← The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos
The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos
What We Still Get Wrong About Happiness (Live at Dartmouth)
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- [00:00]
Dr. Laurie Santos
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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Host of Happiness Lab / Podcast Narrator
Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. We're taking a break from our Happiness Hot Take series to bring you a special treat. If you listened to last week's episode, you know that I recently got to interview happiness historian Darren McMahon, who. Who told me all about the history of the idea of the pursuit of happiness. Well, in this episode, I'll be continuing my conversation with Darren, but this time he'll be interviewing me. You'll get to hear a live conversation that we had at Darren's home institution of Dartmouth College as part of the Nelson A. Rockefeller center at Dartmouth's public conversations on the pursuit of happiness. We talked about all things happiness science, like what practices we can do to really feel better, and some thoughts I've had about new technologies and AI. It was a wide ranging and super fun conversation, so I couldn't wait to share it with all my podcast fans. So enjoy this special episode of my conversation with Darren McMahon at Dartmouth College. Our minds are constantly telling us what
- [01:13]
Dr. Laurie Santos
to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the
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Host of Happiness Lab / Podcast Narrator
science of the mind can point us
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Dr. Laurie Santos
all back in the right direction.
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Host of Happiness Lab / Podcast Narrator
You're listening to the Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos.
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Darren McMahon
This is the second in our series on the winning of the pursuit of happiness, both in the past and the present, and maybe the future. Today we have Lori Santos, and I'm just delighted to have you here, Laurie. Last week, Laurie very kindly invited me to be on the podcast and to talk about happiness in the 18th century. Today, I think we're gonna talk about the pursuit of happiness in the 21st. But feel free to bring history into it if you feel so moved.
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Dr. Laurie Santos
Oh, yeah, we're going, forefather.
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Darren McMahon
So Laurie's known as an authority on the science of happiness and pursuit of happiness, but you cut your teeth as a psychologist and researcher studying animal behavior, I think particularly dogs. And I'd love to hear, I mean, I get as a dog lover, the link between dogs and the pursuit of happiness. But I'd love to hear if there's a link between the study of animals and the pursuit of happiness or how you got from one to the other.
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Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the biggest link between animals and happiness is that animals, definitely dogs, make us really happy. They keep us moving. They make us mindful. Lots of evidence showing that dog owners are happy. So if you need one quick happiness tip, get a dog to make you happy.
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Darren McMahon
Not a cat.
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Dr. Laurie Santos
Cats too. Less research on cats, interestingly, but definitely cats make you happier as well. But I think the psychological connection is one of the reasons I was studying animals is that I've long been interested in the kinds of ways that our minds lead us astray. Most people study animals to try to figure out whether or not animals are as smart as humans. But I spent a lot of my time studying whether or not animals were as dumb as people were and some of the ways that people are dumb. I did this with monkeys, studying the economic errors that we have and trying to see whether monkeys show those too. With dogs, we were really focused on social errors. Do dogs imitate to the point that they're doing really irrational things in some of the same ways as humans do? And the connection between that and the happiness work is that my take on happiness has always been that one of the reasons we're not as happy as we can be isn't that we're not working towards it. We're working very hard towards becoming happier. But we're often doing it in the wrong way because our minds are lying to us about the kinds of things that we need to do to be happier. And so in some ways this work on animals, which is really what it is, that makes our minds go awry. It's very similar to the way I think about happiness that's so interesting.
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Darren McMahon
Is there actually work on the well being of animals? I always point out that Darwin writes about some horses that are sort of ill tempered and some that are cheery. And he begins to speculate along those lines. And I don't know if there's actual work in the lab.
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Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, there's lots of work trying to look at what animals feel. Right. This is really important even for animal researchers who are trying to make animals lives better and thinking about animal welfare and so on. The problem with animals and thinking about animal happiness is that the way I know even if you daren are happy is that I ask you often in some very formalized psychometric survey where I ask you about your life experiences and your life satisfaction and so on. But ultimately I don't really have a way objectively to find out if you're happy. You have to tell me. And the problem with animals is as much as we ask them, they tend not to tell us directly. Lacking verbal language, it's really hard for us to find out whether or not animals are happy. And so I think that's been the main limitation of why there's not a whole field of Animal well being research that's as robust as the research in humans is very hard for them to tell us.
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Darren McMahon
But if I know a psychologist, that won't stop them.
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Dr. Laurie Santos
That's true, that's true.
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Darren McMahon
So you begin with animals and then I think it's in 2018 you launched this great course, Psychology and the Good Life. I'm sure you've answered this a million times, but I'm curious how that came about. Had you taught on well being prior to that point, what was the impetus? And then I'd be particularly interested to know how the course has changed as you've taught it, because I believe you're still teaching it now.
