Hidden Brain - Episode 39: Vacations

Episode Date: July 19, 2016

Summer vacations often take time, energy and money to plan. Expectations can run unreasonably high. This week in Stopwatch Science, we dive into what research says about how to have a better getaway.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. It's summer time, so we felt we had to start our show with a scene from the iconic summer vacation movie. Where in the 1980s, the Griswals are packed into their station wagon. It's pouring rain. Everything has gone wrong. They're on this disastrous road trip to a most centric theme park. The wife and kids suggest that it's perhaps time to just go home. I don't want to be in the car anymore. I want to go home! Clark, under the circumstances,

I wouldn't mind if we just went home. But the dad, Chevy Chase, has other ideas. We're 10 hours from the fun park and you want to bail out. Well, I'll tell you something, this is no longer a vacation. It's a quest. It's a quest for fun. I'm gonna have fun and you're gonna have fun. We're all gonna have so much f***ing fun when we need plastic surgery to remove our goddamn spiles. I gotta be crazy. I'm gonna pilgrimage to see a moose. Praise Marty Moose! Some vacations, we wait for them all year, we pour time, energy and money into planning them, expectations run unreasonably high, coming up a summer edition of Stopwatch Science,

how to plan a vacation, what vacations can reveal about your stock portfolio, and why vacations can be bad for your waistline. If you're like me, Shankar, vacations bring to mind two words. Creeping obesity. Stay with us. Support for this podcast and the following message come from StitchFix, an online personal styling service that makes shopping effortless and fun for busy women on the go. Complete your personal style quiz and then schedule a date to receive

your first personalized shipment. There's no subscription required. Your stylist will send you five hand-selected pieces of clothing delivered right to your door. Buy what you want and send the rest back. Shipping is easy and free both ways. To get started, visit stitchfix.com. That's STI, TCH, f-i-x.com. Support also comes from outdoor voices. A new sportswear brand that takes a totally different approach to getting active.

Instead of harder, faster, stronger, they're all about embracing activity with ease, humor, and delight. Outdoor Voices delivers men's and women's technical athletic wear that's streamlined, comfortable, and made to last. And they're offering 15% off to our listeners. Just go to OutdoorVoices.com slash brain and enter coupon code brain. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. I'm joined now by Daniel Pink. He's the author

of several books about human behavior, but on our show, as you know, his title is Senior Stop What Science correspondent. Welcome, Dan. Thank you, Shankar. It's great to be here. All right, so on Stop What Science, Dan and I give one another 60 seconds to summarize interesting social science research. As we approach the one-minute mark, our producers will bring up the music sometimes gently, sometimes loudly, to let us know our time is running out. Our topic today is vacations. This week we'll tell you why it's so important to take one and how to get the most out of your vacation. You know, Dan, whenever I'm with you, I actually feel like I'm on vacation.

Ah, that's why you're in a swimsuit? Exactly. Alrighty, alright, alright, alright, alright. Let's do some science. Alright, Dan, your first 60-second starts now. Shankar, everyone here at NPR headquarters knows that you're an upstanding citizen who never, ever would use his work computer for personal tasks. Did you? But some people aren't as scrupulous as you.

And when it comes to vacation planning, that might be costing them. Way zhong of Iowa State University and Ajay Khaura of Rice University looked at a large trove of data from an online hotel reservation site. They found that people who booked leisure travel during work hours selected higher quality hotels than those who booked during travel during work hours selected higher quality hotels than those who booked during non-work hours. But once the vacation was over, those making reservations from the office ended up less satisfied with their hotel choice.

Now it's not clear exactly what's going on here, but one explanation seems plausible. When we're at work, we're more likely to be stressed out and depleted, and therefore less likely to be stressed out and depleted and therefore less likely to be vigilant. So instead of pushing hard to find a great deal, we settle for an OK deal that we later regret. Whatever the reason though, the message is clear, don't shop for travel at work. So let me understand this correctly.

They're saying that because people are stressed out and busy or maybe especially in need of a vacation when they're at work, they go online, they see something really snazzy, interesting, beautiful, and they say, yeah, I'm gonna buy that, but then when they actually go there, they find that if they had shopped around for another 10 minutes, they could have found something that was actually a better deal. Right, but we have only one deal here on stopwatch science, and that's a deal that involves 60 seconds seconds and those 60 seconds begin right now. Alright, when we think about great vacations, we often think about going to

unusual places, maybe going to a place that few other people have got, maybe you're already doing this, you're listening to this podcast right now on a beach in Tahiti. One advantage of unusual vacations is that we can then post pictures on Facebook or come home and tell our friends all about our amazing vacation. Now, since they haven't been to these wonderful locales, they will be eager listeners for our stories, right? So we think. No, they won't. Gus Cooney and Dan Gilbert at Harvard, along with Timothy Wilson at the University of Virginia, find that when people have amazingly unique experiences, they're often less happy afterward.

