Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 375: Reversing the Golden Rule | Jamil Zaki

Episode Date: September 1, 2021

In this episode we’re talking about how what you believe— about yourself, or about the world — can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So if you believe the world is a cold and unforgiving place, it can become that way. And if you believe that you have limited capacities for kindness, you can, in effect, make it so. Our guest is Jamil Zaki, who is making his second appearance here on the show. Jamil is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He is a leading expert on empathy and the author of the book The War for Kindness. Jamil discusses three levels of kindness: kindness toward ourselves, kindness in our close relationships, and kindness in our communities. He argues that starting with the self is critical, but also that the kinder we can make our communities, the kinder we will be ourselves. And the more we reorient ourselves to focus on the positive, the more we can create a self-fulfilling prophecy of kindness. We are bringing you this Ten Percent Happier podcast series in collaboration with the Apple TV+ Original Series Ted Lasso because kindness is a huge theme in the show, and there are many practical lessons embedded right in the plot. Watch Season 2 of Ted Lasso on Apple TV+. Subscription required. Apple TV+ and/or select content may not be available in all regions. To sign up for the Ted Lasso Challenge, download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/install Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/jamil-zaki-375 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, today we're talking with another eminent scientist about how what you believe about yourself or about the world can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, for example, if you believe the world is a cold and unforgiving place, it actually can become that way for you.

And if you believe you have limited capacities for kindness, you can, in effect, make it so. Of course, the reverse is true as well. If you have positive beliefs about the world or about yourself, you can in many ways change yourself and the world. My guest is Jamil Zaki, who's making his second appearance here on the show.

Jamil is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He is a leading expert on empathy and the author of an excellent book called The War for Kindness. Today he's going to talk to us about three levels of kindness. There's kindness toward ourselves, kindness in our close relationships, and kindness in the broader community. He's going to argue that starting with yourself is critical. In fact, he'll make a counterintuitive case

for reversing the golden rule, but also that the kinder we can make our communities, the kinder we will be to ourselves, and the more we reorient ourselves to focus on the positive, the more we can create a self-fulfilling prophecy of kindness. Anyway, trust me, he explains this better than I do.

This is the second episode in our Ted Lasso series, which we're doing here on the podcast. It runs through this week and next. It's all about the scientific benefits of kindness, compassion, niceness, etc. I know that being nice, some of you may sound treakly. It certainly did to me for many years. However, as longtime listeners to this show will know, we here at TPH love nothing more than rescuing a cliche from gooey oblivion and turning it into something that can help us do life better. I should also note that the reason why we're calling this the Ted Lasso series is that it's a collaboration with the hit show on Apple TV Plus called Ted Lasso, season two is out right now. Definitely worth a watch if you have the time. Important to note, however, that if you haven't watched the show or don't plan to watch the show, it's totally fine.

You'll be able to listen to these episodes. No problem. We provide plenty of context. Also we're not only doing this series of special episodes here on the show. We're going to launch a special Ted Lasso challenge over on the show. We're gonna launch a special TED LASSO challenge over on the 10% happier app, so you can learn how to practice everything you're learning here on the podcast.

Starting today, you can sign up and join me for free on the TED LASSO challenge, which kicks off on September 7th. Again, it's over on the 10% happier app. Here's how the challenge works. Every day I will share a brief video where I'll play a little bit of a clip from the Ted Lasso show and provide some context. And then after the video, you'll do a quick, but powerful guided meditation from ace teacher

Las Armiento. We love these challenges and we're going to be doing more and more of them and really believe that they're a great way to kickstart, reboot or strengthen your meditation practice. Don't just take it from me, take it from this podcast listener who told us the following about one of our recent challenges. I'm just going to quickly read a quote here. I did the challenge and at last I'm experiencing the benefits of regular meditation, something I've never been able to do on my own, and the videos that precede most sessions are informative and enjoyable.

So, there you go. You can sign up to join us in the Ted Lasso Challenge today, just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps. Enough out of me. Here we go now with Jamil Zaki. Professor Jamil Zaki, welcome back to the show. Great to be here. You were telling me before we started rolling

that you probably wouldn't have watched Ted Lasso if we didn't ask you to or beg you to. It's true, you know, not for lack of interest. I'm just not a big binge watcher and man, it hooked me. I have to say, oh, you all had did a gratitude for turning me on to this show because it presents a type of character that I think we don't see often and don't see enough, which is somebody who trusts not because they're gullible or naive, but because they believe in people. And I

think it being fictional still shows us that sometimes when we believe in people. And I think it being fictional still shows us that sometimes when we believe in people that can have a powerful positive effect on them. Well, how does that rhyme with your research? enormously, I mean, I think that my research for the last couple of years has been focused on self-fulfilling prophecies. That is, in particular, what we believe about ourselves and each other

can change how we act towards ourselves and towards other people. And that can then change the experiences we have, which then go into our beliefs. I don't know if you can see the cycle here, but in essence, what happens is that the way that we believe the world to be can sometimes come true. In my lab, we've studied a bunch of examples of where that goes wrong. Synical and mistrusting beliefs, corrosive beliefs that can hurt us and the people around us. But I think whenever you study the dark side or something, the light side is right there underneath it. Okay, so it would make sense then for me to believe that most people are basically good

and to trust people, is that what you're saying? And couldn't there be a dark side to that where some people don't have good intentions and I could get burnt? Of course, I think that blind trust, totally uninformed optimism that has no basis in any evidence can be a really dangerous thing. Whenever we trust, we take a risk.