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Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, that's right. The pivot to thinking about about well being came with a pivot in my role at Yale. So for most of my time at Yale, I was a professor at the front of a classroom much like this. I interacted a lot with students, but I was a little bit distant from them. I was kind of teaching them, but didn't really see closely what was happening in student life. That all changed when I became what's called a head of college on Yale's campus. These are faculty members who live functionally in the dorm communities with students. Yale is kind of like one of these weird colleges like Hogwarts and Harry Potter where there's like Gryffindor and Slytherin, these mini colleges within a college. Was head of Silliman College, no relation to Slytherin, even though it sounds very similar. But that meant that as a faculty member, I for the first time was seeing student life really closely. I was eating the students in the dining hall, I was hanging out with them in the coffee shop and I just didn't like what I was seeing. Like I was seeing this so called college student mental health crisis up close and personal. Where the stats when I first started were that in 2018, more than 40% of college students reported being too depressed to function most days. Not just Yale students, but nationally more than 60% said that were overwhelmingly anxious. More than one in ten had seriously considered suicide in the last six months. This was a staggering amount of suffering that was happening on campus and it was happening in my community. Right? I'm this benevolent aunt who's hanging out with students trying to make this community great. And I was just watching my students suffer from panic attacks or worse. And that made me really question what my institution was doing in terms of mental health. I was kind of like, we as faculty members assume that you students are learning computer science or Chaucer or whatever we're teaching you. And how can that be true if more than two thirds of you are too anxious to function most days, or if you or your teammate or your roommate is seriously considering suicide? It just seemed like there was this disconnect between what we were expecting students to be learning and the real level of suffering that I was seeing in the community. And so I was just like, I have to take action. And being a nerdy psychologist, there were limited ways I could take action, but I could teach a new class. And I had already had a little bit of experience in this field of happiness science, or what psychologists call positive psychology. I had done some work with Marty Seligman, who's often thought of as, like, the leader of the field. So I had a bit of background in it, and so I thought, you know, let me just teach a new intro class. I'll just make a new class about this stuff. But the difference with this class that I was teaching is that I wanted it to be practical. I wanted it to be a skills learning class where students were learning strategies they could use if they were feeling burned out or stressed and so on. It was a new class on campus, though, so I thought I'd show up and 40 students would be in a classroom, which is typical for a Yale psych class. I did not expect the only place to teach it on campus would be our concert hall. There was also the football stadium, but to be fair, January football stadium was not an awesome spot to teach a twice a week class. Yeah, so that's the history really came out of seeing this need on campus and recognizing that we, as, I don't know, university president felt like we weren't doing our job. We were just, like, pretending it was fine and kind of holding it aside. And I really wanted to give students skills they could use.
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Darren McMahon
So interesting. You know, it's funny, my late godfather was close friends with Lorraine Siggins, who was director of Mental health at Yale for years. And I remember Lorraine saying at one point her office was seeing more than half the undergraduates, and that one had told her that he had mortgaged his childhood in order to get into Yale. And, you know, that realization of the stress that we put our young people through and the stress they take on, it's just overwhelming. You know, you make a point that I often try to highlight, and that is that all this talk about happiness in the news and, you know, elsewhere, it's not necessarily a good sign.
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Danny Blanchflower
Right.
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Darren McMahon
It reflects a kind of underlying anxiety and unhappiness, which is I think says a lot about our time. Has that course changed? I mean, so that's the initial impetus, but has it evolved? Have things gotten better?
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Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, a bit. One of the things that's changed is the focus that I've had. The nice thing about having a quarter of the entire Yale student body in your classroom is that you can see what works, what they resonate with and what's working less. Well, one of the things I consistently hear from my students about the stuff that they take away with them in the course. What I'm most interested in is what are the strategies you're going to use? You heard about all these different strategies, menu of different tools you can use to feel better. Which are you actually using? Which are you putting into effect in your own life? The ones I consistently heard that students were using all the time were strategies that we had to regulate and navigate. Self talk. Right. The stuff in your head, I'm not good enough, I'm screwing up, I should be doing more that like hustle, culture, voice that's out there in society that gets embedded in your head. That's the thing that I think my students needed some help with. And so we talk a lot about strategies you can use to gain more self compassion, strategies you can use to get some psychological distance from the problems that are coming up in your life. And those were the tools that I think my students were using more and more. And so the class has shown shifted to focus more on some of those things. I think when people classically hear about the work in positive psychology, they hear things like meditate or write in your gratitude journal. And those things are great. But I think what my students really needed help with was like, when I'm beating myself up, how can I talk to myself in a healthier way? And those really resonated.
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Darren McMahon
So some basic cognitive behavioral therapy, basically.
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Dr. Laurie Santos
I mean, what we do in the class really is the kind of skills building that you learn with a good therapist. Right. Cognitive behavior therapy is really changing your thought patterns, changing your relationship to your thought patterns, finding ways to regulate your emotions better. That's functionally the tools that we're teaching in a classroom. And I think that's important. It is the case that sometimes for certain issues in life, you need a one on one therapy session to gain these skills. But these skills are also, I don't want to say they're not hard because they're hard to put into effect in the moment, but they're pretty straightforward. And this is one of the insights that I've had teaching this stuff is like, we should be teaching this stuff earlier and earlier because none of this stuff is rocket science. Like, these basic emotion regulation strategies are ones that I think we should be teaching definitely in middle school, but maybe even earlier.
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Darren McMahon
I mean, Yale's done wonderful work introducing these kind of emotional skill building into elementary schools. Right.
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Dr. Laurie Santos
And I think it can come earlier and earlier. There's been so many cool opportunities that came from teaching this course that I didn't expect. But one of the most cool ones was that I got to work with Sesame Workshop, which is the group that runs Sesame street, and think about how we can get these strategies out to little, little kids. And what I realized is like, oh my gosh. One of the strategies I teach students is this idea of affect labeling, which is like, just give a label to what you're feeling. I'm feeling frustrated, I'm feeling overwhelmed. I'm feeling sad. I'm feeling lonely. Whatever it is, a word can help you get some insight into exactly what you're feeling, and it can also help you get some insight into how to fix it. The fix for when you're feeling lonely is totally different than the fix for when you're feeling overwhelmed. But if you're just like, oh, I don't feel, then you don't know what to do. But that's a strategy that you can teach a three to five year old. Maybe not with big words like overwhelmed and frustrated, but you can try. In fact, Elmo was teaching kids about frustrated. That was one of the words that Elmo was learning. So it's like, if we could just get that stuff in earlier, we'd be giving people tools they could use.
