The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - How to Give More Effectively

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

We all want to do good - and doing good can make us feel good - but we often don't make the most effective choices when we do things like donate money to charity.To mark #GiveTuesday, Harvard psychologist Joshua Green explains why we tend to give with our hearts rather than our heads. And why this means we don't do the most good possible with every dollar we donate.To donate to some of the most effective charities around (and to the causes close to your heart) go to: https://givingmultiplier.org/HAPPINESSLAB Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. big boost to our well-being. That said, I don't normally make donations to a good cause just to make myself feel happier. But I do sometimes wonder if I'm getting the most bang for my buck, both in terms of how much good my gift is doing in the world and in terms of how much of a happiness boost I'm getting in return. The reason why we're spending money on charity, let's say, is because we really want to help. We want to do some good. And very few of us would say, well, I want to do good, but not that much good. This is my friend and colleague Josh Green, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, where he studies how our brains make moral decisions. But before I launched into this episode with Josh, he and I had a little catching up to do. Josh, you don't know, but you were actually featured in a recent episode. Was it

this episode on fun and moments of peak fun in my life? You thought of me and fun? My goodness. But do you remember our 80s sing-along that we did when we sang Bon Jovi? Well, it smells funny. Yeah, it's like I wasn't drinking, but it probably seemed like I was. For this Giving Tuesday bonus episode of the Happiness Lab, I spoke with Josh about what we should keep in mind if we want our charitable gifts to be as effective as possible. So Josh, we're about to enter the holiday season, which can be this super stressful time for people. But ironically, one of the best ways that we can give ourselves a little bit of self-care over the

holidays is to think about doing for others. And so talk a little bit about some of the psychological benefits we get from doing nice stuff for other people. Well, you know, this is work that I think you know much better than I do. But what research suggests, and I'm thinking here primarily of research by Elizabeth Dunn and Mike Norton, people really misperceive this, that if you just say, here's $100, go out and make yourself happy, this, that if you just say, here's $100, go out and make yourself happy, and then you check in later with them, the people who spent it on other people are happier. It seems like using your resources to do something nice for somebody else, maybe especially something unexpected, really gives you a boost. It makes you feel connected to other people. And so this is like the first thing we get wrong when it comes to kind of

donating and happiness is just that donating can make us happy. But there's a second thing our mind gets wrong, which is something that you focused on, which is that even when we decide to give to a charity, we often don't do it in the best way for our well-being because not all ways of helping others seem to work the same, right? Yeah. So people in the last 10 years, especially an organization called GiveWell, have been doing this research to try to figure out, you know, how can you do the most good with your dollars? The most effective charities in the world are orders of magnitude more effective than

typical charities. And when I say effectiveness, I'm talking about how many lives can you save per dollar or per thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars, or how much can you improve people's lives? And this is not an easy thing to measure, but it can be done. But the charities that do the most good per dollar are not the ones that we may feel the most immediate connection to, right? A lot of people, and I feel this too, right? That, you know, my wife and I, we want to support our local schools and the greater Boston food bank and fighting for racial justice and equity in

the criminal justice system, etc. It's hard to do randomized controlled experiments to figure out what works and what doesn't, but it doesn't mean it's not necessarily worth supporting. So there are things that I think all of us feel very strongly drawn to personally, but that are not necessarily the things that the evidence shows has the highest impact. In some cases, because they just don't have that impact. And in some cases, because it's just we don't know and it's just too hard to measure. So there's this kind of tension. But the instinct to do the local thing means we sometimes don't rationally pay attention

to the big differences between like what charities are really capable of. And this was something I was actually shocked by until I started reading your work. Just the level of different effect that you could get from one charity to another. And so talk about how big this difference is. Yeah. So the difference can be, you know, a hundred times or even a thousand times. So a really nice salient example from Toby Ord. In the United States, training a guide dog to help a blind person can cost about $50,000. Whereas in the developing world, there's an infectious disease called trachoma that can be treated with a simple surgical procedure that costs less than $100. And in that case, the difference in impact is about

a thousand times, right? For the cost of helping one person in the United States manage their blindness, you can prevent 500, even a thousand people from going blind in the first place by having trachoma surgery. And that's just kind of hard to get your head around, right? And, you know, that's a very extreme case, but it is really not unusual for the most effective charities to be a 100 times more effective than typical charities. But very few people, you know, wake up and think, you know, what I really want to do is support trachoma surgery, this disease that I've never heard of, right?

The challenge here is how can we make decisions that work with our feelings in this sort of pragmatic way, but nevertheless enable us to have more impact, to really do more good? Because that's the point, right? I want to feel good, but it's not about my feelings. That's not why I think I'm doing this. I hope that's not right. You've talked about this distinction in terms of the difference between giving with your heart and giving with your head, right? I mean, it seems like these very effective strategies, you know, it's like, oh, that's kind of giving with my head, but it doesn't maybe feel the same way as giving, you know, with your heart, you know, so talk about this distinction, because it fits with some of the other work you've done on moral psychology, too, right? Like in the context of what's called trolley problems. So what's a trolley

problem? And give me an example of the kind of most famous one that we tend to use in psychology and philosophy. Yeah, yeah. So I think, in general, there are different ways that we can make a decision. And so these sorts of trolley cases that we've used as cognitive probes to understand moral cognition highlight this distinction between a gut reaction that says, do this or don't do this, and thinking in terms of costs and benefits on a large scale. So in one version of the trolley problem, the trolley is headed towards five people and you can hit a switch that will turn the trolley away from the five people and it will put it on a side track, but there's one person there.

And so that person will be killed. And if you ask people, is it okay to hit the switch to minimize the number of deaths? Most people say that that's fine. Then there's the footbridge case where the trolley is again headed towards five people. Then there's the footbridge case where the trolley is again headed towards five people. You're on a footbridge over the tracks in between the oncoming trolley and the five. And the only way to save those five people is to do something that feels really awful. There is this person wearing, let's say, a giant backpack standing next to you.

And you can push them off of the footbridge and they'll land on the tracks and they'll be killed by the trolley, but it'll stop the trolley from killing the five. People inevitably say that it's wrong, or at least feels very wrong to trade one life for five in the footbridge case. So what is going on there? So I and other researchers since have spent a lot of time looking at people's behavior and reaction times and brains. So we have this, what we call dual process dynamic, where you have these feelings that say, no, you can't do that, right? And then you have this cost-benefit reasoning that says, but doesn't this make sense? That's in the footbridge case. In the switch case, you don't have the feeling as strongly. The work that we've been doing on charitable giving has a similar kind of dual process dynamic, but the feelings are in the

positive domain, right? But there's still a kind of tension there to be navigated, and that's what we're trying to do here. Josh's interests in morality go beyond hypothetical situations like the trolley problem. He's part of a movement called effective altruism, one that's very much grounded in reality. So the idea of effective altruism is to use the resources you have to do as much good as possible and to make those decisions about what does as much good as possible based on reason, evidence, this clear analysis as possible. And so there are different categories here. So the most straightforward thing that anyone with disposable income can do is just to donate money to super effective charities. Right. Effective altruism is also broader than that.

It has to do with choosing your career. Right. And this has the same kind of hard head dynamic that maybe the most good one could do in principle is going into finance and making as much money as possible and then giving 95% of it away, right? But very few people are going to do that. And most people wouldn't enjoy that if they're not the kind of person who would go into finance anyway. And if they are, they might not want to give 95% of their money away, right? So it's about finding a balance where you say, okay, what's something that I can do that makes good use of my talents, but uses those resources in a way that really can do a lot of good. And there's a great organization called 80,000 Hours that offers advice to people and helps them figure out in a personal way, like how can I do something that feels good and is meaningful to me,

but also really uses my talents and my skills in a way that does a lot of good for the world. So it's choosing a career, it's choosing what you do with your resources. And it can be personal decisions as well. So things about what you choose to eat. But the general idea is that we should take the evidence seriously. I mean, it's funny that like effective altruism is a new idea, right?

Right, that we really need a movement to tell us, hey, rationally take the evidence seriously. If I went to like Harvard Business School across the river, it's like, I've got this new idea. When you're trying to figure out how to invest your money, look to see what kind of return you're going to get. The idea of investing for impact in the business world

is just like the biggest duh ever, right? But then when it comes to trying to do good for the world more generally, it's only recently that people have been doing the kind of serious analysis that investors have been doing for decades and even centuries. And so it's just, it's just getting serious about it in the same way that you get serious about business as a business person. And so let's talk about some of the biases that, that mess us up with this, like, you know, why we can think about it in the business domain,

