The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Caring What You're Sharing

Episode Date: October 15, 2019

Sharing a good experience with another human deepens our enjoyment of the moment... but only if we abide by certain rules. Dr Laurie Santos shows us how we often get 'sharing' wrong and explains how we can all derive more happiness from ice cream, sunsets and a night in front of the TV.For an even deeper dive into the research we talk about in the show visit happinesslab.fm Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. It's October 5th, 1833. An inventor, William Henry Fox Talbot, is annoyed. After months of delays, Fox Talbot was finally able to take his new bride on their long-awaited honeymoon to the beautiful shores of Lake Como, one of the prettiest vacation spots in Italy. Think shimmering blue waters, statue-filled gardens. Everyone from Lord Byron to George Clooney has vacationed there. And that's why Fox Talbot was annoyed. Because he didn't want to just see this lovely scene himself. He wanted all his friends to see how pretty the lake

was too. The problem, of course, was that this was 1833. No smartphone cameras. If Fox Talbot wanted to share this beautiful scene with his friends back home, he had to draw it. Fox Talbot tried sketching the lakeside with the help of a camera lucida, the 19th century equivalent of the best smartphone camera. But his result wasn't all that great. It was so bad, in fact, that he called it a melancholy to behold. It was in this moment of vacation disappointment that Fox Talbot had some inspiration. How charming it would be, he later wrote,

if these natural images could imprint themselves durably upon the paper. Within just two years, Fox Talbot would invent an early way to do this. He developed the negative positive technique that later became photography, just because he wanted some honeymoon pics to share with the folks back home. Now let's fast forward to a different October 5th, exactly 177 years to the day that Fox Talbot drew that awful picture.

On this October 5th, 2010, another inventor, software engineer Kevin Systrom, is just about to launch the new photo sharing app he's developed with partner Mike Krieger. It's a sleek new tool that lets users take interesting photos to share with friends. What Systrom called an instant telegram of sorts. So they christened it Instagram. Systrom launched the app just after midnight. Within hours, Instagram servers crashed. Too many downloads. In 24 hours, Instagram had 25,000 users. Today, the site boasts a thousand new uploaded photos

every single second. When asked why Instagram was so successful, Systrom said that the app gave users a way to turn ordinary everyday scenes into magical moments. Magical moments that were not only captured, but instantly shared. Humankind now had the perfect way to satisfy Fox Talbot's original urge on the shores of Lake Como. The desire to share what we're experiencing. Now we can do it anytime we want. These stories show how far a technology can come in less than 200 years, but they also illustrate something more profound, the power of a very basic urge to record a moment so that we can brag about, excuse me, share that experience

with our friends and family members, everyone who wasn't there. Nowadays, most of us have devices in our pockets powerful enough to record pretty much every single experience in vivid detail. We also have tools that Fox Talbot probably couldn't even imagine. Ones that let us share those captured images broadly, not just with our family and friends, but with millions of strangers at the click of a button. For the first time in human history, our best moments in life aren't just preserved, Our best moments in life aren't just preserved, they're broadcast for all to see. But is all this sharing making us as happy as we think?

Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Lori Santos. I moved to New York City when I was 16, and I was dropped on Newton Square in a dorm, and I had no one.

Mary Alice Bunn is a young entrepreneur that many have called the Millennial Walt Disney. But long before she earned that nickname, she was just another college student and younger than most, alone in New York City. So I would sit most days in the park in Union Square and I played chess and I kind of just watched people. Mary Alice wanted to connect with people in a huge unknown city, so she turned to something she loved, ice cream shops. I would go on MapQuest, and I would start finding places in the Bronx,

and in Brooklyn, and in Queens, and these ice cream shops felt to me as places that were safe, they felt accessible, and my understanding of the city was by way of ice cream shops. Mapping the city in terms of the most delicious ice cream helped Mary Alice learn about her new urban home. But it also brought her something more important. Real human connection. Everyone's happy in ice cream shops.

People aren't depressed. And ice cream was able to just, for me, undress my social anxieties and put me in a place where I feel like I can converse and be my best social self. Mary Ellis's foray into New York ice cream shops made her realize how powerful shared experiences can be. Doing something with other people. It just makes us feel good. People share experiences with other people all the time in their daily life. This is Cornell University researcher Erica Boothby. When you watch a movie with somebody or a TV show or if you are at a concert or even just in your house and you have the radio on or you're listening to music or looking at visual stimuli such as paintings or photographs or things like that. Erica is an expert on the psychology behind all

these tiny shared moments. People are naturally drawn to share experiences in this way. I think, you know, even if you look at infants, you know, under a year old are already trying to basically co-opt their caregiver's gaze and share moments with them. If you have a young child, or have ever hung out with one, you probably know this phenomenon well. Mommy, look! Mommy! Mommy, come on, look! What's amazing is that babies don't need to be taught to do this. Research shows that our human motivation to share is an instinct, one that kicks in automatically during the first year of life. In one study, psychologist Mike Tomasello and his colleagues brought parents and young toddlers into the lab and staged weird events,

like having a strange-looking puppet pop out of a wall unexpectedly. The kids noticed the puppet naturally, but the parents pretended not to see it. And so, the kids did what they'd normally do. They pointed at the weird thing. But what were they trying to achieve? Did they just want their parents to see the puppet? Or did they want to share the experience? To see it at the same time, together? To test this, Tomasello varied how parents reacted. Some parents looked both at the child and what they pointed at.

But other parents only looked at the objects. They did what the kids were asking. They looked. But they didn't really share the experience with their child. What happened? Thomas Ella found that babies whose parents didn't share stopped pointing over time. Getting the parents to look wasn't the objective. It was about the act of sharing. I think that we, you know, go through life doing this, and it's something we may not be thinking about all the time, but it's something that is playing an underlying role in how we situate ourselves with others and how we go about all of our daily life. The fact that we're so sensitive to that is something that really sets us apart as a species. Erica became interested in why a shared experience is so

powerful. What are we getting out of it? She hypothesized that sharing an event with someone else might change the way we ourselves experience that event, even if we don't realize it. You're just simply attending to the same thing at the same time as this person and just knowing that their mind is also full of the same contents as your mind, changes that experience for you both. Erica devised a cool way to test this new idea, with a chocolate tasting. So we had people come in, they sat down at a table side by side with another person who actually happened to be a confederate who was working for us. We told people that they were going to be experiencing several different kinds of experiences.

We rigged it so that we could assign people to share an experience or not share an experience. They were either both tasting chocolate at the same time, or the participant was tasting chocolate while we had the confederate instead do something else. So the confederate, for example, looked at some paintings while the participant ate chocolate. And then we had them evaluate these chocolates. We had them report how much they liked the chocolate, how flavorful it tasted. People thought they were trying different kinds of chocolates, but they were actually identical. This way we could tell if they rated the chocolates differently, if they experienced them differently, if they thought that one tasted better than the other, for example, that it had to be because of whether the experience was shared or not. The only thing Erica varied was whether subjects tasted the chocolate at the same time

as another person or not. It shouldn't have mattered, but in the end, it did. A lot. So what we found is that when people tasted a pleasant chocolate simultaneously with somebody else, they liked that chocolate more and thought it tasted more flavorful than when they ate that same chocolate while the other person was doing something different instead. And what you're not realizing is that what the other person sitting next to you happens to be doing is affecting your own experience of the chocolate. It actually is tasting different to you when the other person happens to also be tasting it versus not. And you just aren't at all aware of that. Then Erica did another experiment. She used the same setup as before, but this time people tasted yucky, unsweetened baking chocolates.

What happened? Sharing the experience made it worse. A bad chocolate tastes more awful when someone else is tasting it too. What this tells us is that experiences aren't necessarily always enhanced or improved when you're experiencing them together with somebody else. They're actually amplified. They get more intense. Researchers have found similar effects with other kinds of sensations. Scientists at McGill University had subjects stick their hand in super cold water, which hurts a ton. But the cold hurts even worse if a second subject was standing there going through the same event at the same time. So misery doesn't really love company?

Is that what this work is suggesting? In one sense, that's true. These negative experiences get more intense when they're shared, but that might actually not be all that bad because it could actually help to serve a function of bonding people together. Feeling more pain when someone else is hurting isn't the best experience at the time, but it might allow us to empathize with that other person, to bond in the face of a shared trauma. That's kind of the other face of a shared trauma. That's kind of the other interesting side of shared experiences.

What is it doing to our interpersonal relationships? But what about experiences we can't ever share? Some amazing event, like having the chance to travel to space alone, or getting to sample some super expensive but really rare food. Does the uniqueness of an experience make it feel worse? Erica told me about a study by another Cornell researcher, Gus Cooney, who also happens to be her partner. He set up a study where a bunch of people came to the lab to have a relatively ordinary experience.

They got to watch a movie. One of the subjects, however, got picked to have an extraordinary experience. They got to watch a movie. One of the subjects, however, got picked to have an extraordinary experience. He got to watch a really special viral video involving a magician doing incredible tricks. Gus had subjects predict which type of event they'd enjoy more, the extraordinary one or the boring one. People thought the extraordinary movie would make them happier. But what happened when subjects actually experienced the different events? The boring events were fine, but the extraordinary events experienced alone made people feel kind of isolated. They even felt a little guilty.

That could have been an awesome experience and they rate it really highly. But then it has this other social cost of, well, they haven't shared this with other people. Other people can't relate. They can't really talk about it. They feel like they're bragging. They just haven't shared this with other people. Other people can't relate. They can't really talk about it. They feel like they're bragging, right? They just have difficulty expressing that to other people. And so that detracts from the social bonding potential that there is there. And that might be one of the reasons that so many of us have that Fox Talbot urge. When we experience something incredible, we want other people to experience it too. We want to share all the awesome moments that we're not able to share at the time.

That's why there's so many vacation posts with hashtag OMG, hashtag incredible, hashtag yacht, and so on. Erica says these findings have changed her. They've made her more conscious of how her own behavior affects other people. It's even changed her family life, like how she and Gus share experiences together as a couple. We're watching TV at night, and I'm distracted looking at something else, right?

Maybe I'm on my phone, I'm responding to a text or whatever. I realize now that that is actually going to affect my partner's experience of the show we're watching and cause him to, you know, pay less attention to it. I'm just more aware of this constant interpersonal dynamic where we're affecting one another in all kinds of ways. Just even being aware of it makes life a little more interesting. I love Eric's work because it shows the power of sharing, how it intensifies our lives. It makes the good things better. And even though it makes the bad things a little worse, they're more bearable since someone is by our side.

Experiencing stuff together can be a powerful tool for shaping our happiness. This same insight led Mary Alice Bunn, the woman we met earlier, to develop a million-dollar new concept. There was just this line down the street, and I was like, whoa, what are they waiting for? And lo and behold, there's an ice cream shop. And that was kind of the moment where I was like, I need to start building places in the world that people actually want to be in and spend time with and places where people can come together. How do I build something that people just want to go to? The Happiness Lab. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. I would walk around the city and the spaces around me just weren't offering or

afforded me a place that I really wanted to go. Even after finding rich social connections sharing a cone in those New York ice cream shops, Mary Ellis was searching for something more. Where do people, where do my peers, where are they spending their time, and what is actually filling them up? Mary Ellis realized that the modern world doesn't give her generation many opportunities to share events together. My peer groups weren't going to church. My peer groups weren't going to other community-focused spaces.

I was like, how do I build something that people just want to go to? What could possibly bring people together? Ice cream. Ice cream is made to be shared. And this was the realization that led Mary Ellis to develop a completely new kind of venue for people to gather together, one that gave her a rather

unconventional job title. I am the founder and CEO of the Museum of Ice Cream. Just in case you're not lucky enough to already be familiar with the Museum of Ice Cream, I asked Mary Ellis to explain what it was. It wasn't easy. Great question. At the Museum of Ice Cream, we have one goal and mission, and that is to bring people outside together under one single piece, which is ice cream. A visitor enters the Museum of Ice Cream. They're going to go through a series of journeys and stories, all celebrating the acts of ice cream. And so there's a lot of both world building and story building that is built into the experience. And, of course, you get to eat a bunch of my favorite food, which is ice cream.

the experience, and of course you get to eat a bunch of my favorite food, which is ice cream. It sounds really interesting, but despite Mary Ellis's best efforts, I was still confused about what exactly the Museum of Ice Cream is. So I decided to go check it out in person with my friend from college, Sandy Stringfellow. We headed to a pop-up location in San Francisco together. We have just entered the Museum of Ice Cream. First thing, it's not actually a museum. It's kind of like Pepto-Bismol has exploded in this building and covered all surfaces with this incredibly bright pink color.

And I'm really into the sprinkles up there, the neon lights. You are about to enter a completely new world. Not the world you're used to, not the one you grew up in. Something different, okay? That became pretty clear when we had to enter the first exhibit by jumping into a huge fuchsia hole in the wall, one that led to a pink plastic slide winding two stories down. So if you take our slide, there's just one rule. You have got to yell scoop, scoop when you reach the bottom, okay? Scoop, the bottom okay scoop scoop scoop scoop let's do it okay all right who's going first i was the host which meant i had to go first scoop scoop all right thank you are you thirsty i'm through you can do it Woo! Jesus!

All right, you made it! But screaming scoop, scoop while sliding down a huge pink slide was nothing compared to the rest of the museum. Sandy and I spent an entire hour taking in a completely surreal sensory experience. There was a 50s diner that served french fries and ketchup made of ice cream, an entire room filled with pink refrigerator magnets where you could write your mantra. A stable filled with life-size glittery unicorns. Each room was more over the top than the last. We're now in a room filled with

animal cracker carousels that people can ride. Ah! Whoa! Yoo-hoo! Sandy, how does it feel to be on a large pink animal cracker? It's concerning. And then, there's the piece de resistance, a four-foot-deep swimming pool filled with

rainbow sprinkles. Ideas like these are why Mary Ellis is constantly compared to Walt Disney. She's designing incredible fantasy-filled spaces for the next generation. But unlike Disneyland, the Museum of Ice Cream didn't start out with hundreds of staff members and a huge team of designers. In the beginning, it was really a two-person labor of love for Mary Ellis and her co-founder, Manish Vora. I built the pool with my two hands.

I painted every wall. I worked the door. Manish and I were serving ice cream, and it was 22 hours a day, seven days a week. Their first New York City museum sold out instantly for months. Then Mary Ellis started making similar museums in other cities. Her creation has now been visited by millions of people around the world. It's also become a darling of celebrities and Instagram influencers.

I saw Beyonce's feed and she posted like nine posts. And that was like, I mean, it's Queen B, it's Beyonce. That was a big deal. But the product, if you will call it that, has sold itself. We've had, I don't know, almost 2 million people, and they've all swam through these pools of sprinkles, which sounds ridiculous. But it brings so much joy, and it takes people out of a place of, you know, we're all so serious. And it brings them to a place where you just have to have fun.

But it's also a place where people get to be social, to connect with others. The very thing Mary Ellis was missing when she first moved to the city. And so what happens is as those interactions start to become more and more easy or comfortable, is people start to open up and they leave with an understanding of other people. And that's when the connections start to happen. It really starts to happen outside of our doors. I couldn't tell you how many people leave and go grab a drink together, just as a response to them talking about that they both love vanilla ice cream.

Sandy and I saw this firsthand during our visit. We chatted for a while with a local 10-year-old birthday girl and her mom, as well as a group of dressed-to-the-9 20-somethings who had traveled all the way from North Carolina to celebrate their college graduation. It's the social aspect of the museum experience that has made Mary Ellis most proud, the way people from all walks of life get to share this surreal ice cream-filled experience together. One of the best parts of her job is eavesdropping on these tiny new encounters people have, sharing her incredible space. There was an older fellow, and there was a mom and a son

and they were talking about how they all love chocolate chip ice cream. And then they continued to talk and they both continued to talk that they both live on 57th Street. And in any other circumstance, I couldn't imagine these, you know, this mom and his son and this older gentleman coming together and having a conversation. We were able to like start to break down these barriers. And I think they continued on and they took the subway back uptown together and it was this beautiful moment. And I was like, why don't we have more of these moments? Why aren't we able to break down?

And the answer is because no one's getting us the opportunity to get off our phones or like to look up. Ah, yes, our phones. Even back when she was a 16-year-old visiting ice cream shops, Mary Ellis noticed that phones made it harder for people to actually connect with one another. It was one of the reasons she tried to make the Museum of Ice Cream so over the top. For me, our mission is how do we build a world that is so compelling that it outshines the world that we're able to live within within our devices. You need to build something that visually stimulates,

you know, I need to go see this because it looks so fantastic. The problem, though, is that when you build something that fantastic, something as incredibly cool-looking and crazy as the Museum of Ice Cream, people don't just want to share it with the people who happen to be around them at the time. People get that old Fox Talbot urge. They also want to hold on to that experience to share it with other people after the fact. Which means... Phones.

Lots of phones. It's a double-edged sword. That was what hit me most while I was at the museum. Every single person in the museum had their phone out. Including me and Sandy. Sandy and I left with so many ridiculous photos. Pics of us riding strange fictional animals, posing with our thumbs up in a tiny room filled with glittery mirrors,

photos of us buried up to the neck in sprinkles. But all those photos meant I was paying more attention to the small window in my phone than to the actual lived experience. The one I was supposed to be sharing with Sandy, who I hadn't seen in months. The one Mary Ellis wanted me to be sharing with the other patrons, too. The tragic irony is that the very human urge to capture and share was causing people to miss the best aspect of the Museum of Ice Cream experience.

The social part. But there was a second dark side to all this photo-taking at the Museum of Ice Cream experience, the social part. But there was a second dark side to all this photo taking at the Museum of Ice Cream. It made the place hard to navigate. The most Instagrammable spots were often blocked by a big group of people standing around trying to get the perfect photo. Taking pics over and over again to get one that looked just right. Sandy and I ended up bypassing entire displays because there were too many people posing nearby. It was pretty frustrating, and I realized that the frustration was a familiar one.

Because I didn't just have this experience at the Museum of Ice Cream. I felt the same thing at concerts I've been to recently, where I couldn't see the band behind a sea of smartphone lights. And at a national park, where I couldn't even the band behind a sea of smartphone lights. And at a national park, where I couldn't even get near a gorgeous waterfall because too many people were taking selfies. It even happens at weddings and graduations. Our obsession with capturing moments means not just missing them ourselves, but causing other people to miss them too.

Mary Ellis has a complicated relationship with the fact that her creation is one of the most Instagrammed places in the world. It's difficult because so much of what you see are these perfectly curated, edited photographs that appear on your feed. You're not going to be able to understand or translate the feeling, the emotion. The experience far surpasses the things that you can capture in a, you know, a small square. She's taught her staff members all kinds of techniques for getting people to put their phones down.

But as I learned in the museum, they don't always work. Is it frustrating to see how many people are, like, looking at their phones the whole time? We try to engage with the guests who come through. We have, like, little games, and obviously we want you to interact with the space. So I try to get people out of their homes as much as they can, but, you know. But Instagram's going to happen.

When I first heard about Fox Talbot's story, the one I started this episode with, I thought about it from his perspective, how he was one of the first in human history to satisfy that urge to document and share. But as I did more research about the science of sharing for this episode, I started to think about the Fox Talbot tale from a different perspective. That of Mrs. Fox Talbot. Imagine arriving at the most beautiful lake in the world, a young newlywed,

hoping for a bit of romance with your overworked husband. Imagine how annoying it must have been to watch him spend hours on his damn camera lucida, trying to get the perfect sketch. Mrs. Fox Talbot was perhaps the first of thousands upon thousands of spouses to watch their partners stare at their own honeymoon through a camera lens. She was probably one of the first to feel that special frustration you experience when someone you care about is missing the opportunity to actually share a moment with you because they're so worried about being able to

capture it. When we're about to take a bite of our food or we're saying something really deep and the person takes out their phone to capture a photo of the food before we eat it, those things can be disruptive and they can decrease enjoyment of our experience. The Happiness Lab will be back in a second. Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you.

Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. There's an urge. And find them on Bumble. meet with her to get to the bottom of all this sharing. Is it helping us or hurting us? We also have that intuition that when we do that, we're taking something away from the other individual in the interaction. Alex got interested in the topic while she was pursuing a PhD abroad. She was taking a lot of pictures while exploring her new home. It was really beneficial in some ways because I was taking in more aspects of the environment or noticing things that I might not otherwise have noticed because I was capturing these aspects with a camera. But the other side of the equation was that I was sometimes feeling like the camera took

me out of an experience, that I was focusing too much on getting the perfect photo. Alex started looking into the empirical work on how photo-taking affects our experience of an event. Does taking photos make us feel better? Does it help our memory for the event? Despite the ubiquity of photo-taking in our daily lives, surprisingly little scientific work had actually addressed any of this. So Alex decided to study these questions, starting with memory. She recruited

a group of subjects to take part in a real-world photo-worthy experience. We had them go through the Etruscan exhibit inside the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. So they're going through, they're looking at the artifacts, they're listening to their audio guide, just like they would if they were visiting a museum on their own. What she varied was whether or not her subjects were able to take photos. Half of the subjects could have their phones with them and were told to take photos as they normally would. But the others were told to leave their phones at the main desk.

At the end of the exhibit, she gave subjects in both groups a surprise memory test. Which artifacts had they seen? Could they remember all the subtle details? The big question was which group did better, the folks taking the photos or the ones who didn't? The answer is, it depends. The photo-taking condition actually does better on the visual memory test. They remember more of the visual aspects of the experience in the museum, the artifacts that they saw inside the cases, but that is not without a cost.

And when they are attending more to those visual aspects of the museum, they weren't able to focus as much on what the audio guide was telling them. You see that photo taking has a positive effect on one aspect and a negative effect on the other. And that, of course, whether that's good or bad, depends on your goals as a consumer. Alex has now looked at this memory question in a bunch of ways, from trips to museums,

to bus tours, to virtual safaris taken on an experimental computer screen, she finds the same thing time and again. If your goal is to really see all the visual aspects of a scene, then taking photos is a really good way to boost your memory. But if you want to remember something that's not visual, what you heard on the audio tour, or that joke your friend said, or what that amazing meal tasted like, then taking photos is a hindrance. You don't have the cognitive bandwidth to pay attention to all that other stuff, which

means you don't remember it. Makes sense. But what about our enjoyment of the experience? Does taking photos make us happier? This time, the results were less nuanced. People in the photo condition? They showed significantly more enjoyment. You know, imagine going on a bus tour. If you're just sort of taking in the sights, that's definitely enjoyable. But if you're capturing photos, you're noticing new things, you're more immersed, it can make you enjoy an experience more. Taking photos makes us pay attention. And that simple act, noticing the details, attending to what the experience feels like, that can draw us into an experience, which feels good. But only for the visual details, which means we have to be careful not to miss all the non-visual good stuff. What our partner said

at dinner, what the hot fudge sundae tasted like, what the concert guitar solo sounded like. Our enjoyment of the non-visual stuff doesn't necessarily increase when taking photos. But Alex discovered a second, even bigger caveat when doing this research. Because photo-taking doesn't always draw us into the visual aspects of an experience.

It depends on what those photos are for. People take photos for many different reasons. And one of those is to take photos for yourself so that you can remember and kind of revisit those experiences and photos in the future. And the other, of course, as we all know, is to take photos so that we can share them with others to post on our social media accounts. Ah, yes, that old Fox Talbot urge. The reason thousands of photos are shared every second on Instagram. What effect does that sharing urge have on our enjoyment? To test this scientifically, Alex varied why people took photos for keepsake or to put on social media.

We actually showed that the benefits that you get from capturing photos are actually diminished or undermined when you take photos to share. It takes us out of the moment and actually ultimately decreases how much we get out of the experience in terms of our enjoyment. ultimately decreases how much we get out of the experience in terms of our enjoyment. If we get obsessed with it, if we are thinking about how to get the perfect shot to show somebody else an impression managed and to curate our identity online, that's where the costs come into play. And that must be really tricky because it seems like a lot of our photographing right now is to share. I mean, to the point that people don't just take a photo. They Photoshop it and cut it and edit it after the fact. The sharing process is not new, but what is definitely new is that that's active in our minds while we go through the experience.