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Darren McMahon
Well, you know, my five year old daughter then taught me and I got that education a little late perhaps, but still got it nonetheless. So thank you. We human beings are really bad at knowing what will make us happy, and we may make bad choices accordingly. And you, Laurie, are not shy at all at pointing out what people do wrong in terms of pursuing happiness. And, you know, while we have you, can you give us a few quick tips on what not to do?
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Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, because I'm staring out at a bunch of undergrads. It looks like I'll give the one that my college students get wrong the most, which is the connection between money and happiness. Most of you are here at a place like Dartmouth College because you want to, like, earn a lot of money later on and. And turns out there is a connection between money and happiness. But that connection only exists if you really don't have any Money. If you are currently living below the poverty line and I give you more money, yes, that's going to make your life a lot easier. You will be happier. But this connection between money and happiness seems to level off. Researchers fight about exactly where it levels off. Back in a very famous paper in 2010, folks thought it leveled off around US$75,000. In modern day money, that probably is equivalent of like $110,000 people. Whether the slope after that point is totally flat or whether it goes up a minuscule amount over time. But the point is like, it just isn't helping your happiness that much to get more money after a certain point. And that's one that I just feel like is so hard to take into account. I'm looking at a room of students that I imagine some of you are seniors and thinking about different job offers. Maybe you're lucky enough to have multiple ones. And my guess is the first thing you look at is what's the salary? And you're twiddling about like, ooh, which one should I pick? And Maybe I'll get 5,000 extra dollars or whatever, and it's just not gonna matter at all. What will matter? What is your social connection gonna look like at work? One of the biggest predictors of happiness overall and happiness at work is the yes or no answer to the question, do you have a best friend at work? Another big predictor of your happiness at work is whether or not you have a lot of free time. This is some lovely work by Ashley Willins at Harvard Business School on the power of what's called time affluence. The sense that you feel wealthy in time. So much more important to have time wealth than monetary wealth, even interestingly at lower actually, because we're talking with so many folks at public policy here. Ashley's pushed the policy that one way to solve the kind of happiness crisis and so many other crises that come up in low income populations is actually to give low income individuals more time back. Right? Because if you're thinking about what happens if you're low income, you're driving Uber, or maybe you don't even have a car, so you're commuting two hours to work and so on. That is, if we could solve the time crisis, we might actually help them psychologically and maybe even monetarily down the line too. But this isn't how we think. We're not like, if I want to be happier, let me find a life that gives me lots more time. We're just like, money, money, money achievement, achievement Achievement, and it's not going to move the needle in the way we think.
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Darren McMahon
So money, not unimportant, but not as important as people think.
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Dr. Laurie Santos
It's so insidious for the way our mind works, right? Because it is important for a while. Like, if you're an undergrad and you're not making any money or like me when I was, like, a poor grad student, it was the case that, you know, in grad school, I was earning enough that I was not below the poverty line, but more money was definitely making me happier. I wasn't at that threshold. So you learn that reward relationship. You're like, oh, my gosh, more money, more happy. But then when it levels off, you stop realizing that that's the case. And so what happens when you're getting more money and it's not moving the needle? You don't think, oh, I must have been wrong about that relationship between money and happiness. You just think, oh, I was wrong about the amount of money I need. I need way more money to be happy. In fact, one of my favorite surveys, this is Sonia Lubomirsky cites this in her book is you ask people who are earning $30,000, is that enough to be happy? Those folks say, no. They say, okay, what amount of money would you earn? That, like, if you were getting that amount, you'd just be happy. And this was years ago, but folks that earning $30,000 say, well, if I could just get $50,000 and I'd just be happy, I wouldn't ever need another penny more. But you do the same survey with people who are earning $100,000. You ask them, is that enough? They say, no. You say, how much do you need? Those folks say, I need $250,000 to be happy. Now, I'm looking at smart Dartmouth students who can do the math in their head. And you realize, wait, it's not like you get there. It show the difference between what you think you need and what you have is going up. As you get more money, it's not going less, right? And so I think this is the insidious thing about money is we don't realize, like, oh, I was wrong. It must be something else that I need. We think, like, it's still money. I just need way more than I think.
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Host of Happiness Lab / Podcast Narrator
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Darren McMahon
so pursuing happiness through money maybe doesn't quite work. That's one of the wrong pursuits, right? What should we be doing? How should we.
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Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. Well here's one that I think with your focus on the 18th century, you will love. Which is another thing we get wrong about happiness is we think happiness is about us. It's about me, me, me. And I think this is especially true in the modern individualist culture where we find ourselves and at a school like this. To be honest, many of you students are here because you focused on your studies and what you needed and getting your stuff up. It wasn't what are you doing to help the country? What are you doing to help the world? What are you doing to help your brothers and sisters is like you, you, you. And the research just consistently shows us that this is not the path to happiness. And I think this is something that modern culture gets so wrong. If you go on TikTok, you will see somewhere something about self care or treat yourself or me, me, me. Right. But if you look at the happiness research, that's just not what predicts people's happiness. Happiness is about being other oriented, so controlled for income. People who donate more money to charity are happier than those who self report not donating anything. Same with volunteers for your time. Controlling for the amount of free time you have, it just seems like doing stuff for others makes you happier. Those are correlations. So you could be like, well maybe it's that doing nice stuff for other people makes you happy. But it could also be that just if you're happy, you do nice stuff for other people. And we know that's an effect. It's what's called the feel good, do good effect. If you're like in a good mood, you want doing nicer stuff for other people. But there are also studies that they're very cute, they force people to do nice stuff for others, and then they test what happens to your happiness. And what you find is that even when you're forced to do something nice for other people, you wind up feeling better after doing that. And so I think this is one that we consistently get wrong in the modern day. And as I said, Darren, this is one that I think you'll appreciate, because the forefathers, you know, they were good about individual pleasure, but they also got that even just the whole concept of happiness was about everybody's happiness. And this is something we really miss today.
