Hidden Brain - Happiness 2.0: Surprising Sources of Joy

Episode Date: February 24, 2023

Sometimes, life can feel like being stuck on a treadmill. No matter how hard you try to feel happier, you end up back where you started. What’s going on here? Today in our Happiness 2.0 series, we revisit a favorite episode from 2020. Researcher Elizabeth Dunn helps us map out the unexpected ways we can find joy and happiness in our everyday lives. Check out our previous episodes on happiness, including our conversations about chasing contentment and finding your purpose.If you like our work, please consider supporting it! See how you can help at support.hiddenbrain.org. And to learn more about human behavior and ideas that can improve your life, subscribe to our newsletter at news.hiddenbrain.org.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. In 2008, psychologist Liz Dunn was invited to go on a vacation. The man she had just started dating and three of his high school buddies wanted to go on a road trip with their girlfriends. They planned to drive an RV from their home in Vancouver to the Arctic Ocean. Liz said yes. It seemed like an adventure. It sounded like fun. It felt romantic. It was a mistake. I would rank it as probably top three worst vacations ever. One by one, the other girlfriends decided that an RV trip to go swimming in the Arctic Ocean was not their idea of a good time. When the RV rolled out of town, it was just Liz

and four men who thought they were having the time of their lives. So it was kind of like living through one endless day on this highway that never ended with four Canadian men who were increasingly driving me crazy. with four Canadian men who were increasingly driving me crazy. The road trip led Liz to important insights about human nature. Today, in the latest in our Happiness 2.0 series,

we revisit our 2020 conversation with Liz Dunn and explore the relationship between memory and happiness. We look at how things that start out fun can turn miserable and how our minds can take miserable experiences and remember them as fun. and the winding road to happiness today on hidden brain. Elizabeth Dahn is a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia. Along with Michael Norton, she is the author of Happy Money, the Science of Happier Spending. Liz told me that at one point in the intonemental journey to the Arctic Ocean, she decided she'd had enough. She tried to escape.

Yeah, I think this is one of my low moments of my life. My phone, my smart phone didn't work there because we were so far north, so I sought out a pay phone. This was shortly after the waste disposal system in the RV had sprung a leak. And I was just like, I am over this vacation. And I called air Canada and I said, how can you get me out of here? And they said, well, we can't get you back to Vancouver in my home, but we could get you to Edmonton. And I was like, can you put that ticket on hold for me? Because at that very moment, all I wanted was to get out of there. Did you actually manage to catch one of those flights? What happened?

You know, by the time I got back from making this phone call, the guys had realized that I was losing it. And they made a plan to try to make things better for me. So one of my friends who's a cancer researcher, like took me aside and he's like, let's have a nice science talk. That will make you feel better. You know, other guys were like, why don't we, why don't we like read women's magazines and talk about them?

Like they had somewhat misguided ideas of what was going to be helpful, but like they were really trying. And so then I was like, okay, and you know, they convinced me like it's almost time to turn around. Like you can do this. And you know, in the end, I did make it through, but I will never go back. When the waste disposal systems sprang a leak, I understand this is how you derived a nickname on the trip. Tell me about that. Yeah, so the guys, nickname me blackwater Liz, blackwater refers to waste disposal in an RV. Let me be clear, I had nothing to do

with the RV waste disposal system springing a leak, but for whatever reason, like this name stuck to me, and they've still referred to me that way. Like this has not got away. And did you actually go, did you see the Arctic Ocean? Did you go swimming in it? What did you do when you got there? Yeah, so we did when we finally made it to the Arctic Ocean, we did get to go swimming in the Arctic Ocean. We got to see blue gas in the wild.

So that was, you know, very cool and very special. So here's the question that arises from this whole trip. You were obviously miserable through much of the trip, but looking back on it now, do you sort of think of the trip as being a miserable experience or do you think of it as being a rewarding experience? Well, I think that it makes a good story. And so I appreciate that. Like it's this aspect of my life that was very unique. Not many people have swum in the Arctic Ocean or got into hang out with Blu-Gas in the wild. And so it was this unusual experience that I think contributed to sort of my overall life story.

