Speaker 1: Pushkin Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. Today is Giving Tuesday, a
Speaker 1: day where you're supposed to think more about charitable giving.
Speaker 1: Being generous can give a big boost to our well being.
Speaker 1: That said, I don't normally make donations to a good
Speaker 1: cause just to make myself feel happier, but I do
Speaker 1: sometimes wonder if I'm getting the most bank from my book,
Speaker 1: both in terms of how much good my gift is
Speaker 1: doing in the world and in terms of how much
Speaker 1: of a happiness boost I'm getting in return. The reason
Speaker 1: why we're spending money on charity, let's say, is because
Speaker 1: we really want to help. We want to do some good,
Speaker 1: and very few of us would say, well, I want
Speaker 1: to do good, but not that much good. This is
Speaker 1: my friend and colleague, Josh Green, a professor of psychology
Speaker 1: at Harvard University, where he studies how our brains make
Speaker 1: moral decisions. But before I launched into this episode with Josh,
Speaker 1: he and I had a little catching up to you. Josh,
Speaker 1: you don't you don't know about you were actually featured
Speaker 1: in a recent episode of this episode on on fun
Speaker 1: and moments of peak fun in My Life and My Goodness.
Speaker 1: But do you remember our eighties sing along that we did.
Speaker 1: We were saying, Bob Jovi, it's most funny. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like I wasn't drinking, but it probably seemed like I was.
Speaker 1: For this Giving Tuesday Bonus episode of The Happiness Lab,
Speaker 1: I spoke with Josh about what we should keep in
Speaker 1: mind if we want our charitable gifts to be as
Speaker 1: effective as possible. So, Josh, we're about to enter the
Speaker 1: holiday season, which can be the super stressful time for people.
Speaker 1: But ironically, one of the best ways that we can
Speaker 1: give ourselves a little bit of self care over the
Speaker 1: holidays is to think about doing for others and so
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about some of the psychological benefits
Speaker 1: we get from doing nice stuff for other people. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, this is work that I think you know
Speaker 1: much better than I do. But what research suggests, and
Speaker 1: I'm thinking here primarily of research by Elizabeth Dunn and
Speaker 1: Mike Norton, people really misper see this that if you
Speaker 1: just say here's one hundred dollars, go out and make
Speaker 1: yourself happy, and then you've check in later with them,
Speaker 1: the people who spent it on other people are happier.
Speaker 1: It seems like using your resources to do something nice
Speaker 1: for somebody else, maybe especially something unexpected really gives you
Speaker 1: a boost. It makes you feel connected to other people.
Speaker 1: And so this is like the first thing we get
Speaker 1: wrong when it comes to kind of donating and happiness
Speaker 1: is just that donating can make us happy. But there's
Speaker 1: a second thing our mind gets wrong, which is something
Speaker 1: that you focused on, which is that even when we
Speaker 1: decide to give to a charity, we often don't do
Speaker 1: it in the best way for our well being because
Speaker 1: not all ways of helping others seem to work the same, right. Yeah, So,
Speaker 1: people in the last ten years, especially an organization called
Speaker 1: give Well, have been doing this research to try to
Speaker 1: figure out how can you do the most good with
Speaker 1: your dollars. The most effective charities in the world are
Speaker 1: orders of magnitude more effective than typical charities. And when
Speaker 1: I say effectiveness, I'm talking about how many lives can
Speaker 1: you save for dollar per thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: or how much can you improve people's lives? And this
Speaker 1: is not an easy thing to measure, but it can
Speaker 1: be done. But the charities that do the most good
Speaker 1: per dollar are not the ones that we may feel
Speaker 1: the most immediate connection to. Right, a lot of people,
Speaker 1: and I feel this too, right that you know, my
Speaker 1: wife and I we want to support our local schools
Speaker 1: and the Greater Boston Food Bank and fighting for racial