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Darren McMahon
Yeah. One thing that comes very clear is when people in the 18th century talk about the pursuit of happiness, they don't mean the pursuit of quanta of pleasure. They mean the pursuit of a life well lived. And in order to sort of access that, they draw really deeply on wisdom traditions. So in their case, Greek and Roman philosophy as well as religious traditions. Right. And while you were speaking, I was thinking of that wonderful Chinese proverb, and I won't get it quite right, but it's something to the effect that if you want to be happy for an hour, take a nap, if you want to be happy for a day, go fishing, and if you want to be happy for a lifetime, then help others. And that gets at the way in which so many of the world's wisdom and spiritual traditions have deep lessons about how to pursue happiness embedded. And I've heard you say a little bit like John Haidt, who talks about the kind of modern truth and ancient wisdom, that much of what positive psychologists do is to reaffirm or validate insights that we've already known. But they've just put a modern kind of scientific imprimatur on them, which is important. But nonetheless, the knowledge itself may not be new.
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Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. And I think that that's a really important thing to do. Right. I think my scientist hat sometimes is embarrassed. Right. Because it's like we positive psychologists and psychologists and behavioral scientists in general have gone out and test all these things that scholars have been talking about since the time of Aristotle, and we're like, oh my gosh, it turns out that habit's really good to form. We're doing nice things for Other people. It makes you happy. Mindfulness and being present, that's awesome. Folks have been saying that for thousands of years. And so on the one hand, it's like, really, this is the modern science is like you're just showing us what these folks were saying forever. That's now true. But I think it's important to do because it didn't necessarily have to be that way. And sometimes the ancient traditions were just wrong. Think of your favorite ancient tradition. You'll realize some of it we just don't really subscribe to in the same way today. And so I think that that stuff is really important, is asking the question, are we doing it right? And sometimes when we look, we realize we're doing it wrong. This one isn't so much an ancient tradition, but it's another thing that's really popular in the culture right now. It just drives me so crazy is the TikTok trend about manifesting you. All the undergrads are nodding like, oh, I'm just going to, like, I want to get good grades this semester, so I'm just going to manifest it. I'm just going to envision it. Right, right. Turns out it's not just that manifesting is neutral or that it doesn't work. It actively causes the thing that you want to get further away. How does it do that? Well, it does that through a funny trick of the mind. It does that through the way your mind images different rewards and the way your reward system works. So let's say I want to get fit, right? This is something I've been thinking about. I've been trying to go with my trainer, go once a week. I want to get a little bit fitter. Right. So I manifest, I think, like, oh, how awesome it would be if I was fit. Oh, my gosh, my clothes would fit better and, like, I'd have stronger muscles. What I'm doing there is I'm vividly imagining that I've already gotten the reward that I've already put in all the work I need to put in. And I have that good thing already. And a funny thing about our minds is, like, when we image stuff really closely, there's part of our brain that thinks we already got that. There's a wonderful study by Kerry Morwedge and colleagues that test this directly with food. He either has you imagine carefully putting quarters into a slot like you're going to do your laundry, or imagine slowly eating one M&M at a time. And you do this for a while and then the experiment is that you come out and there's a bowl of M and Ms. And the question is, how many MMs do you eat? And what you find is that when you've already imagined really carefully eating all these MMs, the last thing you want to do is eat more M and Ms. You kind of have envisioned what that reward would feel like, so you don't need it anymore. You don't need to take the action to get it. And research by Gabrielle Oettingen and colleague finds that the same thing happens when manifesting. If you manifest, oh my gosh, I want to get great grades, part of your brain thinks you got those great grades, so you don't take as much time to study, you don't work as hard. She finds that students who manifest getting fitter actually go to the gym less often. So it's not just that manifesting is like, oh, it doesn't work. It's like this woo woo thing. It's actively bad. But the good thing is that there's a way you can do it better. Gabrielle Oettingham shows how this works, which is just in addition to kind of thinking very vividly about the reward, you also think, hmm, what are the obstacles that are getting me to that reward? And you imagine that and you're like, oh, I don't have gym shorts or I, I like don't have my books to study. Or like, there's four parties this weekend, I'm never going to have time to read the book I need to read that causes you to think about how you can overcome those obstacles. You can use manifesting. Well, it's just that like the TikTok version drives us astray. And so the whole point of that is that it is the case that sometimes science goes out and they study things that are out there in the public ether that scholars have been thinking about for a while. And they're like, yep, everybody was right. But sometimes we look and we realize that the popular wisdom is just wrong. And that's where I think science can help us get on a better.
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Darren McMahon
That's wonderful. And it's a perfect segue to where I wanted to go next. This last autumn in October, Professor Danny Blanchflower, who is here in the audience and colleagues put together this wonderful conference with the United nations around the crisis in youth well being. And as Danny has shown and others like Gene Twange and John Haidt, who are also at the conference, that crisis is real. And moreover, it shows up in the data at right the same time that the cell phone becomes kind of broadly accessible and so I'm wondering if you might want to comment and I'm hoping you're not sponsored by Meta. I'm hoping we sponsored by Meta.
