speaker 3: in doing the book is that if you accept that,
Speaker 3: embrace that, and do the math at what that would raise,
Speaker 3: it would transform the world and we could switch the
Speaker 3: conversation around philanthropy from being this slightly awkward thing to
Speaker 3: being one of thrilling imagination and possibility.
Speaker 9: Is there a difference in happiness experience between giving away
Speaker 9: your money and giving away your time? And do you
Speaker 9: get exponentially greater happiness by giving away both at the
Speaker 9: same type.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fascinating question.
Speaker 4: You know, I can't think of an experiment that has
Speaker 4: directly contrasted those but there's really strong, robust evidence that
Speaker 4: does meet these kind of gold standards of modern behavioral
Speaker 4: science showing that using money to benefit others promotes happiness.
Speaker 4: And interestingly, the research on volunteering, for example, is one
Speaker 4: way of giving time. Strangely that liurture hasn't produced the
Speaker 4: strongest result, and I'm curious about why that is, and
Speaker 4: I would love to see more large scale work on
Speaker 4: that topic. But I especially love your insight about bringing
Speaker 4: the time and the money together, in part because I
Speaker 4: think putting in some of the time can maybe unleash
Speaker 4: the benefits of the money.
Speaker 2: And in my TED.
Speaker 4: Talk I described a local charity just down the street
Speaker 4: from here where folks in Vancouver will get together donate
Speaker 4: money to this organization and then you go and you
Speaker 4: make dinner for people on the downtown east Side and
Speaker 4: you get to meet them, talk to them, and then
Speaker 4: the money doesn't just buy them dinner. It also helps
Speaker 4: to deal with the food security problem more broadly by
Speaker 4: providing lunches throughout the week. And so that I think
Speaker 4: is a beautiful model of a program where it bridges
Speaker 4: the money and the time and the way that creates genuine,
Speaker 4: meaningful connection for both donors and recipients.
Speaker 10: H I just read there is generosity really a function
Speaker 10: of feeling needed, because one feels better after giving. So
Speaker 10: is that my own for my own satisfaction that I'm
Speaker 10: doing or is just happens a label for it.
Speaker 4: I love the answer you give to this question in
Speaker 4: the box, so I think you should.
Speaker 3: So I have been dismayed at how the conversation around generosity,
Speaker 3: especially in terms of philanthropy, is happening in the modern culture,
Speaker 3: where it feels like every opportunity has taken to poke
Speaker 3: at people and to criticize and snipe at decisions of generosity,
Speaker 3: of saying oh there's mixed motivation here, Oh they're only
Speaker 3: doing it to make themselves feel good or to boost
Speaker 3: their reputation, or oh couldn't they have given more? Or
Speaker 3: oh how did they make that money? In the first place,
Speaker 3: all these things are said, and I think it's toxic.
Speaker 3: I think generosity has actually always there's no such thing
Speaker 3: as pure generosity. I think the philosopher Emmanuel Kant is
Speaker 3: wrong on this. Even when I was brought up, it
Speaker 3: was give and you shall receive. You know, even our
Speaker 3: parents you had to apply these other incentives to give.
Speaker 3: And I think as a philosophy student, I used to
Speaker 3: agonize over this. It was like, but I give to
Speaker 3: satisfy my conscience. But it feels good to satisfy my conscience.
Speaker 3: And so is that generosity? Well, yes, it down well
Speaker 3: is generosity. And so I think we should not look
Speaker 3: for reasons to ding generosity. We should look for reasons
Speaker 3: to celebrate it. And in the connected age there are
Speaker 3: more reasons than ever. Why. You know, generosity can spread,
Speaker 3: It can change how you're regarded. It can introduce your
Speaker 3: work to thousands of other people who may want to
Speaker 3: work with you. It can enhance your reputation. It can
Speaker 3: bring you happiness. It will bring you happiness, just as
Speaker 3: it's hard to decide to go and work out, but
Speaker 3: you know that long term, you know afterwards you'll feel
Speaker 3: good about it. This is in the same category. It's
Speaker 3: hard to do, but we should celebrate it even though
Speaker 3: we know that there are rewards to the giver. And
Speaker 3: so yeah, I've got a tackle in the book called
Speaker 3: imperfect generosity. Generosity is the classic case which the perfect
Speaker 3: becomes the enemy of the good. Let's not do that,
Speaker 3: and that way we'll have a lot more generosity in
Speaker 3: the world.
Speaker 11: Religiously in the different traditions. I mean, the idea of
Speaker 11: having a sincere heart or is the action itself good enough?
Speaker 11: And I'm curious from the study, can I go in
Speaker 11: with really bad motivations and still get the happiness effect
Speaker 11: or does it change me?
Speaker 3: I'm curious.
Speaker 4: Well, we didn't ask people if they had bad motivations
Speaker 4: going in, So yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3: What do you think, Chris, I mean, look, define bad motivations.
Speaker 3: There's definitely a level of cynicism, which is something I
Speaker 3: guess you can't claim is generous. But I think if
Speaker 3: you see someone who needs something and you decide you
Speaker 3: would like to meet that need, there's enough good motivation
Speaker 3: in there for me to celebrate that act.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, certainly we do see that overall people
Speaker 4: are getting the highest levels of happiness from what we
Speaker 4: might call, you know, the purest form of giving, of
Speaker 4: making charitable donations.