But I think that increasingly, our culture suffers from the opposite problem, which is blind cynicism, that without knowing anything about a person, I assume the worst about them. So, for instance, in 1972, 45% of Americans agreed with the statement most people can be trusted. By 2018, that had fallen to about 30%. By 2018, that had fallen to about 30%. Likewise, at the same time, we've lost much of our faith in institutions, in news media, in governmental organizations. But most of all, in each other, social trust has really eroded. And I think what that means is that we're making many of us

making decisions about people and about the social world, absent any evidence, where we're not trusting. And trusting and getting burned is a really obvious problem, right? I mean, that's why we don't do it. We don't hand off our kids to people we don't know, we don't loan tons of money to people we've never met, because we don't want to get burned. But blindly mistrusting people can also cause us to lose lots of opportunities, for instance opportunities to learn from them, opportunities to connect and to build relationships. And I think that risk is one that we don't see as much, but it is just as important.

Are you in favor of Ronald Reagan-esque trust but verify? I think that phrase is a useful one. I would say there's this old work in evolutionary theory and economics where the question is, if you're meeting somebody and interacting with them for the first time and you're going to interact a bunch of times, that's part of it as well. You're sort of building a relationship. What's the optimal approach?

What's the way that you can balance the risk of having someone take advantage of you with the risk of losing out on a chance to cooperate and build a strong relationship that benefits both of you? And the outcome of that was, you know, this was run with all these computer simulations and they had names for the different approaches that a computer agent could take to this. So you could be a punisher or you could be a truster or you could be a reciprocator. And the winning strategy turned out to be something called generous tit for tat.

And I suppose this particular way Reagan-esque strategy that generous tit for tat takes is that you start out trusting. You start out assuming that the other person has goodwill and good intent and will do the right thing. And if you're right, then you get all the benefits of a positive relationship with that person. If you're wrong, you update. You stop trusting them for a while, but not forever. You occasionally give them chances again. Are you familiar with the work of Adam Grantittle? Yes. In his book, Give and Take, and I'm not going to be able to cite it chapter in verse, but there were some quite long passages about mentoring where people were good mentors, just sort of damn the evidence, damn the torpedoes. I am choosing to believe that there is something excellent in you and I'm going to invest. And I actually, I hope it's already in that book, did not do that. And I've found actually that the more I do do that with people I'm mentoring,

the better things go. So that seemed to fall in line with what you're talking about. Oh, totally. Yeah, I mean, I've learned so much from Adam as has so many people. And that's one of those messages is that really, trusting someone takes risk. It takes being vulnerable to them, handing over your success, even your safety, your stability to another person. And that can be so hard, especially if you've worked really hard to get where you are,

and to get in the position where you're mentoring someone. I think the thing that a lot of people don't realize is how powerful and effect trusting or not trusting somebody has on them. We think so much about the risk that it is to me. If I trust this person, I could lose. We don't think of trust as a gift, and I think we should. And we don't think of trust as a gift and I think we should. And

we don't think of mistrust as a harm. And I think in some cases it is. I'll give you a couple of different examples. One comes from my own hometown of Boston. So in 2001, there was a new fire chief who took over the Boston Fire Department. And he noticed that firefighters who until that time had had unlimited sick days were taking more sick days on Mondays and Fridays than any other day of the week. And he decided, oh man, I've got a bunch of cheaters working for me, a bunch of malingurers,

people who are gaming the system. And so he put a tight cap of 15 sick days a year on all firefighters and said, if you go above that cap, I'm going to dock your pay. Well, what do you think happened? Well, the policy went into effect in early December and it backfired spectacularly. So that Christmas and New Year's 10 times as many firefighters took those days off as had the previous year. And in 2002, the year after the policy was enacted, sick days overall rose by more than 100%. About 7,000 additional sick days were taken. In other words, the fire chief sent

a message to his people saying, you are selfish. You are self-serving. And so I'm going to limit the amount of self-servingness you can take. But most firefighters weren't taking that many sick days off at all. They were driven not by selfishness, but by an honorable desire to protect other people, even at great risk to themselves.

And so they took it personally. And they said, well, shoot, if you're not going to give me any credit for the hard work that I do to protect others, if you're going to treat me like I'm selfish, I'll play the part. That's really interesting. It just gets me to a question I've been thinking about since you first started to advance the thesis about 10 minutes ago, which is this notion of a self-fulfilling prophecy that what you believe the world around you can conform to those core beliefs. How do we get ourselves to believe something?

You know, what if I've had a really difficult traumatizing life? How am I supposed to believe that most people are good or that the world is fundamentally a friendly if the evidence of my entire existence is screaming to the contrary. It's a real challenge, but it's not an insurmountable one. I think one of the places to start is with intellectual and even emotional humility. I think we sometimes take our experiences of the world and paste them on to our futures or onto other people's lives. We assume that, okay, I've experienced this in the past and therefore, everyone that I encounter from now on

will be like the people I've known in the past or will treat me like the people in my past have treated me. And first of all, that is a totally legitimate and valid experience to have. I completely understand where that comes from. It can also be limiting. And I think that one of the first things that I talk about with my students when I discuss, what do we learn from psychology? Is I think we learn that we don't know as much as we think we know, that we take our experiences

and construct a whole world out of them. But we can actually be more curious about other people. And in this case, give them more of a chance. Another thing that I would say is that most of us, and again, I want to make clear that people have gone through trauma and their past, their experiences are incredibly important and incredibly difficult. But most of us have access to all sorts of evidence