It also is this really powerful source of bonding for me and those four Canadian men, you know, one of whom I ended up marrying. And so we still, you know, talk about it. It's when one of us is going through a rough time, we pull up pictures from that trip and talk about it. So we really enjoy the memory of it, but I still remember that I was not having a good time while it was happening. So this being this really rich debate in the field of psychology, but also just as people have thought about their own lives,

about the value of spending your money on buying things versus buying experiences. And I'm wondering when you think about an experience like your trip to the Arctic Ocean, how does that dovetail or contradict this larger body of research that has looked at the differences between experiences and things? Well, the research on the value of buying experiences really suggests that a lot of the benefit that we get from buying experiences comes after they're over. So one of the great things about experiential purchases

is that we can reminisce about them. And I really do enjoy reminiscing about this experience. Of course, many experiences are enjoyable in the moment, but that's not necessarily where the real value of experiential purchases comes from. Instead, the big sort of benefit of experiential purchases over material purchases seems to come after they're over, which to me is pretty interesting because material things stick around. So I am not like a frequent clothes shopper so I literally still have clothing that I had on that trip right like that stuff has stuck around that experience of course is gone it's you know long since over.

But you know it lives in my memory and it turns out memory is a great place to store stuff right so when we store stuff in our closet it it kind of gets outdated, it gets torn up over time. But our memories have this amazing property of being able to make things more positive or at least funnier over time. Because we've retold this story so many times, like just starting to think about it kind of makes me laugh. And so that's kind of the magic of experiential purchases. And so that's kind of the magic of experiential purchases. Perhaps you've noticed the magic of experiential purchases in your own life. Liz cites a study that tracks students going on a three week bike trip across California. During the trip 61% reported the trip was worse than they expected.

But after the trip was over, only 11% of the students said the trip was disappointing. You know, our memories are great at sort of making the best of things. And you know, in my case, the Arctic trip was like so far from the kind of vacation that I would like to take, that it's hard for my mind to completely bridge the giant chasm between like my ideal vacation and that trip. But most other vacations that we take have a much smaller sort of a little gap between

what we ideally would have wanted and the way things actually work out. So maybe you go to Hawaii and it rains for several days. But your memory can kind of focus on the days that you were out on the beach and forget about those days, you were stuck in sides or you can think about how it was actually kind of fun, you know, sitting around eating salt and vinegar chips and playing cards. And so when there's a pretty small gap between how we expected to feel and how we actually felt, that's where our minds can kind of jump in and the sort of positive expectations that tend to surround our experiences can actually sort of paint over the little bits of negativity that might have occurred during the experience itself.

I'm also struck by the fact that when experiences are strongly negative, in fact when we have, perhaps not traumatic experiences like your trip to the Arctic and had all these downsides, when you look back on it, there is something sweet about it. I mean, you cite the Roman philosopher, Seneca, who said that things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember. And there is some truth in that, isn't there, that once you've been through something really difficult, there's actually a special pleasure that comes from thinking back on it. Absolutely, I mean, one experience that really stands out to me

is on that Arctic road trip, we did this thing, there's this bar in the Canadian Arctic, you can go to, and you do a shot while having pressed up against your lips, the toe of a dead man, and this is like this classic sour toe cocktail experience that people like to have. And let me tell you, it is not pleasant.

Like having a dead toe up against your face, I can't recommend it. But we still have this fun memory of this thing we all did together. And it's fun to sort of remember and reflect on it. And I feel this real connection with the Arctic, because I had this quintessential experience of this sour to cocktail.

