[MUSIC] Let's go to a topic we talked about before, money. We assume money is going to make us happy, but money often has very salient at reference points, particularly the salary that we have often has a very salient reference point. And this is very salient, in fact, this philosopher John Stuart Mill once noted men did not desire to be rich, but they desire to be richer than other men. And that always, because again, there's always be some other man out there that's richer than you. It's going to make you feel kind of crappy. And this is a real phenomena which reference points messes up, social comparison, which we're going to define is the act of evaluating not just your salary and your money. But your status, your possessions, your spouse, your whatever versus somebody else. And the main thing about social comparison is that our brains tend to pick that other person who has that, that has a much better thing than us. This is social comparison, and it can cause us to do some downright dumb things when it comes to the things that my make us happy. One study that showed this by Sonic and Hemenway looked at this, they looked at whether people were willing to give up real income just to be better than other people. And so here was the question they posed to Harvard students, which of these two salary possibilities would you prefer? Option number one is that you're going to earn $50,000 and everybody around you is going to earn $25,000. You're making relatively more money or option two is that you could earn $100,000. But everybody else at your company who works in the same position as you, they're getting $250,000. Which of these would you want? Now you assume that Harvard students would take twice the salary, but in fact more than 50% of them would prefer this option. They'd reduce their income by half just to be beating everybody else. Which is kind of silly in absolute terms. But make sense with social comparison. That's kind of the bad way to do it. But you might say like, well, maybe there's a reasonable salary reference point you could use, right? Maybe it's weird if everybody doing the same job as you at your organization is like making less money than you. If you have a summer job and you're earning like $15 an hour and everybody else is earning $30 an hour, you might be like, hang on, there's something wrong with this situation, right? And so for me, maybe if I was comparing my salary against this guy, this is Tom, [INAUDIBLE] he's another Yale professor, another head of college. If he was earning way more than me, I mean like hang on what's up, right? But I shouldn't use for example Beyonce's salary as a reference point, right? That would be, we have a different job, we have different skill sets. That would just make me feel unnecessarily bad, right? But it turns out that this is yet another way our mind sucks, which is that we don't just use reasonable reference points. Our mind soaks up and evaluates our own situation based on whatever reference point we happen to notice in whatever domain, whether that salary, our bodies, our grades, whatever. If you see it, it's going to affect your evaluation. How do we know this one, well in the salary domain, we know this because people pick up on salary reference points that are unrealistic all the time. And one of the unrealistic reference points we often see are the people we see on television, right? Like real housewives of Beverly Hills or Empire, right? You see a lot of rich people on television that shouldn't be your standard for wealth, but it turns out people use it as such. And we know this from one study that found that the more Tv watching you do, the higher you estimate other people's wealth. Do you think the average person is more wealthy, the more television you watch? And interestingly, the more television you watch, overall, the lower the average you think of your own wealth. So if you watch a lot of television, you think whatever you earn is probably less than a person who didn't watch that much television thinks. So just seeing these other reference points, they're getting in and making you think, well, I'm not earning any money because you're watching real housewives out there. And so, reference points mess up our sense of how much we're earning, It also messes up our sense of having awesome stuff, right? And we kind of get this, when you see the fantastic stuff of other people, yours feels kind of bad. I have a car that's like fine, it runs fine, whatever. But if I start looking at Beyonce's car, I'm like, man my car kind of sucks right? You can feel bad about your own stuff based on other people's. So much so you have a nice meme for this, if your neighbor's car is ugly, that actually helps your happiness because you don't feel so bad about your other stuff right? That's awesome stuff. But I think more salient for you all is that your reference points are the kinds of things that might mess up your happiness about your grades. And if you're not getting perfect grades, chances are there's someone in your high school who is. There is someone in your high school is doing better than you in terms of the GPA. And that means even if you're doing okay, you might not feel so good because other students are doing better. And this is even more problematic for the students who are in the highest level. So if you're competing with other AP students, chances are they're doing really well. Your comparison group probably is no longer the whole high school, it's like the other students who are in the best highest level classes. That means, even though you might be beating many students at your school, you're not getting the kind of happiness boost that comes from it. because your comparison group narrows narrows narrows to just the very people who make you feel worse about yourself. Thank you reference points, really bad stuff. So that was how reference points affect our happiness about our grades, but reference points of our happiness about pretty much everything. And I think one of the biggest ones that affects teens today is that reference points affect your happiness about your looks. Objectively, you all look great, you're awesome, but if you compare yourself against other people, there's always somebody, even if you look great, that's going to look better than you. And this is where I share this very famous photo of Sophia Loren who is quite beautiful herself, but when she