that people are bad and all sorts of evidence that people are good. But we tend to pay more attention to the bad stuff. And that makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, right? It's oftentimes really important for us as animals to look out for threats, to be really attuned to threat and not as much to the good stuff. But sometimes that can warp our view. So in my lab, and there's work in lots of other labs to this effect as well, we find that people, when you present them, for instance, with stories about somebody who does one bad thing and one good thing, they'll assume that the person is mostly bad, whereas if you present them with stories

of people who do one extroverted thing and one introverted thing, they don't think the person is mostly introverted. When it comes to moral judgments, when it comes to moral impressions, we overweight the bad stuff. And again, that serves a purpose, but I think that if you want to go on a journey of trying to trust more, one thing to do is just to try to notice more of the positive things that people are probably doing all around you all the time that just kind of fly under the radar. Don't we tend to write more negative stories in our minds about people if they're not in our tribe?

Absolutely. So this is one place where experiences with a single person can generalize really quickly, right? So we have a negative experience with one person and that person is different from us along some identity dimension, right? They're from a different generation, or a different gender, or ethnicity or nationality. It becomes extremely easy for us to then extrapolate out from that one negative experience to a stereotype about that entire group.

And stereotypes are, in many cases, extremely cynical perceptions, not just of one person, but of entire categories of people. And again, they're not just harmful to other people. They certainly are. It hurts other people when we stereotype them. But they're harmful to ourselves, because they make us lose out on all of these chances

to have real human connections with other people that can benefit everyone. Are there other practices that might help us have more positive underlying assumptions about the world which would turn into positive self-fulfilling prophecies? I think there's a couple of ways of cultivating this. Again, one is to focus on and try to basically rebalance your scale of paying attention to negative versus positive. Another is to cultivate this type of humility. To hit the pause button, if you feel yourself rushing to judgment, I think that there are

many cases in which we have reactions to something that somebody else does, where we're not actually responding to what they've done, we're responding to its effect on us. And its effect on us may have to do with a lot of things, including our past, and whether we're hangry right now or not, and just all sorts of stuff that's happening in our mind and body. And I think sometimes if we have a reaction to somebody,

like, oh, this person's a jerk, they're trying to take advantage of me. Definitely pay attention to those spidey senses. Definitely don't be gullible or naive, but also interrogate them and say, where is this evidence coming from? What's the actual reason that I think this? And if I looked at it dispassionately, might there be another explanation? Basically, to take a close look at our reactions and assumptions, as I know, you talk about this with a lot of people, and I think that having a contemplative mindset

is a really great way of doing that. And then I guess a third thing that I would say pertains to what in clinical psychology, we call behavioral activation. So if you're depressed, you know, you're sitting on the couch, you're feeling bad, you can try to feel better, or you can just get off the couch and walk around,

and that might actually make you feel better. Sometimes when it comes to trust, or trying to cultivate positive impressions of other people, a leap of faith can matter a lot. You know, Ernest Hemingway said, the best way to find out if you can trust someone is to trust them. Obviously, we want to take care of ourselves and be safe, but sometimes taking those risks can be really powerful for a step.

A couple of other quotes, one on the nose, the other, not at all, but just somehow it has surfaced in my mind. My dad used to say the best stretching for running is running. I think that will only obliquely fit here. And then there's a, I think it's from that movie Lean On Me from the 80s or something about a school principal who says something the effect of Students rise to the level of expectation. That's right. That's right. So that was once called the pigmalion effect as well. You know, and the idea is that again, you know, the Boston fire chief showed his firefighters what he thought of them and they lowered to his expectation in a way. But oftentimes we can do the exact opposite, right. We can make the choice

to believe in somebody, again, not blindly, but we can find parts of that person to believe in. And when we notice those parts of them and show them that we're noticing that, we open up all sorts of possibilities for them. There's a term for this in behavioral sciences called trust responsiveness. So there's

all these studies, play an economic game, two people who don't know each other at all and never meet. And one of them decides how much money to send to another one. And then that money is tripled. So the first person is a truster. So the truster sends money to a trustee. That money is tripled. And then the trustee can send back whatever they want. So they can cheat the person. They can play fairly in which case both people profit. And so the truster is asked, what do you think the trustee

will give back? And in some cases, the trustee is shown what the truster thought they would do in other cases they're not. And it turns out that when you trust me, if I also know that you expect me to reciprocate that trust, that you expect me to do the right thing, if I know that that's your expectation, I'm way more likely to act fairly towards you.

I'm way more likely to step up because you've put faith in me. And I think you see this in mentorship. You see this in friendship. You see this in the best of cases in dialogue, even between people who disagree, right? That when I can not just take that leap of faith of believing, hey, you know what,

I bet that this person is not evil. I bet that they have something in them that is striving to do the right thing. And then show that version of a person to themselves through my belief in them. Then the likelihood that they'll try to live up to that increases enormously. It seems in some ways to be the opposite of stereotype threat. Well, you're nodding your heads all like you describe it and tell me if I'm onto something here. Oh, no, I've not made the connection before, but I really like it where stereotype threat, of course, is where you're reminded of how some part of

your identity is not supposed to do well in some context, right? So for me, as a man, if you remind me of my gender, for instance, before I do an empathy test, I might do worse than a woman because I would say, oh man, I'm a guy. We're not so sensitive. We're not supposed to do well on this. I think that there's a term known as stereotype lift where some part of your identity is supposed to be good at something, so you are good at it. And again, there's evidence from my own world empathy research where women who are reminded that something is an empathy test and are reminded of their gender before they do it actually do better because they say, oh, I am supposed to be sensitive in this way.

Stereotypes threat and lift have to do with groups that you belong to. But Dan, I think that what you're pointing out is that putting faith in someone, showing them that we trust them actually is like a more individualized version of stereotype list. It's saying, the person you are, I've seen you, and I think you're capable of doing something really good. I mean, we see it throughout Ted Lasso. This is a series inspired by Ted Lasso, but I don't want to dwell too much on it just because there may be people listening to who have never watched the show and are never going to watch the show, but just to give you some context, there's a problematic player on the team who I think is actually very funny. It is well acted. His name, the character's

name is Jamie Tarte. And Ted Lasso continues to watch Jamie behave in abominable ways and never signals that I don't like you or I see you as thorough, goingly, bad. It continues to just kind of, I don't know, kill him with kindness really. And instead of a stereotype threat. It's true and just for people who haven't watched the show, I'll also add that what Ted does with Jamie

is not being gullible and naive. He sees what Jamie is doing. He sees that Jamie in this case is being really egotistical, sabotaging some of his teammates sometimes. And Lasso takes action, right? So for instance, he praises Jamie for being really a good soccer player, but then says, but you know what could make you great is if you were more of a team player, right?

So he presents a criticism, but he presents it as an opportunity, a potential for growth that Jamie has instead of criticizing him and saying, you're good at soccer, but you're bad at this saying you're good at soccer. And you know what would make you better is to act in this way. He also, by the way, benches him at some point. So he's willing to, I guess, in a Reagan-esque way, trust and then update also.

But I think that's one of the things is that sometimes even criticism, even punishment can be given in ways that show belief in a person. I'll give you an example, a former student in my department at Stanford and now a professor at UC Berkeley, Jason Akanova has done incredible work on discipline in schools. And so what he finds is that, first of all, black and brown and poor students are much more likely to get suspended, and they're much more likely to then get expelled from school. He then ran an intervention in a bunch of schools around the Bay Area.

We asked teachers as they were disciplining students to do so empathically, almost in a Ted Lasso-esque way to say, okay, there's something that's gone wrong. You've done something in class. I have to punish you. You have to go to detention. I can't not do that. But I want to talk about why this happened,

and I want to urge you to see that you can do better. And it's a very personalized, very empathic way, again, of delivering punishment. So you're not being naive, you're not failing to discipline. You're showing a person that something's gone wrong, but also that you have the potential to do better. And Jason found that that type of empathic discipline cut down suspension rates enormously, especially among kids who tend to be suspended the most, right?

So sometimes even when we're being totally upfront with someone, we can do so in a way that shows opportunity rather than judgment. I have a bunch of areas from the show that I'd love to talk about or just things I'd like to talk about with you generally, but as an empathy researcher, what else did you see in the show that you're bursting at the seams to discuss? I think that one thing that I love about the show is that it presents empathy as a positive thing. You know, one time just for fun, one of my colleagues, Sylvia Morelli and I, just did a poll, we asked 500 people,

complete the following sentence. I feel empathy when someone else feels blank. And we found that people responded with negative words. I think if memory serves 40 times more often than with positive words. In other words, the cultural stereotype that we have for empathy is that it's a response to suffering. And in fact, that's not true. Empathy is a resonance and a response to people's emotions, positive or negative. I believe

there's a term, Dan, please correct me if I'm wrong here, Moudita, which actually pertains to Vicarious joy. Is that right? Yes, it's a Buddhist term. It's sometimes translated as sympathetic joy. It's the opposite of shot and Freud, the opposite of enjoying somebody's suffering. It's enjoying another person's success,

which is very hard to do, especially in competitive environments, like professional sports. Yes, yes, that's right. But it's a key part of empathy. I mean, so Sylvia has done other work where she asks people on a day-to-day basis what empathic experiences they're having.

And in fact, many, many of our regular empathic experiences are a form of vicarious or sympathetic joy. You're right that it's hard to have in competitive settings, but a lot of the times we're around our friends and family and people we love and sharing their positive experiences is a huge part of what empathy means. And so I like that in the show, empathy is portrayed not just as sobbing alongside somebody,

but really celebrating people and celebrating their joy, their happiness. What lessons about teamwork shine through to you? I think that teamwork is a skill that it's not something that always comes naturally. Again, to bring up the character of Jamie, this is a prima donna player who really wants to basically score 100% of the team's goals. And one of the strategies that they employ is for him to be a decoy and instead to pass it to another player, which could then make the team succeed much more efficiently.

And he's just really reticent to do that. And it's a real growth experience for him and he's just really reticent to do that. And it's a real growth experience for him to learn that sometimes you win, you succeed by helping the team succeed. You know, it actually reminded me there's this guy Bill Bradley. He played for the 1973 championship Nix. Dan, I don't know if you're a Nix fan. Are you a Nix fan? I don't know anybody about sports,

but Bill Bradley went on to become a senator and ran for president. And so I know him through that and he's very, very tall. Yeah. Well, as many NBA players are, yeah, he played for this team. It was the last nix team that ever won a championship in 1973. So that's not good news for your New York-based listeners, but he wrote a book about it. And I love a certain thing that he describes in the book.

He says, the 73-nix won the NBA championship, but they didn't have a single superstar. They didn't have one person who just rose above and was scoring 50 points a game. And he says, it was a team championship. And he said, the thing about that type of championship is that it exposes the limits of self-reliance, selfishness and irresponsibility because, and I hope I'm getting this right, he says, the success of the team assures the success of the individual, but not the other way around.

And that always struck me as so profound. There are so many parts of our life, not just in sports, but in general, where we have this instinct to focus on ourselves as individuals and how we can outshine the people around us and how we can, you know, be the best there is. And I think our culture promotes that. We are a pretty individualistic culture. But there are so many cases where, in fact, if we as individuals wanted to succeed, the best thing that we could do is to become part of something greater than ourselves and to contribute to that culture.

Back to self-fulfilling prophecies for a second. One thing that shines through to me in the show is how Ted, this very kind individual comes in and shifts the culture, not only in the locker room, but within the entire organization. You can see that the cultural norm at the beginning of the season, this is not spoiling it in any significant way, but the cultural norm at the beginning of the season is be mean to the locker room assistant, the water boy Nate. Ted shifts that.

And so I won't give any more details because I don't want to run the risk of people being mad at me for spoiling it. But what does that tell you about culture and especially about how if you believe a certain thing about a culture you're likely to just act it out? I mean, what can you say? We are a herd species. You know, we can form. We can form to the culture that we see around us because we want to fit in. And I think that what that means is that oftentimes people act in ways in a group

that they would not have acted in that way if they were alone. And I think that can be super hurtful. So as you say in the beginning of the show, there's this extremely hierarchical culture where people who are low on the totem pole are abused and mistreated. And some people in that locker room, some people in your workplace, some people in your school or town

might not want to act in a cruel way, in a prejudicial way. But if they see the people around them doing so, they're more likely to do it themselves. Like social norms, what's normal around us is almost like gravity. We can jump away from it, but it tends to pull us back in. And I think that's really harmful, but there's good news here as well. Because oftentimes, there's a lot of good being done around us.

There's a lot of people acting kindly and a lot of people helping each other. And when we can focus on that, we can change a culture. So I'll give you an example. My lab did some work recently with middle schools in the Bay Area, seventh graders who are by age, extremely conformist, like some of the most conformist people on the planet by age. And I mean, which I sympathized with,

I wouldn't have done anything in seventh grade to fit in. And so we went to these schools and we asked students to report on why they valued empathy. What do you like about empathy? And they told us. And so then we collated all their responses so that when they came back to school, we could give them a brochure of all of their friends and classmates saying why they valued empathy. In essence, we were alerting these kids to a social norm that they might not have been paying attention to, but was there all along?

The quiet majority that prefers kindness, togetherness, and connection. And we found that students who saw that information about their peers reported more motivation to be empathic. And that in turn predicted the likelihood of them acting kindly towards their peers even a month later. Right? So in essence, if we can get people to realize, and again, this gets back to noticing as well, if we can get people to notice the positivity around them, it's not just good for them feeling good about others or trusting others, it's good for teaching them about a norm that they might want to belong to.

The issue again is that bad tends to be more noticeable than good. You think about what gets put on the front page of a newspaper or who we tend to pay attention to. You know, one toxic colleague among 10 really friendly ones will probably get more attention. One really extreme person on Twitter will get more attention maybe than a centrist. Our attention tends to gravitate towards the most outrageous

extreme and often harmful attitudes that people around us have. So we can confuse those with the majority. So I think one thing that's important in any culture, especially for leaders, is to re-center that perception, to highlight that, hey, there's a lot of good being done here, not just because that makes us feel good, but because that can make it more contagious, can give it more gravity. Much more of my conversation with Jamil Zaki right after this.

Hey, I'm Aresha and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wundery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one.

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It's fundamental and it's really hard to do for many people One of the self-fulfilling prophecies that my lab has studied recently is about self-compassion So one of my students, Christina Chowil, she was an undergraduate at the time at Stanford the self-fulfilling prophecies that my lab has studied recently is about self-compassion. So one of my students, Christina Chowil, she was an undergraduate at the time at Stanford, really terrific student and also a really strong practitioner of self-compassion. And she noticed that her peers at Stanford, many of them, super-high-achieving, but really hard on themselves. And one thing at some high achieving places is that people confuse self-compassion and self-kindness with complacency or weakness or self-indulgence.

And so, Christina and I along with Patricia Chendis, I decided to study this. But we basically asked people, what do you think self-compassion is? Do you think that it will weaken you? Do you think that it's selfish? Do you think that it will make you self-indulgent? And people who believe that are less willing to act self-compassionately. And so when they actually face a problem,

I mean, Dan, I know you've talked with lots of folks about self-compassion. I loved your interview with Christopher Germer, for instance. And I think that one of the tough things is that when you're not self-compassionate, you try to escape or avoid problems because they're just too painful to deal with. And so self-compassion, far from being a weakness, can help us cope effectively with difficult times in our lives. But if people believe that self-compassion is indulgent, they don't use it, and then it doesn't help them.

We, in that same work, decided to change what people believe. So we had them read essays that emphasized, you know, self-compassion is extremely powerful. It's a strength. It's a way of being strong in the face of our difficulties. And we found that reading that shifted people's beliefs just a little bit made them more willing to engage with self-compassion.

And in that case, more able to cope effectively. I mean, in essence, we told people self-compassion was useful. They used it, and it became useful. Yeah, I think that happened when I fought it for so long for a bunch of reasons, including sort of as I've caught to in public before this kind of culturally imbibed sexism that it seems soft in the majority.