As a non-Canadian, forgive me for asking what seems like an obvious question, but how does a bar obtain a dead person to get a dead to press up against you while you're having your cocktail? So there's this whole legend surrounding it about the first guy that decided to donate his toe to the bar, but then it became such a tradition and a legacy that now they have a long lineup of toes, people who are waiting for the you know honor of their toe being taken upon their death to be included in this magical cocktail experience. So we're going to talk a little bit later in the conversation about some of the wise

and brilliant things that Canada does, but I'm actually going to put this one on the other list, Liz, if you don't mind. It doesn't seem to be my cup of tea. But you say that, but then if you experience it, you'll have this great story and you'll remember it fondly. So you've made a case really in the last few minutes of why it's smart to spend money on experiences. That in some ways we anticipate experiences very strongly, we look back on experiences very fondly,

they give us great stories to tell. I want to spend a moment talking about the potential benefits of spending money on physical objects as well. You want to start a study titled the Unsung Benefits of Material Things, where you analyzed people's satisfactions with material purchases and experiential purchases. What did you find this?

Yeah, so this study came about because after I wrote my book Happy Money, and the first chapter was called By Experiences, I gave it out to a bunch of the grad students in my department, and this very smart young grad student named Aaron Readman came to see me, and he's like, you know, I love the book. I think chapter one was wrong. He's like, I think this whole By Experiences recommendation is, you know, bunk. And so I was like, okay, great. Sure. I just published this book and you think the

first chapter is completely wrong. Like, let's, let's, let's talk about that. So we ended up teaming up to, to conduct the study. And his, his insight was that previous studies had captured how people felt about their past experiential purchases and their past material purchases, but they hadn't necessarily captured people right in the moment as they were enjoying, you know, meaningful material and experiential purchases. So Aaron was really dedicated and he actually devoted his Christmas vacation to studying this issue. So he connected this study where we asked people to tell us about either a material thing or an experience that they had received for Christmas. And he began texting

them three to five times a day, every single day starting on Christmas day. And he followed up with them, you know, every single day for two weeks. And one of the things that he discovered was that them, you know, every single day for two weeks. And one of the things that he discovered was that people did actually get more frequent happiness from material things. So material things had this unsung benefit, which was that, you know, they are kind of always around. So for example, I have a leather jacket that I really like. And every time I put it on, I kind of feel a little bit happier. You know, I'm not like freaking out. I'm just like a little bit happier. It was that sort of little small boost

in momentary happiness that these previous studies had kind of overlooked. And so that's what we saw in our study was that material things do provide this small but frequent boost to happiness. And in contrast, experiences in some ways might give you the tallest peaks, right? In other words, they might be less frequent, but the peaks are going to be much higher. Exactly.

So when we asked people about the intensity of happiness that they were experiencing, we saw that these experiential Christmas gifts gave people much bigger peaks, much more intense bursts of happiness, whereas the material things gave people this sort of lower dose, but more frequent feeling of happiness. So in that sense, you might think of it as like two flavors of ice cream. You know, experiences are like gelato with this intense burst of happiness, but then it's gone. And then on the flip side, you know, material things are more like a big thing of froyo, where they're not as amazing in any one moment, but you can have it for a while.

And so in that sense, I think material things maybe got a little bit of a bad rap. So maybe instead of saying that experiences make you happy and things don't, it might be why is it to say that experiences give you, as you say, a different kind of happiness? They give you more anticipation, better memories. But often, in the moment, things can give you many small moments of pleasure. And part of the question about happiness is what kind of happiness do you prefer?

Exactly. So do you want those low level moments of contentment that material things might provide or do you want these bursts of joy that you might get from experiences. Now, from what I've said so far, it does seem like experiences and material things are kind of on an equal playing field, and it sort of depends what flavor of happiness you want. But we actually also followed up with our same participants six weeks after Christmas.

