Speaker 1: Pushkin. I was driving home late at night after spending
Speaker 1: the night in Seattle, and as I was coming over
Speaker 1: a bridge back into Tacoma, a little dog run out
Speaker 1: in front of my car. I did exactly what most
Speaker 1: people do when this happens, and I now know you
Speaker 1: shouldn't do, which as I swerved to try to avoid
Speaker 1: hitting it, and the result of both swerving and then
Speaker 1: ultimately hitting it anyway, was that my car was sent
Speaker 1: into a sort of a fishtail and then a spin
Speaker 1: across the freeway. This is Abbey Marsh. She was only
Speaker 1: nineteen years old when the events in this story took place.
Speaker 1: When the car finally came to a stop, it was
Speaker 1: in the fast lane of the freeway, just past the
Speaker 1: crest of this bridge i'd been crossing, which meant that
Speaker 1: I was invisible to the oncoming traffic. Unfortunately, they were
Speaker 1: quite visible to me because my car was now facing
Speaker 1: backward into the oncoming traffic and the engine on a
Speaker 1: car sort of sputtered to a halt, and I didn't
Speaker 1: have a phone, and I had no way of escaping
Speaker 1: because this bridge didn't have any shoulders on it, so
Speaker 1: there was nowhere to go even if I were to
Speaker 1: get out of the car, and I just panicked. I
Speaker 1: couldn't get the car to her back on And I
Speaker 1: was feeling every time one of these trucks or semis
Speaker 1: past me, the whole car would shutter if they went by,
Speaker 1: like ushit. Now, what am I gonna do? Like I like,
Speaker 1: you know, your mind is sort of stuttering through the
Speaker 1: different options. And do I get out of the car?
Speaker 1: Do I stay in the car? If I get out
Speaker 1: of the car, I was risking car hitting me. But
Speaker 1: then if I stayed in the car, I was definitely
Speaker 1: going to get hit eventually, because these cars that were
Speaker 1: coming over the crest were swerving barely in time. Who
Speaker 1: avoid me? There? Abby was a teenager, all alone and
Speaker 1: trapped on the freeway, confronting what seemed like certain death,
Speaker 1: And it was just the sense of futility and blankness.
Speaker 1: It was awful. But what happened next propelled Abby on
Speaker 1: a totally new journey, a journey that would bring her
Speaker 1: face to face with the worst and best parts of
Speaker 1: human nature, and one that has allowed her to unlock
Speaker 1: a counterintuitive secret to what makes life happier and a
Speaker 1: bit more worth living. Our minds are constantly telling us
Speaker 1: what to do to be happy. But what if our
Speaker 1: minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us,
Speaker 1: leading us away from what will really make us happy.
Speaker 1: The good news is that understanding the science of the
Speaker 1: mind can point us all back in the right direction.
Speaker 1: You're listening to the Happiness Lab of doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 1: Abby Marsh was trapped in her disabled sub in the dark,
Speaker 1: facing the wrong way on the highway. She watched in
Speaker 1: terror as oncoming traffic swerved by. She needed a miracle.
Speaker 1: It's funny because you know, I don't believe in guardian angels,
Speaker 1: and in fact, it frustrates me when people refer to
Speaker 1: very alterwistic people as angels, because I feel like it's
Speaker 1: sort of takes away from how compassionate real live human
Speaker 1: beings can be. You know, you don't have to be
Speaker 1: supernatural to help somebody else. But it did have that
Speaker 1: sense of just he just appeared out of nowhere. Abby
Speaker 1: looked over to see that a complete stranger was knocking
Speaker 1: calmly on her passenger side door. My memory of him
Speaker 1: is that he was wearing a suit and a lot
Speaker 1: of gold jewelry and sunglasses. It was the middle of
Speaker 1: the night, that made no sense, but he said, you
Speaker 1: looked like you could do some help, and I said, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I could. And he ran around the front
Speaker 1: of my car into the traffic, got into the driver's seat,
Speaker 1: and then he got the car back started again and
Speaker 1: got just back across the road and parked us behind
Speaker 1: his car. I was shaking, and I'm sure it was gray,
Speaker 1: and I fell awful, and he said, you don't look
Speaker 1: so good. Do you need me to follow you to
Speaker 1: make sure you get home? Okay? I was like, no, no no, no,
Speaker 1: I'll be fine. I'll be fine. I'm pretty sure. I
Speaker 1: didn't say thank you. And he's like, okay, you take
Speaker 1: care of yourself, and he got out of my car,
Speaker 1: back into his own and disappeared. Abbey has spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time wondering about the man that rescued her
Speaker 1: and the reasons behind his actions. The instant practically he
Speaker 1: saw in my car. He must have pulled over and
Speaker 1: then run across five milnes of freeway traffic in the
Speaker 1: dark to get to me. Why would somebody do that?