Speaker 2: But also, you know, there's this interesting little finding.
Speaker 4: I don't want to make too much of it because
Speaker 4: we didn't expect it totally exploratory, but we saw that
Speaker 4: in the public condition where people had to share the
Speaker 4: decisions they were making along the way with this money,
Speaker 4: we actually saw those folks getting a little bit less
Speaker 4: happiness from their charitable donations compared to those who are
Speaker 4: keeping it private. So it actually suggests that when you're
Speaker 4: trying to be a little showy about this, it might detract.
Speaker 2: Now, it doesn't mean we could never do this in.
Speaker 4: A way that would work where we could both share
Speaker 4: it and feel happy about it. But maybe it speaks
Speaker 4: to the idea that generosity isn't all about just looking
Speaker 4: good to other people, and that maybe when we're doing
Speaker 4: it in these more private ways, it can feel great.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 12: Hi, I'm Marla. I'm curious about the intake process for
Speaker 12: your research. Did you track previous generosity, previous charitable donations,
Speaker 12: et cetera. And I'm also wondering if your plan to
Speaker 12: track moving forward if they continue to be generous, and
Speaker 12: if so, how we.
Speaker 4: Did not track people's previous you know, charitable donations or
Speaker 4: other spending choices. We did ask them, you know, just
Speaker 4: as I think kind of a point of interest. We
Speaker 4: did ask them some questions to make sure it would
Speaker 4: be safe for them to be in this study. So
Speaker 4: we did do a pretty careful intake process where we asked,
Speaker 4: you know, we'd like to tell you about some wacky
Speaker 4: things that could happen to you. Would any of these
Speaker 4: cause you danger or serious distress? And so like having
Speaker 4: a movie star show up on your doorstep getting ten
Speaker 4: thousand dollars out of the blue, you know, all of
Speaker 4: these things. And so we did not include people who
Speaker 4: told us that it could be a danger to them,
Speaker 4: but we didn't assess, you know, their previous giving. I
Speaker 4: would love to know how this changes people in the
Speaker 4: future and follow up with them, see you know, how
Speaker 4: happy they are, what choices they've made down the road.
Speaker 4: I think that would be a wonderful, fascinating thing to do.
Speaker 3: Okay, Liz, do you have any final thought you'd like
Speaker 3: to share from the mystery experiment or just in general,
Speaker 3: something from your work that you wish was more widely known.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think this experiment, along with a
Speaker 4: growing body of research, has really dealt the final death
Speaker 4: blow to our notion of homoeconomicists as this self interested creature,
Speaker 4: and it is time to leave that vision behind.
Speaker 2: And I think that that is very freeing.
Speaker 4: I'll also just leave you with one other stat that
Speaker 4: didn't come up, which is that we found that people
Speaker 4: in lower income countries got three times the happiness boost
Speaker 4: from this money as those in higher income countries. So again,
Speaker 4: in terms of an asymmetry, it's suggest how we can
Speaker 4: really make.
Speaker 2: The most of our money.
Speaker 4: That said, we found that there were detectable benefits for
Speaker 4: individuals making up to one hundred and twenty three thousand
Speaker 4: dollars per year. Ninety nine percent of the world's population
Speaker 4: makes less than that, and so I do think it
Speaker 4: speaks to the incredible potential power of redistribution of wealth
Speaker 4: to more happiness as we move into the future.
Speaker 3: Elizabeth Dunn, thank you so much. That was spectacular. Thank you. Okay, Well,
Speaker 3: that's all for today. A reminder that if you'd like
Speaker 3: to dig deeper into this conversation about the power of generosity,
Speaker 3: please consider reading my book Infectious Generosity or listening to it.
Speaker 3: Thanks to the Incredible Generosity of a Dona in the
Speaker 3: TED community. You can claim a free copy of the
Speaker 3: book by heading to Ted dot com slash Generosity. Next
Speaker 3: week is our final episode of this season. We'll be
Speaker 3: speaking with a visionary in the world of philanthropy, Natalie Cargill,
Speaker 3: whose work we actually just referenced here with Litz about
Speaker 3: the potential for truly big scale philanthropy. She's done a
Speaker 3: fascinating and essential mission to replace pessimism about the world's
Speaker 3: biggest problems with plans for actually solving them. And if
Speaker 3: you're keen to start your own generosity journey but not
Speaker 3: sure where to start, I would love you to check
Speaker 3: out a new tool that we've created called Tig. Tig
Speaker 3: is an AI assistant that can help you brainstorm ideas
Speaker 3: for what you can do with a little generosity and
Speaker 3: creativity in your own life or community. It's actually really
Speaker 3: fun to play with, and you can find Tig at
Speaker 3: infectious generosity dot org. The Ted Interview is part of
Speaker 3: the Ted Audio Collective, a collection of podcasts dedicated to
Speaker 3: sparking curiosity and sharing ideas that matter. This episode was
Speaker 3: produced by Jess Shane, our team who are there at
Speaker 3: the back includes Constanza Gaiado, Grace Rubinstein, Van van Cheng,
Speaker 3: Michelle quint Roxanne high Lash and Danielle Ballereso. This show
Speaker 3: is mixed by Sarah Bruguer and it was co created
Speaker 3: by you, our amazing live audience here in Vancouver. All right,
Speaker 3: If you like this show, please do share it with
Speaker 3: others wherever you can. Thanks so much for listening until
Speaker 3: next week