looks over at Jayne Mansfield, she's kind of not feeling that good about herself, right? And this is a famous photo, I think because everybody relates to it, right? There's always the prettier girl in the room as it were, right? But your generation has more prettier people, not because there's objectively better looking people around, but because you have to look at more and more people, right? I mean, think about it, before the 1950s people just didn't see that many people. But then television came around and now you're looking at all these beautiful actors and actresses that you're kind of looking at all the time. And your generation has it even worse because you don't just have television, you have magazines that show you these glossy supermodels and things. And of course you have the internet where right on display on Tiktok on Instagram are like the most beautiful people out there. And again, remember this really stupid feature of reference points. You don't look at a glossy photo magazine or look at an instagram model and think that's not the right reference point to use. I'm just a high school student. I don't have hordes of people who are focusing on my diet and my hair and my exercise and all this stuff. You just think, reference point that makes me feel bad and your brain soaks it up. And so social media isn't just bad for body comparisons. I think social media is like a whole network of giving you comparisons about all kinds of things that are going to make you feel bad. Because you're getting lots and lots of reference points on social media and that means you're kind of comparing everything you experience on social media to yourself. And it often makes you feel bad and this can lead to lots and lots of comparisons that make us feel unhappy. Just another meme here that one of my Yale students made, you're just going around trying to love yourself. And there's your stupid friend on social media keeps going to Italy and you're like, why don't I get to go and feel really bad, right? But there's a particularly bad thing about all these social comparisons that happen on social media. It's not just that they happen and that they're kind of bad and we could avoid them. It's that we're really bad at doing the comparisons, we're getting the comparisons all wrong. It's not just that we compare ourselves against these extreme examples of beauty or money or whatever. We don't even get the comparison right, what do I mean by that? I mean with the science fiction writer Cory Doctorow once talked about, which is quoted as saying, it cannot be repeated too much that you live your own blooper reel and experience everyone else's highlight real. The problem with social media is people are putting together their perfect highlight reel. Where they look beautiful and happy and rich and whatever, especially in the public version. But in the private version, what's going on inside their brains, what's going on in the background might not be so good. You might see an Instagram picture that looks like this where you look at these people like, my gosh, my friends are so happy. And they're doing all this fun stuff and on this vacation, but you don't know what's going on in the inside. You're comparing your insides of what you're thinking to their outsides and if you look at their insides, they might be thinking something like I hate my body completely anxious right now about how I look. Or, I'm pretending to have fun but I have so much work, I need to get back to applying for colleges and all this stuff. You don't see any of that, it's just gone. And this is the problem that what the research shows is that we get the comparisons really wrong because we don't have access to the same stuff. And one of my favorite studies that looked at this came from Jordan and colleagues where they really tried to explicitly look at how offer our predictions about what's going on with the good and bad things that are happening to other people. And so they brought first year students in and had them estimate the number of positive and negative experiences other first year college students had. So their sound of guessing how many good and bad things are happening. But then they also said how often those things happen to them. And that means that the researchers have an accurate guess about how often good and bad things happen versus your estimate of how often these happen to other people. And we can just ask whether or not those match up. And so, here's what Jordan Et Al found when they were looking at positive experiences. So a positive experience would be like, how many people do you think in your school, for example, attended a fun party? Like in their estimate for these college first years, 62%. How many went to an athletic game that they enjoyed? How many went out with their friends? How many had a great meal? How many got a higher grade than they expected? That's the estimate. But when you look at the actual, what the actual percentages are, in every single case, the actual per of people who had the good thing happen is usually less than people are predicting. So we're overestimating the positive things that are happening to other people. That's the positive stuff. But when you look at the negative things, the pattern is even worse. So let's look at negative events that could happen your first year at college, you have a fight with your roommate. You thought about missing your friends. You kind of were rejected by somebody you're trying to date. You thought about all your bad habits and felt really bad about yourself. You received a lower grade than you expected. Those are the estimates. But here's what happens in the actual, in these cases, they're not just like higher than people predict. They're often in many cases way higher than people predict. And the researchers figured out why, which is if something negative happens to you in college, it's not like you announce it on Instagram. You try to effort fully hide it so nobody knows. And that means that we're just not working with the right social comparisons. We're not tracking all the good and bad things that happen to people accurately. And so all that goes to say that we're overestimating other people's good stuff, and we're really underestimating other people's bad stuff. So we're making all these social comparisons, in some cases automatically and make us feel terrible. And those comparisons are just wrong.