Speaker 1: Why would somebody do that? What was that moment that
Speaker 1: happened inside this other person's head that I owe my
Speaker 1: life too? What's interesting to me is that just knowing
Speaker 1: that people do it sort of semantically, you know, you
Speaker 1: read about it in a newspaper, is you can sort
Speaker 1: of be like, oh, that's interesting, but there's something about
Speaker 1: it happening to you. Real human being made this choice
Speaker 1: to save my life, even though he risked being killed himself,
Speaker 1: to make you want to understand it, and the fact
Speaker 1: that we don't really have good explanations for why somebody
Speaker 1: would do something like this. In fact, it defies a
Speaker 1: lot of conventional wisdom about human motivation. You know, all
Speaker 1: humans being fundamentally selfish, that's something many people believe, and
Speaker 1: so what could be more interesting than a concrete fact
Speaker 1: that defies a lot of established ideas. But Abbey wasn't
Speaker 1: content to just sit and wonder why her savior chose
Speaker 1: to help her. She decided to get to the bottom
Speaker 1: of his actions. Scientifically, I'm not sure how often these
Speaker 1: motivations that drive us are clear in the moment, but
Speaker 1: in retrospect, it's very clear that my research took a
Speaker 1: very distinct track since then. Abby is now a professor
Speaker 1: in the Department of Psychology and the Interdisciplinary Program in
Speaker 1: Neuroscience at Georgetown she's a world expert and how we
Speaker 1: process other people's emotions. I started studying how we respond
Speaker 1: to other people's fear initially, so why it is that
Speaker 1: the site of somebody who's frightens elicits caring responses and
Speaker 1: people who see it. But that's a really difficult question
Speaker 1: to study in the lab because you know you can't
Speaker 1: ethically induce extreme fear in people, and it's really hard
Speaker 1: to measure people's behavior when it comes to things like
Speaker 1: altruism in the lab in a way that doesn't make
Speaker 1: them do what you want them to do. So Abby
Speaker 1: decided to employ a common psychology research logic. If you
Speaker 1: want to understand a concept, one of the better ways
Speaker 1: to do that is to find a population to people
Speaker 1: who were missing the thing you're interested in and try
Speaker 1: to understand what makes him different, and hopefully that will
Speaker 1: help understand where that process you're interested and comes from,
Speaker 1: which led Abbey to explore the nature of altruistic actions
Speaker 1: using a seemingly strange population psychopaths. We had known for
Speaker 1: a while, and sciences and known for a while that
Speaker 1: people who are psychopathic don't respond normally to the site
Speaker 1: of other people's fear, which even the idea of other
Speaker 1: people's fear. And one of my favorite examples of this
Speaker 1: comes from a story of my colleagues of fighting was
Speaker 1: telling name she was testing a bunch of psychopathic adult
Speaker 1: inmates on their ability to recognize other people's facial expressions,
Speaker 1: and one psychopathic inmate she was testing was particularly about
Speaker 1: it recognizing other people's fear so bad he missed every
Speaker 1: single fearful expression she showed him. But he knew he
Speaker 1: was doing badly because he got to the last fearful
Speaker 1: expression in the set and he's like, you know, I
Speaker 1: don't know what that expression is called, but I know
Speaker 1: that's what people look like right before you stab them.
Speaker 1: I find that so incredibly profound, because, you know, here's
Speaker 1: a man who is imprisoned because he does things that
Speaker 1: cause other people to believe they're going to die, and
Speaker 1: he's like, oh, yay, I know what they look like.