Why? Your friends don't want to hear you drawn on about getting on that SpaceX flight. They are talking to each other about the block party in the neighborhood that you missed, so you feel socially isolated, social isolation matters more to your happiness than your vacation destination.

This is very interesting, so how do they do this? Did they send one group of people to the Caribbean and another group to the banks of the Ollentangie River in Central Ohio? They both sound pretty exotic to me then, but no, that's not what they did. This was a social psychology experiment, which means it was done on the cheap. What they did is they brought and volunteers into a laboratory and they sat the majority of them down together to watch a very mediocre movie and they sat one person down to watch an absolutely fantastic riveting movie and then they put the whole group together to talk and the person who'd watch the amazing movie wanted to talk about the amazing movie

that he or she had watched but of course none of the others had seen the amazing movie and they didn't really want to talk about it they wanted to talk about what a silly experiment this was the others bonded with each other and the person who watched the great movie ended up feeling isolated. I see. And so how does this play into this idea that experiences are more valuable to us than goods? That's interesting because there is a lot of research showing that experiences are more valuable than things when you're buying yourself gifts, but I've actually come by recent work then that actually finds that the reason experiences are often better than things as gifts is that experiences are inherently often social.

If you're going on an experience and actually enjoying it entirely by yourself, it's not clear that it actually is much better than just buying yourself a new television set or a new car. It's the social aspect of experiences that makes them better. This is why when I do stop watch science by myself at home, it's no fun. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha words. Creeping obesity. That's the medical concept for what happens to many of us in middle age. We don't become overweight overnight. Instead, we gain a pound or two each year. And before long, that person in the mirror looks a little different. Well, according to a recent paper in the journal physiology and behavior, our vacations could be part of the problem. These researchers studied 122 adults who'd gone on vacations of between 1 and 3 weeks.

They find that these folks each gain nearly a pound on vacation, and that the extra weight was still there six weeks later. Now the reason is intriguing. Turns out people are more physically active on vacation, so inactivity wasn't the cause. The real culprit was that vacationers increased their calorie consumption in excess of their activity, especially in the form of alcohol. Oh, yeah, of course. So if you want to avoid weight gain while on holiday, try to drink less. Although that might be tough if you're on a family vacation

So this makes total sense to me then I often feel that I'm significantly more active when I'm on vacations But I have noticed that I don't lose weight while I'm on vacations and it's probably because I'm just eating and drinking more Right and especially the drinking part this this paper showed something like a doubling in alcohol consumption during the weeks that people are away. So they're living it up, but they're paying for it later in creeping obesity. So speaking of creeping, your moment has crept to us right now in your 60 seconds begins right now. All right, vacations can be fun, they can be relaxing, but they can also be very useful signals. Think about your own behavior. If you're the boss of a company and your own vacation is your company likely to make big moves that rock the boat, not likely, or let's say you're the boss and things are falling apart at work.

Now, you might have to cancel your vacation to deal with the crisis. In other words, paying attention to when the boss goes on vacation can be a market signal. Interesting. David Yormack at NYU tracked when CEOs go on vacation by merging records of corporate jetflights and where CEOs of various companies are known to have vacation properties. He finds that CEOs are more likely to go on vacation right after their company's announced good news.

And he also finds that stock prices for a company are less volatile when the CEO is on break. In other words, if you and I were running a hedge fund then we might want to keep better track of which CEOs are hitting the beach this summer and which ones are canceling their travel plans. Yeah, this is a great study. This is really interesting.

So do you think that investors, funds are actually using this kind of information to make bets on companies? I think they might be, except it probably isn't easy to come by all the information that David Yormac pulled together. It's also probably the case that the signal is a small signal. So the only way to really be successful at this is if you apply the strategy over a very, very lengthy period of time, and in the long run, the law of averages will work in your favor. Now, the law of averages don't necessarily work on your favor in stopwatch science because

we have only 60 seconds to pull things off, and your next 60 seconds Dan starts right now. Vacations can recharge the mind and replenish the soul, but once we're back on the job, how long do the positive effects last? Two German psychologists tackled that question in the Journal of Organizational Behavior. The researchers chose a profession with lots of stress and high burnout rates. Teachers. They had teachers fill out questionnaires the day before a two-eification, and then three more times after the vacation had ended, and they were back on the job.

First, the good news. When the teachers returned to the classroom after their ended and they were back on the job. First the good news, when the teachers returned to the classroom after their break, they were more engaged in their jobs and significantly less emotionally exhausted. The vacation worked. Now the less good news, that positive boost faded away after only about four weeks. A month after returning to work, they were generally back to their provocation levels of engagement and exhaustion. Now, we can't leap to universal conclusions here.

Maybe there's something unique about teachers or Germans, but if the benefits of time off do fade out so quickly, perhaps we should all be taking more vacations. There's something terribly sad about that story, Dan, because it really suggests that we have these dreams about what vacations will do, and even when those dreams come true, what you're saying is that the effects are likely to be very short-lived. That's what it seems like, and you know what we've seen that before in other areas. If you look at, wait, generally people return to what's called their set point of weight.

You know, they might lose some here, gain some here, but in general, they return to that set point. Even if you look at this measure of subjective well-being, how happy we are, you know what? Something really bad happens to you. It drops. Something really great happens to you. It goes up. But then it returns to that same level. Which sort of leads to the question of actually, what's the point of taking a vacation at all?

If you're going to come back to who you are at the end of it Maybe you should just stay home Maybe you should just stay at work and just keep working and working and working until you grind yourself into full despair And don't even hit your set point. That's a great suggestion. I'm sure our listeners would love it I'm hoping that your next one is a little bit more uplifting Shankar your 60 seconds start right now. All right, we did a podcast episode recently about Alaska looking at climate change.

I went there on vacation with my family recently. And when you're in Alaska Dan with all those mountains and glaciers and vast open spaces, you can't help but notice that you're a very, very small animal on a very, very big planet. Now we've all felt this. You've looked up at the sky in a dark night. You've seen the Milky Way,

where you listen to a beautiful piece of music, you feel a sense of majesty, a sense of awe. Paul Piff, Docker-Caltoner, and many other researchers, have found that awe not only does wonderful things for you, but that it helps you do wonderful things for others. Volunteers induce to feel awe, act more altruistically, more ethically. They stop thinking of themselves and their problems as bigger or more important than

others. So, if you're in vacation right now, whether that's a hike around the neighborhood or a hike around the Grand Canyon, remember that one of the most important things you can do is to let yourself get caught up in the moment. Feel grateful, feel awe. It's one of the ways vacations can make us better people. Interesting. So if you're at that black party rather than the SpaceX flight,

look up in the air, wave to the other guy who's miserable in that SpaceX flight, and look at the clouds and just sort of get a sense of awe with your friends and your family. Yeah, I think so, this is the thing. I think many of us believe that the source of awe is in the things that we're seeing and the things that we're noticing. But in many ways, I think the source of the awe is in ourselves.

It's in our ability, our orientation to actually look at the world and appreciate how marvelous it is. Yeah, also based on that study, I really think that there's a lesson for the Alaska Department of Tourism. There should have a campaign that says, welcome to Alaska. That's yours, folks in Juneau for the taking. So there's some marketing advice from Dan Pink, and there you have it, book your next vacation at home, pick the neighborhood block party over the SpaceX flight,

drink less while you're on vacation, try to keep that vacation bliss going a little longer after you get back, perhaps by soaking up lots of awe-inspiring moments. Finally, if any of you see Dan Pink hastily cancelled his vacation plans in the last minute, you can be fairly confident that the hidden brain hedge fund that we run together is about to tank. Dan, thank you for joining me.

It's always a pleasure. This episode of Hidden Brain was produced by Max Nestrak and Chris Benderev, and edited by Jenny Schmidt. Our staff also includes Maggie Pennman and Karamagar Galison. We should also say it's Max's last week with us at Hidden Brain before he moves on to a new job in public radio. Many of you loved our recent episode featuring Max's last week with us at Hidden Brain before he moves on to a new job in public radio. Many of you loved our recent episode featuring Max's effort to quit smoking. He's promised to keep us posted on how that goes. We're going to miss you, Max. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and listen to my stories on your local public radio station.

If you like this episode, give us a review. It helps. I'm Shankar Vedant, and this is NPR. Hey y'all, Sam Sanders here, Campaign Reporter with NPR News. Here to tell you that the NPR Politics Podcast has you covered for the biggest two weeks of this election year so far. Skip the cable news, hang over, and listen to our daily episodes from the Republican and Democratic conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia. Every day about conventions, it all starts July 19th.

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