Every time we take a photo with the intent to share it, we lose the positive effects of capturing the moment. Every time we get in a, oh, this will be fun to post mindset, we stop paying attention to the right stuff. We're thinking about how to get the perfect photo, not what the moment feels like. And that Fox Talbot urge in the moment, it's an intentional buzzkill, and our enjoyment takes a hit. I find these scientific findings so ironic

because the sharing part is good. It intensifies the experience and the taking photos part is good. It makes us pay more attention. But as soon as we put the sharing and the photos together, all those positive effects go away. Seriously, the way our works can be so annoying sometimes. Alex, who's a business school professor, realizes it's getting harder and harder to avoid thinking about sharing. Companies are pushing us to share all the time now. They post hashtags on their menus. Of course, that has a lot of advantages in terms of free advertising and word of mouth. But I show in this work that there's a cost, that it's actually going to also undermine consumers' enjoyment if they're really thinking

a lot during the experience about capturing that best photo so that they can post it and share it later on. Alex's comment made me think back to my conversation with Mary Alice Bunn. That double-edged sword she mentioned, the complicated relationship she has with how Instagram, the Museum of Ice Cream, has become. Mary Alice knows all those celebrity tweets are great for business, but they can also ruin her patrons' enjoyment of the space. And that's why she's now trying something radical. She's explicitly redesigning the Museum of Ice Cream in an effort to end all the Instagram posts. She's now trying all kinds of new techniques to get people to put their phones down.

Like exhibits with hands-free eating. So if you have no hands to eat, you also have no hands to photograph. And she's rearranged the flow of experiences inside the museum. Previously, we ended with the sprinkle pool because that was oftentimes the most desired capture moment. And then by reversing it, what happened is that all the anticipation and angst to go and capture that photo, now that it happened at the beginning, becomes removed. They weren't so involved in having to take the photo, they'd already taken it, that they could really enjoy the experience. Finally, she's beta testing a new idea

she's especially excited a new idea she's especially excited about. The first thing that came out of everyone's mouth was it was the best experience we've had to date. What was that best ever experience? Mary Ellis took a page out of Alex Barish's studies. She didn't let her patrons have their phones at all. People are able to come for free and the only thing we ask is them to turn in their cell phones at the beginning. for free. And the only thing we asked is them to turn in their cell phones at the beginning. And the reason why it was most successful in our minds is there's so many details that we think about that you're going to miss. It's like, you know, to really think about all the taste and the notes and whatnot. But if you're so consumed in capturing that, those things all go away. And

they didn't have that clutch of a phone to guide them through the experience. So what's the takeaway from this episode? Our urge to share is an instinct, one that brings us a lot of joy, but it can lead us astray in the modern world. Science shows that sharing experiences is good for our happiness. All the wonderful things in life, yummy food, a nice view, the warm sunshine. They're even more awesome in the company of another human being. And it's a two-way street. Your presence will also make other people's moments richer. Documenting those awesome moments is also good for our happiness.

You'll look at that scenic vista or that cool museum object a bit deeper if you have a camera in your hand. Like sharing in the moment, photo taking also makes our lives richer. But when we put the two urges together, when we start thinking about sharing that sunset while we're looking at it, when we focus on who will see our dessert pick when we post it, our minds get pulled away. We get obsessed with the tiny image in the camera, not the moment. So to become happier, we need to fight that Instagram urge. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't get out there and share. We should be sharing the

wealth of life, but in the moment, with a live person, if at all possible. So get out there and eat lunch with a friend, not at your desk. Make the effort to go to the cinema, rather than watching Netflix alone. You could even start up a podcast brunch club. And if you do, maybe you could share The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley. The show is mixed and mastered by Evan Viola and edited by Julia Barton. Fact-checking by Joseph Fridman. And our original music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Carly Migliore, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Maya Koenig, and Jacob Weisberg.

The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos.