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Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to welcome all of you to the LSE for this evening's event. My name is Elaine Fox and I'm professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and I'm director of the Oxford Centre for Emotions and Affective Neuroscience. And one of the things we're really interested in in that centre, the Ocean Lab, is happiness. So I'm absolutely delighted to be here to listen to Professor Paul Dolan this evening talking to us about happiness. Professor Paul Doolan will define happiness in terms of experiences of pleasure and purpose. He will describe how being happier.
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Stop it. You don't want to be giving it all away.
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That's all right. I won't give all away. Don't worry. You describe how being happier means allocating our attention more efficiently towards the things that bring us pleasure and purpose and away from the things that generate pain and pointlessness. Behavioral sciences tells us that most of what we do is not so much thought about, rather it simply comes about. So, by clever use of priming, I hear some of you, you may have heard this before. I think so. By clever use of priming, which I'm doing right now, defaults commitments and social norms, you too could become a lot happier without having actually to try to think very hard about it. You'll be happier by design. Paul is a professor of Behavioral Neuroscience in the Department of Social Policy and he's the author of Happiness by Design, Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life. So, just before we begin, for those Twitter users in the audience, the hashtag for today's event is lschappiness. So if any of you are tweeting, that's the hashtag you can use. I'd ask you at this point to please put your phones on silent so as not to disrupt the event. The evening's event is being recorded and will hopefully be made available as a podcast, subject to no technical difficulties, as usual. After the lecture, there will be a chance for you to put your questions to Paul. There will also be a book signing taking place following the event, and copy of Happiness by Design will be on sale in the foyer area and Paul will be available for book signing in the old theatre. But now would you please join me in welcoming Paul Dolan to the LSE to deliver his lecture, Happiness by Design. Thanks, Paul.
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Wow, thank you so much. Am I on? Can you hear me all right there at the back? Excellent, excellent. Yeah, it's nice to give a talk on home soil. Feel quite nervous actually, so I should say a few thank yous at the start. It's not like an Oscar ceremony, anything where I'm going to start gushing and crying. But I obviously want to thank my agent for getting me a fantastic book deal, Penguin, for doing a fantastic book. I love the COVID by the way. I've always said that that actually isn't true. I said that I didn't like it to begin with. Have we got the next. I need to press something to get the next slide up. Do I. Do I press something? Okay, I'll just leave it at that. Anyway, well, you can see the book. There's loads of people that I worked with. I can see many of them here. So I'm not going to thank them all now. They know who they are. I will thank Laura Kudrina, though, who last summer worked almost as hard as I did, finishing the book with me. And most of the academic insights are hers. No, actually, actually, no. She went and found out things that I was making up recently and some things that were true. So things have been actually going really well so far and there's been quite a few sales, but of course you can't please all the people all of the time. And I'd just like to read you a couple of words from an Amazon review. It's a great place to look at what people think of you and your work. Ah, there you go. Don't worry, don't worry, don't worry. You sure? Yeah, just making things worse, But thanks for trying. My only lesson from reading this book is that once renowned universities, I guess that means the lse, once seats of academic excellence, have slumped to the lowest common denominator. I guess that's me. Who would have seriously imagined a professor of happiness 30 years ago? Well, there you go. Well, let's cast our minds back 30 years. For those of us old enough, there was a miner strike, there were IRA bombs going off on mainland Britain. The Smiths released. Heaven knows I'm miserable now. And less significantly, Sir John Stone received the Nobel Prize in Economics for developing an accounting model that could be used to track economic activities. So, Dr. Stephen Lee, you're absolutely right. 30 years ago, it would have been unimaginable to have a professor of happiness, especially at the LSE. Fast forward 27 years to three years ago. And I gave my inaugural lecture here at the LSE in the Sheikhsayed in February 2011. And after that talk, someone said to me, you should write a book about that. I thought, well, yeah, maybe Kahneman can do it thinking fast and slow or something. Heard of it. And I Thought, yeah, well, okay, I'll try and see if I can gather up some of these insights into a book. And that's what I did. So three years on, here we are. Thanks again for coming and let me tell you a little bit about the book. So, well, actually you've been told everything about the book anyway from the intro. The first thing that I think it's important to do is to be clear about what happiness is because of course the term is used quite widely and different things are used. Subjective well being is a term that's favoured in the academic literature. Perhaps it makes it feel a bit more serious. Misery and suffering are actually really quite useful terms to use for policy making. By the way, as someone who's spent a lot of time around Whitehall and elsewhere, if you try to sell happiness measures and happiness measures, sometimes people look at you as if they're a little bit trivial and silly. But if you try to reduce suffering, who's not interested in that? You'd be a pretty sadistic person that wasn't interested in doing that. So language matters. But it's important that I think that we measure these things properly and as many of you will know, most of how we. So I'm just checking got my flies down. Most of I thought I could do that. I thought I could do that subtly, but I thought I'd just probably share that with you. Most