The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Happiness Through Generosity : Liz Dunn on The TED Interview

Episode Date: May 20, 2024

Liz Dunn is a regular guest on The Happiness Lab, but in this extended interview with TED's Chris Anderson she take us on a deep dive into her research. It shows that by increasing our generosity and by giving to others we can significantly boost our own happiness.  Listen to more episodes of The TED Interview wherever you get your podcasts.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. out on June 3rd. But here's a quick sneak preview. Can you hear me now? I'm Dr. Laurie Santos, and I'm devoting the new season of my podcast, The Happiness Lab, to topics that are dear to my heart, with people dear to my heart, like my mom. Wait a minute, let me put the TV on. I'll be finding out why I personally struggle so badly with perfectionism, stress, and even sitting still and doing nothing. But I feel like I'm bad at boredom because you're bad at boredom. Yeah, no, I didn't do well with doing nothing. And once I find out why these things affect me so badly, I'm hoping to do something about it. So join me on my journey, wherever you get your podcasts. So be sure to stay tuned.

But today, I wanted to share an amazing episode of the TED interview podcast, which focuses on the work of my friend and close collaborator Liz Dunn, a psychology professor from the University of British Columbia. Liz has been a guest on the Happiness Lab a bunch, but in this episode, she'll take Chris Anderson from TED on a deep dive across her entire career, including some of her important work on how we can all become happier. I hope you like this episode,

and be sure to check out more editions of the TED Interview Show wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone. I'm Chris Anderson. Welcome to The TED Interview. This season, we're delving deep into the concept of generosity, which I've come to believe is the single most crucial idea that our modern world needs. It's an idea that I've spent the last three years thinking about and researching for a book titled Infectious Generosity. Now, today's episode is a special one for two reasons. First of all, I'm sitting in front of a live audience at TED 2024. The audience is full of brilliant people, and they will be helping co-create this episode by asking

questions partway through. And then secondly, our guest today. She has played a catalytic role in developing my thinking about generosity. Her name is Elizabeth Dunn. She's a social psychology professor at the University of British Columbia. And apart from delivering a beautiful TED talk on the links between generosity and happiness, she also was involved in an experience which forced me to go ahead and write this book, honestly. We will be talking about that shortly. But for now, please join me in welcoming Elizabeth Dunn.

It's great to have you here. Oh, thank you for having me. Let's start by your sharing a little bit of your background and what drew you to the study of happiness, generosity, and related. Yeah, so I have been studying happiness for over 20 years now as a social psychologist. And I got into studying generosity primarily because I wanted to understand what made people happy. And specifically, actually, when I got my first faculty job as a professor at the University of British Columbia,

I started earning more money than I needed to stay alive for the first time in my life. And I was like, oh, I have disposable income. This is a novelty for me. And so I wanted to understand how people could use money in order to enhance happiness. And I thought generosity might actually be a pretty good way to go. So we started running experiments, first small experiments just here in Vancouver, and then built it out from there. So that's sort of where I started. And then my research has taken me in all kinds of different directions to try to understand what really matters for human happiness.

So a typical experiment would be some students get given 10 or 20 bucks and told to do different things with it? Yeah, so in the first experiment we ever ran on this topic, we sent our research assistants out on campus at UBC armed with cash. We gave them five and twenty dollar bills. We had them literally walk up and hand them to people and we either told each individual to spend this money to benefit themselves or to benefit others. And then we called them at the end of the day, found out how their day had been, asked them to complete measures of happiness. And what we discovered was that people felt happier at the end of the day when they'd been assigned basically by the flip of a coin to spend this money on others. And do you think they actually did spend it on others?

You know, they gave us pretty detailed reports of like exactly what they did. So yeah, I'm pretty confident. Give us some more headlines of big findings that have happened over the last decade or two. So another big finding for us was to show that this effect, you know, wasn't just limited to Vancouver, to folks with a reasonable amount of disposable income. We wanted to try doing this in countries around the world. We explored this idea with the littlest humans, with toddlers, showing that even two-year-olds get joy from giving their resources to others. Toddlers don't really care about money. We worked with toddler gold, specifically goldfish crackers. And so, you know, we've explored this idea in a number of different ways. We've also looked at other

aspects that matter for happiness in a project that grew out of a collaboration at TED. We've been examining how to increase social connections by bringing together architects and software engineers to figure out how we can design physical spaces to bring people together in positive ways. So I've done all kinds of different things. But along the way, happiness has been sort of my North Star. I mean, I think your team wrote a paper connected to a giant Gallup survey that was done once asking more than 200,000 people across the world about their happiness levels. Can you say a bit about that? Yeah. So in taking advantage of really amazing data collected by Gallup, what we discovered was that around the world, people who had donated money to charity in the past month

reported greater happiness than those who didn't. And this wasn't a small effect. In fact, when we really dug into the data, what we saw was that donating money to charity was basically equivalent to a doubling of household income in terms of its relationship with happiness. People work their whole year to try to justify maybe if I could just get 20% more income, that's what would make all the difference to me and my family. Doubling of income rarely happens to most people. It's like, it's not quite winning the lottery, but it's close. And yet, on the face of it, just committing to being generous to charities could actually deliver you the same life happiness. That seems so implausible. Can that really be true?