And then once I just had enough conversations with really smart people and saw the science, I was like, oh, okay, I'm just going to screw it, I'm just going to do it. And then it works. And now I'm in. But you just said something before about self-compassion being foundational on root to kindness to other people. But I think we can all think of people who are mean to themselves, but incredibly generous and kind to other people.

It doesn't seem accurate to call it a prerequisite. No, I don't think it's a prerequisite necessarily. I think that self-compassion might be most important, though, to being sustainably kind. Right. I think a lot of times there are martyrs out there, people out there who throw themselves on the grenade to protect others, and it's a really noble way to be. I think that it also can burn us out really quickly. Lord knows that during the pandemic, many of us have shifted to caregiving roles where

we're trying to do much more for our loved ones who are vulnerable than we would before. And that's good. That's necessary. I think that if you don't mix in some self-kindness, some self-compassion, that can become really all encompassing and exhausting. One way of thinking about it is, again, and it's a little bit of a reversal of the Bill Bradley

quote, I suppose, is that if you want to do the most good for other people, it's kind of like, what do you do if you want to do the most good for other people, it's kind of like, what do you do if you want to run the furthest, right? You don't just go as fast as you can and not drink any water, right? In order to accomplish something, you need to take care of whatever the apparatus is that you're using to accomplish that, whether that's your knees or your brain in the case of being compassionate and kind. And I think that self-compassion, you can think of it as oiling the machine,

as giving yourself more capacity to be there for others. I want to talk about in this back half of the interview, some of your strategies for building empathy. And I think the first one that I'm going to reference here picks up right on what you were talking about, which is reversing the golden rule. Yeah, exactly. I mean, and that really is about self-compassion. I've talked with lots of people about strategies for building this. And I think Dan, your own story is a really great one where you basically saw the evidence

for self-compassion and moved from there. And of course, that's what Christina and I tried to do as well. Sometimes, though, more than evidence is just shifting people's perspective. So reversing the golden rule is just basically saying, well, the golden rule holds that we should treat others as we would like to be treated. But many people have a much easier time

being kind to others than to themselves. And that's especially in the face of failures. I don't know if you've ever had this experience where someone makes a mistake, they screw up somehow, and they're beating themselves up about it. And you say, honestly, oh my goodness, that says nothing at all about you. And it was the situation that you were in and any of us could do this. That's not who you are. You're better than that. And you'll bounce back

from this no problem. And then you make the exact same mistake, and all of a sudden, no, that's a life-defining event. You'll never be any better. It's so easy to basically give up on ourselves more than we would other people. And so the idea of reversing the golden rule, which again, it's really just another way of talking about very common

self-compassion practice, is when you're going through a difficulty, ask yourself, what would you say to somebody you loved, who is going through the exact same thing? How would you treat them and what would you think about them? And basically trying to shine that warm light that we give to others, back on ourselves a little bit. Another of your precepts here is spend kindly. Yeah, and again, this is a simple practice, sort of like behavioral activation, like that leap of faith that we were talking about earlier, or how the best stretching for running is running.

And in this case, I think a lot of people have misperceptions of what it will mean to help somebody else. So in some of our work, we find, for instance, that there are some people out there who think happiness is zero sum. So anything that I do for you to make you happier will have to come at the cost of my own. And if you have that zero sum belief, it turns out from our research, you're less likely to give to other people.

You're also less likely to end up happy, probably because you're missing out on a key ingredient of well-being, which is being there for others. And so one of the things that I teach my students is even if you are assuming that helping someone else will exhaust you or that spending money on someone else will make you feel broke or spending time on someone else

will make you feel stressed, just try it. You know, it doesn't have to be super high stakes. Just do it, but then pay very close attention to the way that it makes you feel because you might realize that it's the opposite of what you thought it would be. And my students have this all the time. They report to me that they're nervous because they've got a calculus problem set do the next day. So how could they possibly go and attend to their friends play to support them?

And they end up 90 minutes later, back in the same room, doing their same calculus set, but much more fulfilled and much more energized than they were before. And so sometimes again, just taking that step, just doing the thing for someone else that we're wondering whether we should do is a great step to learning about the power of kindness. Adam Grant is instructive again here because back to his book I was quoting earlier, give and take is instructive again here because back to his book, I was quoting earlier, give and take, really explores the benefits of generosity, specifically in a workplace, but I think it's probably scalable to all of life.

He shows that the givers tend to do really well, be the most successful, but they're both the most successful and the least successful, the difference is, are you a wise giver or a strategic giver or not? If you give it away that makes sense that is enjoyable to you, that doesn't deplete you, then yes, you are likely to be happier, have more social support and rise to the top. If you're a selfless giver in a way that is unwise, not strategic and self-depleting, then you are likely to not do well. And so, yeah, it can make sense to go see your friends play if you really do have the time on the other end

to do the calculus set. In my life, I found that, in part, in consultation with Adam, there's many asks that come into me, what are the ones that I really wanna do? Turns out it's mentoring. I like talking to people about their careers. It's genuinely enjoyable to me. And I tend to employ the strategy that Adam recommends

called chunking. You know, chunking it all together at a time where it's convenient for me. So after dinner is good, or like right after my son falls asleep or on the weekends for a little bit. So it's not adding a bunch of friction into my life. It's actually just a fun thing that I look forward to.

So anyway, it's not just you should be more giving. It's how you do it, too, is the point I'm trying to make. Oh, totally. You want to be efficient with your giving. I love Adam's idea of chunking. By the way, I will also add, Adam is the most walk the talk person I think I've ever met. He is truly such a generous guy and also writes and speaks on that topic. So he really lives the values that he writes about, which I was really admire. I think you want to be efficient with giving, you want to monitor and see, you know, truly what type of giving is most meaningful to you and what type of giving

actually does to pleat you. Yeah, I mean, I'm the same way. There are certain ways of being there for other people that I think are really fulfilling for me. And also, I happen to be better at than others. And I think oftentimes we feel obligated to just be kind in every way possible to everyone. I guess that's a little bit of what are we allowed to talk about season two of Ted Lasso? Um, go for it. Well, why don't we just spoil alert you if we glued this in the show just fast forward for a minute or two.

Okay. Without spoiling anything, I think that's what season two of Ted Lasso starts to get into is this idea of toxic positivity, you know, of in essence, being so, so defined by a sense of yourself as kind and giving, that you just do everything for everyone in every way, even if it harms yourself, even if it harms other people. There's a big difference between being kind and being a slave to kindness, being a slave to whatever people request of you at any time. One thing that I'll just quickly add is that in workplaces during the pandemic, there's rightly been a lot of focus

on devoting time to self-care, like self-care days in workplaces. I would like to advocate other care days at workplaces, because this, again, gets back to the idea of chunking that you just brought up and efficiency and meaning, to just give people a day every month, whatever rhythm works for you, to just go and help somebody else in whatever way they see fit, to give people space to access that meaning in their life. That's just something that more people can start to implement.

Let me just keep working down this list that I got of some strategies from you for exercising your empathy muscles. The third of the five items on this list, I know you're not a practicing Buddhist, but it's very Buddhist to have a list. We structure many shows around various Buddhist lists. The third here is disagree better. Yes, and this again gets back to self-fulfilling prophecies. I think oftentimes, especially when we are in conflict with others, it's extremely easy to take an uncharitable view of where they're coming from.

Somebody doesn't just disagree with us. They are also a bad person, and they have halitosis, and they are, they're stupid or evil or both, right? I mean, it's just, it's ramped up so much. I think we've seen this, of course, in our culture politically. This is what political scientists call affective polarization.

We no longer just disagree, we dislike the people we disagree with. And that is just a dead end, in my opinion. I think that just makes things worse. And I think it changes what we think is possible in disagreement. So in our lab, one of my students, Louie Zassantos has explored, do people think it's worth empathizing with trying to understand folks on the other side? And she finds that when people believe

that empathy is a weakness, very similar to the self-compassion work, when people think empathy in politics is a weakness, they avoid it. And they even avoid getting to know people on the other side. For instance, they tend to hang out only with people that they agree with. So we tend to cut off our ability to connect with people who are different from us at the knees in this way. The good news is that we don't have to obviously. And so disagreeing better is,

again, a tactic kind of drawn from political science and from the idea of deep canvassing. I don't know, Dan, if you've ever heard of this. So deep canvassing is where you go in the old days door to door and instead of giving someone statistics and sniping at them if they disagree with you, you ask them for their stories. And then you share as the canvas or you share your stories. And you try to find a story you have in common and experience you have in common. And you use that as a fulcrum, as a kind of archemedis point, to find more and more common ground until you can get to the issue that you were there to talk about.

It's almost like a cross between canvassing and therapy in a way. And it's really powerful. And so when I say disagree better, the challenge here is to find someone you disagree with and try to do some deep canvassing with them. Instead of talking about what your opinions are and fighting about them, try to talk about how you came to have your opinion in the first place and how the other person did sort of find the stories underneath the opinions. And oftentimes there, you can find some surprising common ground.

Kind tech. What do you mean by kind tech? This is the idea that I think if you read wired from 2010, there is all this breathless thinking about how the internet and social media were going to create this public worldwide community. And I think many of us feel that it's done the exact opposite. I think though that within our technological lives, there is the capacity to broaden our kindness and also obviously to broaden our cruelty.

The fact that we're doing the second doesn't mean that we can't also do the first. So engaging in kind tech is just an exercise to, on a given day, try to be more intentional about what we do when we're online. So for instance, instead of lurking, maybe sending a message or note of positive reinforcement to somebody if they post about a life event or reaching out personally to somebody who is struggling or posting publicly about something kind that somebody did, again,

sort of elevating and making that type of positive behavior more visible in the culture? I love that. I get a phenomenal amount of nice tweets. I mean, I get some nasty ones or some constructive criticism too, but I do see just from part because I'm in the happiness business. I do see a lot of people sort of using Twitter in a nice way. And then of course, when I flip over to my main feed, instead of my at-reflas, I see people just sniping at each other non-stop. So, and yeah, I'm intrigued by the notion of using social media to be a vector of positivity rather than taking random pictures of my lunch

or selfies in front of private jets that say hashtag blessed or complaining about my neighbors who I disagree with politically. Anyway, good point. Final one here is be a culture builder. Yeah, and this again gets back to what we already talked about around social norms and the fact that sort of like the locker room culture that we were talking about earlier in Ted Lazo, which is that we are conformists, right? And I don't mean that in a pejorative way.

I think conformity is just part of who we are. And we are social creatures, and we always will travel together more than we do alone. And that means that social forces work on us, right? So what we see around us will change who we are and how we behave. But it's also important to remember that you are part of somebody else's social environment. You are creating the norms that they respond to.

