The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

Cheers was a sitcom hit in the 80s thanks to a theme tune promising that the fictional bar was a place "where everybody knows you name". Venues like pubs - away from our homes and workplaces - are vital for building our social networks and making our lives richer, easier and more fun.   But these so-called "Third Places" are in danger. Neighborhood hangouts are closing and membership of clubs, associations and unions is falling. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam has been watching this worrying decline across a lifetime and warns that we need to act before it's too late.   Robert is author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community and The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. He also inspired the 2023 film Join or Die. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. It was a Thursday night ritual in the Santos house. Like families all over America, we'd settle in front of the TV to watch a sitcom that, from the opening bars of its theme song, really spoke to me. That show was Cheers. Cheers is filmed before a live studio audience. Kind of like pen pals. It's a comedy about a bar in Boston,

owned by washed-up baseball star Sam Malone. You exchange letters? No, pens. The jokes spring from the ups and downs of the bar's slightly oddball roster of staff and clientele, from prissy psychiatrist Frasier Crane to beer-loving accountant Norm Peterson. I was just a kid when Cheers was on the air. I hadn't tasted my first

beer, and most of the jokes went over my head. Yet, I loved Cheers. I fantasized The Hindus believe that you led a good life, that you come back in an elevated state. Like Colorado. Yet, I loved Cheers. I fantasized that as an adult, I'd move to Boston and hang out in a place just like that, night after night after night. Bars can be very sad places. Some people spend their whole lives in a bar. Just yesterday, some guy sat right here next to me for 11 hours. But why did I love Cheers so much?

I think it mostly came down to the show's theme song. Life is tough, the song said, so wouldn't you like to get away and find a spot where community and camaraderie can fix all your troubles. Even as a kid, I understood the value of a place where you could be known and accepted, where you'd be welcomed among friends. But of course, Cheers was just a TV show. It was a fantasy. Deep down, we may all want to go somewhere where everybody knows our names,

but those places are getting harder and harder to find. Many are closing their doors, and the ones that aren't shutting down are changing. Lots of local spots are becoming places where it's incredibly hard to see the same face twice, let alone form long-term friendships with a bunch of regulars, which, as we'll see in this episode,

is bad for all our happiness in some pretty fundamental ways. But the most sad thing is that the same fate has even befallen my beloved Cheers Bar. What's the ratio of people who come here who are kind of from Boston versus tourists? Is it mostly tourists now? Oh, it's very heavily tourists.

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. They liked the intimacy of it. It's small, about 750 square feet, so that they were relaxed and could meet other people.

Tom Kershaw is something of a Boston legend, and so is his bar. Long before Cheers appeared on the Santos family television, his Bull & Finch tavern was pulling in Bostonian drinkers from all walks of life. We had college professors, We had college graduates. We had construction workers. I remember one fellow, Butchie. I think he kind of was a man of all trades. What a hoot he was.

And he was there every night. The Bull & Finch was inspired by the cozy pubs Tom had visited on trips to England. He even had the interior built in Britain and shipped over piece by piece. The tavern opened in 1969 and was soon buzzing with locals. It was just nice people being nice people, and they became good friends. And it wasn't just beer that was acting as a social lubricant. Tom had imported another pub fixture from England, a dartboard. That dartboard was the melting pot, the entree into meeting people and becoming friends with people.

The Bull and Finch quickly became what sociologists refer to as a third place. Third places are locations that aren't home or work, those first and second places where we spend most of our time. Third places are another space where people can get together for the sort of informal social interactions that make us all feel happier. And third places aren't just bars. They can be Lions Clubs, barbershops, community parks, coffee shops, rotary clubs, PTA meetings, or churches. To qualify as a third place, a spot doesn't just need a lot of people, but a lot of regulars. People need to have enough repeated connections and conversations that they start to feel like a community. Third places also have a knack for bringing together different kinds of folks.

They're neutral grounds where nobody cares all that much about your income or background. They're spots where people are all the same, as that great Cheers theme song put it. And they're spots where the regulars wind up feeling happier and more connected. Tom and his dart-playing regulars could tell that the Bull and Finch was a special kind of gathering spot.

But what they didn't know was that a big change was looming. Because it turns out some television producers, James Burroughs and brothers Glenn and Les Charles, were on the hunt for their next sitcom. The trio had worked on a string of hit shows that were set in workplaces like hospitals and newsrooms, and they had just wrapped their Emmy award-winning comedy Taxi, which centered around a group of New York cabbies.

The producers thought a third place, namely a neighborhood bar, would be the perfect venue for their new show. And Boston seemed like the ideal setting. The city's unusual mix of blue-collar workers and nerdy academic types hadn't yet been featured on a sitcom. mix of blue-collar workers and nerdy academic types hadn't yet been featured on a sitcom. The new show would be filmed on a Hollywood soundstage, but the producers wanted to find a real-life bar for the exterior shots. So they grabbed a Yellow Pages, went down the list of Boston bars, and spotted a big ad for the Bull and Finch. One morning, two strangers from Hollywood were waiting outside when Tom's bar manager arrived at work. Can we come in? He said,

sure, I'm opening the business. They walked in, they looked around, looked at each other and said, this is it. They went to the pay phone and called their mates and said, Eureka, we have found it. The outside of the pub was perfect, but it was what was going on inside that really matched what the producers wanted for their new show. The clientele at the Bull and Finch was the exact oddball mix the writers were looking for. You know, we had Norm and Cliff and Carla, and on the other side you had Fraser, Lilith. So did the characters seem to map on to any of the actual regulars? Absolutely. We had Fred, or that's Susie, or that's, you know, whatever. Yeah, we played that game as to who were the characters they copied. Tom's a graduate of Harvard Business School, so he can spot a good

deal. For allowing his bar to feature in Cheers, he was paid just a dollar. But he soon made a fortune from the publicity surrounding the show and from selling Cheers merchandise to the fans who flocked to drink in his now world-famous pub. So how many people come here a year? You know, it's hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions. But the problem is, you can't be one of Boston's top tourist attractions and a place where everybody knows your name. The regulars don't come so regularly anymore.

And if someone does know your name at the Bull and Finch today, it's probably a gag that the staff are playing along with. We have people that come and say, I have a friend coming. His name's Fred. When you walk in the door, can we say, Hi, Fred! People love it.

Tom is thrilled that his pub has become more profitable than ever, especially in a time when so many similar businesses have closed their doors. But the Bull & Finch isn't the home away from home it used to be. Times change, people's attitudes change, people's needs change, the neighborhoods themselves change. The business is a very dynamic business, and what's popular today could be unpopular tomorrow. I started with the story of Cheers not because this is an episode about the mixed fortunes of the tavern business, but because research shows that what happened to the bar I fantasized about as a kid isn't unique.

Lots of third places are in trouble. I was born in 1941, so I'm pre-Boomer. It takes pretty old people to be able to recognize the cycle. Political scientist Robert Putnam has been keeping a close eye on the decline of third places. He started noticing their demise in his own community thanks to his wife and collaborator, Rosemary. One breakfast, she put the Glossier Globe on the table and said, look at this. Apparently, they're having trouble getting enough people to go to the PTA now in some place. I forgot, Bill Ricker, God knows where. And she said, so what's happened to that?

But Robert wasn't worried about school governance. His real concern was that skipping the PTA meetings to work late or binge something on Netflix was affecting our happiness and connection. One of the things that's shocking is if you ask people what makes them happy, everybody says it's my family and my friends and neighbors. I mean, it's just hands down. Nobody says what makes me happy is my Buick. And Robert should know. He's now in his mid-80s and remembers how things were when he was growing up in Port Clinton, Ohio. Back then, little Bobby Putnam was surrounded by third places where people mingled day in and day out. My dad, every morning, went to a diner in town to have breakfast. It was called

the Breakfast Club. And it was, you know, sort of a cross-section. One of the richest people in town, although none of us knew that, was in that group. Robert also found his own favorite third place. But it wasn't a diner or a bar. It was a bowling alley. In junior high school, I was part of a five-man bowling team, and we did pretty well. We were not great. But bowling a 300 game wasn't really the point of hitting the lanes. Being on the team allowed people from different identities to connect. At the time, Port Clinton, just like many neighborhoods across America, was divided along racial lines.

So I don't want to say this was nirvana. It wasn't. But just like his dad ate breakfast with the town's richest man, Robert's time at the bowling alley was spent crossing the societal divides of the time. And there's a picture that shows the team, which is three white guys,

one tall, gangly guy in the middle, which was me, and two black guys. And we did not think that was strange. That, Robert says, was the power of third places. But it was a power that people back then took for granted. I didn't know it was special. And I don't think it was all that special in America

in the middle of the 1950s. But today's science shows that local hangouts like these were incredibly special. Research shows that the abundance of third places Robert enjoyed not only promoted personal happiness, but produced neighborhoods that were better run, more fun to live in, and even safer. We'll hear why when the Happiness Lab returns from the break.