Speaker 1: justice and equity in the criminal justice system, etc. It's
Speaker 1: hard to do randomize controlled experiments to figure out what
Speaker 1: works and what doesn't, but it doesn't mean it's not
Speaker 1: necessarily worth supporting. So there are things that I think
Speaker 1: all of us feel very strongly drawn to personally, but
Speaker 1: that are not necessarily the things that you know, the
Speaker 1: evidence shows has the highest impact in some cases because
Speaker 1: they just don't have that impact, and in some cases
Speaker 1: because it's just we don't know and it's just too
Speaker 1: hard to measure. So there's this kind of tension. But
Speaker 1: the instinct to do the local thing means we sometimes
Speaker 1: don't rationally pay attention to the big differences between like
Speaker 1: what charities are really capable of. And this was something
Speaker 1: I was actually shocked by until I started reading your work,
Speaker 1: just the level of different effect that you could get
Speaker 1: from one charity to another, and so talk about how
Speaker 1: big this difference is. Yeah, so the difference can be
Speaker 1: a hundred times or even a thousand times, So a
Speaker 1: really nice salient example from Toby Ord in the United
Speaker 1: States training a guide dog to help a blind person
Speaker 1: and cost about fifty thousand dollars, whereas in the developing world,
Speaker 1: there's an infectious disease called trachoma that can be treated
Speaker 1: with a simple surgical procedure that costs less than one
Speaker 1: hundred dollars, and in that case, the difference in impact
Speaker 1: is about a thousand times. Right, for the cost of
Speaker 1: helping one person in the United States manage their blindness,
Speaker 1: you can prevent five hundred, even a thousand people from
Speaker 1: going blind in the first place by having trachoma surgery.
Speaker 1: And that's just kind of hard to get your head around, right,
Speaker 1: And you know, that's a very extreme case, but it is.
Speaker 1: It's really not unusual for the most effective charities to
Speaker 1: be a hundred times more effective than typical charities. But
Speaker 1: very few people wake up and think, you know, what
Speaker 1: I really want to do is support trachoma surgery, this
Speaker 1: disease that I've never heard of. Right, The challenge here
Speaker 1: is how can we make decisions that work with our
Speaker 1: feelings in the sort of pragmatic way, but nevertheless enable
Speaker 1: us to have more impact, to really do more good
Speaker 1: because that's the point, right, I want to feel good,
Speaker 1: but it's not about my feelings. That's not why I
Speaker 1: think I'm doing this. I hope that's not right. You've
Speaker 1: talked about this distinction in terms of the difference between
Speaker 1: giving with your heart and giving with your head, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, it seems like these very effective strategies. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, that's kind of giving with my head,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't maybe feel the same way as giving,
Speaker 1: you know, with your heart. You know. So talk about
Speaker 1: this distinction because it fits with some of the other
Speaker 1: work you've done on moral psychology too, right, like in
Speaker 1: the context of what's called trolley problems. So what's a
Speaker 1: trolley problem? And give me an example of the kind
Speaker 1: of most famous one that we tend to use in
Speaker 1: psychology and philosophy. Yeah. Yeah, So I think in general
Speaker 1: there are different ways that we can make a decision,
Speaker 1: and so these sorts of trolley cases that we've used
Speaker 1: as cognitive probes to understand moral cognition highlight this distinction
Speaker 1: between a gut reaction that says do this or don't
Speaker 1: do this, and thinking in terms of costs and benefits
Speaker 1: on a large scale. So, in one version of the
Speaker 1: trolley problem. The trolley is headed towards five people, and
Speaker 1: you can hit a switch that will turn the trolley
Speaker 1: away from the five people, and it will put it
Speaker 1: on a sidetrack. But there's one person there, and so
Speaker 1: that person will be killed. And if you ask people
Speaker 1: say is it okay to hit the switch to minimize
Speaker 1: the number of deaths, most people say that that's fine.