but it's so hard in the charitable giving domain. You know, one reason we mess this up is that, you know, our brain isn't really good at seeing everybody in need who's worthy of our help. You know, so talk about this idea of the moral circle and why it might be a little bit more narrow than we think. Yeah. So where does morality come from, right? And where does human sociality come from? And my view, not unique to me, but not shared by everybody, is that the fundamental principle of life, not just humans, is cooperation. That if you go all the way back to the beginning of the history of life, you know, what you see are molecules coming together to form larger molecules that can make copies of themselves

better, coming together to form cells and then multicellular colonies and organisms and complicated animals with different organs that cooperate and function together and then social animals like ants and chimpanzees and us. And then starting with us, there's hunter-gatherer bands and there's more complex chiefdoms and tribal societies and nation states. So the story of life is a story of cooperation at increasingly complex levels. But that cooperation isn't just there because it's nice. It's there because it evolved. And anything that evolved evolves because it has a competitive advantage.

So teamwork is a competitive weapon, right? It serves a competitive purpose at the highest level. So you don't compete as much with other people on your team so that you can more effectively compete with the other team. And so there's this challenge here. Our social emotions are designed to produce cooperative interactions in the service of out-competing others. So cooperation can exist up to a point, but then it's always strained at the highest level because the very force that caused it to evolve biologically or culturally is competitive. But we humans, we're unusual.

We have the ability to understand all of this stuff, climb that evolutionary ladder, and then kick it away. We're going to do what makes sense for us, given our values, which are not necessarily the same thing as the values that are implicit in the biological process. And I view effective altruism is we are understanding the process and we're saying, okay, we as a species have created enough resources that no one has to be hungry, right? So why don't we do one better? Why don't we apply the cooperative social-emotional capacities that we evolved for competition and apply them not just cooperatively within our local groups,

but more broadly? And so my mission is to expand that circle all the way out as best as I can. Because that means if we keep the circle too narrow, we might be like missing out on the happiness benefits that comes from doing really good in the world, but just in this kind of narrow scope. But another thing we get wrong is this idea of what's called scope neglect when it comes to giving more broadly. You know, so what is scope neglect? Explain this concept, which I think is so powerful. Yeah, well, I mean, it's just that our emotions are not designed to be numerate, to take numbers into account, right? So there's a very real sense in which saving a thousand people's lives is a thousand times better than saving one person's life. But research

suggests that if anything, that saving a single person is more emotionally salient than saving a thousand, that it becomes, the numbers become very abstract. And even when you think about the numbers, there's a kind of diminishing returns where after a while, it's just a lot. And so we kind of have to compensate for that if we really want to make choices that really maximize the amount of good that we can do. really maximize the amount of good that we can do. And we can see this even in the way sometimes charities advertise things, right? You know, it's the oftentimes charities will put, you know, a picture of one person in need. This is what researchers have called the identifiable victim effect. So what's that? I think it's powerful. Yeah. So this goes back to work by Deborah Small and George Lowenstein. They did some really nice lab experiments where they kind of created in an economic way, a victim in the lab, they lost their money. And then they could ask other experimenters,

Hey, do you want to give some of your money to make up for the person who lost it? And they did this two different ways. It was a very sort of subtle manipulation. It's kind of amazing that it worked, although it makes sense. In one version, they said, do you want to help the person, whoever it's going to be, who was harmed by this, you know, be like one of six people, but it wasn't determined yet who would be. And then in another version, they said, do you want to help person number four? Who's the person who had this, right? And you don't know anything about them. It's just that it's been determined and people were more willing to help just when you said that it's person number four,

as opposed to some person to be determined, right? And this is like the thinnest possible shift. And when, you know, but when it's a real identifiable victim, like, you know, you can see on an ad on TV, that has a much more powerful response. And, you know, one worry about this is that, you know, if you draw people's attention to this, you know, one way to go is to say, okay, I'm going to care about all of those anonymous children more, instead of just focusing on the single person who's very emotionally salient. But one worry, and there's some evidence to suggest that this could happen is when people understand what's going on instead, they just say, okay, well, I'm not going to care about either.