Giuseppe had a fictitious younger brother who wanted to become an auto mechanic, and he wanted to get the form so that he could apply for a subsidy for auto mechanic school. Back in the late 80s, political scientist Robert Putnam was engaging in some mild academic subterfuge. Robert was interested in why some governments worked well while others didn't, so he set up a new study in Italy. He wanted to know why it was easier to access health care or enroll a child in kindergarten in some towns but not others. So he created fake Italian characters, like Giuseppe, and had them navigate the bureaucracy of different regions. For example, how long would it take Giuseppe's equally made-up brother to successfully apply for vocational training?

And then we counted. How long did it take until we got back the forms, if we got back. Almost never did we get the forms back. So then Giuseppe picked up the phone, and then we counted to how many different people was the telephone call passed until at last someone would say they were the right person. Italy back then was a land of extremes. Some areas were ruled by conservatives, others by communists. Some areas were rich, while others were decidedly not. The south of Italy at that point economically looked like Nicaragua or Syria or something. Pretty underdeveloped, pretty poor. And the northern regions looked like Holland or Sweden or someplace. But new reforms began better balancing how the different regions in Italy were governed. And Robert was super excited about these changes.

These changes allowed Robert to directly test the role that culture, wealth, and history played in a government's effectiveness. The first thing we found was that richer regions were better governed than poor regions. And we thought that makes sense because the richer regions can afford computers and more talented people and so on. But Robert also found that wealth wasn't the whole story. We had many different ideas, many hypotheses about what the secret ingredient might be.

It might be politics. It might be, I don't know, lots of different things. But we never guessed what turned out to be the best predictor. You can see I'm enjoying this. I know, edge of the seat. Come on, tell us. Choral societies. That's right, choral societies. Those groups of people who get together regularly to sing in choirs.

Robert found that regions with more of these groups were the ones whose governments ran most efficiently. Now, I'm guessing choral societies probably wasn't the answer you were expecting. But Robert's strange result was about to get even stranger, because like a good political scientist, Robert decided to look further back in history to figure out why choirs mattered so much.

He thought maybe people in richer towns had more spare time and money to set up singing clubs. Turns out that wasn't right either. It was not that wealth produced choral societies, but that choral societies produced wealth. The Italian towns where it was easy for Robert's fictional citizen Giuseppe to access health care, or the forms his brother needed to train as a mechanic, weren't just the towns that had the most choral societies now. They were also the towns that had the most choirs hundreds and hundreds of years ago. The number of choral societies in a region of Italy

in the 13th century predicts, it turns out, not only whether Giuseppe will get his medical bill reimbursed, but predicts the happiness of people in regions of Italy today. I mean, think of that. Robert was excited about these odd findings, but he didn't fully understand the link. That is, until he suffered a temporary bout of insomnia. I thought, God, I've got to read something boring that I'll fall asleep over.

And there was a big book lying open. I thought, this is clearly going to put me to sleep. It was social theory, foundations of social theory. Robert just so happened to stumble on a chapter by the sociologist James Coleman, which explained the concept known as social capital. Coleman argued that just as regions can have different amounts of physical capital, resources like property, roads, and money, so too can they amass different amounts of social capital, social resources like relationships, networks, and communities. I had never heard the term social capital, but I began reading it. I said, my god, this is what I've been studying. I saw essentially instantly why that was the right concept to use for choral societies. Robert realized that third places like choirs and bowling leagues make governments work better

because they allow people to build social capital. They help create local networks in which everyone knows each other's names. And research shows that having people around who know our names changes our psychology. It helps us behave more virtuously. When people know who we are, we want to win their trust. And that means we put work into meeting our commitments, playing by the rules, and settling our bar bills. And if the people around us are doing the same thing, if they, like us, want to be trustworthy and do nice things, then that's a win-win that makes life easier for everyone in the community.

Trustworthiness is demonstrably increased by social networks. If you and I are engaged in some kind of transaction and I cheat you, you'll be angry at me. But if we're doing that in a setting of networks and I cheat you and he's watching, he knows that I'm not trustworthy because he's seen me mistreat you. And that means he'll never play a game with me. And when you generalize that to everybody, if everybody in town is looking at this transaction, I have a huge incentive not to cheat you. And this is the reason that choral societies were such an important factor in Robert's study of those local Italian governments. If a city official sang in a choir with other townspeople, their reputation and good name became more important to them.

They wouldn't want it getting around town that they couldn't do their job well or send out an application form promptly. But the more interesting thing is that social capital is externalities. That is, it has benefits for people outside the networks. It's not just that an Italian official would work hard for a fellow choir member. The social capital that stems from third places like choral societies encourages people to make the whole system work better,

which means that everyone in town gets to enjoy the fruits of more diligence and trustworthiness. And Robert observed other externalities too. Take crime, for example. The best predictor of a low crime rate in a neighborhood is how many neighbors know one of those first names. If you hang out with your neighbors in a bar or a singing group or residence association, you'll start to look out for them. And they'll start to look out for you too. Robert himself benefits from living in just

such a neighborhood. And this is the moment for confession. I actually never went to the picnics and barbecues and sledding parties and so on, but I was able to benefit from the networks of reciprocity and people keeping an eye on one of those house and so on, even though I was not in it. Another example of these social capital building groups is parent-teacher associations. The more that parents are involved in schools, the better the performance of the schools, the better performance of the kids. And that's true for even kids whose parents are not in the PTA. They benefit from the extra netalities of those networks. of those networks. But when Robert's wife, Rosemary, showed him the newspaper story that PTA attendance was declining in that nearby Massachusetts community of Billerica,

he began to worry. At that point, I had not ever thought about measuring social capital in America, but, you know, the first thought is, well, what's wrong with Billerica? Is that also true in Lexington? Yes, it turned out to be. Could that be true every place? And so Robert began a careful statistical study, not just of PTA membership, but of attendance in third places and social groups of all kinds. He tracked what was happening to rotary clubs, labor unions, religious groups, scout troops, fraternal organizations, women's groups, and even his favorite teenage third place, bowling leagues. And by golly, it was true everywhere. Robert published his findings in a groundbreaking academic article,

which years later became a book. He argued not just that our third places and civic groups were in rapid decline, but also that society should be much, much more worried about it. In honor of his own positive experiences in Port Clinton, he titled his article, Bowling Alone, America's Declining Social Capital. The article rang alarm bells across the entire country. Newspapers picked up Roberts' arguments and politicians vowed to act. Within one week, I was invited to Camp David. Camp David, for goodness sakes? And Rosemary and I were on the cover of People magazine, so this is not the normal experience of any academic.

So Robert's warning was heeded, right? He'd discovered just how important third places were for our happiness and social connection in the late 90s. And people listened. And things today should be great. Uh, right? Unfortunately, that's not how the story went. Since Robert's article came out in 1995, the story of third places has gotten much, much worse. Is there any way to stop this nasty cycle? Is there a way we

can play a part in bringing back third places and all the social capital they create? Saying I'm not really a joiner isn't going to cut it in the coming decades because we need people in this country to be joiners. To hear what we can do to rebuild third places, join me when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. Harvard professor Robert Putnam has taught political science to countless students over the decades. Do you remember, like, when you first heard about bowling alone? Yep, you know, I was an incoming freshman, and he was a professor at the college I was going to.

Many were inspired by his lectures, but some have actually decided to act on his dire warnings about the decline of third places. Hello, everyone. I am Pete Davis. I am the co-director of Join or Die, a new film out about why you should join a club and why the fate of America may depend on it. After arriving in college, Pete Davis took a seminar class with Putnam called Community

in America. Pete was electrified by his teacher. You know, what's so amazing about Bob is he wasn't just about the academics. He was also about making an impact on the country. He thought the best way he could make an impact on the country was getting people riled up, his students and the people who were reading his books, to be excited about rejuvenating community in America. He's had that spirit in the whole time that I've known him these 13 years. Robert wanted to rekindle the businesses and clubs he'd known growing up in the 50s. Pete and the other millennials in class had never experienced these third places, but they did feel something about their lives wasn't quite right. I think a lot of people my age feel a real sense of lack in the meaning department,

and I think it's all connected. Of course, there are still some spaces that millennials like Pete can go to outside of work and home. But Pete worries these new places haven't provided his generation with the meaning or social capital they crave. So many of our third places had become unfortunately corporatized. So, you know, you'd meet in a Starbucks or you'd meet at a McDonald's or meet at a Panera. And, you know, it wouldn't be the story of meeting that our grandparents or even parents would remember of meeting at an Elks Lodge or meeting at a Masonic Temple or meeting at an NAACP headquarters in a state. So why aren't people nowadays pushing to develop more of these satisfying third places? There are lots of reasons, but Pete says at least one of them is the fact that people

today kind of just want to stay home. One of the culprits Bob pointed to in Bowling Alone was television. And I want to be clear, it's not the only culprit, but it is a very significant one. And part of the reason is that TV provided parasocial interaction. You felt like you were friends with the Today Show hosts or the sitcom characters. The irony that television is causing America's decline in third places hits pretty hard. I mean, my family was definitely among the people who stayed home to watch Cheers on TV while dreaming of someday finding a place where everybody knew our names. In retrospect, maybe we should have been forming real-life social bonds at third places instead of hanging out with fantasy friends on TV. But Pete says the temptation of TV was just the first in a series of problematic