Speaker 1: Then there's the footbridge case, where the trolley is head again,
Speaker 1: headed towards five people. You're on a footbridge over the
Speaker 1: tracks in between the oncoming trolley and the five and
Speaker 1: the only way to save those five people is to
Speaker 1: do something that feels really awful. There is this person
Speaker 1: wearing let's say, a giant backpack, standing next to you,
Speaker 1: and you can push them off of the footbridge and
Speaker 1: they'll land on the tracks and they'll be killed by
Speaker 1: the trolley, but it'll stop the trolley from killing the
Speaker 1: five people. Inevitably say that it's wrong, or at least
Speaker 1: feels very wrong, to trade one life for five in
Speaker 1: the footbridge case. So what is going on there? So
Speaker 1: I and other researchers, since it's spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time looking at people's behavior, and reaction times and brains.
Speaker 1: So we have this what we call dual process dynamic
Speaker 1: where you have these feelings that say, no, you can't
Speaker 1: do that right, and then you have this cost benefit
Speaker 1: reasoning that says, but doesn't this make sense? That's in
Speaker 1: the footbridge case. In the switch case, you don't have
Speaker 1: the feeling is strongly. The work that we've been doing
Speaker 1: on charitable giving has a similar kind of dual process dynamic,
Speaker 1: but the feelings are in the positive domain, right, But
Speaker 1: there's still a kind of tension there to be navigated,
Speaker 1: and that's what we're trying to do here. Josh's interest
Speaker 1: in morality go beyond hypothetical situations like the trolley problem.
Speaker 1: He's part of a movement called effective altruism, one that's
Speaker 1: very much grounded in reality. So the idea of effective
Speaker 1: altruism is to use the resources you have to do
Speaker 1: as much good as possible, and to make those decisions
Speaker 1: about what does as much good as possible based on reason, evidence,
Speaker 1: as clear analysis as possible. And so there are different
Speaker 1: categories here. So this most straightforward thing that anyone with
Speaker 1: disposable income can do is just to donate money to
Speaker 1: super effective charities. Right. Effective altruism is also broader than that.
Speaker 1: It has to do with choosing your career right, and
Speaker 1: this has the same kind of hearthead dynamic that maybe
Speaker 1: the most good one could do in principle is going
Speaker 1: into finance and making as much money as possible and
Speaker 1: then giving ninety five percent of it away, right, But
Speaker 1: very few people are going to do that, and most
Speaker 1: people wouldn't enjoy that if they're not the kind of
Speaker 1: person who would go into finance anyway, and if they are,
Speaker 1: they might not want to give ninety five percent of
Speaker 1: their money way, right. So it's about finding a balance
Speaker 1: where you say, Okay, what's something that I can do
Speaker 1: that makes good use of my talents but uses those
Speaker 1: resources in a way that really can do a lot
Speaker 1: of good. And there's a great organization called eighty thousand
Speaker 1: Hours that offers advice to people and helps them figure
Speaker 1: out in a personal way, like how can I do
Speaker 1: something that feels good and it's meaningful to me but
Speaker 1: also really uses my talents and my skills in a
Speaker 1: way that does a lot of good for the world.
Speaker 1: So it's choosing a career, it's choosing what you do
Speaker 1: with your resources, and it can be personal decisions as well,
Speaker 1: so things about what you choose to eat. But the
Speaker 1: general idea is that we should take the evidence seriously.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's funny that like effective altruism is a
Speaker 1: new idea, right, right, then we really need a movement
Speaker 1: to do us hey ration susly. Yeah, if I went
Speaker 1: to Harvard Business School across the river, it's like, I've
Speaker 1: got this new idea. When you're trying to figure out
Speaker 1: how to invest your money, look to see what kind
Speaker 1: of return you're going to get. You know, the idea
Speaker 1: of investing for impact in the business world is just
Speaker 1: like the biggest du ever, right. But then when it
Speaker 1: comes to trying to do good for the world more
Speaker 1: generally is you know, it's only recently that people have
Speaker 1: been doing the kind of serious analysis that investors have
Speaker 1: been doing for decades and even centuries, and so it's
Speaker 1: just it's just getting serious about it in the same
Speaker 1: way that you get serious about business as a business person.