of what we think we know about happiness comes from asking people global questions of the kind overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays? And it takes people on average about 3 seconds to answer that question. If you think about it is very fast. I'll save this one for later. It's very fast and clearly isn't an answer to the question that's being asked if you actually thought about overall satisfied life. It's a difficult, cognitively demanding question to answer. Most people just think, well, maybe I'm about a seven or an eight, maybe if I'm feeling lucky. So importantly though, I think those questions are construct the answers to those questions are largely constructions. Most of us don't routinely walk around thinking about how satisfied we are with our lives overall. We'll answer the question when it's asked of us. And actually most of what goes into the answer is not an assessment of how we feel, but much more of an assessment of how we think we should answer the question given the circumstances of our life. So I want to draw an important distinction between evaluations and Kahneman does this towards the end of thinking fast and slow and experiences which are much More directly located in how people feel moment to moment, day to day, as they engage in their activities. And I'm just going to give you a couple of stories that give you an insight into the distinction. I think that's important. Let's just talk about two friends. These are real people. I've got more than two friends, but these are two friends, one of whom I went for dinner with. And she spent the whole of the evening complaining about her job, her boss, her commute. Everything about her experience was miserable. And then without any hint of irony, at the end of dinner, she said, of course I love working where I work. Now that's actually not such an odd thing to do because on the one hand her experiences were telling her that her job was miserable, but the story that she told about her job was that it was a good one. She was working for a great company. It's somewhere that she'd always wanted to work. Other people were envious of her working there. How could she not be happy? So her evaluation of her work and her life was quite different to the experiences that she was having. Another friend. I'm not sure this is the best advert for the book, especially if I've got any married couples in the room, but this friend split up with her boyfriend of seven years after reading the book. He was a great guy, actually. I'm sure he is still a great guy. I'm sure he's absolutely lovely, you know, handsome and all those things, great job and everything. But when she paid attention to the experiences, they weren't consistent with the story that was being told. And both of those people have now since changed jobs and partners and are happier as a result because they paid attention to the experiences, the feedback for how things were making them feel day to day, moment to moment, rather than the stories that we're told. It's really interesting that these stories can be quite pervasive and they start from a very early age. We have a six year old daughter, we also have a five year old son. But our daughter was saying, when we're going to see granddad again. That's my wife's mum. Dad. Mum. Yeah. It's a strange family. I'm sure there's something Freudian in what I just said there, Elaine, maybe you can make a note of that, Granddad. And she said, when are we going to see him again? And my wife asked, why do you want to go and see him? Because he's quite ill and they don't have an especially good time when they go. And she said because we haven't seen him for a while. It's really interesting because we hadn't said that there's something about the story that we need to go and see him regularly, but it's obviously one that she's picked up from somewhere as something that we ought to do. Now, it's not to say that we ought not to do that, but it's not directly consistent with the experiences that the kids are having when they're going to. So these stories are quite pervasive and very strong. So I think we should be paying much more attention to our experiences, but not just. And most of the experience measures that we talk about when we measure happiness are experiences of affective states, our emotions, basically joy, contentment on the one hand, and a lot more negative adjectives, worry, stress, anger, anxiety, and so on on the other. And what I'm arguing in the book is that we should be considering another important category of experiences that are not just about pleasure, shorthand for pain and pleasure and all the things that we feel as emotions, but purpose. Experiences of things that we find fulfilling, worthwhile and meaningful, and the obverse, futile and pointless that sit alongside experiences of fun. And the argument is that happy lives are ones that contain a good balance, not in equal measure and not the same for everybody, but the right balance between experiences of pleasure on the one hand and purpose on the other. So a lot of our research is informed by our own personal experiences. And coming from the East End, I kind of grew up around a lot of experiences of pleasure, but very few people having, well, at least jobs that they found purposeful. And you come to a learned institution like the LSC or other places that I've worked before, and you see lots of people that have lots of purpose but not very much pleasure. And so I think each of those lives could be made happier by a different combination of pleasure and purpose. So it's all right, by the way, for the LSE academics here to have some fun once in a while. It won't kill you. And if it does, at least you died happy. So I will now just. I've got another. Another little thing to say about Dr. Stephen Lee. This is. This is. This is the final quote I will read. This is one of the worst books I have ever read on any subject. The read offered me only pointless pain, but I backed through this awful book on happiness in order to write a review and warn others. Now, see, I think, Stephen, that actually you're wrong about that. I think writing that review gave you a lot of pleasure and I can see a whole lot of purpose in that. He's having a bloody great time writing that, isn't he? Whoever he is, he probably knows me. He's always bound to know me. He's getting a lot of pleasure and purpose from that. He's actually living proof of the book without even knowing it actually. Who writes a review anyway, right? You've got