By this point, they must have been really sick of us, but they still filled out another survey for us. And, you know, we asked them how they were feeling about their Christmas gift at that point. And what we found was that six weeks after Christmas, people were significantly more satisfied with their experiential gift than people were with material gifts. And so this was really interesting to us,

because again, it suggests even though the experiential purchases or experiential gifts in essence were gone by that point, like most people had already enjoyed their spa day or gone to the hockey game or whatever it was that they'd received for Christmas, but they actually felt more satisfied with it six weeks after Christmas compared to people who had gotten these material gifts. So in that way, I think Aaron was right, I mean, grads who was right, that like the advice to buy experiences might be a little too simple, but I feel like I kind of have a last laugh and saying, yeah, but by six weeks afterward,

like, experience is still win. When we come back, why the pursuit of happiness can feel like being on a treadmill and how to get off it. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Have you ever noticed that your loved ones can seem like totally different people when they are around strangers or acquaintances? Maybe it's your mom, so grumpy over her breakfast cereal,

chatting and laughing with colleagues 10 minutes later on Zoom. Or your toddler, on the brink of a meltdown at home, who becomes a perfect angel when you bring him into daycare. Liz Dahn first noticed something similar when she was in grad school. She had a boyfriend, Benjamin, and he did something that she found pretty annoying. So when Benjamin was in a little bit of a bad mood, he would come to me, his longtime girlfriend, and he would act kind of cranky and grumpy. But if we happen to run into random acquaintance or even a stranger, Benjamin would perk right up,

acting all pleasant and cheerful as social norms demand. And what I noticed is that afterward, he would actually be in a much better mood. As a result of his own sort of pleasant, cheerful behavior, he would get himself into a better mood. And so, I started to wonder, is this just some weird quirky thing about Benjamin? or is this part of the way that humans behave? And so, I decided to bring in about a hundred romantic couples into the lab to try to get to the bottom of

this. Liz recorded some of the people chatting with their actual partners, and some chatting with a stranger. Here's a clip of two people who are in a relationship. Is that where you run into them? No. It's not really. What about today I lost 55? And here's a clip of two strangers. How old are you?

Seven months. How old are you? Just a year. A year? A year? I'm just a year. Yeah. Yeah, we're in the same dorm. What stands out to me is that when the romantic couple is talking, you hear this sort of low-level,

sort of mildly cranky kind of tone. Whereas when the strangers are talking, they have this very cheerful, positive upbeat lilt, which is what we expect. So in North America, at least there's this strong demand to act pleasant and cheerful when you're talking to someone that you haven't met before or don't know well. And so what we see in our study is that when people engage in this positive self-presentation, acting all sort of pleasant and cheerful around someone that you don't know, it actually has benefits for their own mood in a way that they themselves don't seem to foresee. It provides this unexpected boost to our moods when we just act pleasant

and cheerful for the benefit of somebody else. when we just act pleasant and cheerful for the benefit of somebody else. The fact that we tend to present our best sides to strangers rather than to people who inhabit our lives is very sad. But it turns out it's not just our partners that we take for granted. We do this with nearly everything in our lives. Familiarity breeds, if not contempt, at least a certain amount of indifference. Can you talk about this idea, Liz? Yeah, so this is one of the most important ideas across all of happiness research, which is that whatever we have, we tend to get used to it. So no matter how awesome our lives might be or what wonderful things come into our lives,

we tend to get used to them over time. And the pleasure that they provide gradually diminishes. This has sometimes been called the hedonic treadmill. Give me a sense of the origin of that phrase. What is that phrase trying to communicate? Yeah, so the hedonic treadmill is such a sad phrase, right? It conveys this idea that we're sort of stuck. No matter how hard we try to get happier, we can't. We're kind of on this treadmill where we always end up kind of back where we started. So try to run faster, work harder to get happier, and it doesn't do any good. So the metaphor of the treadmill here, of course, is the idea that you're running, but it's still

you're staying in place even as you're running. In other words, it's not changing how happy you're feeling, even though it feels like you're doing things that should make you happier. So you and others have thought of ways to fight this psychological phenomenon, this phenomenon of the hedonic treadmill. And you've drawn inspiration from a marketing trick

by McDonald's. Here's a clip of a McDonald's customer talking about the Macribe. I'm not a Macribe. I'm so good. Here's the thing, right? It's amazing. It's the best thing ever made.

Why would you get rid of it? I don't like it. I need it. But it's not gonna stick around. What's going on here, Liz? I need it, but it's not going to stick around. What's going on here, Liz? So the McRib is a McDonald's sandwich that is only available for a limited time.