Speaker 1: And so let's talk about some of the biases that
Speaker 1: mess us up with this, Like, you know why we
Speaker 1: can think about it in the business domain, but it's
Speaker 1: so hard in the charitable giving domain. You know, one
Speaker 1: reason we mess this up is that you know, our
Speaker 1: brain isn't really good at seeing everybody in need who's
Speaker 1: worthy of our help, you know, So talk about this
Speaker 1: idea of the moral circle and why it might be
Speaker 1: a little bit more narrow than we think. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: where does morality come from, right, and where does human
Speaker 1: sociality come from? And my view, not unique to me
Speaker 1: but not shared by everybody, is that the fundamental principle
Speaker 1: of life, not just humans, is cooperation. That if you
Speaker 1: go all the way back to the beginning of the
Speaker 1: history of life, you know, what you see are molecules
Speaker 1: coming together to form larger molecules that can make copies
Speaker 1: of themselves better, coming together to form cells, and then
Speaker 1: multicellular colonies and organisms, and complicated animals with different organs
Speaker 1: that cooperate and function together, and then social animals like
Speaker 1: ants and chimpanzees and us, and then starting with us,
Speaker 1: there's hunter gatherer bands, and there's more complex chiefdoms and
Speaker 1: tribal societies and nation states. So the story of life
Speaker 1: is a story of cooperation at increasingly complex levels. But
Speaker 1: that cooperation isn't just there because it's nice. It's there
Speaker 1: because it evolved. And anything that evolved evolves because it
Speaker 1: has a competitive advantage. So teamwork is a competitive weapon, right.
Speaker 1: It serves a competitive purpose at the highest level, so
Speaker 1: you don't compete as much with the other people on
Speaker 1: your team, so that you can more effectively compete with
Speaker 1: the other team. And so there's this challenge here. Our
Speaker 1: social emotions are designed to produce cooperative interactions in the
Speaker 1: service of out competing others. So cooperation can exist up
Speaker 1: to a point, but then it's always strained at the
Speaker 1: highest level because the very force that caused it to
Speaker 1: evolve biologically or culturally is competitive. But we humans, we're unusual.
Speaker 1: We have the ability to understand all of this stuff,
Speaker 1: climb that evolutionary ladder, and then kick it away. We're
Speaker 1: going to do what makes sense for us given our values,
Speaker 1: which are not necessarily the same thing as the values
Speaker 1: that are implicit in the biological process. And I view
Speaker 1: effective altruism is we are understanding the process and we're saying, okay,
Speaker 1: we as a species have created enough resources that no
Speaker 1: one has to be hungry, right, so why don't we
Speaker 1: do one better? Why don't we apply the cooperative social
Speaker 1: emotional capacities that we evolved for competition and apply them
Speaker 1: not just cooperatively within our local groups, but more broadly.
Speaker 1: And so my mission is to expand that circle all
Speaker 1: the way out as best as I can, because that
Speaker 1: means if we keep the circle too narrow, we might
Speaker 1: be like missing out on the happiness benefits that comes
Speaker 1: from doing really good in the world, but just in
Speaker 1: this kind of narrow scope. But another thing we get
Speaker 1: wrong is this idea of what's called scope neglect when
Speaker 1: it comes to giving more broadly. You know, So what
Speaker 1: is scope neglect? Explain this concept which I think is
Speaker 1: so powerful. Yeah, Well, I mean, it's just that our
Speaker 1: emotions are not designed to be numerous to take numbers
Speaker 1: into account. Right, So there's a very real sense in
Speaker 1: which saving a thousand people's lives is a thousand times
Speaker 1: better than saving one person's life. But research suggests that
Speaker 1: if anything, saving a single person is more emotionally salient
Speaker 1: than saving a thousand, that it becomes the numbers become
Speaker 1: very abstract, and even when you think about the numbers,
Speaker 1: there's a kind of diminishing returns where after a while
Speaker 1: it's just a lot. And so we kind of have
Speaker 1: to compensate for that if we really want to make
Speaker 1: choices really maximize the amount of good that we can do.