Well, first off, you know, in that particular study, it's important to recognize it's just a correlation, right? So people who give money to charity are happier than people who do not, right? And you can imagine that people who are giving to charity might differ in all kinds of ways. And we do our best as scientists to try to control for the obvious ones like income, and that relationship still holds. But I wouldn't presume that it's entirely causal, that it's just about spending money on others leading to happiness. Now, that said, it is still fascinating, you know, when we see this relationship emerge in experimental work as well. So we know there is this causal relationship, and yet it doesn't seem like people are always

aware of it. So it's a bit like the riddle about marriage and happiness. Like, all the stats show that on average, married people tend to be happier. But did the marriage cause it, or is it that the happier people get married? Because no one wants to marry a saddle get. Well, yeah. And you know, the really interesting thing with marriage is that the best longitudinal studies on this, where you follow the same people over time,

suggest that people do get happier when they get married. But that boost in happiness lasts two years. Now, that's an average. Individuals vary. So like, if you went to your friend's lasts two years. Now, that's an average. Individuals vary. So, like, if you went to your friend's wedding two years ago, you don't need to send a little, you know, condolence note. But certainly that's the sort of fundamental force that we as happiness researchers are working against

is this thing called hedonic adaptation, where whatever wonderful thing we have, we adapt to it. So it's super exciting to walk down the aisle. It's less exciting to walk down and see your spouse at the breakfast table. One thing I've learned about you, Liz, is that you have all the skepticism that you would hope for from a scientist. And recently you've been involved in work trying to address what's been this crisis in social science, that all these weird and wild experiments that were reported, some of them didn't replicate. Talk about the work you've been doing recently about that. Yeah, so this is really important. And I think it's something that many people who are interested in psychology and behavioral science don't realize is that

there's really been a revolution in behavioral science over the past decade, where we came to realize that some of the really neat, exciting effects that some of you might have heard about just don't replicate. And so my lab has been involved, along with many other people in my field, in trying to change that, trying to create a more replicable, reliable, robust science. And so one of the big things that we've been involved in doing is pre-registering our studies. So I'm going to get a little nerdy for a second, but I promise it's going to be worth it because it's super important. So I'm going to get a little nerdy for a second, but I promise it's going to be worth it because it's super important. So in science, sometimes it's like we throw a bunch of darts against the wall and then we draw the bullseye on afterward and say, hey, look, we found what we expected to find.

Right. And there's an obvious problem with that because you don't know how many darts we actually shot. And so this is a problem not just for psychology, certainly not just for happiness research, for really all of quantitative science. And so now what we're trying to do is pre-register our studies and say, up front, we're going to call our shot ahead of time and say, this is what I'm going to do. This is how I'm going to test it. And I'm going to prove myself wrong if that shot doesn't land. And so one thing that I've been doing is going and trying to reassess the happiness literature in particular to try to understand, you know, how good does it look when we apply these newer approaches? Another really key piece is using larger samples. So if you look at some of the older psychology studies out there, they'll often have a teeny tiny number of participants. And this can leave us with a situation where those effects don't actually

replicate. You can get little weird fluky findings when you only study small numbers of people. So increasingly in my field, we're using much larger sample sizes and that gives us much more reliable conclusions. And your work found that actually quite a large percentage of some of the earlier work probably wasn't that valid. Right. I mean, we don't know for sure which studies would fail to replicate, but we found, we looked at some of the most widely reported ideas about happiness in the media. So we looked at strategies like getting out in nature, practicing meditation and mindfulness, as well as exercise, very popular strategies for promoting happiness. And we found that 95% of those experiments really did not meet our current standards. It doesn't mean that those things, like if you're super into meditation or exercise,

I'm not saying like give those things up and just watch Netflix because whatever. Like those things, there's good reasons to believe those strategies should work. But it's just remarkable that we don't actually have the kind of evidence that we would consider the kind of modern gold standard to support them. I mean, that seems like really important social science to do. I mean, as someone who loves being in nature, I would really like to know that my impression that it brings happiness wasn't just my imagination.

Right, and I mean, you may know, right, like one of the wonderful things about happiness is that you can experiment on yourself, right, and you can see, hey, does this make me happy? And that's great. So if you find being in nature makes you happy, then do it. But if we want to make broader recommendations and really push forward policies and stuff,

we want to know what has the most reliable and the biggest effects for the most people. It turns out that if you do little things like you say, oh, let me analyze the data a little bit differently. Let me control for gender. These people seemed like they weren't really paying attention. I'm going to cut them from my study. Then you can quickly actually create an effect where none really exists. And that is what we are trying to change. And I think where our field has come so far over the past decade.