to be a bit. You gotta be a bit fucking weird, right? I mean, there can only be purpose in doing that, right? You're warning others, you're doing all these things that give you experiences of purpose. That's what happy lives contain. Good. So you're a very happy man. So I want to just finish on the purpose thing before then moving on to the second part of the first part of the book. I think experiences and purpose are critical to being happy overall, particularly at work. And I think we should be thinking much more about how within workplaces we can think about making activities that people engage in feel purposeful if they don't always feel like they're pleasurable. And particularly giving feedback. A lot of people work in places where they start projects that get terminated or cancelled for whatever reason and there's no feedback that that's been worth it in any sense. So I think it's quite critical that we start to do that. And I'm hoping that measures of experiences of individual purpose will become important. I should just emphasize that it's experiences of purpose that I'm talking about. That's the contribution, not evaluations of how meaningful life is. I'm interested in the meaning of moments, not the meaning of life. The meaning of moment shows up when I'm listening to my kids read the same story for the 15th time when I'm helping them tie their shoelaces, when I'm trying to teach them the times tables. That's where my experiences of purpose as a father show up. Not when I evaluate my life and the story that I tell about how purposeful it is to be a father. That's a construction, it's a narrative, it's a story. I want to locate these experiences much more directly in people's experiences. Okay, let me then move on. I'm going to talk for another five minutes. Is that about right? Perfect. So actually I should have said at the outset that the book is essentially in two parts. There's a kind of academic contribution, if you like, in the first part and then it's more prescriptive and self helpy in the second part. Obviously the self help book to end all self Help books. And I'll explain why maybe later on. But the second part of the first part is to then consider if we know now what happiness is and how we should be measuring it and thinking about experiences of pleasure and purpose, what determines it. And most research today has essentially tried to relate inputs to outputs. Does money make people happy? Does being married? There's more sex. As if there's a direct association between that stimulus, the input and the output of happiness. But anyone trained in Econ 101 or knows anything about companies knows that you don't just get land, labor, capital and all the inputs and suddenly widgets emerge. There's a production process that converts the inputs into the output. And my argument is that we do the same when we generate happiness. There's a production process that converts money, marriage and sex into the output of happiness. Well, what does that production process look like? What's the mechanism by which we produce output? Well, essentially the answer is attention. It's what we pay attention to. So the answer to the question of whether more money, more marriage and more sex make you happy is answered by, well, it depends how much attention you pay them. Now interestingly, pay attention right now. That implies that it's a scarce resource because if you pay attention to one thing, by definition you're not paying attention to something else. So the short answer to being happiest of all is to allocate attention efficiently. And the short answer to why people aren't as happy as they might otherwise be is they make errors about where they will pay attention and the things that will continue to draw attention to themselves in the experiences of their lives. As Elaine alluded to. Basically the last two decades of research in neuroscience, economics and psychology have taught us that most of what we do simply comes about, rather than being thought about, were driven by unconscious and automatic processes. You're making about two to ten thousand decisions every day. You're not thinking about most of those. They're automated processes largely through habits. And so again, in short, if you want to be happier, you're not going to get very far by thinking yourself. So this is why every single self help book that you will ever read tells you to think differently. He'll say like be positive. It's like, yeah, no shit, I kind of worked that bit out. How do I actually do that? And of course you don't know how to do that. It makes you more miserable when you buy another self help book. The biggest single factor predicting the purchase of a self help book is having bought a self help book in the last 12 months. So the US subtitle, by the way, for the book is quite I spent a lot of time talking about finding pleasure and purpose in everyday life, which is the subtitle for the uk. The US subtitle is change what you do, not how you think. As it was about to go to press, the US editor said Americans won't get that. It's too vague. They need to be directed what to do. So it's change what you do, not how you think. And so a lot of time in the second part of the book is spent thinking about how you can essentially organize your life in ways that make it easier for you to be happier without having to think too hard about it. It's really interesting that there's this kind of almost like this Protestant work ethic thing about most things and also happiness that you've got to work at it. It's got to be effortful. I have no idea why. If I can make being happier easier or you can make being happier for yourselves easier, I'm up for that. See why I've got to work it. What you need to work at is the design of your environments, of your situations, of your context, organizing your life in ways that just make it easier for you to do things that you want to. The simple behavioral science insight, the very simple one, is if you want to do something, make it easier, and if you don't want to do something, make it harder. But you think about the number of things you do in your life, and policymakers too. We make it very easy for people to do things we don't want them to and very hard for them to do the things that we do. So I could go on for a lot longer. I won't, because we're going to break this up into segments. I had it in my mind to finish around 7 o'. Clock. That's pretty much where I shall finish. That's the first part of the book covered. Thank you very much.