Speaker 1: And we can see this even in the way sometimes
Speaker 1: charities advertised things right, you know, it's the oftentimes charities
Speaker 1: will put a picture of one person in need. This
Speaker 1: is what researchers have called identifiable victim effect. So what's that?
Speaker 1: I think it's powerful. Yeah, So this goes back to
Speaker 1: work by Debrah Small and George Lowenstein. They did some
Speaker 1: really nice lab experiments where they kind of created in
Speaker 1: an economic way a victim. In the lab. They lost
Speaker 1: their money, and then they could ask other experimenters, hey,
Speaker 1: do you want to give some of your money to
Speaker 1: make up for the person who lost it? And they
Speaker 1: did this two different ways. There's a very sort of
Speaker 1: subtle manipulation. It's kind of amazing that it worked, although
Speaker 1: it makes sense. In one version they said, do you
Speaker 1: want to help the person whoever it's going to be
Speaker 1: who was harmed by this? You know, would be like
Speaker 1: one of six people, but it wasn't determined it who
Speaker 1: would be. And then in another version they said, do
Speaker 1: you want to help person number four? Who's the person
Speaker 1: who had this right? And you don't know anything about them.
Speaker 1: It's just that it's been determined, and people were more
Speaker 1: willing to help just when you said that it's person
Speaker 1: number four as opposed to some person to be determined, right,
Speaker 1: And this is like the thinnest possible shift, and when
Speaker 1: you know, but when it's a real identifiable victim, like
Speaker 1: you know you can see on an ad on TV,
Speaker 1: that has a much more powerful response. And you know,
Speaker 1: one worry about this is that you know, if you
Speaker 1: draw people's attention to this, you know, one way to
Speaker 1: go is to say, Okay, I'm going to care about
Speaker 1: all of those anonymous children more instead of just focusing
Speaker 1: on the single person who's very emotionally salient. But one worry,
Speaker 1: and there's some evidence to suggests that this can happen
Speaker 1: is when people understand what's going on. Instead they just say, okay, well,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to care about either. I'm going to
Speaker 1: care about the one person less. And so the challenge
Speaker 1: here is how do you take that pro social feeling
Speaker 1: and scale it up in a way or align it
Speaker 1: more with the scope of the need is and what
Speaker 1: you can do about it. I love this idea that
Speaker 1: once we recognize our minds biases, we can find ways
Speaker 1: to work with them rather than it's them. We'll hear
Speaker 1: more about this when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment.
Speaker 1: Psychology professor Josh Green wanted to understand what would make
Speaker 1: people decide to give more donations to his list of
Speaker 1: high impact charities instead of to causes that hold more
Speaker 1: personal appeal. He wanted people to give with their heads
Speaker 1: rather than with their hearts. But purely rational appeals didn't
Speaker 1: turn out to be very effective. So you mentioned instead
Speaker 1: of fighting the biases. But the idea here is to
Speaker 1: not fight them, to work with them rather than against them.
Speaker 1: And what's interesting is I started out trying to fight them,
Speaker 1: you know. I was convinced to support highly effective charities
Speaker 1: basically by philosopher Peter Singer, and he gave a famous
Speaker 1: argument for doing this. You know, he said, look, if
Speaker 1: you were walking by a pond and there was a
Speaker 1: child drowning in that pond, and you could save the child.
Speaker 1: But if you do that, you're going to wait in
Speaker 1: and you're going to ruin the you know, nice suit
Speaker 1: you're wearing or whatever it is. You know, would you
Speaker 1: still save the child? Would it be okay for you
Speaker 1: to let the child drown because you don't want to
Speaker 1: ruin your suit that of course it would be terrible.