- [25:31]
Dr. Laurie Santos
One thing we have Meta sponsorship, but yes. So I think it's important when talking about technology and social media and cell phones and how they're affecting our well being to remember that cell phones are just a tool. This is a technology, we could use it in all kinds of different ways. We could use our phones to call a friend, to donate money to a good cause, to do a meditation app. It could be used for good stuff. It's just the problem is we don't tend to use it for good stuff. Basically, all the different strategies I talk about, about how to. If you look at how we tend to use technology, it leads us astray. Let's take the one that I find most ironic, which is social connection. Every available study of happy people suggests that happy people are more social. Quickest intervention, other than getting a dog you could do to be happier is to get a friend or talk to a human or be socially connected in any way. Our phones were built to literally do that. It's a phone. The whole purpose of a phone is to call someone. How do we normally spend it? Staring at it while ignoring the people in real life around us. Deep irony that these tools that were meant to help us connect often help us not connect. And there's some lovely work by folks like Liz Dunn and others showing just how much phones steal our attention when we're around other people. Liz does this lovely study where she puts people in a waiting room. Imagine Darren and I, who are sitting up on the stage, we're in a waiting room together. We could just chat with each other. But if we have our phones out, what are we going to do? We're not going to chat with one another, we're going to look at our phones. And Liz just does this clever study where she measures how much smiling happens between people in a room together. You know, maybe the basic tiniest unit of social connection. And she finds like a 30% reduction in smiling when people have their phones available to them in this waiting room. Right. Imagine that 30% multiplied by our whole society walking around on campus and this kind of stuff. So we socially connect less. Another big one, especially for young people. You sleep less because you have your technology out. I think the most evil thing cell phone companies ever did was to put an alarm clock in cell phones because it gives us an excuse to have it right near us in bed. And when we wake up in the middle of the night, we look at it and we are tempted by it and so on. I think it also makes us way less present over time. But mindfulness, kind of noticing where you are just being in your space, so much evidence that this boosts our happiness. We never have moments to be mindful. You know, probably even some of you walking over here. Darren, you and I are talking on this beautiful spring day where Dartmouth's campus is just gorgeous right now. Guessing some of you didn't even notice that. Why? Because you were staring at whatever was going on in your phone. Right? Not to mention all the anxiety provoking information about the news and everything else. So it's just a technology. It's just one that we tend to use in ways that make us miserable. And the coolest finding that I've heard most recently this actually I learned on a podcast with Mahmoudsh Zamarudi, who's a journalist who has been thinking a lot about the effects of technology in the ways people typically thought about, about attention and all this stuff. But recently she's become interested in the way technology shapes our physical body. Not like what we're thinking in our mental health, but our physical health. And she talks about research showing this connection between our core muscles and our adrenal glands, like our stress system. And if you think of the way we often sit when we are on our phone, I will demonstrate for those of you who are not on your phone right now. It is like this. It is in what if I'm hunching over in what's called the cashew posture. It turns out that this is a posture that is literally stimulating our stress system. And Zamaruti actually claims that, like, maybe a lot of the mental health crisis that we are getting with our phones is actually just the way we are sitting in our physical bodies and our physical. So everyone in the room right now is now straightening up and like getting into the right position. But yeah, she argues that we might be able to solve some of this if we think about the way technology is changing our very posture.
- [29:19]
Darren McMahon
Neither of us are policy people. I'm a historian, you're a psychologist. And yet we're here under the auspices of the Rockefeller center on Public Policy. Our director is right here. I feel obligated to ask a question about public policy. If you were advisor to a king for the day, what would you tell them about things we could do at the macro level to improve well being in the United States?
- [29:39]
Dr. Laurie Santos
I'm so glad you asked me that because sometimes a lot of this work Comes off as saying the following thing. Here are these strategies you can use as individuals to feel happier. Write in your gratitude journal. Use these self talk strategies and that's it. Good. We can ignore the fact that there's many structures around us and governments and companies and institutions that are actively making it harder to be happy happier. And I think that that's just a misnomer. It is the case that we can use individual strategies to get happier, but it would be so much easier to employ those individual strategies if we had the institutions and governments around us helping us. And we as psychologists don't often get to pontificate about that. So I'm excited to pontificate about that. What do we know about the policy implications of what we've learned in happiness? We talked about this connection between money and happiness where money after a certain level doesn't make you happy happy, but money under a certain level really, really, really doesn't make you happy. I think the happiness science is super clear about the powerful impact that a universal basic income could have on both levels. If you give low income people more money, it will necessarily make them happy. If you have to tax higher income people to get that money, it's going to have absolutely no effect on their happiness. It's just super, super clear. Another big policy implication is that social connection really matters for happiness happiness. I think there's many ways that public policy can influence social connection. Here I'm channeling great folks like Robert Putnam and others who've long talked about the power of things like third spaces, literal spaces that aren't work or school or something, or home, places where you can get together with other people. These are things that governments can do is just make it easier for people to have these spaces. And in empirical cases where people have done that, we've seen huge impacts in terms of more connection, more happiness, but I think even more conversations across the political line, which can help a lot. Finally, we talked a lot about the power of time and the importance of time affluence. I think this is a lever that public policy can use that it often doesn't think about because we forget the importance of time. But even things like a four day work week, which even economists are now telling us, wow, four day work week makes workers more productive. They get more of the bottom line stuff done and they also have time to rest and do other things can be super powerful powerful. Finally, I'll say that I think one of the things we forget is that being happy leads to doing nice things for others and kind of doing what the forefathers wanted, which is like being good in terms of your civic life, living a good life not for yourself, but for everyone else. There's lots of new work just showing that a really great way to get people to fight for what's good in the world, to fix the structures around them, is just to make sure they're in a positive mood and feeling happy. This is some lovely work by Kushlev at Georgetown that asks the question of, well, who's going out and, like, doing the stuff? Who's going to, like, climate protests? Or he was doing this work around the time of the Black Lives Matter, and he's like, who's going to those protests and, like, fighting for social justice. And what he finds is, it's not what you think. You might assume, like, who's going to a climate protest? It must be somebody who's really anxious about climate. Turns out, no, it's the people who are least anxious. The people who have the most positive mood. They're the ones getting out to. And in some ways, you didn't need to know that study to know that fact. Like, if you think of when you're just feeling overwhelmed and in a really bad space, you're not out there trying to fix the world, you're just, like, trying to deal. But it does mean that this connection between individual happiness and civic happiness is an important one. But if we give people the tools and the skills to promote their individual happiness, it's going to give them the bandwidth to fix the bigger stuff. And so I think policymakers need to realize that it's not just that welfare at the individual level is a policy goal. It might be a policy tool to help people to do better more broadly.