So wearing your full skeptical hat, you and I, we had a conversation in 2020 about a crazy idea that happened because there was a donor in the TED community who wanted to give away a million dollars and to do some social science in the process. Talk about what happened. This was like the coolest phone call I've ever gotten, where Chris called me and said, you know, I've got this interesting opportunity. Is this something that your lab would like to study where we could potentially, I think initially that we would give 10,000 US dollars to a hundred people in multiple countries around the world and study what happened. And I was blown away. I was very excited. I was like, count me in. And then we got to talking more and we thought, oh, it'd be interesting to vary, you know, to have a couple of different conditions or groups. So give these groups some different instructions and be able to test what kind of difference that made.

And so we thought, well, maybe we could take that 100 people and split it into two groups of 50. And that's where I gave you like a boring lecture on statistics and how like when you have 50 people per group, it's actually not necessarily enough to detect these effects in a really reliable way. group, it's actually not necessarily enough to detect these effects in a really reliable way. So I said, is there any way we can have two groups of 100 people? Would $2 million be possible? And let me tell you, as somebody who applies to academic funding agencies, I just expected the answer to be no, but I was like, ah, you might as well mention this. And you can... The tech community is full of surprises. It is full of surprises and i'm so but also be careful what proposal you put to liz dunn but so yeah so so so ended up being 200 people getting ten thousand dollars each that was the plan how did you

structure the experiment yeah so we had one group of 100 people who were told to share their participation in this experiment publicly. So they were told to share this with their social networks on Twitter at the time, now X. And then we told the other 100 to just keep this on the down low. You know, you can tell a couple of close friends and family if you need to, but basically keep this news private. And so this allowed us to look at whether sharing this news publicly would make a difference for how people spent the money or how they felt about it. And also, in one of our early conversations, I said, you know, what would be really great is if we could have a control group of people that don't get any money and we could study them all along the way. And you're like, okay, Liz, yeah, sure, we can do that too. So we had this control group of folks

that were chosen at random. So after recruiting people, making sure they qualify, we can do that too. So we had this control group of folks that were chosen at random. So after recruiting people, making sure they qualify, we randomly assigned people to either get this money, share it publicly, get this money, keep the news private, or not get any money, but complete all of our surveys and get a small fee for completing the surveys. And specifically what they were told is that this money was up to them as to how they could spend it. First of all, when they were recruited, because I got to play a role in recruiting people, and we basically put out a tweet saying, hey, do you want to participate in an interesting experiment? Could be stressful, could be

potentially life-changing, will take quite a bit of time. What do you think? But no mention of money. So we got people not knowing really what they were signing up for. And then when we told them they were getting $10,000, some of them were like, oh, it's a scam. And I think that was one of the biggest challenges, right? Because if you go to the spam folder of your inbox right now, you can probably find an offer like this, right? So we had to, I think one of the biggest challenges was convincing people it was real. And so you made a great video of yourself, just like kind of a low production video, explaining to people what was happening. And I think that was really important in kind of convincing people like, no, for real, we're going to send you $10,000. The only real strings attached then was that they

just had to report back to us. They had to fill out a survey every few months, basically. Once, yeah, every month for three months, and then again at the six-month mark. Right. So what did we discover? Well, we learned a lot from this experiment. And I just want to say one of the really beautiful things about this whole experience was that we were able to conduct this experiment at a scale that I never would have thought was possible. And the donors were so committed to doing the science really carefully too. And so we were able to address several longstanding fundamental questions in

behavioral science. And I think the one that was probably the core question that we started with was how would people spend this money? And would they use it in ways that benefited others? I think one of the remarkable findings from this study was that people used the majority of this money, over $6,000 of the $10,000 windfall, in ways that benefited other people. Now, we were defining benefiting other people in a broad way as, you know, any way that was, you know, it could be anything from taking friends out for dinner to making a donation to charity to treating a loved one to something special. So perhaps in that sense, it's not so surprising that that number was big.

But even when we look at a much narrower definition, we look just at charitable donations, we still found that people spent almost $1,700 on average just on charitable donations. And that kind of blew me away. In general, people, I think on average, spend 2% or 3% or 4% at most of their income on charity. And that's a massive increase. So what's going on there? Well, I mean, I think one important component here is that it was a gift, right? So it wasn't like people earned this money per se. It wasn't something that they were expecting. It began with an act of generosity by the donors.

And I think that's still very interesting, right? That one powerful act of generosity. But in some cases, the kinds of donations that people were making could themselves create other opportunities, could have these incredible ripple effects into some of the communities. To me, that was one piece of it that was just so powerful. Was there a difference in the behavior between people who were on social media proudly boasting of the amount that they were giving away to those who were keeping it private? Yeah, so we expected that there would be a difference. We thought people who were sharing this publicly would spend more on others. If everyone knows you've got this money and whatever

you can imagine, you would spend it more generously. We pre-registered that prediction. So we said up front, hey, this is what we think we're going to find. This is how we're going to test it. And we were wrong. So we found that it did not matter whether people publicly sharing this information or not. Either way, we found these very high levels of generosity, which you could call a failed experiment, but I call like a beautiful testament to humanity that like, even when they're spending choices private, they still chose to spend the majority of the money in ways that benefited others. So it really was, this was a response to generosity. It wasn't