Speaker 1: You'd be a monster, right if you let the kid
Speaker 1: drown because you're worried about your suit. And then singer says, well,
Speaker 1: there are children who are drowning in poverty all around
Speaker 1: the world, who are badly needed food and medicine, And
Speaker 1: for the price of an nice suit, you can save
Speaker 1: or contribute to saving many of these children. So why
Speaker 1: do you have any more of an obligation to wade
Speaker 1: into the pond than you do to use what resources
Speaker 1: you have to help those people. So I was very
Speaker 1: much convinced by that argument when I was in my
Speaker 1: late teens. I think, do you remember when you read it, Like,
Speaker 1: do you remember having a moment of like, oh crap.
Speaker 1: Like it was in college. I was in an urban
Speaker 1: environment for the first time, and I would see homeless
Speaker 1: people a lot, and I started thinking about this and
Speaker 1: thinking about you know, I'd be on my way to
Speaker 1: go buy something. This was back when I used to
Speaker 1: buy a lot of CDs as in music for those
Speaker 1: young people listening, and you know, I think, like, why
Speaker 1: is it more important for me to have this? Like
Speaker 1: you know, John Coltrane CD than it is for me
Speaker 1: to help this person, right. And then you know, I
Speaker 1: talked to Jonathan Barron, with psychology professor, and he's like, oh,
Speaker 1: you should read this guy, Peter Singer. And I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: and you know, Singer did a much better job of
Speaker 1: laying this all out than I did. And I didn't
Speaker 1: realize that, you know, he had already laid this out
Speaker 1: a couple of years before I was born. But then
Speaker 1: when I read that, you know, then it really gripped me.
Speaker 1: So that was how I became convinced of this. And
Speaker 1: I thought, well, if that's what worked for me, I'll
Speaker 1: try to convince other people. And so with various people,
Speaker 1: I've tried experiments where you kind of lay out the
Speaker 1: Peter Singer sort of argument and see if people are
Speaker 1: willing to, you know, donate something, if you give them
Speaker 1: some money that they could keep or donate or otherwise
Speaker 1: convince them. And what we found is that this works
Speaker 1: a little bit at best. You know, sometimes that doesn't
Speaker 1: work at all, and sometimes it works a little tiny bit,
Speaker 1: but people do not respond to this in general the
Speaker 1: way that I did. And so more recently he started thinking,
Speaker 1: maybe there's another way here instead of fighting it, to
Speaker 1: go with it, to be like water a bit. And
Speaker 1: so this is the new project with the amazing Lucious
Speaker 1: Caviola who's currently a post doc in my lab. And
Speaker 1: we thought, rather than saying to people, don't give to
Speaker 1: the charity that you love that is personally meaning for you, instead,
Speaker 1: give to this charity that distributes malaria nets or provides
Speaker 1: deworming treatments, which you don't know anything about. For a
Speaker 1: lot of people, that just feels cold and alien. And
Speaker 1: they said, like, yeah, I kind of get that, but
Speaker 1: that's not where my heart is right and again I
Speaker 1: get that too, you know, I don't exclusively give to
Speaker 1: the super duper effective recommended charities. So then we thought, well,
Speaker 1: what if we just ask people to do both, just
Speaker 1: said hey, sor right, pick a charity that you love,
Speaker 1: but also, you know, here's one that experts say is
Speaker 1: incredibly effective. So we started doing experiments with this where
Speaker 1: we said, you have this money, you can give it
Speaker 1: to a charity that you choose or to this one
Speaker 1: that's super effective. And we found that almost everybody chooses
Speaker 1: the charity that they chose, not surprising. But then we
Speaker 1: found if we just said hey, you've got choices. Give
Speaker 1: it all to the one you picked, give it all
Speaker 1: to the one we're recommending, or do a fifty fifty split.