So at the height of its popularity, McDonald's will pull it off the menu, which at first glance seems a bit counterintuitive if you have a product that's selling really well, you'd think you'd wanna keep it available. But in fact, by yanking it away, McDonald's can actually make it more desirable. And how is this connected to the idea of the hedonic treadmill and the psychological insight about how to overcome it?

Well, it turns out that one way to fight hedonic adaptation or get off the hedonic treadmill is to deprive ourselves a little bit. So to not have constant access to the things that we like. So on the one hand, it seems like the recipe for happiness should be to have all the things that we like abundantly available to us all the time. But in fact, what that's a recipe for is massive hedonic adaptation, where we just get used

to the things that we like and no longer derive as much pleasure from them. So in some of my research, what we've discovered is that actually taking things away from people for a period of time can increase their capacity to enjoy those things. What kind of things have you taken away from people to see the effects it has on them? So in my lab we buy a lot of chocolate. Chocolate is a pretty good reliable source of happiness. Most of our research participants really like chocolate and get enjoyment from eating it. So in one study that we ran, we brought people into the lab and asked them to eat a little bit of chocolate. And then we sent one group of students away with a big bag of chocolate and asked them to eat as much as they comfortably could over the ensuing week.

Meanwhile we asked another group of students to please refrain from eating any chocolate for a whole week. And finally we just left this third group of students without any special chocolate-related instructions. Then we brought everybody back into the lab a week later, and once again, we had them eat some chocolate. Now, what we see across most of the sample is that people enjoyed the chocolate significantly

less the second time than they had the first time. And this little tiny finding kind of captures the sad reality of the human experience, which is that the more we have something, the less we tend to appreciate it. But there was one group of people that enjoyed the chocolate, at least as much the second time as they had the first, and this was the people who had been asked to give up the chocolate in between. So what this suggests is that taking a break from things that we enjoy can actually sort of renew our capacity to appreciate them.

So there are people, many of them of course in Silicon Valley who are taking this idea to its logical conclusion. If scarcity can produce greater happiness, let's engineer scarcity. Take a listen to this clip about someone talking about a dopamine fast. The rules are no pleasure. Anything you find pleasurable, you're not allowed to do. Examples, electronics, no electronics, no computers, no iPods, no phones, no food, no coffee, no teas, no juice, no juice, no, just water.

In other words, Liz, everything you thought would make you happy actually makes you unhappy and everything you thought would make you unhappy actually makes you happy. Yeah, I mean, I would say taking a break from all of those things, as terrible as it sounds to me to take a break from coffee, taking a break from these things probably won't make you happy while you're abstaining from them. So I'm not arguing that, you know, there's something really pleasurable about having nothing, right? not arguing that there's something really pleasurable about having nothing. Right?

Instead, the idea is that we can kind of restart our happiness systems a little bit by taking a break from the things that we like. I would not advocate that we should all move into the woods and give up every kind of pleasure in life. That's not the recipe for happiness, but you know the recipe for happiness does involve figuring out how to reset ourselves a little bit so that we appreciate the things that we've started to take for granted. And so that can mean you know I think long distance relationships are

potentially interesting in that way because you know you have these breaks where you're not able to be with your romantic partner. So my husband went to Africa for six months and I really missed him and I can still sort of channel that, even though we're around each other all the time, even just thinking back to that long period where we were separated can help me appreciate that he's around all the time now. Is it possible that experiences are less likely to produce the hedonic treadmill precisely

because they are in fact rarer? You can't go to the Arctic Circle every weekend, so investing in experiences rather than things automatically forces you into a form of scarcity that you don't have when you are thinking about material purchases or material objects. Absolutely, because one of the things that's interesting about experience is that they feel unique. My Arctic road trip feels very unique to me, but even going to, like, say, a spring steam concert, like I did in grad school, obviously Bruce Springsteen plays all over the world. Many, many people have seen him, but that concert, for me, feels like, oh, well, the hat was