an attempt to boost reputation, it seemed. Yeah, I mean, we can't, of course, it's possible that some people were, you know, taking friends out for dinner and in a way that can have reputational benefits. So we can almost never erase reputation. And that's part of it. And something that I love in your book is that you say, you know, it's not necessarily bad if people are engaging in generous behavior to enhance their reputations. Like what a wonderful feature of humanity that that's something, a way that we would want to increase our, enhance our reputation. But yet we designed what we felt was a very powerful manipulation of reputational concerns, and it did

not matter. So that tells us, to me, my takeaway from that is that, you know, perhaps reputational concerns are not a necessary or driving force behind generosity. And have you heard from other social scientists that they view this as a contribution to the science? Yeah, we've gotten an amazing response to this from the scientific community. And I think because we had the opportunity to scale this up, to have this diverse worldwide sample, to work with amounts of money

that are deeply meaningful. So for folks who were in lower income countries who participated, we were essentially doubling their annual income with this gift. So it was a huge amount of money. In contrast, the kinds of experiments my lab has done throughout my career are usually more on the order of $10. And so one might say, well, sure, people feel happy when they give away a few dollars, but they don't really care. And so this shows us with very large amounts

of money, people are giving a lot and as we'll, I'm sure, talk about more, getting a lot of joy from it. So talk about the first paper you published. Yeah. So Chris started out, of course, with this interest in how generously are people going to spend the money? And I wanted to know the answer to that too. But I was like, this experiment can answer a lot of fascinating questions. And one thing that I wanted to know was just how much happiness can $2 million buy when it's distributed across a large diverse group of people as opposed to concentrated in the hands of one affluent couple. And so in a paper that is entitled Wealth Redistribution Promotes Happiness, we demonstrate and quantify just how much happiness $2 million can buy.

And one of the things that we demonstrate is that by giving this money away to this diverse group of people, this couple provided 225 times as much happiness as they could possibly have found for themselves from this money. And that's an incredible number. And one level, when you think about it for a minute, it's kind of obvious. I mean, when someone's rich, how much happier can a bit of extra money actually make them? Not much. But when it's shared out, we know that that can make a lot of difference to a lot of people. I've just been hit so many times since thinking about this work and writing the book of just

how big a deal it is that generosity is fundamentally asymmetric. This is a really, really exciting feature about things. We normally think of the world in zero-sum terms. The reason people don't give is because of loss aversion. You don't want to give away. You lose it. It feels like your gain, my loss. No, thank you.

But actually, there are so many circumstances when that is not the case. There's so much inequality in the world, and that money is sitting there, and the cost to the richer person literally is pretty low. And in fact, you could argue, and in fact, some of the other data you've shown is that the actual act of generosity doesn't cost them any happiness either. It actually boosts their happiness. And so it's this kind of thinking which really gave me no choice but to write this book. And if there was a culture of generosity, everyone benefits in the most amazing way. And we're all connected. And so it should be easier

to do this than ever. So how on earth is it that we're actually experiencing being in a world that's getting meaner? Well, you know, I don't know if we are living in a world that's getting meaner. I think that, you know, we have that perception. But I think one thing that we've been seeing already just this week at TED so far is how much of that may be an illusion and how much good really is happening. And that's one thing that I love about this experiment is that it really highlights like like, when we did the science very carefully and tracked exactly what happened, you know, we were discovering that people were spending this money in ways that benefited others, paying this act of generosity forward. And so I actually, especially after doing this experiment, I feel pretty good about humanity's potential for goodness.

So part of the riddle is that we are filtering the stories we tell each other about humanity in a way that's very destructive. Social media algorithms are probably helping with this. And that when you actually pull the camera back and look for actual data about what's happening in the world, really different pictures can amaze and certainly what you know in doing Research for this book. My brilliant researcher is actually here Kate Kate honey spent a couple years researching and looking for stories under the radar and there are so many stories of people doing kind things That create these amazing ripple effects. Are they on your newsfeed? They are not.

And so it's tragic because there's a saying, we are shaped by the stories we tell ourselves. There's evidence for this, yes? That's right. And I think it can also be a kind of self-reinforcing cycle where if we feel like the world is this terrible place where nobody's doing anything good, then why should I step up and do something positive? And so I think flipping that script is incredibly important. Well, one of the joyful things was that after the experiment was done and the science was sort of locked down, I got to write to some of the people who had participated, because they had told us what they had done. And I got to ask them, why did you do that? And it was an amazing, consistent picture that came back. People often use the same language.

A typical thing that people said, and this surprised me, was I felt seen. You know, the act, this is weird to me. Like being given $10,000 by a stranger on the internet, they felt, I felt seen. And I felt like I needed to let other people feel seen the way I had felt seen. So this was quite a powerful, you know, biological thing that really surprised me. But several of them said, if I'd won this money in a lottery, I wouldn't have behaved this way. Well, and that's a really interesting hypothesis, right? So is it the case, you know, that they wouldn't have been so generous had we described the source of the money differently?