Speaker 1: And people were very happy to do the fifty fifty split,
Speaker 1: so much so that more money went to the charity
Speaker 1: that we chose with the fifty fifty splits. Then when
Speaker 1: people only had the option to do one or the other,
Speaker 1: so we said, off, maybe we're onto something here. And
Speaker 1: we did some other experiments to try to understand the
Speaker 1: psychology in more detail, and you know, the short and
Speaker 1: long of it is that there's a kind of diminishing
Speaker 1: returns that you get from supporting your favorite charity. That
Speaker 1: when you support the charity that you love, it's not
Speaker 1: so important to you whether you give fifty dollars or
Speaker 1: one hundred dollars. It's just that you want to support it.
Speaker 1: And yeah, it feels a little bit better to give
Speaker 1: twice as much but not twice as good, But then
Speaker 1: that makes room for doing something else. What we found
Speaker 1: is that giving to a highly effective charity is not
Speaker 1: only something that people are willing to do, but there's
Speaker 1: something especially appealing about it because it has this kind
Speaker 1: of hearthead complimentarity and then we thought, okay, so we
Speaker 1: want to try to see if we can do this
Speaker 1: out in the world. Okay, we can do the obvious
Speaker 1: thing and say, well, what if we incentivize people. They say,
Speaker 1: all right, if you make a split donation between one
Speaker 1: you choose and one that experts recommend, we'll add, you know,
Speaker 1: twenty five percent on top of both your donation. And
Speaker 1: a nice thing about this is that it's both right.
Speaker 1: We're not saying we're only encouraging you to do the
Speaker 1: thing that we're kind of suggesting. We're supporting your charity,
Speaker 1: the one that you picked, right, and we're happy, happy
Speaker 1: to do that. I mean, we found that people really
Speaker 1: loved this. And then there's one other piece to this.
Speaker 1: He said, okay, well, we need these matching funds, and
Speaker 1: one way to do this would be to have a
Speaker 1: kind of angel investor donor who would sort of put
Speaker 1: up the matching funds for this. But we thought maybe
Speaker 1: we can do this in a new way. We ask people, okay,
Speaker 1: so you've just had these matching funds with this donation,
Speaker 1: would you be willing to take part of your donation,
Speaker 1: the part that was going to go to the charity
Speaker 1: that you actually didn't choose, but but is highly effective.
Speaker 1: Would you be willing to put that in a fund
Speaker 1: that would provide matching funds for other people, so kind
Speaker 1: of pay it forward thing, And we found that a
Speaker 1: significant number of people were very happy to do that.
Speaker 1: So Lucius and I, with the help of some wonderful
Speaker 1: web developers and one in particular, fabio Kun, created a
Speaker 1: site called Giving Multiplier, which gives people the option to
Speaker 1: do just that. But you can go to giving multiplier
Speaker 1: dot org, slash Happiness Lab all caps, all one word,
Speaker 1: where we've got a little special landing page just for
Speaker 1: listeners of this podcast, and it's very simple. We have
Speaker 1: a little search field where you can find any charity
Speaker 1: that's registered in the United States. You enter the amount
Speaker 1: of money that you want to donate, and then we
Speaker 1: have this nifty I think it's very nifty little slider,
Speaker 1: and then you can slide it to decide, Okay, do
Speaker 1: I want to split it fifty fifty or do I
Speaker 1: want to give like eight twenty percent to the other.
Speaker 1: Right now, we're at the highest matching rate we've ever had,
Speaker 1: especially with the Happiness Lab code, so we're experimenting with
Speaker 1: seeing if we can go this high and still be
Speaker 1: self sustaining. So I hope, I hope that works out,
Speaker 1: and I hope happiness Labbs will give this a try.
Speaker 1: I love this. I love that we get you know,
Speaker 1: special multiplication on our donations. But I mean you said,
Speaker 1: I hope this will work, but you already seeks a
Speaker 1: lot of success from giving multiplier, right, like give me
Speaker 1: a sense of like how much money people are donating.