- [33:28]
Host of Happiness Lab / Podcast Narrator
It's time for a break, but Darren and I will be back with more conversation when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment.
- [33:42]
Darren McMahon
Well, I have more questions than I have time, and I'm mindful. I want to open it up to folks. The Dartmouth tradition is that a student asks the first question. And so if there's a bold student.
- [33:53]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Hi. Thank you for being here. My name is Mia. I'm a first year student. I was wondering, what do you think the relationship is between, like, comparison and happiness? And to what extent can you really separate your happiness from evaluating it in comparison to someone else's? Like, like, how can a college student derive their own happiness without thinking, oh, I'll be happier if my life looked like so and so's Totally so. Here's another dumb feature about how the mind works when it comes to happiness. And how the mind works just in general is not just true of happiness is just like human mind writ large. We don't think about anything in objective terms. We only think about stuff relative. We are here in this room with kind of brightish, artificial, artificial lights. When you walk outside into the slightly darker hallway, you'll feel like, oh my gosh, it's so dark. It's not that the hallway is dark, it's just, it's brighter in here. You don't think of the light in terms of its objective properties. You think of it relative to another space. Right? This is just how we think about everything, including our own level of whatever our grades, our beauty, our salary. We can't even understand them in objective terms. We only can think about them in relative terms. And our brains have this other insidious property, which is that we tend never to do that relative comparison towards things that we're better at. So we tend to look at the person that makes us feel worst about ourselves. My favorite nerdy example of this is a sports example. Researchers looked at Olympic medalists on the stand and their emotional expression. So the gold medalists, super happy, really excited, right? What about the silver medalist? They're not just like ever so slightly less happy than the gold medalist. If you do analyses of their facial muscles, what you find is that silver medalists are shifting, showing emotions like contempt, deep sadness. They're not like little less happy, they're miserable. Why? They just feel like a total loser. They're just looking to the gold medalist and feeling awful. Right? You can be in objectively the best circumstances in life and if your mind finds the one person that's better than you, it's going to look to that person and do it. I consulted very briefly for a NBA team with basketball players, which is funny because like, I don't know anything about basketball or anything about sports in general. And so I have to figure out ways to talk these basketball, basketball players. But we were talking about the insidiousness of social comparison, even at the highest level in the NBA. And I was asking them who their comparison points were. I was like, who's your comparison point for salary right now? And at the time they were like, oh, it's Steph Curry. And I was like, who's your comparison point for three point shots? And they're like, Steph Curry. And I was like, who is your comparison for height? And they're like, oh, it was like taco fail or something. I was like, why is it not Steph Curry for Height. Because if you know basketball, Steph Curry is pretty short. And they're like, well, I didn't think about him for that. But you thought about him for every other comparison. Why is that not so? Even at the highest level, we pick the awful stuff. So I think one way to deal with comparison is just to have some grace about it. It's just the way your mind works for everything. Of course you're going to compare, but you need to realize that you can shift that process a little. And this is why I love to nerd out and tell this Olympian story. Because there's a third data point that I haven't mentioned. I talked about the gold medalists and the silver silver medalist. I didn't mention the bronze medalist. Researchers analyze their facial expressions and it turns out they're ecstatic. They often in some of the analyses are showing more positive expressions than the gold medalist. Why? Their comparison point isn't gold. They were like multiple seconds or multiple points away. Their comparison is like, oh my gosh, if I just messed up a little bit more, I would be going home empty handed. And so the joke is you have to find not the silver lining, but the bronze lining. You literally have to look at, could it be worse? Is there another comparison I could find? And that intentional energy takes work, but it's possible. So little grace. Everybody does it just the way your mind works. But if you look carefully, you can detect that objectively you're not doing so bad.
- [37:51]
Darren McMahon
Strive in life for third place.
- [37:52]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, exactly, Professor Blanchflower.