really special, and I'm never him, but that concert for me feels like, oh, well, that was really special. And I'm never going to have that exact experience again. And so our experiences take on this property of uniqueness that makes it harder to adapt to them. Whereas material things, they're really easy to compare. You know you could replace them with something probably even better. And so material things may be more subject to this problem of the hedonic treadmill than

experiences. Taking time to save up the experiences we've had in the past and whatever experiences are currently available is one way to maximize happiness during a very difficult time. Coming up, we look at another way to increase well-being at a moment when many people are experiencing hardship. Stay with us. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Whoever said money can't buy happiness didn't know where to shop. You've probably heard some version of this quote about the relationship between money and happiness. Philosophers, novelists and TV writers have all wrestled with the question of whether we can buy our way to bliss. Over the years, researchers have tried to test the relationship between spending and contentment. One method they've used is to give money to volunteers and tell them to spend it either on themselves or on others. Social psychologist Liz Dunn says most people expect, no surprise, to get more happiness from spending the money on themselves.

And you know, it's kind of interesting because I do get letters from people saying, you know, why did scientists need to come along and do this research like this idea of helping others as in the Bible or my mom told me this. But the interesting thing is that when you bring money into the picture, people just don't seem to realize that that $20 bill in their pocket might be better spent on somebody else than on themselves. So some years ago you were sitting down with an accountant and going over your taxes,

and the accountant stops on the line that talks about your charitable contributions. As someone steeped in the literature on the psychological benefits of generosity, was your accountant worried that you were giving away too much of your money? He was not worried that I was giving away too much money. He had read about my research, you know, the downside of having your work prominently featured in the media is that your accountant reads about it. And so when he saw the charitable giving line of my tax return, he shot me this look of like,

I see through you to the barest, ugliest part of your soul. And you're telling everybody else, oh, happy it would make them to give money away. But like, this is not impressive. How much money you're giving away. And I really like stood out to me, you know, as this like moment of reckoning, I was like, oh God, okay, I really need to be doing better.

Why were you not practicing what you were preaching Liz? And what would happen when you tried? Well, you know, I would give money to charities here and there. And one thing that I was really wrestling with is that I wasn't getting much of an emotional boost from these giving experiences that I was having, which was really puzzling to me because, you know,

we saw that even in parts of the world where people were struggling to meet their own basic needs, giving money to charity was linked to greater happiness. So I was like, what is wrong with me? Why am I not feeling this emotional boost that all of my research suggests should be there? And you started to ask yourself, is there something wrong in the literature or is there something wrong with you? Yeah, and so, you know, maybe there is something wrong with me, but I guess my first inclination was to explore whether we'd miss something in the research.

So maybe it's not the case that giving to charity always makes people happier. Maybe it actually depends how you do it. So maybe I was just doing it wrong. And so I started with my colleagues and students exploring when people get the biggest emotional boost from giving to charity. And when that emotional boost seems to sort of disappear. You ran a study where you asked people to give money to UNICEF. Tell me what UNICEF does and what the experiment was about.

Yeah, so UNICEF is a wonderful charity that really helps to support children's health initiatives around the world. But UNICEF is such a big broad charity that it can be a little hard to really envision how your own small donation is going gonna really make a difference. So we asked people to give money to either UNICEF or another charity called Spread the Net.

And what does Spread the Net do and what's the difference between their approach and the UNICEF approach? So Spread the Net has a lot in common with UNICEF. They're actually partners. They both care about promoting children's health. But Spread the Net has a very clear and specific mission And so what they do is that for every ten dollars donated

They purchased one bed net to protect a child from malaria So if you make even a small donation to this charity you have a very clear idea of how you're making a difference So we chose these charities because you know both important, worthwhile, working kind of the same general space, but spread the net is giving donors a very clear window into how their dollars are making a difference. Whereas with UNICEF, it can just be a bit harder to really understand how your donation is really going to change anyone's life. So in other words, when you're asking people to give it's really

helpful that they know what their money is getting, that the more specific feedback that you can give them about the good that their money is doing, the greater the likelihood that their generosity is going to give them a warm glow and the greater the likelihood that they actually give. Yeah, so people get the biggest emotional boost from giving to others when they can really envision or better yet directly see how their dollars are actually making a difference. So in the case of our spread the net and unicef experiment, what we discovered was that the more money people gave to spread the net, the happier they tended to feel afterward. But kind of remarkably, this emotional boost of giving was eliminated when people gave money to UNICEF. So the suggests

that just giving money to a worthwhile charity doesn't automatically inherently trigger this emotional benefit. Instead, it really does seem to matter whether you can have a window into how you're actually having an impact on others' lives. So besides the value of telling people exactly how their money is going to be used and to give them a sense that this is the impact it's going to have, you're also finding that the connection that people have with the object of their generosity seems to matter.

And I'm wondering if you can tell me a personal story of your involvement with the Syrian refugee crisis and how your work with them has shaped how you've come to understand the psychology of generosity. Yeah, so at the peak of the Syrian refugee crisis when stories about that terrible, terrible crisis were on the cover of the newspaper every day, and we were seeing really just horrifying photos of even young children dying in this crisis, I was overcome with the desire to

do something to help. My first inclination was to donate money to big, reputable charities that were doing good work on this issue. And that's exactly what I did. But again, I just didn't feel much of an emotional boost at all from it. I just felt like I wasn't making a difference. And so luckily, I live in Canada. And here in Canada, I discovered we have this incredible program

called Group of Five. So the idea of the Group of Five is that any five Canadian citizens can actually privately sponsor a family of refugees, and you have to raise enough money to support the family for their first year in Canada, and then they actually get on a plane to your city. So they moved to your city and you're responsible for them for their first year in Canada. And you know, this is a big undertaking.

And one of the things that I think is so awesome about this program is that no matter how sort of wealthy and connected or smart you might be, you are not allowed to do this alone. And it happened that a bunch of my friends were interested in this as well. So I remember we all got together at someone's house one night and talked through it and thought, you know, is this something that we could do? And by the end of that night, we pretty much decided like, okay, let's try to do this. So the first step was that we

had to raise the money. So in our case, we had to raise about $40,000. That turned out to really be kind of the easy part because everyone was very concerned about the Syrian refugee crisis at that time and people really opened up their wallets and gave. One of the big challenges, of course, is finding them a house. And so the family that we brought over had five kids,

which is pretty much unheard of in Vancouver. Like in Vancouver, housing is very expensive. Most people have zero, one, or two kids. So that was a huge mission in and of itself. We found them a house, we filled it up with furniture, we stuffed their fridge with some nice fresh food and then before long it was time for us to go to the airport and meet our family. Liz and her friends gathered in an airport waiting room with welcome signs and balloons. And I still think about this moment where the doors are opened from customs and our family of seven walked through those doors. And as soon as they saw us, the father, who's this, you know, very strong, emotionally resilient man, his eyes just filled with tears at seeing us. And, you know, his wife was also quite overcome

with emotion. Her sister had come to Canada previously through the same program. So they were with us too. And so we got to see these two sisters be reunited after being separated for 15 years. So we got to be there for that moment where these two women came back together. And that experience, it still gives me chills now and I think about it. And it's, you know, so far removed from the experience of going onto a website and donating money to charity and hoping that it makes a difference for somebody at some point, right? In this moment, you know, we could see everything that our group had contributed

really reshaping the lives of this whole family. I'm struck that you use the phrase, our family, when you describe this, this Syrian family that came in. I mean, at this point, this is not just a them that you're helping. This is an us that you're helping. at this point, this is not just a them that you're helping, this is an us that you're helping. Yeah, and so when we when we first took on this project, we would always just refer to the refugees, which I think is the way that most people talk about refugees, right? And now it sounds so weird to me to refer to them as the refugees, right? Because I think from the moment that they walked through the doors at the Vancouver Airport, like the children in this family just climbed into my heart. They'll just be there forever. And yeah, so it's a really

amazing experience to know that you have been able to alter the course of life for a whole family. After we met them at the airport, we got to take them to their new home. We got to play soccer with them in the front yard, show the kids their bedrooms. One of my friends, my friend Kylie, had brought her daughter over a week or two earlier, and together they had decorated the girl's bedroom to try to make it just the way a preteen girl would want it. So basically we'd put quite a bit of thought into trying to create not just this house for them, but create this home for them. And this feeling of being able to say to them, your home, you know, this is your place now.