And I think the more power, privilege, and status you have, the more that this is, an opportunity and responsibility for you. But whatever megaphone you have, what you do with it creates the social reality of the people around you and influences who they become. And so I think that when I say be a culture builder, you know, the simple way to do it is to intentionally at some moment take time to either call out in a positive way somebody who's acting empathically in kind, make it really, you know, visible that they're doing that without embarrassing them, but, you know, just making it clear,

elevating that, highlighting that type of behavior for them and the people around them, or challenging people when they act in a way that's not so kind, you know, like the original locker room and Ted Lasso at the beginning of the series, right? So I think that those little, I suppose, social nudges, recognizing and elevating positivity, and also standing up to and challenging negativity and cruelty are those little things that each of us do that together can develop more positive cultures, whether those are microclimates, just in a locker room, in a classroom, in a family, in a company, or whether they're macroclimates,

I think both matter a lot. I'm going to call somebody out, unfortunately, not around live anymore to hear it, but something you said about how we use language, got me thinking about a lesson that was taught to me by somebody who's way younger than me when she was alive. Her name was Grace, she was a former employee, a 10% happier. She was my assistant on a book that I'm still writing. And unfortunately, she didn't get to see it come out

into the world because it still hasn't come out. But she was a really key player in that process. And one of the things she was really interested in based on some hard experiences in her life is how people in general talk about food and body image. And she noticed that I had a way of sort of flippantly sort of self-deprecatingly and I thought it was funny and maybe sometimes it was, but probably not worth it. Saying, oh yeah, I ate so much, I feel like sick or you know, I ate so much. I need to wear spanks now or whatever. And it can be funny, but her point was that it's useless speech. The

Buddhists have a term for this. Sumpa Palapa, which is almost like an onomatopoeic in its beauty, that there's this useless garbage talk that we do. And in this case, that can be kind of useless garbage talk that we do. And in this case, that can be kind of noxious in that it's, you're just spreading this unexamined assumption that your body needs to look a certain way, that certain foods are sinful, you're talking about foods in a moralistic way that can create a sort of disordered relationship to food.

And so you really got me paying attention with my sort of offhand comments that were creating, I was not doing culture building, or I was building the wrong kind of culture, either through my megaphone, through which I reach a lot of people, or in my various microclimates. So anyway, that just came to mind based on everything you said. It's a really powerful example, and I think you're right. A lot of us talk in ways that we don't monitor very much. And I think it's important to realize the power that that can have. I mean, I think of the people

around us as being to our minds, like the air that we breathe and the food that we eat are to our bodies. Right. And so we monitor that stuff, right. We try to not live next to a giant coal factory with a bunch of smoke stacks coming out of it. We try to eat healthy when we can in whatever ways we can. We don't monitor enough what we're taking in socially, right? So when I go on social media, for instance, I'm doing the mental equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes simultaneously. Sometimes it feels like, you know, and I think it's important that we monitor what we're taking into our minds the same way that we do our bodies, but also remember that we are the environment that other people are taking in and be conscious

of. You know, this is not to say, you know, to muzzle everything that you would say and to not be yourself, but rather just to be intentional and mindful about the fact that whatever you're saying, there are other people around who are hearing it. I mean, I've not experienced that anymore than now having little kids. I notice that if I'm in a bad mood, if I'm sort of stomping around the house,

they act differently, they seem nervous. And it breaks my heart to think that I act in a way that would make them feel that way. But to me, it's this small, tiny thing that no one would notice, but it affects them. And I think that that's true of so many people around us. And just to be aware of that, again, not to force ourselves in, box ourselves in, but just to be mindful I think is so important. I have a hard time picturing you stomping around the house or anywhere, but.

I don't know. I want to leave people with a simple thought, which is that you might know less than you think, but have more power than you think you do. You might not know as much about this new person that you just met as you think you do, you might not know as much about this new person that you just met as you think you do. You might not know as much about yourself as you think you do. But what you think will have power over who they and you become. And so I think it's critical for us to own that power and to realize that we don't need to be polyannas.

We don't need to believe that everything is great all the time. It's not. There are real problems. But part of addressing those problems is to try to find hope and to try to believe in ourselves and in other people when we can. Before I let you go, can you just blatantly plug your book and anything else that you've got going on that we should know about? Yeah, thanks Dan.

My book is The War for Kindness, Building Empathy in a Fractured World. The challenges that we've talked about, if people want to try them out, there are some videos that I've recorded that walk you through how to do them, and they're at warforkindness.com slash challenges. And I've got some new projects on everything

that we've been talking about on cynicism, what it does to us and how to escape it coming up. So stay tuned in N number of months or years from or on that from me. Pleasure to talk to you. Thank you again. Yeah, thank you, Dan. Thanks again to Jamila. I do want to add that if you're interested in what Jamil has to say, he just dropped a new TED talk and you can check it out at TED.com and get some key pieces of Jamil's wisdom on kindness to still into a bite-sized video. Before we head out, let me just plug again the TED LASO challenge in which we will teach you how to practice kindness in your life. The challenge starts on Tuesday, September 7th, over on the 10% happier app. Let me just plug again the Ted Lasso challenge, in which we will teach you how to practice kindness in your life.

The challenge starts on Tuesday, September 7th, over on the 10% happier app, download the app wherever you get your apps to join. This show is made by Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justine Davey, Maria Wartell, and Jen Poient with audio engineering from ultraviolet audio, as always, a big shout out to my ABC News

Comrades, Ryan Kessler and Josh Cohen. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus meditation from Sharon Salzburg. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with 1-3-plus in Apple podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.

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