And I think you and I had a conversation after we'd collected the data, after we'd run the experiment. And you said, I wish we'd had this other condition where we told people the money was, you know, from a lottery or if they'd earned it or something. And I was like, welcome to being a scientist. This is the experience you always have after you run the experiment. You wish you want the next thing. But that's also the beautiful thing about science is that each question we try to answer propels us toward the next one. And I think that's a really, really fascinating one that if anyone wants to donate $2 million,

I'd love to pursue. But there's a third paper you're working on. Tell us about that one. Yeah, so in the paper that we're currently writing up, so you all are among the first to hear about it, we were looking at the choices that people made about how to spend the money in terms of the implications for their own happiness. So we painstakingly coded each and every spending description to assess how people had spent the money. So we placed each purchase into 17 different possible categories,

ranging from paying for utility bills, buying durable goods, buying purchases that would save you time, all kinds of different things. And then we looked at how much happiness each purchase provided participants. And so what we discovered is that out of all 17 categories, the type of spending that provided the highest level of happiness was in fact making charitable donations. So it confirmed what we had seen in previous research, but with much larger spending amounts. If you're curious what some of the others were, second place was buying experiences. So going on trips, going out for

special meals, these also provided a lot of happiness. One that hasn't popped up in previous research, but that we discovered in this study produced particularly high levels of happiness was spending money on education. And as a professor, I like that one. Liz, one thing I'm puzzled by is that, I mean, on one level, it makes sense why being generous would bring happiness with it. If you think from an evolutionary perspective, you would want there to be a reward for cooperative behavior because there's obviously, you know, the belief is that species that learn to cooperate

get benefit from it, and so you need that reward to do it. And yet, unlike with other types of happiness, it doesn't seem to be advertised. So if I'm hungry, I know that if I eat, I will feel better. And you can say the same for most other sort of obvious sort of biological urges. But on this one, I think a lot of people don't know that they're going to be happy. this one, I think a lot of people don't know that they're going to be happy. It becomes a matter of sort of wisdom passed down by the elders in your community or something like that, or something that you eventually discover. Why do you think that is hidden? Yeah, I mean, I think it's actually surprisingly difficult for people to figure out what makes them happy. For one thing, you know,

to figure out what makes them happy. For one thing, you know, we can notice that we feel happy after, you know, helping a friend, engaging in some act of generosity. But we might say, oh, it's because, you know, my friend was in this particular situation and I'm glad that I was able to help her out with that. But we don't necessarily make the right broader inference of like, this is about generosity as a whole. And I think there's also just a lot of smoke screens in our society where that's not necessarily the message that we hear. Although it's interesting because I have gotten, you know, letters from people saying, why did we need you as a social scientist to tell us that giving makes us happy? This is something that is, you know, taught to us in religious traditions by grandparents and so forth. So those messages are out there. But I think it's really interesting the point you make about, you know are out there. But I think it's really interesting,

the point you make about feeling hungry, because I think it's when people are in the moment that they don't necessarily realize, oh, this is the best thing that I could do with this money is use it to benefit somebody else. And in fact, we've run studies where we say, hey, we can give you money and we want you to tell us what would make you the happiest.

And they don't tend to think of using it to benefit others. So there does seem to be something about money in particular that puts people in this mindset of looking out for themselves. And so that may actually serve to distract us from this broader knowledge that we have maybe picked up from important people and traditions in our life that may get lost when we're faced with that wallet. In your wonderful TED Talk, in our life that may get lost when we're faced with that, you know, wallet.

In your wonderful TED Talk, you said that generosity doesn't always bring happiness. What matters is how it's done and that generosity that is done where there is direct contact, for example, with a person when you can feel or see the human impact of it works a lot better in terms of bringing happiness. Could you say a bit more about that? Yeah. So I would say there's sort of three key ingredients that are pretty essential in turning generosity into happiness. So one is feeling a sense of connection, ideally with the individuals or the cause that you're helping, having that actual, in my case, for example, we were able to privately sponsor a family of Syrian refugees to come to Vancouver,

and we were literally picking them up at the airport and hugging them. And so that's like the ultimate form of contact. But even if you're a little bit more removed from that, feeling that sense of connection is critically important. And I think a lot of charitable giving opportunities don't offer that. And that there's this beautiful space for innovation and figuring out how to create that, particularly when we're giving to people far away.

So connection's probably the number one, but also impact matters. So being able to really understand or at least vividly imagine how your generosity is making a difference. And finally, choice matters. So feeling that you have a sense of choice, of autonomy, of agency. There's no better way to rob people of the joy of giving than to back them

into a corner and make them feel like they've been forced to give. And so I think we want to keep these ingredients in mind because ideally we are building a future that is filled with opportunities to give in these joyful ways that involve, you know, connection, impact, and choice. So help connect the dots here, because that makes a lot of sense to me. But it also seems to contradict another piece of advice that feels important, which is that we want people to bring their minds to their giving. So much of, you know of life is this battle between our instincts and then our reflective selves. And Paul Bloom, who's been on this podcast series, wrote a book called Against Empathy, where he was arguing that we have these powerful feelings of empathy. You see someone suffering, you want to help them. And quite possibly that does bring with it most happiness. But