Speaker 1: You know, I recognize that phase. But he couldn't link
Speaker 1: it to the emotion fear. He just he couldn't make
Speaker 1: sense of that vivid, you know, wide eyed, distressed expression
Speaker 1: and understand the emotional content behind it. Abby's now done
Speaker 1: some elegant work exploring why psychopaths have this problem recognizing
Speaker 1: others distress. We found that there's a structure in their
Speaker 1: brain called the amgala that doesn't seem to respond normally
Speaker 1: to other people's fear, whereas in most people, this particular
Speaker 1: structure seems to be very active in response to somebody's fear,
Speaker 1: and that seems to help you interpret that emotion, and
Speaker 1: people who are psychopathic just show no response at all.
Speaker 1: But the biggest idea that came from Abbey's work on
Speaker 1: the brains of psychopaths was an insight that eventually led
Speaker 1: her back to the question she first started asking on
Speaker 1: that highway many years ago. We have understood now for
Speaker 1: a while that psychopathy is not a sort of cluster
Speaker 1: of individuals that's qualitatively different from everybody else. It's a spectrum.
Speaker 1: And so there are people who are highly highly psychopathic
Speaker 1: and people who are only moderately psychopathic, and then those
Speaker 1: traits vary continuously throughout the population. And what it's interesting
Speaker 1: about that fact is it suggests that there must be
Speaker 1: such a thing as an anti psychopath. So if most
Speaker 1: of us are sort of moderately compassionate, and we've got
Speaker 1: psychopaths on one end who have no compassion, Well, there
Speaker 1: must be a mirror image of that people who are
Speaker 1: unusually compassionate, And I got to thinking about what that
Speaker 1: might look like. What would it look like to be
Speaker 1: anti psychopathic? Are they, for example, the kind of people
Speaker 1: who would run into oncoming traffic to save a complete stranger.
Speaker 1: Could they be the key to understanding why some people
Speaker 1: are willing to lose everything to help others. After the
Speaker 1: break you'll hear more about these so called anti psychopaths
Speaker 1: and how they are unusual choices, demons straight what you
Speaker 1: can personally do to become a little bit happier. The
Speaker 1: Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. I started
Speaker 1: out thinking it would be fun too, and you know,
Speaker 1: edifying to study people who were heroic rescuers, like the
Speaker 1: man who saved my life. But at the time it
Speaker 1: wasn't at all clear how I would find them. After
Speaker 1: exploring the brains of psychopathic killers, researcher Abbey Marsh wanted
Speaker 1: to understand the minds of the polar opposite side of
Speaker 1: the psychological spectrum. It's not an easy thing to put
Speaker 1: like an ad in the newspaper for have you ever
Speaker 1: saved a stranger's life? And risk your own. It wasn't
Speaker 1: aware of any way to recruit them, and so I
Speaker 1: thought about, well, there are other ways to save lives
Speaker 1: that involve significant risk and sacrifice, and at the time,
Speaker 1: a number of articles and a book could come out
Speaker 1: about altruistic kidney donors. People who give away a kidney
Speaker 1: to save the life of a stranger and ende renal failure.
Speaker 1: Patience and end stage renal failure often wait three to
Speaker 1: five years to get a kidney from a deceased donor.
Speaker 1: Living kidney donors, people who are willing to give up
Speaker 1: one of their two functioning kidneys, can cut down on
Speaker 1: the weight time for the nearly one hundred thousand people
Speaker 1: who are on that wait list. The donation procedure is
Speaker 1: more straightforward than you might think. Most donors return to
Speaker 1: their usual activities in a few weeks. But like all surgeries,
Speaker 1: kidney donations come with at least some risk of serious complications,
Speaker 1: things like blood clots, infection, or even death. And I thought,
Speaker 1: you know, if anything is altruistic, it is that it
Speaker 1: is this very significant decision to give away of an
Speaker 1: internal organ, invital internal organ, to save the life of
Speaker 1: somebody that you've never met. And in most cases have
Speaker 1: been picked off a list for you. So it struck
Speaker 1: me that if anything could be considered antipsychopathic, gets the
Speaker 1: decision to give a kidney to a stranger. So Abby
Speaker 1: harder target group kidney donors, but at the time it
Speaker 1: was a pretty exclusive club. There are only a few
Speaker 1: thousand in the entire country who'd gone through that invasive procedure.
