The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Psychopaths and Superheroes

Episode Date: April 27, 2020

We talk a lot about psychopaths - but rarely discuss their polar opposites, super altruists. These are people who go to extreme lengths to help others - even though their acts of kindness might cost them time, money or expose them to physical danger. These folk are also happier than the rest of us.A super altruist once saved the life of psychology professor Abigail Marsh - so she devoted her career to understanding what drives these amazing and happy people and how we call all learn to be more like them.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. that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini is 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.

I was driving home late at night after spending the night in Seattle. And as I was coming over a bridge back into Tacoma, a little dog ran out in front of my car. I did exactly what most people do when this happens, and I now know you shouldn't do, which is I swerved to try to avoid hitting it.

And the result of both swerving and then ultimately hitting it anyway was that my car was sent into sort of a fishtail and then a spin across the freeway. This is Abby Marsh. She was only 19 years old when the events in this story took place. When the car finally came to a stop, it was in the fast lane of the freeway, just past the crest of this bridge I'd been crossing, which meant that I was invisible to the oncoming traffic. Unfortunately, they were quite visible to me because my car was now facing backward into the oncoming traffic and the engine of the car sort of sputtered to a halt.

And I didn't have a phone and I had no way of escaping because this bridge didn't have any shoulders on it. So there was nowhere to go, even if I were to get out of the car and I just panicked. I couldn't get the car to turn back on and I was feeling every time one of these trucks or semis passed me the whole car would shudder as they went by. Oh shit, now what are we gonna do? Like, you know, your mind is sort of stuttering through the different options and do I get out of the car or do I stay in the car? If I get out of the car I was risking the car hitting me but then if I stayed in the car I was definitely gonna get hit eventually because these cars that were coming over the crest were swer I was risking the car hitting me. But then if I stayed in the car, I was definitely going to get hit eventually.

Because these cars that were coming over the crest were swerving barely in time to avoid me. There Abby was, a teenager, all alone, and trapped on the freeway, confronting what seemed like certain death. And it was just a sense of futility and blankness. It was awful. But what happened next propelled Abby on a totally new journey. A journey that would bring her face to face with the worst and best parts of human nature. And one that has allowed her to unlock a counterintuitive secret to what makes life happier and a bit more worth living. 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. Laurie Santos. Abby Marsh was trapped in her disabled SUV, in the dark, facing the wrong way on the highway. She watched in terror as oncoming traffic swerved by.

She needed a miracle. It's funny because, you know, I don't believe in guardian angels. And in fact, it frustrates me when people refer to very altruistic people as angels because I feel like it sort of takes away from how compassionate real live human beings can be. You know, you don't have to be supernatural to help somebody else. But it did have that sense of just, he just appeared out of nowhere. Abby looked over to see that a complete stranger was knocking calmly on her passenger side door. Abby looked over to see that a complete stranger was knocking calmly on her passenger side door. My memory of him is that he was wearing a suit and a lot of gold jewelry and sunglasses. It was the middle of the night. That made no sense.

But he said, you look like you could use some help. And I said, yeah, I think I could. And he ran around the front of my car into the traffic, got into the driver's seat. And then he got the car back, started again, and got us back across the road and parked us behind his car. I was shaking, and I'm sure I was gray, and I felt awful. And he said, you don't look so good. Do you need me to follow you to make sure you get home okay? And I said, no, no, no, I'll be fine. I'll be fine. I'm pretty sure I didn't say thank you. And he's like, okay, you take care of yourself. And he got out of my car, back into his own, and disappeared. Abby has spent a lot of time

wondering about the man that rescued her and the reasons behind his actions. The instant, practically, he saw my car, he must have pulled over and then run across five lanes of freeway traffic in the dark to get to me. Why would somebody do that? Why would somebody do that? What was that moment that happened inside this other person's head that I owe my life to? What's interesting to me is that just knowing that people do it sort of semantically, you know, you read about it in a newspaper is you can sort of be like, oh, that's interesting. But there's something about it happening to you. A real human being made this choice to save my life, even though he risked being killed himself, to make you want to