Speaker 1: We launched this in November of last year, and we thought, okay,
Speaker 1: we'll we'll be really happy if this, you know, raises
Speaker 1: like twenty thousand dollars or something like that, you know,
Speaker 1: better than bakesale. You know. It was what we were
Speaker 1: we were aiming for, and the response was unbelievable. We
Speaker 1: have now I think we're we're up to about six
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty thousand dollars total funds raised, but I
Speaker 1: think we're really sort of just getting started, and it
Speaker 1: seems like people like it and get it. Do you
Speaker 1: think after, you know, after the end of the year,
Speaker 1: we can come back and say how much money we, like,
Speaker 1: my listeners raised for this? Oh? Absolutely, And I think
Speaker 1: this is a great opportunity to take that competitive instinct
Speaker 1: and turn it into something cooperative. So let's say, if
Speaker 1: you can kick the crap out of the other podcasts,
Speaker 1: I won't name them, but yeah, I will report back
Speaker 1: with I'll come back with the numbers and let you
Speaker 1: know how you did. It's for anyone that's on the
Speaker 1: fence about maybe using this giving Tuesday, you know, to
Speaker 1: do more for others, or who's who's on the fence
Speaker 1: about doing more for others in this very effective way.
Speaker 1: Any final advice for jumping in and making the decision
Speaker 1: to give a little bit more with your heart and
Speaker 1: your mind. Well, it's very hard to live one's life
Speaker 1: being a pure effectiveness maximizer, right, I mean in the
Speaker 1: limiting cases, this is like no birthday party for your kids.
Speaker 1: You know, you don't need two kidneys. And so again,
Speaker 1: this is not it's not about finger wagging, and it's
Speaker 1: not about saying thou shalt you know, do this or
Speaker 1: do that. But I mean for me, once you kind
Speaker 1: of know that you can be extremely effective, like hundreds
Speaker 1: of times more effective, then you know, once you have
Speaker 1: that knowledge, it's like how can you ignore it? Giving
Speaker 1: to others can provide us with a much needed happiness boost.
Speaker 1: And that's why I wanted to give you that special
Speaker 1: web address from Josh one more time. It's giving multiplier
Speaker 1: dot org, slash Happiness Lab all caps, all one word.
Speaker 1: But even if you aren't in a position to donate
Speaker 1: to a charity right now, I hope you've picked up
Speaker 1: some useful strategies from this episode to help you maximize
Speaker 1: how you help others, and whether you give with your
Speaker 1: head or your heart, with money or with time this
Speaker 1: holiday season, the important thing is that you're making the effort.
Speaker 1: This is the final Happiness Lab episode for twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: but we will be back on January fifth with a
Speaker 1: new year mini season. We'll take a deep dive into
Speaker 1: what we usually think of as negative emotions, things like sadness, grief,
Speaker 1: and anxiety, and we'll talk to experts like Brenee Brown,
Speaker 1: Adam Grant, and Julia Samuel about how understanding these emotions
Speaker 1: better can help us improve our overall happiness. I'm also
Speaker 1: releasing six special meditations to go along with these January
Speaker 1: shows that will be exclusive to Pushkin Plus subscribers. Pushkin
Speaker 1: Plus is available on the show page in Apple Podcasts
Speaker 1: all Right, Pushkin dot fm slash plus That's Plus sign
Speaker 1: up now and you'll have access to ads free listening
Speaker 1: across many Pushkin Industry shows. I hope you have a
Speaker 1: fantastic holiday season and I look forward to seeing you
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty two. Until then, stay safe and stay happy.
Speaker 1: The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Delley.
Speaker 1: Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring,
Speaker 1: mixing and mastering by Evan Viola. Joseph Fridman checked our facts.
Speaker 1: Sophie Crane mckibbon edited our scripts. Emily Ann Vaughan offered
Speaker 1: additional production support. Special thanks to Miela Belle, Carl mcgliori,
Speaker 1: Heather Faine, Maggie Taylor, Daniella Lucarne, Maya Kanig, Nicole Morano,
Speaker 1: Eric Xandler, Royston Baserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent Ben Davis.
Speaker 1: Thatppiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Me
Speaker 1: Doctor Laurie Santos