- [37:56]
Danny Blanchflower
Thank you, Danny Blanchflower. That's exactly the theme I was going to try and think, think about. Darren and I were in Scotland for the 300th anniversary of Adam Smith's birth. And if you read the first page of A Theory of Moral Sentiments, he says what you just said. He actually says, actually we compare ourselves to others and we care about the well being of others. For the guy who wrote about markets, so the relative thing is really important, even I think in macro sense, it's really important. I just tell you a Nobel Prize winner who's remained nameless called me one day and I'd written about relative things and he said, I can buy anything that I like, but I still care about the salaries of my colleagues. But this is a big deal, right? So if you think in, in macro terms, we've seen GDP rising, income of the nation rises, and if you look at happiness as flat as a pancake, well, what happens is people compare themselves to others. If I get a BMW, this is work of Colleagues of ours, if I get a BMW, it makes me happy. Happy. But if you get one, I'm not happy anymore. So, I mean, this is. This is literally true. And there's. There's evidence. Ozo Lutman's famous paper finds that if I get 10% rise in income, that's fine, but if I get no rise in income and everybody in the neighborhood gets a 10% rise, I'm. I'm worse off. So these comparators are really important. And I know you talked about it on an individual level, but I obviously, I. I think it's really important for us to think perhaps to your connection. On smart. When I was a kid and I was 12, I'm old now, I was 12, I compared myself to my sister and my school colleagues. Maybe what we've got here is the smartphone has changed the comparator group. The comparator groups are not real. Right. If I'm comparing myself to my sister or to Darren or something, that's fine. But in a sense, the connection of the real things and the smartphones is. The smartphones change the comparison at a group. And until we can do that, the individual things you've talked about fall flat. So I'm just trying to think about how do we actually get people to compare themselves to real things? Because if I've learned anything about the happiness work I've done, it's what you said. Relative things matter.
- [40:04]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, No, I think this is such an important point, right? It's comparing yourself, you know, if you're a student here, to everyone at Dartmouth, but it's also comparing yourself to literally everyone on the Internet. And of course, what's happening on the Internet is completely curated, especially when it comes to beauty, your physical looks and so on. It's all made up. And I think in the age of AI slop, which we're moving towards, we're going to have even more comparisons that don't even exist. Right. And so it raises this interesting question of what we can do. Again, being a psychologist, I think of the individual strategies that we can use. And the idea is like, you have some agency over whether you pick up that phone and look at TikTok, you can mindfully notice how is it making me feel when I do that? If I leave TikTok hating my body and demanding I go to the gym and feeling bad about my coffee grades. Like, try to notice when are these comparisons coming up and are they really real? This is a strategy that journalists like Catherine Price was this really lovely book, how to break up with Your phone, where she argues, you don't necessarily have to break up with your phone, but you need to take it to couples counseling to figure out a healthier relationship with it. And she has this strategy that she uses. It's an acronym, www, which stands for what for why now and what else? Why did I pick up my phone phone? What am I using it for? What else could I be doing? But the reason I like this WWW strategy is it's a moment to be mindful. Why did I pick up the phone? How am I feeling when I'm using it? If it's making you feel totally crappy. If you have all these social comparisons, it's a hint to like maybe pop off that stuff or take a moment to read and realize like a crappy thing about our mind is that we don't have a lot of control over what other reference points. These social comparison points we use, we just soak up any that we get and especially ones that make us look bad. And that means that we're constantly affected by other folks. And when those other folks are real and around us in our peer group, that's one thing. When those other folks are fake people on the Internet with photo filters and whatever, it's just so much worse.
- [42:03]
Darren McMahon
Question right here.
- [42:05]
Dr. Laurie Santos
I was wondering, because I'm a cognitive strength science major, given that like people started using AI sometimes as a substitute for mental health counselors. Like AI can lead as long as you prompt in the way it can lead you to do self harm. Do you have any suggestions? Because even when you google something, it's usually AI based answers too. I don't know your perspective. No, I love this question because I think more and more we're going to be needing to think about how these emerging technologies like AI and LLMs are affecting our happiness. On the chatbots and advice or chatbots and therapy or even chatbots and friendship. Chatbots and relationships. I just did an episode with Jean Twenge and she was talking about how it's likely that most like middle schoolers will have their first romantic relationship with a chatbot because it's just easy, it's frictionless. You can talk to them about sexy stuff without having to talk to a real person and we just haven't and thought carefully about this stuff at all. But on chatbots and therapy and chatbots and friendship, I think you've identified a lot of the problems which is that these tools aren't necessarily so hot at distinguishing between good advice and bad advice. And sometimes, especially since a lot of the tools are built to kind of agree with you a little bit. You know, if you say, oh, I want to do this terrible self harmy thing, sometimes they're prone to kind of, oh, that sounds great. I think these tools are getting better, especially as awful as these incidents are coming out. But yeah, it's dangerous. I worry too about the idea that social connection can seem a little frictiony. It can be hard. Many of us are feeling lonely and that people are really turning to these tools just for friendship advice, companionship. And there's some new work coming out of Liz Dunn's group that finds that at first that's helpful. Like in the moment it makes you feel less lonely, but long term it makes it harder, it makes you more lonely. I think it's a kind of like a Nutra suite of connection where it feels good, it feels sweet in the moment, but it's not giving you the nutrition you need. Another thing I'll say, just because I'm in a room of lots of students that I worry about a lot with AI that I think we're not thinking about is the impact that cognitive offloading is having that you let your chatbot just do your response paper because it's a little faster, or you let your chatbot like kind of write your essay or do that hard thing because you kind of feel the friction of doing the hard thing. You're having some resistance and you just offload it to that. There's lots of work by folks like Mickey Inslict and others showing the power of effort. That effort feels good. We don't like to do it, but once we get through it, it feels nice. We like to have our own ideas. We like to push through things. That's why for those of you who do the New York Times wordle in the morning, you don't just like look on one of the many sites that just has the word answer and type the wordle answer in. You try to push through it. That feels good, right? But we are not thinking of the consequences of this kind of offloading for an entire generation's academ. Academic work for an entire generation's stuff where there are cognitive benefits of pushing through something on your own. And I think we're not tracking the happiness cost of that. I see it a little bit in my students. Professors can tell when you use the LLM. They're like, okay, this was LLM written. And I'll be like, oh, what did you think of paper? How is the idea? And they're just not as into it. They just don't engage with it in the same way. There's something interesting being lost about that connection. There's obviously a learning cost and other connection kinds of costs. I'm really interested in the, like that little happiness boost, the little flow boost that you get from working hard on something. I think more and more over time we're going to lose that, and I worry that that's dangerous.