understand it. And the fact that we don't really have good explanations for why somebody would do something like this. In fact, it defies a lot of conventional wisdom about human motivation, you know, all humans being fundamentally selfish. That's something many people believe. And so what could be more interesting than a concrete fact that defies a lot of established ideas? But Abby wasn't content to just sit and wonder why her savior chose to help her. She decided to get to the bottom of his actions, scientifically. I'm not sure how often these motivations that drive us are clear in the moment, but in retrospect, it's very clear that my research took a very distinct track since then.

Abby is now a professor in the Department of Psychology and the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience at Georgetown. She's a world expert in how we process other people's emotions. I started studying how we respond to other people's fear initially, so why it is that the sight of somebody who's frightened elicits caring responses in people who see it. But that's a really difficult question to study in the lab because, you know, you can't ethically induce extreme fear in people,

and it's really hard to measure people's behavior when it comes to things like altruism in the lab in a way that doesn't make them do what you want them to do. So Abby decided to employ a common psychology research logic. If you want to understand a concept, one of the better ways to do that is to find a population of people who are missing the thing you're interested in and try to understand what makes them different. And hopefully that will help understand where that process you're interested in comes from.

Which led Abby to explore the nature of altruistic actions using a seemingly strange population, psychopaths. We had known for a while, and scientists had known for a while, that people who are psychopathic don't respond normally to the sight of other people's fear, or even the idea of other people's fear. And one of my favorite examples of this comes from a story my colleague Essie Veiding was telling me. She was testing a bunch of psychopathic adult inmates on their ability to recognize other people's facial expressions. And one psychopathic inmate she was testing was particularly bad at recognizing other people's fear. So bad he missed every single

fearful expression she showed him. But he knew he was doing badly because he got to the last fearful expression in the set. And he's like, you know, I don't know what that expression is called, but I know that's what people look like right before you stab them. I find that so incredibly profound because, you know, here's a man who is imprisoned because he does things that cause other people to believe they're going to die. And he's like, oh, yeah, I know what they look like. You know, I recognize that face. But he couldn't link it to the emotion fear. He just, he couldn't make sense of that vivid, you know, wide-eyed, distressed expression and understand the emotional content behind it. Abby's now done some elegant work exploring why psychopaths have this problem recognizing others' distress. We found that there's a structure in their brain called the amygdala

that doesn't seem to respond normally to other people's fear, whereas in most people, this particular structure seems to be very active in response to somebody's fear, and that seems to help you interpret that emotion. People who are psychopathic just show no response at all. But the biggest idea that came from Abby's work on the brains of psychopaths was an insight that eventually led her back to the question she first started asking on that highway many years ago. We have understood now for a while that psychopathy is not a sort of cluster of individuals that's qualitatively different from everybody else. It's a spectrum. And so there are, you know, people who are highly, highly psychopathic

and people who are only moderately psychopathic. And then those traits vary continuously throughout the population. And what is interesting about that fact is it suggests that there must be such a thing as an anti-psychopath. So if, you know, most of us are sort of moderately compassionate and you've got psychopaths on one end who have no compassion, well, there must be a mirror image of that, people who are unusually compassionate. And I got to thinking about what that might look like. What would it look like to be anti-psychopathic? Are they, for example, the kind of people who would run into oncoming traffic to save a complete stranger? Could they be the key to understanding why some people are willing

to lose everything to help others? After the break, you'll hear more about these so-called anti-psychopaths and how their unusual choices demonstrate what you can personally do to become a little bit happier. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. 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. I started out thinking it would be fun to and, you know, edifying to study people who were heroic rescuers like the man who saved my life. But at the time, it wasn't at all clear how I would find them. After exploring the brains of psychopathic killers,

researcher Abby Marsh wanted to understand the minds of the polar opposite side of the psychological spectrum. It's not an easy thing to put like an ad in the newspaper for. Have you ever saved a stranger's life and risked your own? I wasn't aware of any way to recruit them. And so I thought about, well, there are other ways to save lives that involve significant risk and sacrifice. And at the time, a number of articles and a book had come out about altruistic kidney donors, people who give away a kidney to save the life of a stranger in end-stage renal failure. Patients in end-stage renal failure often

wait three to five years to get a kidney from a deceased donor. Living kidney donors, people who are willing to give up one of their two functioning kidneys, can cut down on the wait time for the nearly 100,000 people who are on that wait list. The donation procedure is more straightforward than you might think. Most donors return to their usual activities in a few weeks. But like all surgeries, kidney donations come with at least some risk of serious complications. Things like blood clots, infection, or even death. And I thought, you know, if anything is altruistic, it is that. It is this very significant decision to give away an internal organ, a vital internal organ,

to save the life of somebody that you've never met and in most cases have been picked off a list for you. So it struck me that if anything could be considered anti-psychopathic, it's the decision to give a kidney to a stranger. So Abby had her target group, kidney donors, but at the time it was a pretty exclusive club. There were only a few thousand in the entire country who'd gone through that invasive procedure. Meaningful results in scientific studies require having as many test subjects as possible, and so Abby was a bit worried that she wouldn't be able to find enough donors. In spite of the odds, she put an ad on an organ transplant listserv. Have you ever donated a kidney to a stranger? If so, a researcher

at Georgetown is interested in conducting a study with you. Abby reasonably assumed that she'd never find enough participants from such an absolutely tiny pool of potential recruits. I have this vivid memory of sitting down and being like, oh, I wonder if anybody's responded to my ads for kidney donors and opening up my laptop and my inbox was just flooded with new messages, many with like all caps, subject things from altruistic kidney donors who were just very excited to be taking part in my research. You know, I would love to be your guinea pig. Please sign me up. Abby was immediately shocked by this population's generosity.

Hundreds of them were ready to fly to her lab at a moment's notice. And once they got there, they were happy to go to great lengths to be helpful and considerate. Working with lots of different populations over the years, it can be a real trick to just get people to come in and to come in on time. And the first three altruistic kidney donors we brought in, and they'd come in from all over the country, and they were staying in a hotel just a few blocks from the campus where we were going to be scanning them. And they were so worried about not being late to their brain scans that they came three hours early to their first scan. It's like unheard of. And they ended up getting

lost in the bowels of the university hospital and almost ended up breaking through a fire door to try to get to the scan center and setting off alarms all over the hospital because, again, they were so incredibly concerned about not being late. Abby also found that her kidney donors were unusually humble. They didn't like her hypothesis that they were in any way special or at the extreme end of some goodness spectrum. A number of them very kindly told me that they were happy to participate in the study. They were happy to help out, but they were pretty sure that I was barking at the wrong tree. The idea that there was anything different about them at all

was just wrong. They're not unusually altruistic. They're not unusually compassionate. They're just like anybody else. They happen to be in the right place at the right time, which is not how anybody else talks about people who give kidneys to strangers. But their real sense of humility has been really striking, just an unwillingness to think of themselves as better than anybody else. Of course, Abby's results showed that kidney donors were wrong. They were different, at least when it came to their brains. Abby used neuroimaging techniques to measure the size of the donors' amygdalas, that same brain structure involved in processing fear, the very same part that was significantly smaller than average in psychopaths.

It turns out that her kidney donors also had peculiar amygdalas, but they were 8% larger than those of average people. Now, it could be that her donors were just born that way, but it was also possible that performing acts of kindness over time had caused the enlargement, like a muscle responding to exercise. Whatever the reason, these extreme altruists had amygdalas that indeed looked like the polar opposite of what she'd seen in her malicious criminals. Abby had finally identified a population of antipsychopaths, which was a pretty cool result for a budding neuroscientist. But the most important thing about studying this new population for Abby wasn't just that she had discovered a completely new, nearly atypical population. The altruistic kidney donors finally gave Abby the opportunity to pose the question that had puzzled her for decades. The question she wanted to ask her highway savior.

Why would somebody do that? Why did her rescuer choose to save her? Abby conducted interview after interview asking, what was going through your head when you decided to help someone in such an extreme way? The most common answer I get to the question is it just hit me like a bolt of lightning. I found out that there are people who are dying from kidney failure. There's 100,000 of them on the waiting list, and most of us can give a kidney away and be none the worse for wear for it. And I thought, I'll do that. I mean, there is no decision process, I think, is the interesting thing. Like, it's not a hemming and hawing process for really almost anybody I've talked to.

It's just a, well, you can do this. Somebody's life is going to be saved. I'll do it. At first glance, this sort of answer fits with Abby's initial hypothesis, that there had to be something fundamentally different about people who'd risk their lives for strangers without a moment's thought. But if that were the case, her results wouldn't be as relevant for all of you, and so I wouldn't be talking about them here on the

Happiness Lab. As Abby probed more deeply, she realized that this couldn't be the whole story. As she heard more about her participants' lives, she realized that many of them got to this act of kidney donation through lots of smaller acts of generosity. Nobody goes from sort of ground zero to donating a kidney. Almost always the people we've worked with are long-time blood donors, platelet donors, some have been marrow donors, many of them work in volunteer positions, rescue animals, foster children. They've all done things in the past that involve giving of themselves to help other people. Abby realized that many of her kidney donors wound up getting to what seemed like an extreme altruistic choice

through lots of baby steps, smaller nice actions, the kinds of things that lots of us do or could easily do. Over time, the donors recognized that performing these smaller acts of kindness felt, well, kind of nice. The sense that I get is that they have had the wonderful opportunity to discover how rewarding that is, what a sense of joy and happiness it gives you to help other people. And it's just like any other reinforcement process. You sort of work your way up. You're like, well, that was so rewarding. What else could I do? If donating blood is good, I guess donating marrow is even better. If donating kidney is good, I guess donating a piece of my liver is even better. And I now have several kidney donors I've worked with who've also donated a portion of their liver. As she heard from more interviewees, Abby's big

savior on the highway puzzle started to become clearer. Extreme altruists did what they did because they had learned a simple yet counterintuitive principle of human motivation. Doing nice things for other people feels really good. Even in cases where it's a bit costly, helping others can provide a big spike to our well-being. Altruistic kidney donors just take the usual well-being spike we all experience to an extreme. It's therefore no surprise that they tend to be a really happy group on average. It's a universal response I get from them. They are so glad that they made the decision to donate. They'd do it a hundred more times if they could do a hundred

more times. It's one of the best things that they ever did. And it gives them this sense of joy that sticks with them as far as I can tell forever. Some of the people I've worked with donated close to 20 years ago now, and it doesn't ever seem to go away, that sense of vicarious joy of having been able to do this thing for somebody else. I have had many interviews and in tears as people are describing the after effects of their donation and hearing that the child who had received their kidney, like days after donation, he was making plans to go like to the beach and camping for like the first time. He'd never been able to do these things. And the kidney donor's sobbing, relating this, and I'm sobbing, relating this. It's incredibly profound. As Abby heard more of these stories and saw the

incredible joy that her subjects experienced, she started to think that her extreme subjects might be on to something important, something that the rest of us could learn from too. If you want to make a good decision about bringing joy and meaning and a sense of connectedness into your own life, helping people is clearly the way to do it. Abby started to realize that all of us can benefit from doing nice things for others, even if we're not yet ready to give up a body part to a stranger. We all have our own ways that we can make the lives of other people better.