Speaker 1: Meaningful results in scientific studies require having as many test
Speaker 1: subjects as possible, and so Abby was a bit worried
Speaker 1: that she wouldn't be able to find enough donors. In
Speaker 1: spite of the odds, she put an ad on an
Speaker 1: organ transplant list Serve, have you ever donated a kidney
Speaker 1: to a stranger? If so, a researcher at Georgetown is
Speaker 1: interested in connecting a study with you. Abby reasonably assumed
Speaker 1: that she'd never find enough participants from such an absolutely
Speaker 1: tiny pool of potential recruits. I have this vivid memory
Speaker 1: of sitting down and being like, oh, I wonder if
Speaker 1: anybody's responded to my ads for kidney downers, and opening
Speaker 1: up by laptop and my inbox was just flooded with
Speaker 1: new messages, many with all caps subject things from altars
Speaker 1: to kidney downers who were just very excited to be
Speaker 1: taking part in my research. You know, I would love
Speaker 1: to be your guinea pig. Please sign me up. Abby
Speaker 1: was immediately shocked by this population's generosity. Hundreds of them
Speaker 1: were ready to fly to her lab at a moment's notice,
Speaker 1: and once they got there, they were happy to go
Speaker 1: to great lengths to be helpful. And consider it, working
Speaker 1: with lots of different populations over the years, it can
Speaker 1: be a real trick to just get people to come
Speaker 1: in and to come in on time. And the first
Speaker 1: three altruistic kidney donors we brought in and they come
Speaker 1: in from all over the country, and they were staying
Speaker 1: in a hotel just a few blocks from the campus
Speaker 1: where we were going to be scanning them, and they
Speaker 1: were so worried about not being late to their brain
Speaker 1: scans that they came three hours early the first camp.
Speaker 1: It's like unheard of, and they ended up getting lost
Speaker 1: in the bowels of the university hospital and almost ended
Speaker 1: up breaking through a fire door to get to the
Speaker 1: camp center and setting off alarms all over the hospital
Speaker 1: because again they were so incredibly concerned about not being late.
Speaker 1: Abby also found that her kidney donors were unusually humble.
Speaker 1: They didn't like her hypothesis that they were in any
Speaker 1: way special or at the extreme end of some goodness spectrum.
Speaker 1: A number of them very kindly told me that they
Speaker 1: were happy to participate in the study. They were happy
Speaker 1: to help out, but they were pretty sure that I
Speaker 1: was barking at the wrong tree. The idea that there
Speaker 1: was anything different about them at all was just wrong.
Speaker 1: They're not unusually altruistic, they're not unusually compassionate. They're just
Speaker 1: like anybody else. They happen to be in the right
Speaker 1: place at the right time, which is not how anybody
Speaker 1: else talks about people who give kidneys to strangers. But
Speaker 1: their real sense of humility has been really striking, just
Speaker 1: an unwillingness to think of themselves as better than anybody else.
Speaker 1: Of course, Abbey's results showed that kidney donors were wrong.
Speaker 1: They were different, at least when it came to their brains.
Speaker 1: Abbey used neuroimaging techniques to measure the size of the
Speaker 1: donors amygdalas, that same brain structure involved in processing fear,
Speaker 1: the very same part that was significantly smaller than average
Speaker 1: in psychopaths. It turns out that her kidney donors also
Speaker 1: had peculiar amygdala's, but they were eight percent larger than
Speaker 1: those of average people. Now, it could be that her
Speaker 1: donors were just born that way, but it was also
Speaker 1: possible that performing acts of kindness over time had caused
Speaker 1: the enlargement, like a muscle responding to exercise. Whatever the reason,
Speaker 1: these extreme ultruists had ambigdalas that indeed looked like the
Speaker 1: polar opposite of what she'd seen in her malicious criminals.
Speaker 1: Abby had finally identified a population of anti psychopaths, which
Speaker 1: was a pretty cool result for a budding neuroscientist. But
Speaker 1: the most important thing about studying this new population for
Speaker 1: Abby wasn't just that she had discovered a completely new,
Speaker 1: nearly atypical population. The ultruistic kidney donors finally gave Abbey
Speaker 1: the opportunity to pose the question that had puzzled her
Speaker 1: for decades, The question she wanted to ask her highway savior.
Speaker 1: Why would somebody do that? Why did her rescuer choose
Speaker 1: to save her? Abby conducted interview after interview, asking what
Speaker 1: was going through your head when you decided to help
Speaker 1: someone in such an extreme way. The most common answer
Speaker 1: I get to the question is it just hit me
Speaker 1: like a bolt of lightning. I've found out that there
Speaker 1: are people who were dying from kidney failure. There's one
Speaker 1: hundred thousand of them on the waiting lists, and most
Speaker 1: of us can of a kidney away and be none
Speaker 1: the worse for wear for it. And I thought, I'll
Speaker 1: do that. I mean, there is no decision process I
Speaker 1: think is the interesting thing. Like, it's not a hemming
Speaker 1: and hawing process for really almost anybody I've talked to,
Speaker 1: it's just so, well, you can do this. Somebody's life
Speaker 1: is gonna be saved. I'll do it. At first glance,
Speaker 1: this sort of answer fits with Abby's initial hypothesis that
Speaker 1: there had to be something fundamentally different about people who
Speaker 1: would risk their lives for strangers without a moment's thought.
Speaker 1: But if that were the case, her results wouldn't be
Speaker 1: as relevant for all of you, and so I wouldn't
Speaker 1: be talking about them here on the Happiness lab. As
Speaker 1: Abby probe more deeply, she realized that this couldn't be
Speaker 1: the whole story. As she heard more about her participants' lives,
Speaker 1: she realized that many of them got to this act
Speaker 1: of kidney donation through lots of smaller acts of generosity.
Speaker 1: Nobody goes from sort of ground zero to donate a
Speaker 1: kidney almost always. The people we've worked with are long
Speaker 1: time blood donors, platelet donors, some have been marrow donors.
Speaker 1: Many of them work in tier positions, rescue animals, foster children.
Speaker 1: They've all done things in the past that involved giving
Speaker 1: of themselves to help other people. Abbey realized that many
Speaker 1: of her kidney donors wound up getting to what seemed
Speaker 1: like an extreme altruistic choice through lots of baby steps,
Speaker 1: smaller nice actions, the kinds of things that lots of
Speaker 1: us do or could easily do. Over time, the donors
Speaker 1: recognize that performing these smaller acts of kindness felt well,
Speaker 1: kind of nice. The sense that I get is that
Speaker 1: they have had the wonderful opportunity to discover how rewarding
Speaker 1: that is, what a sense of joy and happiness it
Speaker 1: gives you to help other people. And it's just like
Speaker 1: any other reinforcement process. You sort of work your way up.
Speaker 1: You're like, well, that was so rewarding. What else could
Speaker 1: I do? If donating blood is good, I guess donating
Speaker 1: marrows even better. If donating kidney is good. I guess
Speaker 1: donating a piece of my liver is even better. And
Speaker 1: I now have several kidney donors I've worked with who've
Speaker 1: also donated a portion of their liver. As she heard
Speaker 1: from more interviewees, Abbey's Big Savior on the Highway puzzle
Speaker 1: started to become Clearerultists did what they did because they
Speaker 1: had learned a simple yet counterintuitive principle of human motivation.
Speaker 1: Doing nice things for other people feels really good, even
Speaker 1: in cases where it's a bit costly. Helping others can
Speaker 1: provide a big spike to our well being. Altruistic kidney
Speaker 1: donors just take the usual wellbeing spite we all experience
Speaker 1: to an extreme. It's therefore no surprise that they tend
Speaker 1: to be a really happy group on average. It's a
Speaker 1: universal response I get from them. They are so glad
Speaker 1: that they made the decision to donate. They do it
Speaker 1: one hundred more times. If they could do one hundred
Speaker 1: more times. It's one of the best things that they
Speaker 1: ever did, and it gives them this sense of joy
Speaker 1: that sticks with them as far as I can tell forever.