I'm going to care about the one person less. And so the challenge here is how do you take that pro-social feeling and scale it up in a way or align it more with the scope of the need is and what you can do about it. I love this idea that once we recognize our mind's biases, we can find ways to work with them rather than against them. We'll hear more about this when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. Psychology professor Josh Green wanted to understand what would make people decide to give more donations to his list of high-impact charities instead of to causes that hold more personal appeal. He wanted people to give with their heads rather than with their hearts. But purely rational appeals didn't turn out to be very effective. So you mentioned sort of fighting the biases,

but the idea here is to not fight them, to work with them rather than against them. And what's interesting is I started out trying to fight them. You know, I was convinced to support highly effective charities, basically by philosopher Peter Singer. And he, you know, gave a famous argument for doing this. You know, he said, look, if you were walking by a pond and there was a child drowning in that pond and you could save the child, but if you do that, you're going to wade in and you're going to ruin the, you know, nice suit you're wearing or whatever it is, you know, would you still save

the child? Would it be okay for you to let the child drown because you don't want to ruin your suit? And I said, of course, it'd be terrible. You'd be a monster, right? If you let the kid drown because you're worried about your suit. And then Singer says, well, there are children who are drowning in poverty all around the world who are in badly need of food and medicine. And for the price of a nice suit, you can save or contribute to saving many of these children. So why do you have any more of an obligation to wade into the pond than you do to use what resources you have to help those people? So I was very much convinced by that argument when I was in my late teens, I think. Do you remember when you read it? Like, do you remember having a moment

of like, oh, crap, like it was in college, I was in an urban environment for the first time. And I would see homeless people a lot. And I started thinking about this and thinking about, you know, I'd be on my way to go buy something. This was back when I used to buy a lot of CDs, as in, you know, music for those young people listening. And, you know, I think, like, why is it more important for me to have this, like, you know, John Coltrane CD than it is for me to help this person, right? And then, you know, I talked to Jonathan Barron, my psychology professor, and he's like, oh, you should read this guy, Peter Singer. And I was like, oh, and, you know, Peter Singer did a much better job of laying this all out than I did. And I didn't realize that, you know, he had already laid this out a couple years before I was born. But then when I read that, you know, then it really gripped me. So that was how I became convinced of this. And I thought, well, if that's what worked for me, I'll try to convince other people. And so with various people, I've tried experiments where you kind of lay out the Peter Singer sort of argument and see if people are willing to, you know, donate something if

you give them some money that they could keep or donate or otherwise convince them. And what we found is that this works a little bit at best. Sometimes it doesn't work at all. And sometimes it works a little tiny bit. But people do not respond to this in general the way that I did. And so more recently, I started thinking maybe there's another way here that instead of fighting it to go with it to be like water a bit. And so this is the new project with the amazing Lucius Caviola, who's currently a postdoc in my lab. And we thought rather than saying to people, don't give to the charity that you love, that is personally meaningful for you, instead give to this charity that distributes malaria nets or provides deworming treatments, which you don't know anything about. For a lot of people that just feels cold and alien. And they said like, yeah, I kind of get that, but

that's not where my heart is. Right. And, and again, I, I get that too. You know, I don't exclusively give to the super duper effective recommended charities. So then we thought, well, what if we just ask people to do both? Just said, Hey, it's all right to pick a charity that you love, but also, you know, here's one that experts say is incredibly effective. So we started doing experiments with this where we said, you have this money, you can give it to a charity that you choose or to this one that's super effective. And we found that almost everybody chooses the charity that they chose.

Not surprising. But then we found that if we just said, hey, you've got three choices. Give it all to the one you picked. Give it all to the one we're recommending or do a 50-50 split. And people were very happy to do the 50-50 split, so much so that more money went to the charity that we chose with the 50-50 splits than when people only had the option to do one or the other. So we said, oh, maybe we're onto something here. And we did some other experiments to try to understand the psychology in more detail. And, you know, the short and long of it is that there's a kind of diminishing returns that you get from supporting your favorite charity. That when you support the

charity that you love, it's not so important to you whether you give $50 or $100. It's just that you want to support it. And yeah, it feels a little bit better to give twice as much, but not twice as good. But then that makes room for doing something else. What we found is that giving to a highly effective charity is not only something that people are willing to do, but there's something especially appealing about it because it has this kind of hard head complementarity. And then we thought, okay, so we want to try to see if we can do this out in the world. So we thought, well, okay, we can do the obvious thing and say, well, what if we incentivize people? We say, all right, if you make a split donation between one you choose and one that experts recommend, we'll add, you know, 25% on top of both your donations.