it may distract us from the wisest spending of money. So many people, their charitable lives are limited to, oh, I saw some need on TV of some disaster, and so I'll text the money there, and then you forget about it. And part of what we want to argue for is for people to be reflective and almost strategic about their giving so that they can spend the money wisely. Now, that may mean that that doesn't make them as happy because you're not triggering those instant sort of human instinctive cells. How might we bridge and get the best of both worlds here? Yeah, I think the key to bridging those worlds is to focus on impact because obviously

impact is what matters when we're kind of thinking with our heads but we also see in our research that people get a lot more joy from giving when they can see or vividly imagine the impact that they're having and so I think making it possible for charities that really do have a genuine impact, bringing that out in a way that potential donors can see it, understand it, vividly experience it. I think that is an opportunity where our heads and our hearts meet and can center around impact. That said, you mentioned, you know, is this the wisest use of your money? And my favorite part of your book was arguing that maybe that's not the right question. Maybe we shouldn't be trying for the wisest use of our charitable donation money or

our pro-social spending, because that puts us in a trap. And I've experienced this myself where I'm like, I have to find the best charity doing X, right? And then I don't get around to donating or I just get in my head about it. And so I love your book for sort of freeing people to say, is this a good use of the money? And if the answer is yes, then maybe greenlight yourself to go ahead and donate. Yes, I like that. We have to really know ourselves and figure out one, how to avoid that trap. Two, how to feed some of those human instincts. So say you discover, make an intellectual conclusion

that an organization is a wise one to support. Don't just stop there. Give your humanness a chance to actually see the impact. So the statistics coming out of that group won't be enough, but maybe if you actually can meet and get to know some of the stories that are actually behind those statistics and perhaps join a community of other people

who are supporting them, that is the kind of thing that can carry you on and turn a sort of short-term intellectual decision that's smart into an emotional thing that actually brings with it joy and habit-making. Yeah, and I think for folks working in the non-profit world, contemplating not just how can we get donors to give more money, but how can we make the experience of donation more joyful is potentially a way to tackle that question from a different perspective.

Well, okay. So Ted audience, this is your turn now. If you have a question for Liz, please raise your hand. A microphone will come to you and we're gonna get through as many as we can. Hi, yes, Sarah. So I'm wondering, is there a direct correlation

between the amount of happiness and the amount of generosity? Do you get so much more money, happiness out of giving a million versus out of giving a thousand? And what does that sort of ratio look like? This is actually a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Certainly there is a relationship. And in fact, there's a relationship. What we see in the data from the mystery experiment is that just in general, people get more happiness from more expensive stuff. So like the more money they spent on a purchase, the more, the higher they tend to rate it, not perfectly in terms of happiness, but certainly that relationship is there.

So I would say overall, larger amounts of money spent charitably do provide more happiness. And yet, it is not at all like a perfect or super strong relationship because people can also spend a pretty small amount of money, but do so in a way that provides a ton of connection, a lot of impact, something felt freely chosen. And that can deliver a big boost in terms of happiness. So it's certainly not just like a dollar for dollar kind of relationship. And I will say too, I just want to mention, there's more to discover in these data. And we have done a lot of work on our side to make these data accessible to researchers. So researchers need to come to us, we'll check their credentials and everything, but we think there are unanswered questions. So if you are a scientist or a curious philanthropist and want to try to figure something out, one thing we've talked about is trying to make these data as much of a gift to the scientific community as we

can by allowing people to use the data to answer their own questions. So I'm Veronique. Thank you for this. This is fascinating. So I work in the U.S., but I live in Europe. And my question is, to what extent does culture impact how generous we are? Because what I've seen is that in the U.S., it's a very giving culture when it comes to making a check, supporting your local charity, donating your time. In Europe, it's very, very different. And it's really hard to find local charities, not even for children. Or I tried to put something together for my daughter's school and everybody was so shocked, you know. And I think they even doubted my intentions. It was really crazy.

So I had a thought and I'd love to know what you think. So in America, we pay fewer taxes, really. And there isn't this social safety net. And I'd love to know what you think. So in America, we pay fewer taxes, really. And there isn't this social safety net. So maybe there's, we have to do this because we have to fill the gaps. And maybe in Europe, that's not the case. And we pay a lot of taxes. That's a theory. But I think it's probably more complex than that.

So what are your thoughts? I mean, certainly, we see big cultural differences when you look, for example, in the Gallup World data that Chris mentioned. There are substantial differences between different countries in terms of how much people give to charity. I would say the fascinating thing in this particular experiment was that, you know, we had people from three lower income countries, so Kenya, Indonesia and Brazil, four higher income countries, the U.S., the U.K., Australia, and Canada. And we didn't have enough people within each country to treat each country separately, but we compared the lower income countries with the higher income countries. And we expected that perhaps people in the higher income countries would spend more money on others because they have a lot more disposable income on average, but we didn't find that. We actually

found people in the lower-income countries spent just as much on others compared to those in the higher-income countries. First of all, let me say I'm 100% on giving. I'm a philanthropist. I work with my local community foundations. The first challenging question I have is this. Is since you're measuring happiness,

I want to focus on that word because I want to talk about happiness versus joy. I noticed that you use those two terms, I guess, interchangeably too. And I'm going to ask you how you define happiness in order to measure happiness. Thank you for asking that because it is helpful to clarify the definition. So we define happiness as subjective well-being. That's like the technical jargony term if you want to Google research in this area. And broadly in my field of social psychology, that is the dominant way that we think about happiness. And so subjective well-being has three core components.

And so we have positive affect, and that can include feelings like joy, although it's very central. It's like capturing sort of the core elements of just feeling good, basically. We have negative affect. And so we're looking, you know, just to be clear, even happy people experience negative emotions. Negative emotions are healthy and they're good. They're part of who we're meant to be as a species. But, you know, very happy people tend to experience a lot more positive emotion than negative emotion on a typical day. And then the third component, which is really important, is life satisfaction. And that is a more cognitive, evaluative,

more reflective judgment of like, am I leading the kind of life that I want to have? And the remarkable thing about this experiment is that we saw substantial changes not only in positive emotions and negative emotions, but also in life satisfaction. And in fact, when my lab reviewed all of the preregistered experiments that have ever been conducted on happiness, we found that this experiment had the largest impact on life satisfaction that's ever been found. So I think what the question was getting at is that we want to feel that there's a difference between the kind of the temporary pleasure of eating strawberry ice cream versus the sort of the deeper life satisfaction or joy of that can come from giving. And I mean, does science support the fact that there's the form of happiness that you get from generosity? You know, it goes to that deeper happiness.

It's longer lasting than just the sort of temporary positive effect that you might from generosity, it goes to that deeper happiness. It's longer lasting than just the sort of temporary positive effect that you might otherwise get. Yeah, I mean, we see it in this work and in other studies, we see that the effects of generosity are pretty broad and robust. So we see them both in terms of this immediate increase in positive mood, but also that over time, this seems to result in actual changes

in people's satisfaction with their lives. When I'm giving, should I be giving a dollar a day to get my happiness? Or quarterly? What's the cadence? And then should I be paying attention to the percentage of my income or the percentage of the receiver's income? I would say, again, it's not so much about the exact number of dollars, but I would say looking for opportunities to give where you really feel a sense of the impact. In the book, I suggest to people who are well-off that we could do worse than look at what the religious traditions are and the expectations are, which in Christianity

and Judaism are 10% of income, and in Islam, it's 2.5% of net worth annually. And I say, if you really want to embrace the notion that as secular people, many of us here at TED are probably secular people, do we want our moral standards to be at least as high as those of the religions? If so, there's an argument that you should try and get to the position where you can commit to the higher of those two standards, 10% of income or 2.5% of net worth. What amazed me in doing the book is that if you accept that and embrace that and do the math

at what that would raise, it would transform the world. And we could switch the conversation around philanthropy from being this slightly awkward thing to being one of thrilling imagination and possibility. Is there a difference in happiness experience between giving away your money and giving away your time? And do you get exponentially greater happiness by giving away both at the same time? Yeah, fascinating question. You know, I can't think of an experiment that has directly contrasted those, but there's really strong, robust evidence that does meet these kind of gold standards of modern behavioral science showing that using money to benefit others promotes happiness. And interestingly, the research on

volunteering, for example, is one way of giving time. Strangely, that literature hasn't produced the strongest results. And I'm curious about why that is. And I would love to see, you know, more large scale work on that topic. But I would love to see more large-scale work on that topic. But I especially love your insight about bringing the time and the money together, in part because I think putting in some of the time can maybe unleash the benefits of the money. And in my TED Talk, I described a local charity just down the street from here where folks in Vancouver will get together, donate money to this organization. And then you go and you

make dinner for people on the downtown east side, and you get to meet them, talk to them, and then the money doesn't just buy them dinner. It also helps to deal with the food security problem more broadly by providing lunches throughout the week. And so that, I think, is a beautiful model of a program where it bridges the money and the time in a way that creates genuine, meaningful connection for both donors and recipients. Hi, just read here. Is generosity really a function of feeling needed? Because one feels better after giving.

So is that for my own satisfaction that I'm doing? Or is just happiness a label for it? I love the answer you give to this question in the book. So I think you should. So I have been dismayed at how the conversation around generosity, especially in terms of philanthropy, is happening in the modern culture,

where it feels like every opportunity is taken to poke at people and to criticize and snipe at decisions of generosity of saying oh there's mixed motivation here oh they're only doing it to make themselves feel good or to boost their reputation or oh couldn't they have given more or oh how did they make that money in the first place all these things as I said and and I think it's toxic I think generosity has actually always there's no such thing as. And I think it's toxic. I think generosity has actually always, there's no such thing as pure generosity.

I think the philosopher Immanuel Kant is wrong on this. Even when I was brought up, it was give and you shall receive. You know, even our parents, you had to apply these other incentives to give. And I think as a philosophy student, I used to agonize over this. It was like, but I think as a philosophy student, I used to agonize over this. It was like,

but I give to satisfy my conscience, but it feels good to satisfy my conscience. And so is that generosity? Well, yes, it damn well is generosity. And so I think we should not look for reasons to ding generosity. We should look for reasons to celebrate it. And in the connected age, there are more reasons than ever why generosity can spread. It can change how you're regarded. It can introduce your work to thousands of other people who may want to work with you. It can enhance your reputation. It can bring you happiness.

It will bring you happiness. Just as it's hard to decide to go and work out, but you know that long-term, afterwards you'll feel good about it, this is in the same category. It's hard to do, but we should celebrate it even though we know that there are rewards to the giver. And so, yeah, I've got a title in the book called Imperfect Generosity. Generosity is the classic case

in which the perfect becomes the enemy of the good. Let's not do that. And that way we'll have a lot more generosity in the world. Religiously, in the different traditions, I mean, the idea of having a sincere heart or is the action itself good enough? And I'm curious from the study, can I go in with really bad motivations

and still get the happiness effect? Or does it change me? I'm curious. Well, we didn't ask people if they had bad motivations and still get the happiness effect? Or does it change me? I'm curious. Well, we didn't ask people if they had bad motivations going in. So yeah, I don't know. What do you think, Chris? I mean, look, define bad motivations. There's definitely a level of cynicism at which something I guess you can't claim is generous. But I think if you see someone who needs something and you decide you would like to meet that need, there's enough good motivation in there

for me to celebrate that act. Yeah, I mean, certainly we do see that overall, people are getting the highest levels of happiness from what we might call the purest form of giving, of making charitable donations. But also, there know, there's this interesting little finding, I don't want to make too much of it because we didn't expect it, it's totally exploratory, but we saw that in the public condition where people had to share the decisions they were making along the way with this money, we actually saw those folks getting a little bit less happiness

from their charitable donations compared to those who are keeping it private. So it actually suggests that when you're trying to be a little showy about this, it might detract. Now, it doesn't mean we could never do this in a way that would work, where we could both share it and feel happy about it. But maybe it speaks to the idea that generosity isn't all about just looking good to other people and that maybe when we're doing it in these more private ways, it can feel great. Oh, hi. I'm Marla. I'm curious about the intake process for your research. Did you track previous generosity, previous charitable donations, et cetera? And I'm also wondering if you're planning to track moving forward if they continue to be generous? And if so, how? We did not track people's previous, you know, charitable donations or other spending choices. We did ask them, you know, just

as I think kind of a point of interest, we did ask them some questions to make sure it would be safe for them to be in the study. So we did do a pretty careful intake process where we asked, you know, we'd like to tell you about some wacky things that could happen to you. Would any of these cause you danger or serious distress? And so like having a movie star show up on your doorstep, getting $10,000 out of the blue, you know, all of these things. And so we did not include people who told us that it could be a danger to them, but we didn't assess, you know, their previous giving. I would love to know how this changes people in the future and follow up with them, see how happy they are, what choices they've made down the road.

I think that would be a wonderful, fascinating thing to do. Okay. Liz, do you have any final thought you'd like to share from the mystery experiment or just in general, something from your work that you wish was more widely known? Yeah, I mean, I think this experiment, along with a growing body of research, has really dealt the final death blow to our notion of homo economicus as this self-interested creature. And it is time to leave that vision behind. And I think that that is very freeing. I'll also just leave you with one other stat that didn't come up, which is that we found that people in lower income countries got three times the happiness

boost from this money as those in higher income countries. So again, in terms of an asymmetry, it suggests how we can really make the most of our money. That said, we found that there were detectable benefits for individuals making up to $123,000 per year. 99% of the world's population makes less than that. And so I do think it speaks to the incredible potential power of redistribution of wealth to promote happiness as we move into the future. Elizabeth Dunn, thank you so much. That was spectacular. Thank you. Okay, well, that's all for today. A reminder that if you'd like to dig deeper into this conversation about the power of generosity, please consider reading my book, into this conversation about the power of generosity,

please consider reading my book, Infectious Generosity, or listening to it. Thanks to the incredible generosity of a donor in the TED community, you can claim a free copy of the book by heading to ted.com slash generosity. Next week is our final episode of this season. We'll be speaking with a visionary in the world of philanthropy Natalie Cargill whose work we actually just referenced here with

Liz about the potential for truly big-scale philanthropy she's on a fascinating and essential mission to replace pessimism about the world's biggest problems with plans for actually solving them and if you're keen to start your own generosity journey but not sure where to start, I would love you to check out a new tool that we've created called TIG. TIG is an AI assistant that can help you brainstorm ideas for what you can do with a little generosity

and creativity in your own life or community. It's actually really fun to play with and you can find TIG at infectiousgenerosity.org. The TED interview is part of the TED Audio Collective, a collection of podcasts dedicated to sparking curiosity and sharing ideas that matter. This episode was produced by Jess Shane. Our team, who are there at the back, includes Constanza Gallardo, Grace Rubinstein, Ban Ban Cheng, Michelle Quint, Roxanne Heilash, and Danielle Balareso. This show is mixed by Sarah Bruguere,

and it was co-created by you, our amazing live audience here in Vancouver. Yay. All right. If you like this show, please do share it with others wherever you can. Thanks so much for listening. Until next week.