Speaker 1: Some of the people I've worked with donated close to
Speaker 1: twenty years ago. Now, and it doesn't ever seem to
Speaker 1: go away, that sense of vicarious joy of having been
Speaker 1: able to do this thing for somebody else. I've had
Speaker 1: many interviews and in tears as people are describing the
Speaker 1: after effects of their nation and hearing that the child
Speaker 1: who would receive their kidney like days after donnation, he
Speaker 1: was making plans to go to the beach and camping
Speaker 1: for like the first time. He'd never been able to
Speaker 1: do these things. And like the kidney donors sabbing relating this,
Speaker 1: and I'm sabbing relating this, it's incredibly profound. As Abby
Speaker 1: heard more of these stories and saw the incredible joy
Speaker 1: that her subjects experienced, she started to think that her
Speaker 1: extreme subjects might be onto something important, something that the
Speaker 1: rest of us could learn from. Two. If you want
Speaker 1: to make a good decision about bringing joy and meaning
Speaker 1: in a sense of connectedness into your own life, helping
Speaker 1: people is clearly the way to do it. Abby started
Speaker 1: to realize that all of us can benefit from doing
Speaker 1: nice things for others, even if we're not yet ready
Speaker 1: to give up a body part to a stranger. We
Speaker 1: all have our own ways that we can make the
Speaker 1: lives of other people better. You know, donating kidney is
Speaker 1: one way, but it's certainly not the only way. But
Speaker 1: as Abby right, I mean, it's clear that her donors
Speaker 1: get a huge happiness boost from their generous act. But
Speaker 1: can the average person really become happier by making a
Speaker 1: small sacrifice to aid a stranger? Can shifting your focus
Speaker 1: to helping other people really be a strategy for improving
Speaker 1: well being? And if there is a path to becoming
Speaker 1: a happy altruist, is there a step along that path
Speaker 1: that you could take today? The Happiness Lab will be
Speaker 1: right back. When we think of small, everyday things we
Speaker 1: can do to boost our mood, we often think of
Speaker 1: the idea of pampering ourselves. And whenever I think of
Speaker 1: personal pampering, I'm reminded of one of my favorite seams
Speaker 1: from the TV show Parks and Recreation. Once a year,
Speaker 1: Donna and I spend a day treating ourselves. What do
Speaker 1: we treat ourselves to? Clothes, treat yourself, treat yourself, massage,
Speaker 1: treat yourself, mimosa, treat yourself, fine leather goods. Treat yourself.
Speaker 1: It's the best day of the year, the best day
Speaker 1: of the year when we want to be happier. We
Speaker 1: think it's time to spoil ourselves, or, in the popular
Speaker 1: parlance of parks wreck, I've got three words for you,
Speaker 1: Yo sill. On the show Tom and Donna observed treat
Speaker 1: yourself day every October thirteenth. It's now become a cultural phenomenon,
Speaker 1: so much so that Rheta, the actress who plays Donna,
Speaker 1: can't post a photo of a cocktail or a purse
Speaker 1: on Instagram without some fan telling her to go ahead
Speaker 1: and treat yourself. But it's a strategy, right. Should we
Speaker 1: be treating ourselves to feel happier or are we missing
Speaker 1: other more powerful opportunities to boost our moods? You know,
Speaker 1: I don't think treating ourselves is a terrible idea, like
Speaker 1: spending money on ourselves can be good. This is Liz Done,
Speaker 1: a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia an
Speaker 1: author of the book Happy Money, The Science of Happier Spending.
Speaker 1: It's just that this idea of that spending money on
Speaker 1: somebody else could actually be helpful, I think is especially
Speaker 1: easy to overlook because I think we do just get
Speaker 1: focused on ourselves. Liz studies the cases where our so
Speaker 1: called treat yourself. Intuitions can lead us astray, especially when
Speaker 1: it comes to spending our disposable income. I first got
Speaker 1: interested in this idea, like, not because I was especially
Speaker 1: interested in generosity, but because I was interested in money.
Speaker 1: So I managed to make it through my twenties without
Speaker 1: ever holding a real job. At twenty seven, I got
Speaker 1: my first real job and they actually started paying me,
Speaker 1: and I was like, oh wow, Like, what do I
Speaker 1: do with all of this money? Like this is more
Speaker 1: money than I need to survive, you know, and what
Speaker 1: do I do with it? I was surprised at the
Speaker 1: time by how little research there was on this topic.
Speaker 1: Liz Comb the literature to figure out the best way
Speaker 1: to spend our money to feel happier, and all the
Speaker 1: existing studies seem to point in the same direction. The
Speaker 1: science shows that treating ourselves doesn't make us as happy
Speaker 1: as treating other people, and that result is not just
Speaker 1: true for extremely altruistic people like Abby's kidney donors, even
Speaker 1: when we look in pretty diverse regions of the world.