You know, donating a kidney is one way, but it's certainly not the only way. But is Abby right? I mean, it's clear that her donors get a huge happiness boost from their generous act. But can the average person really become happier by making a small sacrifice to aid a stranger? Can shifting your focus to helping other people really be a strategy for improving well-being? And if there is a path to becoming a happy altruist, is there a step along that path that you could take today? The Happiness Lab will be right back. 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. personal pampering, I'm reminded of one of my favorite scenes from the TV show Parks and Recreation. Once a year, Donna and I spend a day treating ourselves. What do we treat ourselves to? Clothes. Treat yourself. Fragrances. Treat yourself. Massages. Treat yourself. Mimosas. Treat yourself. Fine leather goods. Treat yourself. It's the best day of the year. The best day of the year! When we want to be happier, we think it's time to spoil ourselves. Or, in the popular parlance of Parks and Rec, I've got three words for you. Treat yourself. On the show, Tom and Donna observe Treat Yourself Day every October 13th.

It's now become a cultural phenomenon. So much so that Retta, the actress who plays Donna, can't post a photo of a cocktail or a purse on Instagram without some fan telling her to go ahead and treat yourself. But is this strategy right? Should we be treating ourselves to feel happier? Or are we missing other, more powerful opportunities to boost our moods? You know, I don't think treating ourselves

is a terrible idea. Like, spending money on ourselves can be good. This is Liz Dunn, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and author of the book, Happy Money, the Science of Happier Spending. It's just that this idea of spending money on somebody else could actually be helpful, I think is especially easy to overlook because I think we do just get focused on ourselves. Liz studies the cases where our so-called treat-yourself intuitions can lead us astray, especially when it comes to spending our disposable income.

I first got interested in this idea, like, not because I was especially interested in generosity, but because I was interested in money. So I managed to make it through my 20s without ever holding a real job. At 27, I got my first real job, and they actually started paying me, and I was like, oh, wow, like, what do I do with all of this money? Like, this is more money than I need to survive, you know? What do I do with it? I was surprised at the time by how little research there was on this topic.

Liz combed the literature to figure out the best way to spend our money to feel happier. And all the existing studies seem to point in the same direction. The science shows that treating ourselves doesn't make us as happy as treating other people. And that result is not just true for extremely altruistic people like Abby's kidney donors. Even when we look in pretty diverse regions of the world, in fact, in all seven major regions of the world, we find this relationship whereby people

who donate money to charity are happier than those who don't. So I thought, well, okay, would we actually get more of a kind of happiness thing for our buck by spending on others than by spending on ourselves? Liz and her colleagues decided to test this in a rather simple experiment. They walked up to people on the street and handed them $20. We asked them to spend it by the end of the day, but with a catch. So we told half the people they had to spend it on themselves, and we told half the people they had to spend it to benefit others. Imagine for a second that you're a subject in this study. You just got 20 bucks out of the blue, and you're asked to spend it. What would feel better? Spending that money on a nice free meal

or a shiny manicure for yourself, or using that same amount of money to help someone else? If you're like Liz's subjects, you probably think the treat-yourself condition would feel better. In fact, Liz asked over 100 people to predict which condition they would prefer, and about two-thirds of them went with the treat-yourself option. But what did Liz find when people really spent that cash windfall? People were in a better mood at the end of the day when they'd been asked to spend this money on other people rather than on themselves. The simple act of spending $20 on another person

was enough to significantly raise people's well-being levels. But Liz has found that the same effect holds for smaller amounts of money, too. Her team tested a different group of subjects. They were given only $5 to spend on themselves or someone else. This second group showed exactly the same effect as those who were given more cash. You don't necessarily have to be spending crazy amounts of money on others, even like say $5 or even just $2, you know, and shifting it towards using that money to benefit other people does seem to provide this detectable benefit for moods.

Liz and her colleagues have now replicated this same effect in people all over the world, in Canada, India, Uganda, and even remote villages on the island of Vanuatu. The results are always the same, for rich and for poor people. One study of South African subjects found that people are happier spending money on others even when they report not having enough money to buy food for their families in the last year. But what's most impressive

is that Liz has shown that generosity doesn't just feel good in adulthood. We started to wonder, like, you know, is this a fundamental part of human nature? So my student, Lara Akman, and I teamed up with Kylie Hamlin, who's a developmental psychologist, and we brought toddlers just under the age of two into the lab. Now, of course, toddlers don't really care about money, so we worked with the closest thing to toddler gold, which of course is goldfish crackers.

And so we gave these little kids a windfall of goldfish for themselves, as well as a chance to give some of those goldfish away to a puppet named Monkey. The researchers watched how many goldfish crackers kids gave away, and then they coded their facial expressions to see how happy toddlers seemed afterwards. What we see in this study is that even children under the age of two seem to exhibit pleasure from giving their resources away. Counterintuitively, the kids smiled more and seemed much happier after losing a bunch of their goldfish crackers. It's kind of just reassuring, like as many problems as we have in the world right now, it's like the tiny humans are starting out with this proclivity to derive joy from giving their stuff away. That to me, I don't know, it makes me optimistic again about the world. What's less

optimistic though, is that we adults don't realize that doing nice things for others feels so good, that it can have such a positive impact on our mood. I mean, I definitely want to be happier, but I haven't given away a really significant chunk of my income, let alone a kidney. I bet you haven't either. Our lying minds keep saying, treat yourself, which means we tend not to even take baby steps towards kindness nearly as much as we could. It's so interesting because I think on a broad level, people totally recognize that this is the case. And I get postcards and emails and stuff from people saying, why did you as a scientist need to waste your time showing this? Where people are just saying like, oh, we already knew this from like the Bible or

from like, you know, what our parents taught us. And I think, you know, on a broad level, people recognize that generosity feels good. I think what they miss is that, you know, when they're looking at how to spend the $20 in their pocket, that's where they make the error. So it's like in this moment with this like piece of extra money in my hand, it doesn't maybe occur to me to spend it on somebody else or, you know, it feels much more tempting to use it to benefit myself rather than to spend it on others. And again, I think we forget that like, oh, I could buy a slightly less expensive car and then have a lot of money left over to use to help other people in my life or donate

to charity or whatever. And I think, you know, that's where the error creeps in is that we kind of forget that we would actually benefit from using the money less on ourselves and more on other people. So if you really want to treat yourself to a happier day, give up something to benefit another person. You can start with money, just give up a dollar or two. But if you're strapped for cash, you can also give up time, like letting someone cut in front of you in line at the grocery store. It could even be a small service, like helping a neighbor clear off the snow, or maybe taking the time to rate and review your favorite podcast. And doing nice things for others doesn't just boost your mood. It also makes the person who received your kind actions a little

happier too. And that's the kind of tip I most love sharing on this podcast. One that lets my listeners selfishly bump up their own happiness in a way that also helps to make the world a better, more empathic place. And who knows, maybe you won't be satisfied with the small act of donating $2 here or $5 there. Maybe you'll also graduate from those baby steps to the kind of selfless acts that lead to a huge, huge long-standing boost in well-being. Ones that really, really help people. Maybe you'll even save the life of another person. A person like Abby, stuck on the highway alone, embraced for what could have been certain death. A moment that has stayed with her for decades. It just stuck with me, the fact that I owe my life to the stranger

who was willing to risk his to save me. I'm hoping that your altruistic savior is out there somewhere. If he's listening right now, what would you say? That's a big one. But, you know, if he's out there listening today and I just want to say how profoundly grateful I am for the beautiful thing that you did and

the opportunities you've given me. And I hope to do your tremendous act of bravery justice. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley, with the help of Pete Naughton. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. The show was edited by Sophie McKibben and fact-checked by Joseph Fridman. by Joseph Fridman. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Carly Migliore, Heather Fane, Julia Barton, Maggie Taylor, Maya Koenig, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and by me, Dr. Laurie Santos. 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.