And certainly the most profoundly rewarding experience of my life. So, when you had this group come together, the Canadian government requires that at least five families come together, but I understand that you actually built a larger group. Tell me about that group and tell me about the dynamics in that group before this family came over. I'm imagining that actually this was a source of bonding for the group itself, that in other words, you were establishing ties with the one another,

separate from the ties that you were establishing with this Syrian family that you were bringing over. Absolutely. So, in the end, there were more than 25 people involved in our group, and about six or seven of us who were very deeply involved. And we were constantly having to sort of overcome challenges, problem solved together. You know, one of the things that I loved about this experience is that I really got to see my friends' strengths.

So most of the people that I was working with closely on this project, I already cared about I was already good friends with, but I hadn't necessarily seen everything they were capable of. So, you know, one of my friends, for example, is a nurse and she can just take over any situation, get everything under control, and like fix whatever is going wrong. And she just amazed me time and time again

through this process. Like I just got to see these strengths of hers that, you know, in our casual sort of day to day friendship, I hadn't got into experience. So it's so interesting because the difference here is not just between, you know, writing a check and helping a family. I mean, just in terms of financial help, I'm guessing you probably have donated far more financially than you would have ever written in a check to any organization, just not just in terms of time, but just in terms of the resources you're giving this family or the help you're giving this family. Essentially,

you've essentially had an open checkbook as you're working with this family, but it's also, you're not even thinking about the money it sounds like, because at this point, you're not actually helping someone else. You're actually helping them as if you were to help your own family members. You're not thinking of it as an act of generosity. You're just saying, this is what it means to be Liz. Yeah, and I think this was something that really struck all of our group members is that once our family arrived, it just seemed obvious that we were just gonna do whatever they needed. We were just gonna, you know, whatever problem arose,

we were gonna help them figure it out. You know, again and again, I've been just stunned by the level of generosity that my group members have shown not only in terms of the financial support, but also, you know, my friend Mandy dropped all of the work that she was doing one day when the family needed to go to a clinic and, you know, needed her help in getting there and in navigating that system. And the oldest kid in the family who was 13 when he arrived, he just kept saying, I just wanna be on a soccer team. And so one of my friends was able to find a team even though it was the middle of the season. She found a coach who was willing to add a last minute player

who had just arrived in Canada. And I just remember seeing him kind of running onto the soccer field and, you know, getting high fives from these teammates who were opening up their team to him. People have just been ready to sort of drop what they're doing and help this family. And I think that, too, has really just increased the depth of my relationship with my close friends who've been involved in this because I've just seen the best side of their humanity. Elizabeth Dunn is a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia.

Along with Michael Norton, she's the author of Happy Money, the Science of Happier Spending. Liz, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you so much for having me. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quarelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer.

I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero this week is Hidden Brain listener and supporter, Christian Lee. Christian tells us that she started listening to the show about two years ago. She was drawn in by an episode we did about identical twins. She writes, I was hooked from that point on. Now you can find me listening when I run, when I drive, when I clean, when I'm getting ready for work in the morning. Pretty much anytime I have a spare moment. We're so happy to be a part of your daily routines, Christian. Thank you for listening and for your support. If you'd like to join Christian in helping to bring more episodes of Hidden Brain to life,

please go to support.hiddenbrain.org. That site again is support.hiddenbrain.org. Next week we conclude our Happiness 2.0 series with a look at an emotion that can be both exhilarating and destabilizing and the profound effects it has on our mental and physical health. You just share more when you're feeling awe, you cooperate more, you give more, just with a minute or two of looking it up at some trees. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.