Speaker 1: In fact, in all seven major regions of the world,
Speaker 1: we find this relationship whereby people who donate money to
Speaker 1: charity are happier than those who don't. So I thought, well, okay,
Speaker 1: would we actually get more of kind of happiness being
Speaker 1: for our buck by spending on others than by spending
Speaker 1: on ourselves. Listen, our colleagues decided to test this in
Speaker 1: a rather simple experiment. They walked up to people on
Speaker 1: the street and handed them twenty dollars. We asked them
Speaker 1: to spend it by the end of the day, but
Speaker 1: with a catch. So we told half the people they
Speaker 1: had to spend it on themselves, and we told half
Speaker 1: the people they had to spend it to benefit others.
Speaker 1: Imagine for a second that you're a subject in this study.
Speaker 1: You just got twenty bucks out of the blue, and
Speaker 1: you're asked to spend it. What would feel better spending
Speaker 1: that money on a nice free meal or a shiny
Speaker 1: manicure for yourself, or using that same amount of money
Speaker 1: to help someone else. If you're like Liz's subjects, you
Speaker 1: probably think the treat yourself condition would feel better. In fact,
Speaker 1: Liz asked over a hundred people to predict which condition
Speaker 1: they would prefer, and about two thirds of them went
Speaker 1: with the treat yourself option. But what did Liz find
Speaker 1: when people really spent that cash windfall. People were in
Speaker 1: a better mood at the end of the day when
Speaker 1: they'd been asked to spend this money on other people
Speaker 1: rather than on themselves. The simple act of spending twenty
Speaker 1: dollars on another person was enough to significantly raise people's
Speaker 1: well being levels. But Liz has found that the same
Speaker 1: effect holds for smaller amounts of money too. Her team
Speaker 1: tested a different group of subjects. They were given only
Speaker 1: five dollars to spend on themselves or someone else. This
Speaker 1: second group showed exactly the same effect as those who
Speaker 1: were given more cash. You don't necessarily have to be
Speaker 1: spending crazy amounts of money on others, even like say
Speaker 1: five dollars, or even just two dollars, and shifting it
Speaker 1: towards using that money to benefit other people does seem
Speaker 1: to provide this detectable benefit for moods. Listener colleagues have
Speaker 1: now replicated the same effect in people all over the world,
Speaker 1: in Canada, India, Uganda, and even remote villages on the
Speaker 1: island of Vanawatu. The results are always the same for
Speaker 1: rich and for poor people. One study of South African
Speaker 1: subjects found that people who are happier spending money on
Speaker 1: others even when they report not having enough money to
Speaker 1: buy food for their families in the last year. But
Speaker 1: what's most impressive is that Liz has shown that generosity
Speaker 1: doesn't just feel good in adulthood. We started to wonder, like,
Speaker 1: you know, is this a fundamental part of human nature?
Speaker 1: So my student lair Acting and I teamed up with
Speaker 1: Kylie Hamlin, who's a developmental psychologist, and we brought toddlers
Speaker 1: just under the age of two into the lab. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, toddlers don't really care about money, so we
Speaker 1: worked with like the closest thing to toddler gold which
Speaker 1: of course is goldfish crackers, And so we gave these
Speaker 1: little kids windfall of goldfish for themselves, as well as
Speaker 1: a chance to give some of those goldfish away to
Speaker 1: a puppet named Monkey. The researchers watched how many goldfish
Speaker 1: crackers kids gave away, and then they coded their facial
Speaker 1: expressions to see how happy toddlers seemed afterwards. What we
Speaker 1: see in the study is that even children under the
Speaker 1: age of two seem to exhibit pleasure from giving their
Speaker 1: resources away. Counterintuitively, the kids smiled more and see much
Speaker 1: happier after losing a bunch of their goldfish crackers. It's
Speaker 1: kind of just reassuring, Like as many problems as we
Speaker 1: have in the world right now, it's like the tiny
Speaker 1: humans are starting out with this proclivity to derive joy
Speaker 1: from giving their stuff away. That to me, I don't know,
Speaker 1: it makes me optimistic again about the world. What's less optimistic, though,
Speaker 1: is that we adults don't realize that doing nice things
Speaker 1: for others feel so good that it can have such
Speaker 1: a positive impact on our mood. I mean, I definitely
Speaker 1: want to be happier, but I haven't given away a
Speaker 1: really significant chuck of my income, let alone a kidney.
Speaker 1: I bet you haven't either. Our lying minds keep saying
Speaker 1: treat yourself, which means we tend not to even take
Speaker 1: baby steps towards kindness nearly as much as we could.
Speaker 1: It's so interesting because I think on a broad level,
Speaker 1: people totally recognize that this is the case, and I
Speaker 1: get postcards and emails and stuff from people saying why
Speaker 1: did you, as a scientist, need to waste your time
Speaker 1: showing this Where people are just saying like, oh, we
Speaker 1: already knew this from like the Bible or from like,
Speaker 1: you know, what our parents taught us. And I think
Speaker 1: you know, on a broad level, people recognize that generosity
Speaker 1: feels good. I think what they miss is that, you know,
Speaker 1: when they're looking at how to spend the twenty dollars
Speaker 1: in their pocket, that's where they make the error. So
Speaker 1: it's like, in this moment, with this like piece of
Speaker 1: extra money in my hand, it doesn't maybe occur to
Speaker 1: me to spend it on something else, or you know,
Speaker 1: it feels much more tempting to use it to benefit
Speaker 1: myself rather than to spend it on others. And again,
Speaker 1: I think we forget that, like, oh, I could buy
Speaker 1: a slightly less expensive car and then have a lot
Speaker 1: of money left over to use to help other people
Speaker 1: in my life or donate to charity or whatever. And
Speaker 1: I think you know, that's where the error creeps in,
Speaker 1: is that we've kind of get that we would actually
Speaker 1: benefit from using the money less on ourselves and more
Speaker 1: on other people. So if you really want to treat
Speaker 1: yourself to a happier day, give up something to benefit
Speaker 1: another person. You can start with money, just give up
Speaker 1: a dollar or two, But if you're strapped for cash,
Speaker 1: you can also give up time, like letting someone cut
Speaker 1: in front of you in line at the grocery store.
Speaker 1: It could even be a small service like helping a
Speaker 1: neighbor clear off the snow, or maybe taking the time
Speaker 1: to rate and review your favorite podcast. And doing nice
Speaker 1: things for others doesn't just boost your mood, it also
Speaker 1: makes the person who received your kind actions a little
Speaker 1: happier too. And that's a kind of tip I most
Speaker 1: love sharing on this podcast, one that lets my listeners
Speaker 1: selfishly bump up their own happiness in a way that
Speaker 1: also helps to make the world a better, more empathic place.
Speaker 1: And who knows, maybe you won't be satisfied with the
Speaker 1: small act of donating two dollars here or five bucks there.
Speaker 1: Maybe you'll also graduate from those baby steps to the
Speaker 1: kind of selfless acts that lead to a huge, huge,
Speaker 1: long standing boost and well being, ones that really really
Speaker 1: help people. Maybe you'll even save the life of another person,
Speaker 1: A person like Abby stuck on the highway alone, embraced
Speaker 1: for what could have been certain death, a moment that
Speaker 1: has stayed with her for decades. It just stuck with me,
Speaker 1: the fact that I owe my life to the stranger
Speaker 1: who is willing to risk his to save me. I'm
Speaker 1: hoping that your altruistic Savior is out there somewhere. If
Speaker 1: he's listening right now, what would you say. That's a
Speaker 1: big one. But you know, if he's out there listening today,
Speaker 1: and I just want to say how profoundly grateful I
Speaker 1: am for the beautiful thing that you did and the
Speaker 1: opportunities you've given me, and I hope to do your
Speaker 1: tremendous act of bravery justice. The Happiness Lab is co
Speaker 1: written and produced by Ryan Dilley with the help of
Speaker 1: Pete Naton. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver,
Speaker 1: with additional scoring, mixing and mastering by Evan Viola. The
Speaker 1: show was edited by Sophie mckibbon and fact checked by
Speaker 1: Joseph Fridman. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Carlie mcgliorre Heather Fame,
Speaker 1: Julia Barton, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanik, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent,
Speaker 1: Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries and by me, Doctor Laurie Santos