technological developments. What's happened in the 20 years since Bowling Alone is we've had an even more supercharged version of parasocial interaction, which is everything that's been happening on the internet. Because you have your friends that you're following on Instagram, but you're only experiencing their internet presence. And so what that's doing is giving us this, I would call it kind of junk social interaction. That's not the nourishing real world social interaction that gives you kind of the full experience of community. Pete made me realize that we really did squander our chance to heed Robert's warning. The momentum his initial Bowling Alone article had back in the late 90s was huge. The White House calls him up and, you know, the president and

first lady and cabinet have all read Bowling Alone and are interested in talking with him about it. But then, you know, after kind of 9-11, America starts talking about other things. 9-11 brought huge political upheavals that overshadowed concerns about social capital. 9-11 brought huge political upheavals that overshadowed concerns about social capital. But it was also an era that saw epic technological change. Many people back then assumed that online communities would eventually replace physical spaces. Why gather in person for your morning coffee at your charity club when you could set up a GoFundMe page that reached hundreds of people? Why attend a political debate when you could join a Facebook group?

Online communities can connect us to people more easily, but the science shows that these groups aren't a great psychological replacement for the face-to-face encounters we get at real-life third places. Virtual meetings just don't seem to encourage the same trustworthiness that Robert saw in his choral societies and bowling leagues. And research has shown that we tend not to be our kindest selves online. In real life, third places promote trustworthiness across differing identities. But online communities do just the opposite.

They sow division and misinformation, which, if you've been paying attention, you know has already led to some really nasty civic results. All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by a mold of radicals. They completely took over that spot. We're going to clear this. We're going to get this straightened out and we're going to go back to work. The events of January 6th are just one reason Pete thinks we need to return to Roberts' ideas and act this time. There's just been a very growing drumbeat of interest stemming from personal experience of everyone across America, especially young people, that we are living in a social

isolation crisis, that we are lonely, that we are hungry deeply for kind of a rejuvenation of community. So what does Pete propose we do? Well, first, he thinks we need to understand that we do have a big problem when it comes to social capital, one that's getting worse and worse and worse. And that's where his new movie, Join or Die, comes in. We hope that the movie can be a catalyzer, a wake-up call of, wow, you know, if we're going to turn things around as a country, or if I want to, you know, get all the joys of community, I have to become a joiner. Tommy, are you good, brother?

Yeah? I can see the transition in my life from, like, joining Lodge to, like, who I am now. The film chronicles people Pete's age who are doing just this. Gig workers who are forming new labor unions. Bike associations who are bringing low-income communities together, and even new school bowling leagues that are forming where you least expect them. I was a very unhappy attorney and became an extremely happy bowling alley owner. It's a grassroots joiner effort that makes Pete feel really hopeful. All right. Good evening, Bo Borland.

There's not a switch, you know, in Fort Knox that says isolation versus community. The way it's going to change is going to be much more like the growing of a forest. We need a thousand different seeds planted of new ways of being in a community spirit. You know, new ways of getting together with your neighbors, new clubs out there, new cultural ideas about the importance of community and how we can be better neighbors. All of that together in every region across the country is what we need. That's the message Bob's been preaching. And I'm ready to be a follower.

I've been taken in being a follower of that. And what we're hoping for with this film is we can recruit some more people to this spirit of community in the coming years. some more people to this spirit of community in the coming years. Pete's film title, Join or Die, sounds a little dramatic. But he thinks there's something important in us that does die when we don't have opportunities to build ties with our neighbors. If you want your neighborhood to be the kind of place where everybody knows your name, Pete says you might have to shut off the TV and head out of the house so that you can form some community with your local barkeeper and bowlers. And if there isn't an obvious group to

sign up for, then Pete says you should put in the work to start one yourself. That might feel like a big undertaking, but that's what previous generations did. And through their efforts, they found camaraderie and comfort. But the importance of joining and creating new third places isn't quite the end of our story today. Our individual actions count a lot. But Pete says that rebuilding social capital is also a huge societal challenge. Cities should take seriously the social infrastructure they have. Our libraries, our parks, our plazas, where just like how physical infrastructure facilitates things,

like getting the water moving through it or the cars moving through it. Social infrastructure facilitates the building of social capital and the marshalling of social capital for community purposes. And so in our next episode, we're going to explore how those at the top of government are again waking up to the need to save the little social infrastructure we have left and what plans they have to build back the social capital needed to protect our future. We have met these truly existential threats in the past when we have adjusted as a nation. I absolutely believe that we can find a way out. So if you dearly want there to be more places where everybody knows your name, I hope you'll return for the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. 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. Thank you.