This whole class is about trying to help you all become happier. But there is this interesting question about whether or not that should be the goal we're putting time and effort into. Because it's opportunity costs, you can put time and effort only into a certain number of things. Should we be really focused on this idea of becoming happier? One of the objections I sometimes get from my students when I talk about the fact that I teach a whole class about being happier is they say, "Well isn't that totally selfish?" Maybe you're going to make one person happier but that means everybody around them is not going to be happy, or maybe you're going to make that person happier but then that person will become more selfish. They'll just be complacent and not do anything to help others. Is this even a good goal morally to get people to feel happier? Here's a spot where I think the science gives us a really clear answer, which is that the evidence suggests that people who self-report being happier they're not selfish. If anything, there's lots of evidence that feeling happier can actually make you a little bit more pro-social. It can make you nicer to other people. This is a phenomenon that researchers call the feel good do good phenomenon which you can probably guess what this phenomenon is. It's just a phenomenon in which when people are in a good mood they tend to help other people. Which you can guess this and you can see it in your own life. When you're in a super good mood, you're going to hold the door open for somebody. You're going to give other people compliments just because you feel good. But it turns out experimentally that this is a big predictor of people's pro-social behavior, just the kind of mood that you put them in. One study that looked at this by North and colleagues did this in a funny way. They tested students at a college who were just at a gym. What they varied was the kind of music that was on. They were either playing very happy music, flows like 'because I'm happy' or they were playing really depressy emo, you know the stuff. What happened was they asked these students whether or not they'd be willing to help out and experiment afterwards. This experimental says, hey I have this class, I have to distribute these leaflets. I'm really desperate for some help, would you spend 15 minutes helping me distribute these leaflets afterwards? What they find is that when the happier music is on, more students stick around to distribute the leaflets. More students are around to actually help. This is just one example I'm showing you because we don't have that much time to go through these but there are countless examples of these. If you have people list their happy memories they're more likely to say yes to donating blood. From a very early study in the 1970s, if you play people happy information, happy news over the radio, they're more likely to help a person find a lost contact. I guess in the 70s people would lose their contacts all the time so like, I need help finding my contact or something. But basically, the point is that when we're happier we just do nicer stuff. In some sense, it's not selfish to feel happier. We wind up doing nicer things for other people. But there's a different worry you can have about happiness. Its not that it makes us selfish towards other people around us but maybe it makes us complacent. Maybe it makes us not worry about the big picture of the stuff that's going on. This is not a particularly big worry because there's this idea like this is fine me. That if we're just happy and enjoying it, even the world could be on fire around us and we would completely ignore it. The sad thing for your generation is that the world is on fire for your generation. The world is literally on fire in terms of climate change but it's also on fire in terms of social justice. We need to deal with racial injustice, we need to deal with racial violence. We need to fight all the bad things that are going on right now. For better or for worse, this is going to take some emotion, is going to take some anger and some energy is going to take people who are upset about things to actually get something done. The worry is if we make people happy, this sort of SpongeBob toxic positivity way then maybe people will just ignore it. They'll just be happy with their own life and not take action to fight when it's needed. Is this what happens? Well, this is something that researchers really worry about because it would be bad to make everybody happy if that meant that the world didn't get fixed. It turns out that this is another spot where our conception is just wrong. It turns out happy people are more actively trying to fix the world. How do we know this? We know this from some studies by Kushlev and colleagues that looked at this in some different contexts. They went out to the University of Virginia right after a bunch of white supremacist protests and looked at people's reactions to this. They gave these UVA students first a test of their positive affects, testing whether or not these students are happy. Then they're saying, hey this awful incident just happened around your campus. Did you do anything about it? Did you go to a protest? Did you donate money? Did you take some action to fight this? What they find is that positive affect, how happy you are feeling, seems to be positively correlated with actually taking some action, which fits. If you're feeling depressed and anxious you might not have the bandwidth to go to a protest and fight things, but if you're in a good mood, you're going to get upset about what's going on and you're really going to take some action. Kushlev found the same thing when he looks at other things that we need to be worried about, things like climate change and so on, he actually did this in a big sample of people. He went out and measured happiness in over 2,000 people. Then he looked at people's attitudes towards climate change. Are you worried about climate change? Are you anxious about it but then also people's actions? Then here's why he found again, we're going to nerd out and I'm going to show you this graph. I'm going to plot people's attitudes towards climate like basically how anxious are you? What he finds is that the not-so-happy people are pretty anxious about climate change which tracks. If you're feeling depressed, if you're feeling anxious you might be anxious about climate change too. From this you might be like aha, this is the complacency thing we were worried about. But he also looked at people's action. Do you go to a protest? Did you donate money? What did you do to do it? What did you do to deal with this? What he finds is that the people who are the happiest are the ones that are taking the action. Again, it tracks. You have more bandwidth to deal with it. All this goes to say that happiness isn't selfish. It's correlated with doing nice stuff for other people. It's correlated with taking action. It's one way that we can think about solving these social injustice problems of the world is maybe we need to focus on people's mental health first, and that will allow them to take the action they need to solve some of these things.