- [45:50]
Darren McMahon
What's true of wordle, by the way, is also true of learning the conjugations of irregular Latin verbs. Just so folks know. So let's see. We are almost out of time, but I think we could probably take one more question if somebody wants to fight it out. Yes,
- [46:06]
Dr. Laurie Santos
it seems like comparison is this thief of joy, but we're taught that ambition is really important. And economically ambition and productivity are kind of these things that our society prioritizes. So how do you reconcile that mindset of it's okay to be a bronze medalist with the idea that we want people striving towards being golden medalists? One way to reframe your question is to ask, well, what are the things that get us to be gold medalists in whatever field? What are the things that cause us to be a students, the best worker, like, whatever achievement you want to pick. How do I get there? And I think our minds have this assumption, which is like, you just work to the point of absolute burnout and kill yourself and push yourself and hustle, hustle, hustle, and you'll get there. And I think that what we're learning is like, that's just not how it works. Even if your goal is just achievement at all costs and you don't care about your mental health, it might be that by prioritizing your mental health, you get to that achievement more. And we see this in the context of our physical health, I think a little bit better right here at Dartmouth. So I know a lot of you are athletes and you probably, if you're on a team or you work out, have heard about concepts like active rest where, like, if you just kill yourself and keep practicing and push yourself 110% for working out all the time, time you're going to get an injury, your body's not going to be able to handle it. If you want to be optimal, you have to have moments of rest and scale back and this kind of thing. My read of what's happening in the performance literature is that we're learning the same thing about mental health and burnout and so on, that if we just push, push, push all the time, even if Your goal is just the full performance goal. You're not going to get there as effectively by doing that. Four day work weeks people perform better than the five day work week. Taking time off sleeping and resting makes perform better. There's lots of evidence for the power of sleep and grades that if you take an hour off of studying to sleep, you'll probably do better and perform better over time. There's also evidence though like a different achievement bottom line, which is just a capitalism achievement bottom line of like make as much money as possible. Where researchers are learning that in fact the act of taking rest, focusing on happiness, doing the stuff that I'm talking about seems to matter. My favorite study of 2025, people have like the Spotify wrapped from 2025 and I always say nerdy researchers want their favorite like it would be great if app gave us our list of our favorite studies. But my favorite study of 2025 was by the Oxford researcher Jan Emanuel Denev and he partnered with the job website Indeed, which I'm sure some of you know to ask the following question. He's like, you know, on Indeed, they have 15 million rankings of all this stuff about people's workplaces, like their salary and all this stuff. But one of the rankings they have is people's happy happiness at work. And he's like, oh, these are rankings across 5,000 different publicly traded companies. Right. And so we could do is the following. We could take per company the average happiness at work and look at whether or not that predicts the stock performance of a company. And we could imagine this goes different ways. We could have the theory that like, well, the way you get good stock performance is like you exploit the heck out of your workers, you make them really miserable, you push and push, but that's how you get to good performance. What Jan Emanuel Denev finds is just the opposite super strong correlation between the happiest companies and the best stock performance. Just a perfect beautiful correlation. In fact, the correlation was so high that Denev has now made a stock index of the happiest companies. You know, like the S&P 500 where it's like you can invest in this and it'll get you money you can invest in. You can look on his website and see this, the top 100 indeed companies and invest in that. And he's found that at every time in the market from 2021 till I think the last data set was like in 2020, 2025, this will being 100 outperforms like the Dow Jones and the S&P 500. It's a little investment tidbit from the hacking study.
- [50:00]
Danny Blanchflower
You didn't know.
- [50:00]
Dr. Laurie Santos
You get that? But a little tidbit to take with
- [50:02]
Darren McMahon
you, which is why you came tonight.
- [50:04]
Dr. Laurie Santos
But my point is we have an incorrect theory about performance, whether it's for companies, as individuals. We think, push, push, push, that's the way to achieve more. But it might be that the way to achieve more is to rest. But focus on your positive mood, to take some time, time off. I think even if all you care about is your output, you need a different theory about how to do that. Well, and so that would be the idea is like, ask the question, what gets the gold medalist to be the gold medalist? Right. It might be rest, it might be time off. Look at Alyssa Liu, who we've just had this wonderful Olympics. Everybody watched her video. I think that's beautiful. But if you know her story, you know what happened was she was feeling burned out, so she took time off. She had people tell her, that's stupid. You're. You're never going to be a good skater. Like, you're never going to be a good athlete. Right? What happened? She took the time off. I mean, her own kind of account of it is that's why she was able to win.
- [50:54]
Danny Blanchflower
Right.
- [50:55]
Dr. Laurie Santos
So I think that's the message. Even if what you want is to hustle, hustle, hustle and achieve as much and be the gold medalist and the perfect Dartmouth College student, you might do that by focusing on your well being more than you expect.
- [51:07]
Darren McMahon
Wow, that was wonderful. Oi. Please join me in thanking her for one of it.
- [51:23]
Dr. Laurie Santos
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.