And a nice thing about this is that it's both, right? We're not saying we're only encouraging you to do the thing that we're kind of suggesting. We're supporting your charity, the one that you picked, right? And we're happy to do that. And we found that people really loved this. And then there's one other piece to this. We said, okay, well, we need these matching funds. And one way to do this would be to have a kind of angel investor donor who would sort of put up the matching funds for this. But we thought maybe we can do this in a new way. We asked people, okay, so you've just had these matching funds with this donation. Would you be

willing to take part of your donation, the part that was going to go to the charity that you actually didn't choose, but is highly effective, would you be willing to put that in a fund that would provide matching funds for other people? So a kind of pay it forward thing. And we found that a significant number of people were very happy to do that. So Lucius and I, with the help of some wonderful web developers, and one in particular, Fabio Kuhn, created this site called Giving Multiplier, which gives people the option to do just that. You can go to givingmultiplier.org slash happiness lab, all caps, all one word,

where we've got a little special landing page just for listeners of this podcast. And it's very simple. We have a little search field where you can find any charity that's registered in the United States. You enter the amount of money that you want to donate. And then we have this nifty, I think it's very nifty, little slider. And then you can slide it to decide, OK, do I want to split it 50-50 or do I want to give like 80 percent, 20 percent to the other? Right now, we're at the highest matching rate we've ever had, especially with the Happiness Lab code. So we're experimenting with seeing if we can go this high and still be self-sustaining.

So I hope that works out and I hope Happiness Labbers will give this a try. I love this. I love that we get, you know, special multiplication on our donations. But I mean, you said, I hope this will work, but you're already seeing a lot of success from giving multiplier, right? Like give me a sense of like how much money people are donating. We launched this in November of last year

and we thought, okay, we'll be really happy if this, you know, raises like $20,000 or something like that, you know, better than bake sale, you know, raises like $20,000 or something like that, you know, better than bake sale, you know, is what we were aiming for. And the response was unbelievable. We have now I think we're up to about $650,000 total funds raised. But I think we're really sort of just getting started. And it seems like people like it and get it. Do you think after, you know, after the end of the year, we can come back and say how much money we like my listeners raised for this? Oh, absolutely. And I think this is a great opportunity to take that competitive instinct and turn it into something cooperative.

So let's say you can kick the crap out of the other podcasts. I won't name them, but yeah, I will report back with with I'll come back with the numbers and and let you know how you did. And so for anyone that's on the fence about maybe using this Giving Tuesday, you know, to do more for others or who's who's on the fence about doing more for others in this very effective way. Any final advice for jumping in and making the decision to give a little bit more with your heart and your mind? Well, it's very hard to live one's life being a pure effectiveness maximizer, right? I mean, in the limiting cases, this is like no birthday party for your kids. You know, you don't need two kidneys. And so again, this is not, it's not about finger wagging and it's not about saying thou shalt, you know, do this or do that. But I mean, for me, once you

kind of know that you can be extremely effective, like hundreds of times more effective, then, you know, once you have that knowledge, it's like, how can you ignore it? Giving to others can provide us with a much needed happiness boost. And that's why I wanted to give you that special web address from Josh one more time. It's givingmultiplier.org slash happiness lab. All caps, all one word. But even if you aren't in a position to donate to a charity right now, I hope you've picked up some useful strategies from this episode to help you maximize how you help others. And whether you give with your head or your heart, with money or with time, this holiday season, the important thing is that you're making the effort.

This is the final Happiness Lab episode for 2021. But we will be back on January 5th with a new year mini-season. We'll take a deep dive into what we usually think of as negative emotions, things like sadness, grief, and anxiety. And we'll talk to experts like Brene Brown, Adam Grant, and Julia Samuel about how understanding these emotions better can help us improve our overall happiness. I'm also releasing six special meditations to go along with these January shows that will be exclusive to Pushkin Plus subscribers. Pushkin Plus is available on the show page in Apple Podcasts

or at pushkin.fm slash plus. That's P-L-U-S. Sign up now and you'll have access to ads-free listening across many Pushkin Industries shows. I hope you have a fantastic holiday season, and I look forward to seeing you in 2022. Until then, stay safe and stay happy. happy. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. Joseph Fridman checked our facts. Sophie Crane McKibben edited our scripts. Emily Ann Vaughn offered additional production support. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Carly Migliore, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Daniela Lucarn, Maya Koenig, Nicole Morano, Eric Zandler, Royston Berserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos.