The Pursuit of Happiness: The Science of Happiness

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:29]Welcome. Welcome everyone.

[00:00:32]Thank you so much for being here with us this afternoon to participate in this program as part of the law and democracy speaker series. My name is Maya Dumbroski, class of 2029. I'm studying government, anthropology, and Native American indigenous studies. I do art for Dartmouth's Feminist magazine and dance with the classical ballet theater.

[00:00:53]It's my pleasure to welcome you to today's program.

[00:00:57]Law and democracy is a series of conversations focusing on foundational laws, policies, and institutions as we approach the semi-quincentennial milestone of the Declaration of Independence.

[00:01:11]This series builds on the Rockefeller Center's commitment to bringing our community together in discussion with a wide range of experts and practitioners to examine and deliberate on these themes.

[00:01:23]We are grateful to Dartmouth Dialogues, the office of the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, and the office of the associate dean for the social sciences for being crucial partners in making this program happen.

[00:01:35]We would like to thank our virtual attendees who are joining us today via live stream. For those joining us in person, when we reach the audience Q&A portion of our program, you can raise your hand and one of our student assistants will bring you a microphone.

[00:01:49]Please be sure to wait for the microphone before speaking to make sure that everyone in the room and on our live stream can hear you. As a reminder, Dartmouth is committed to protecting free expression and peaceful descent. We encourage you to ask questions during the Q&A, but ask that you do not interfere or disrupt today's program, which would include preventing attendees from seeing or hearing our guest and moderator or interfering with our guest and moderator's ability to speak or be heard. This conversation will be moderated by Professor Darren McMahon, David W. Little, class of 1944, professor of history and chair of the department of history. Professor McMahon is the author of Happiness, a History.

[00:02:34]We are honored to be joined today by Daniel Gilbert, Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

[00:02:42]He has won numerous awards for his research and teaching. He's an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, as well as a winner of the Association for Psychological Sciences William James Award for a lifetime of significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology. His popular book, Stumbling on Happiness, spent six months on the New York Times best-seller list, has sold more than a million copies worldwide, has been translated into more than 40 languages, and was awarded the Royal Society's General Book Prize for best science book of the year. He is the host and co-writer of the award-winning NOVA television series, The Emotional Life, which was seen by more than 10 million viewers in its first airing.

[00:03:35]Dan's three TED talks have been viewed more than 30 million times.

[00:03:39]Please join me in welcoming Professor Dan Gilbert and Professor Darren McMahon to the stage.

[00:03:55]Thank you so much, Maya. Um, and welcome everyone. It's a particular treat for me uh to have uh Dan here because in addition to all that, uh uh he's also a much admired and uh uh longtime friend going on 20 years now. So, uh we're having conversations that we've had before, but in a different setting. This is the final uh of three uh uh discussions on the pursuit of happiness, its meaning in the declaration of independence and in in life. Um and the final one I believe uh of the series law and democracy which began in in the fall and has been ongoing all year. So uh we're concluding uh with the bang having Dan with us tonight. So Dan, this series, as you know, is devoted to sort of unpacking the meaning of that uh that that celebrated phrase in the Declaration of Independence, uh the pursuit of happiness. And we've had legal scholars, we've had historians, uh talk about this. We had Lori Santos here a couple of weeks ago to discuss. And I want to begin there by asking you what you make of that phrase as a psychologist, as a citizen. Uh you can put your historian's hat on too if you'd like, but uh what does that what does the pursuit of happiness mean to you?

[00:05:07]>> Uh yeah, great question. And I you know I think what always strikes me about that much quoted phrase life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Well, maybe two things. First of all, why those three? Why are there not four? Why are there not seven? And I think the answer is there's really actually only one and it's happiness. Because if you ask why life and liberty are important, it's because they make human beings happy. I mean, if we're happier when we're under threat and in bondage, then the Constitution would promise us those things instead. So, for me, it's really just a promise about happiness. And it happens to mention two things that we think bring it. The third, the second interesting thing to me about the phrase is that you're guaranteed life and liberty, but why aren't you guaranteed the happiness? No, no, no. You're just guaranteed the right to go try to find it and probably fail on your own. That to me is quite curious. It's not the, you know, it's not the pursuit of liberty, is it? No. Liberty is yours, but only the right to chase happiness is what we give you. I to me those are the two things that stand out. But why are you asking a psychologist about legal matters? What do I know?

[00:06:21]>> All right, fair enough. Well, and and what is happiness then? How does that scan to you?

[00:06:26]>> Oh my god, how much time do we have?

[00:06:28]What is happiness?

[00:06:30]>> Or how do you read it in the in that document is I guess >> oh uh well I happiness well what is happiness? The right answer is happiness is a word and it's a word that means so many different things that uh philosophers have rarely had anything useful to say about it.

[00:06:50]Mainly I think sorry if you're a philosopher mainly because they're often talking about different things.

[00:06:57]Sometimes they're talking about something fleeting like a feeling that smile you get when you see your, you know, your grandchild scamper toward you or somebody feeds you chocolate.

[00:07:06]Sometimes they're talking about everything good in life wrapped together. You know, meaning and social relationships. If we're going to make any progress in understanding happiness, not just what it not not just what it is, but how to find it, we first have to just agree on some definition.

[00:07:23]Fortunately, I'm a scientist. And so for psychologists, the definition is really quite simple. Happiness isn't with a big H. It's not happiness is, you know, having family. Happiness is a temporary emotional cognitive state. Okay?

[00:07:42]>> It's something your brain produces at certain times, never holds on to. It's a feeling. It's a subjective experience.

[00:07:49]It's a state of mind. And so when psychologists study happiness, that's the thing they're trying to measure and study.

[00:07:59]So I I don't know if that has much of an answer.

[00:08:00]>> No, it's happiness. But it's great to uh get your take on this because I would argue that the founders didn't have that idea of happiness that they did think of happiness as a kind of complete life that involved living in a certain way and according to certain dictims that have been passed on by those bad philosophers that you talked about.

[00:08:16]>> Well, Jeffrey Rosen makes that point and I know he's been here. But then my question to Jeffrey is always then why didn't they say that if that's what you think they meant? rather these very articulate people who were tremendous writers chose a wildly ambiguous word and stayed with it. And I I can't help but wonder if that's because they wanted it to be interpreted uniquely by each individual rather than mandated by them.

[00:08:46]So I don't know, maybe you knew what was on their minds. I don't.

[00:08:49]>> It's a capacious word to be sure. Um, and as you show in so much of your work, we're actually not very good as human beings in predicting what will make us happy. Um, why is that so?

[00:09:03]>> Well, uh, you could write a book about that and I did. Uh, uh, but you're looking for the the, you know, the cliffnotes version. Sorry for everybody under 50. The, uh, the chat GBT summary.

[00:09:14]Uh, I guess the first thing I'd say is I would never say people are bad at predicting what will make them happy. I mean, you could give anybody here a very simple test. What would be better? Uh, a week in Paris or gallbladder surgery?

[00:09:30]Uh, would you rather have chocolate or be hit in the head with a 2x4? And we could go on with these questions.

[00:09:36]They're like, you know, short IQ tests.

[00:09:38]Everybody here knows which thing is good and which thing is bad. What's interesting to me as a scientist is that we're not perfect at predicting it. We do make mistakes. But before we discuss them, I think it's important to say we get a lot of stuff right. We have a general idea what the good things are and what the bad things are. What we're often wrong about is how long those good and bad things will make us feel good and bad, respectively. Probably the major error people make when trying to predict how they will feel in the future if certain events unfold is that they think the effects of events will be bigger and longerlasting than they are.

[00:10:20]So they know that getting married is a good day, getting divorced is a bad day.

[00:10:25]But people are wrong about how long the happiness of marriage will last. Answer 12 years. Uh or how long the pain of divorce will last. answer negative one year because people start getting happier before the divorce is finalized.

[00:10:42]So, we're wrong in those ways, but I don't want to overstate it as if we're bumbling fools who have no idea how to pursue happiness. We do, but we could do better and particularly if we paid attention to science.

[00:10:54]>> Okay. Well, tell us more about science then. And in fact, this talk tonight is entitled The Science of Happiness. And I think for some people that might seem like an odd pairing. What is scientific about?

[00:11:06]>> Well, you know, it might seem like an odd pairing if your notion of science is, you know, people with beers and test tubes and telescopes.

[00:11:17]But you can use all of the same methods that we use to figure out why butterflies migrate or what causes cancer to ask the question, what makes people happy? It's really not hard to do this kind of science. It's frighteningly easy. All you have to do to do any kind of science is know how to measure something. Measuring happiness is the easiest thing in the world. I mean, there's complicated ways to do it. You can look at cerebral blood flow using fMRI. You can measure muscle movements in the face. And you can throw away a lot of money doing what you could accomplish by saying to people, "How you feeling right now?" There's a reason that in every culture, are you happy is basic the basic form of greeting. Hey, how you doing? What am I asking you?

[00:12:08]Now, if people couldn't answer that question accurately, do you think we would just constantly be asking people?

[00:12:13]Of course, they can answer how are you feeling right now on a scale, Darren, from 0 to 10, where zero is very bad and 10 is very good. Where are you? I I bet you're seven, eight, nine, some somewhere in there. you're not four and you know it. Okay. Since people can give you a basically quantitative answer to the question, how are you feeling right now? You can start measuring how they're feeling now, later, next hour, next day, and you can correlate the people who say I'm feeling good with what they're doing, what they have, where they were born, with their gender, with their age, and start to get at least preliminary answers to what are the kinds of things that are associated with happiness.

[00:12:56]That's how you do the science of it.

[00:12:58]>> And what are what are those things?

[00:13:01]>> Well, if you had Lori Santos here, you probably already heard. Um, it's such a boring list. I hate the thing about this question is, okay, after after 20 years of doing science on happiness? What have psychologists and economists are the main people doing this research? What have you learned? Uh, we learned that it's better to be healthy than sick.

[00:13:23]>> Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. Um, it's better to have money than not have money. Oh, there's a surprise. And there aren't that many surprises in the science of happiness. If there are any, they're probably these two. The first is everyone here knows that social relationships are good. Nobody here thinks a happy marriage or a good friendship is a bad thing. But you probably underestimate how good. It is so much powerfully more important than almost every other thing scientists have studied or you could name. It's a better predictor of your happiness than your own health is. Way better predictor than your wealth is. If I had, you know, Rabbi Hel was asked to stand on one foot and and, you know, tell us the meaning of the If you were to ask me to stand on one foot and say, "What's the secret of happiness?" before I fell down in front of you, I'd say, "Family and friends."

[00:14:23]Hugely important. And we make a big mistake in our lives by trading away time in those relationships for other things that bring happiness, but not nearly as much. I remember a couple years ago you were here uh and gave a lecture and and in a class I teach on happiness and you said basically what you said now but you gave it all to your mother uh that your mother had given you good advice you know find a job with meaning make friends get married uh find a partner essentially that right uh and you know this is one of the things that comes up again and again is that so many of the wisdom traditions teach this kind of basic knowledge so it turns out that you know science is uh not rocket science.

[00:15:05]>> Well, uh certainly conventional wisdom has largely been verified. Now, there are some cases where it hasn't. For example, my mother told me, your mother probably told you that another thing you should do in life if you want to have a happy one is to have children. Uh sorry, there may be reasons to have children, but being happy is not one of them.

[00:15:28]People with children are less happy, not dramatically, but on average they are less happy than people without them.

[00:15:35]They're the least happy when their children uh are of the ages where they have the temerity to live with them.

[00:15:42]Children are not a source of happiness.

[00:15:45]I mean, we're talking about hundreds, maybe thousands of studies, and I know of not one that has found a positive correlation between parenthood and happiness. even in the long run because I know I mean I I actually first time I heard this data we were giving a talk together in Portugal and there were a lot of people with a lot of children in the room and he trotted out this data and people were looking at him like no I've ruined my life >> the antichrist I believe they called me yes >> but but when the children leave the home right then then happiness increases yes >> and a sense of meaning and purpose and fulfillment increases and can't you track that >> sure of course that happens >> okay >> yeah of course your happiness goes up when anything bad stops happening. But if we >> but but your the question should be not does does the happiness of people go up when their children leave home.

[00:16:37]Absolutely. It starts to rebound when children leave home. The question is does it then shoot up so much higher than the non-parents that it compensates for that brief, you know, 30-year period of your life where you had children? And the answer is no. You don't end up happier than the non-parents. You just catch up to them. You heard it here.

[00:16:57]Don't have children. No, >> this is not a recommendation not to have children by any means because you probably believe there are other things in life you want. You don't just want to feel happy at all possible moments. You want things like you said meaning and people find that in children often.

[00:17:18]>> Yeah. And that's I guess where I was wanted to push you. I mean we were talking about happiness or at least you are uh it solely in terms of feeling right now, right? how how does it make you feel right now? But there of course is another evaluation of happiness that your scientist friends uh use which is a kind of evaluation of your life as a whole. Right?

[00:17:35]>> And I'm wondering whether or not you know the some of the the meaning comes into that definition of a life evaluation maybe not children but other aspects that are not immediately associated with with feeling feeling. Um I mean a lot of people will sort of you know play sports probably in the room and a lot of the work that they do on a day-to-day basis is suffering. running wind sprints and you know doing calisthenics and getting hurt and so forth. But at the end of the day if you ask him was that was that a good thing?

[00:18:01]Did it enhance my life? Yes, absolutely.

[00:18:03]Um and and that that enters into the discussion of happiness too, doesn't it?

[00:18:08]>> Well, it certainly does enter in the discussion. Uh sometimes I think it ought not, but um I guess I'd say two things about it. First of all, we're imagining if you're a parent, I'm a parent. If you're a parent and you're imagining the you think about the meaning that children have brought to your life and then you think what would my life be without it you think gosh it would be without that meaning it would be kind of empty and you're probably right but you're mistaken to imagine that that's a proxy for what your life would have been if you'd never had the children in the first place. People who don't have children don't just have meaningless lives. Well, we didn't have kids, so we just watched TV. No, they do other things that bring great meaning to their lives. So, they too have meaning and they find it in a different way.

[00:18:58]There's no evidence that the meaning one gets from having children is greater than the meaning one gets from so many other meaningful activities. So, that's the first thing I'd say. The second is imagine uh imagine I said to you you can either have a life it'll be 80 years long and most of the moments will be filled with what you call happiness joy you'll be satisfied if somebody pulls you you'll go hey I'm feeling good but for 60 seconds on your deathbed you'll go it was all meaningless okay or the opposite life the one of toil and struggle for 60 seconds you go and I did it. I don't know about you, but I kind of integrate over time there and go, g give me the really good life with one stupid bad minute at the end. I say this to ask you, how important is it for us to be satisfied with our lives when we only ask the question, are you satisfied with your life every once in a while?

[00:20:00]I'd rather be a happy guy who occasionally goes pretty happy but there's not a lot of meaning in my life. Oh well, I'll go back to being happy than the person who isn't happy and occasionally goes but it's all for a good purpose. Let's go suffer some more.

[00:20:15]>> I don't up to you. We all get to pursue which version of life we want.

[00:20:19]>> That's the, you know, the famous ending of the life of Ludvford Vickenstein, right? one of the more most important philosophers of the 20th century who was a famous grump and you know was always complaining and at the very end of his life his last words were it's all been wonderful all right well enough of children mine are almost out of the home so things are looking better I'm a little grumpy but uh uh um talking about the pursuit of happiness and you mentioned social connection and this is a theme that's come up through all the discussions that Americans tend to often think of the the pursuit of happiness as an individual pursuit and yet it's bound up with social relations and indeed community.

[00:20:59]And this is something I know you've thought about and you've thought about and and advised governments uh who now have ministers of well-being who think about what they can do in their countries to increase the happiness of the citizens. I'm wondering, you know, what kind of advice you give when you're called off to advise governments on uh on happiness. Well, I I do wish more governments were asking me for advice.

[00:21:23]Um, and you know, the kind of advice governments want is not tell us what to do. They have particular programs that they're interested in evaluating. Um, maybe the another way to frame your question and tell me if I'm wrong is imagine that a government did turn to a bunch of happiness experts say, "Okay, what what should we do differently?" Uh well, of course it depends which country you are. Uh but no doubt you should stop. Well, the best advice I could give any government is measure it.

[00:22:02]You can't possibly be implementing policies and programs to increase the average happiness of the citizens. If you don't know how happy they are, governments do measure many things. They love to measure things like GDP.

[00:22:18]uh and try to maximize it. And that's not bad because money does make people happy. I mean, a little makes you really happy. A lot makes you only a little more happy. So, there is a diminishing returns on wealth for sure. I'm sure Lori talked about that. Um, but why not measure the happiness of your citizens directly and see how your policies affect them?

[00:22:42]>> And of course, increasingly this is being done, right? I mean there are alternative indices that measure gross national happiness. Are you in favor of that? Do you think that'd be a good idea? I mean said you are but here in the United States for example.

[00:22:54]>> Yeah. I'm I'm a scientist. I believe measure everything. I mean the worst thing that'll happen is you go well I guess we didn't need that measurement.

[00:22:59]But it doesn't hurt right >> to measure everything.

[00:23:02]>> So you start with measurement.

[00:23:03]>> So yes of course start by measuring and then ask which things are working. Now the things that work in one culture, things that work in one socioeconomic group are not necessarily the things that will work elsewhere. So there's no general prescription you could give every government. But if they forced you, if they said just come on, stop with the blabber, professor, give us a few things. I would say once again any policy that encourages and allows people to have time for social interaction is a policy that will benefit them in terms of happiness. It's just hugely important. So child care. So child care is a very good example. So I told you that um there's generally a small but negative correlation between happiness and children. Not everywhere. In the United States for sure and on average across the world, but some countries seem to be kind of exempt from it. And parents seem to be getting a lot of pleasure out of their children. Well, what are those countries doing that's different than ours? They're supporting children. They're giving people time.

[00:24:12]They're giving parents time away from a job when they have a baby. uh people aren't working 60 hours a week, so they actually get to go home and be with the people they care about and love. So we actually there's some data to suggest that to the extent that governments can support families and friendship groups, they're supporting the happiness of their citizens. Liberty also turns out to be very important.

[00:24:39]there's a good correlation between you know the we think countries are democracies or aren't but as you know it's a continuum uh we used to be one of the most democratic countries in the world and we've been sliding towards autocracy the last in the last uh uh how long has it been uh >> and our happiness has been declining too >> yes and exactly so but we do know that uh that democracies have happier people feel happier even in countries that aren't democracies when they say things like I'm relatively free to pursue the things I want to pursue etc. So freedom is important.

[00:25:14]>> Social tolerance too, right?

[00:25:16]>> Yeah.

[00:25:17]>> Yeah.

[00:25:17]>> Yeah.

[00:25:18]>> You can see why I've never been hired as an adviser.

[00:25:21]>> They don't pay you very much for this advice.

[00:25:23]>> Economists like to make jokes about that. Why doesn't the president have a council of psychological adviserss? And their answer, my economist friends always say, is because you talk like this. You go on and on. You say, "Well, maybe this." an economist comes into the room and you say, "Uh, you know, we have a question for you." And he says, "I've got the answer." What's the question?

[00:25:43]So, maybe we need to learn to talk like that a little more.

[00:25:46]>> All right. I want to go back to a question that I asked badly and you dodged because I was asking you to summarize an entire book in two minutes.

[00:25:53]Um, but I think it's of use to particularly the undergraduates in the room who are thinking about what's going to make them happy right now. They're thinking about their futures, who they're going to be with, what they're going to do, etc. And a lot of your work is showing us that what we think is going to make us happy often doesn't for as long as as you say uh we think it's going to be. Can you just talk a little bit more about that?

[00:26:14]>> Well, I think the biggest mistake is in the phrase you used. Now, you didn't use it mistakenly, but I we all use this phrase, it's going to make me happy.

[00:26:25]>> Just think about that for a moment, right? I'm going to go have an experience and it will make me happy.

[00:26:34]Well, it just turns out a whole lot of our happiness is happiness we make for ourselves.

[00:26:41]>> Uh I've used the phrase before synthetic happiness. Not meaning it's artificial, but meaning we've synthesized it from within. People are really, really good at finding happiness where you might not expect it to dwell.

[00:26:56]We all have this, I shouldn't say we all have this power. On average, we all have this power. This ability to make lemonade out of lemons. Uh you've all seen it. Uh uh an example. Oh, a friend says, "Oh gosh, if she ever leaves me, I'd be devastated. I I just I want to kill myself. I never fall in love again." And then she leaves him and what happens, right? What are the odds he never falls in love again? No. What happens is he cries for a while and then shortly he says, "I'm feeling a little better." And about a week later it's like, "This could actually be a really good thing, you know, because she was really never right for me." And in a very short order, the person says, "This was the best thing that could have ever happened to me." I cannot tell you how often I have heard that and how much we've seen it in our own research.

[00:27:46]People finding happiness where they didn't expect it. So I think the first mistake you make is thinking happiness is just something you will either get or not get by finding the right circumstances. The truth is a lot of happiness is what you will make of the circumstances in which you find yourself. And most of us are pretty good at it much better than we realize and we will even make happiness out of situations in which we don't get what we were pursuing in the first place. Right.

[00:28:15]>> Yeah. I mean, you you can do simple studies with college students. You know, how are you going to feel if you fail the test? Oh my god, I'll be devastated.

[00:28:24]Okay. Well, how will you feel the next day and the day after and the day after?

[00:28:28]Oh, I'll still be feeling awful weeks later. And then you measure them and when they fail a test, they feel really bad for roughly 9 seconds. So then they go on and they go, "Well, I'm not I'm not going to be a psychology major.

[00:28:40]Forget that. This isn't working for me.

[00:28:42]Test was so stupid and unfair." And so and then they soldier on and they go on to the next class. So that's, you know, I'm make kind of making fun, but that's us throughout our lives soldiering on, picking ourselves up by our bootstraps and doing okay in circumstances we didn't know would allow it. Fortunately, the flip side is people getting exactly what they were aiming for and going, "That was good, but like only for a very short while. And why am I me again? Why am I back here? And why didn't it change everything? The good things are good.

[00:29:18]The bad things are bad. Neither of them are as good or as bad as they seem in anticipation. And can over the course of a lifetime does one sort of cultivate a wisdom about this? I mean, in many cases, or can we can we learn to anticipate less and to synthesize more?

[00:29:38]Um, is there variation in people and how they they do this or this is a universal we all synthesize? We all kind of make, you know, make do with what we get. And there's not a lot of evidence that we learn from our mistake.

[00:29:54]So, we learn very local lessons. So, um, I thought if my marriage ended, I would be sad forever and now I'm happier than I've ever been. Now, let's just pause.

[00:30:04]that person could learn a big lesson which is wow the things I dread may not be as bad as I anticipate because I have the ability to change the way I think about my circumstances but they don't they learn a different lesson which is divorcing Debbie is a good idea everybody should do it right but they haven't learned the bigger lesson about their own minds about what we call their psychological immune system, right?

[00:30:35]>> This this system of cognitive techniques that allows us to be happy in circumstances that you might think would preclude it.

[00:30:41]>> So, I wish I could say there's good evidence we get a lot wiser as we move through life, but there isn't. Now, the good news about moving through life is that our ability to experience negative emotion diminishes. So, we do get happier as we go through life. Uh older, there's almost nobody happier than a healthy 80-year-old. I mean, they're basically the happiest people on earth.

[00:31:05]>> Um, but part of that is that we lose our ability to experience negative emotions.

[00:31:10]I mean, we know like if you look at amydala activity, that's activity in a part of the brain that often kind of lights up when you're feeling tense, anxious, and afraid. You you uh you can elicit this in a young person by showing them a horrible picture of a a you know, a scary tiger. If I show that to her, to Maya, her brain will light. her amydala will go. If I show that well to somebody my age, the amydala does nothing. It's like next. Yeah. Right. So, we do get happier as we age, but I don't think it's because we're learning great lessons.

[00:31:44]>> Do you have an explanation for why that is the case? Why the amygdala slows down? Is it because you can't see the tiger properly or?

[00:31:50]>> Yeah, exactly. No, our brains are deteriorating and you know.

[00:31:56]>> All right. Well, >> what was that? you clearly are getting happier uh every moment and I love it.

[00:32:03]Um but I do want to ask about this. I mean look, you you you published uh stumbling on happiness in 2025 and you know millions of people have watched your TED talks. I have a sense sometimes that you're kind of over happiness and ready to do something else. But you've been speaking about it to so many groups and and getting feedback along the way. Have you learned things that you didn't know when you started uh about about happiness and the pursuit of happiness in the process in the journey?

[00:32:30]>> So many things. And I really, you know, I think if you're a psychologist and you discover things that you claim are true and then you don't live your life by them. Do you really believe they're true?

[00:32:43]>> I've lived my life by all the research I've read, by the research I've done.

[00:32:47]I'm trying to think of is there Oh, okay. So, yes. Um maybe uh well quite a long time ago we did some research showing that people are happier with things when they can't change their minds about them.

[00:33:02]>> Right? So you buy a sweater at a store that has a no return policy and you buy a sweater at a store that allows you to bring it back if you don't like it.

[00:33:12]Which do you prefer? Most of us go, "Oh, I'd like the freedom to bring it back."

[00:33:16]But if you actually track people in these two kinds of situations, what you find is that if you buy the sweater at the store where you can bring it back, you bring it home, you try it on, you go, "Hey, that looks great, except I don't know. Maybe the red one was better. Maybe I should I don't know.

[00:33:29]Maybe I should just go try the brown one." You torture yourself and you aren't all that happy with the sweater.

[00:33:36]What happens if you can't return it? You put it on and you go, "Yellow. I don't know. Do I look good in yellow?" Yes, I look great in yellow. This was $600 and I can't bring it back. Yellow is my color. Okay. So, we found in a series of studies that people are happier with decisions that are irrevocable.

[00:33:56]Now, after this gets published, a friend of mine uh emails me and says, "Dan, I think you may have stumbled on the answer to why people are happier when they're married than when they're living together."

[00:34:10]Right? Because marriage is kind of the irrevocable condition. Yeah, you can get divorced, but it's expensive and difficult. And if you're living together, all you need to do is say bye and you're out. And so I thought, God, that's probably true. It's probably true that just the act of getting into this relatively irrevocable commitment increases your happiness with the thing you're committed to. And so at the time, I was living with my girlfriend, so I proposed.

[00:34:40]>> Yeah. Well, look, >> and uh and she's been my wife ever since. And I gotta say, I really think I love her more. And it's not just I love her more after 30 years. I think I loved her more like five minutes later. Like right after the wedding, it was like, I'm never getting out of this.

[00:35:01]>> Wow, I look so good in yellow.

[00:35:06]>> Perfect.

[00:35:06]>> So, yes, there was a surprise for me.

[00:35:09]>> All right. Well, look, um, I think it's at this point that I'd like to, uh, turn to the audience and ask you all if you have questions while we have Professor Gilbert here with us. We'll have microphones coming around and if you'll just wait for those, put your hand up when uh, you're ready to to fire away.

[00:35:30]>> I think I'm calling on people.

[00:35:32]>> No, we'll do that.

[00:35:33]>> Thank you.

[00:35:34]>> Thank you for this amazing talk. Uh, I wonder what do you think is the relationship between feeling inner peace and feeling happy?

[00:35:45]>> Oh my gosh. I I would find those two things very hard to disentangle.

[00:35:51]I mean, if you said, "What's the correlation between those two things?"

[00:35:54]I'd say, "Aren't they kind of two ways of talking about the same thing? Can you be happy without inner peace? Can you have inner peace without happiness?" Is there anybody who says I have great inner peace and I'm miserable? So I I guess I'm wondering you must have in your mind some idea of how they're different. Say a little more to me about what I know what happiness means. What does inner peace mean for you?

[00:36:19]>> Yes. So I was thinking about inner peace and I feel like it's sometimes hard to um for me to define what is happiness versus what is inner peace. Sometimes I feel peaceful in my mind but I couldn't tell if am I happy at the time or do I just feel detached at the time being the observer of life and seeing everything goes around um having the ability to disentangle everything in my mind with a logical sense but without feeling the ne necessarily living at the moment without the feeling of living. So I guess um I think an element that different differentiates an inner peace and happiness is the feeling of being present to me. I could feel a sense of inner peace when I'm walking around. But for me to feel happy, there must be something that links me back to the reality to the present. So I was curious about your thoughts about like inner peace and happiness.

[00:37:19]>> Oh my gosh. Well, it I mean I would turn to you to ask to answer that question.

[00:37:24]you've thought so deeply and hard about it and and made as good a progress as I could imagine making. Um, you know, maybe one definition of happiness is you're happy when you don't want things to be different than they are. Now, you might say, "Oh, that's just satisfied. That's not happy." Well, I I don't know. Is that re is there really a difference? But inner peace as you're describing it sounds to me like a state where you don't want anything to be different than it is in this moment.

[00:38:00]You're not yearning for more. You're not wishing for less.

[00:38:04]It's just perfect the way it is. I can't imagine how that's much different than saying I'm happy. I mean, you might not have a big giant smile on your face and be laughing, but you're somewhere very high on that, you know, that scale from very bad to very good. You're up on the very good part. And whether you want to call it peace because it's kind of a calm, relaxed feeling or happiness because it's exciting, I think the amount of positivity in those two feelings is probably about the same.

[00:38:37]Yeah. Bad answer to a good question.

[00:38:39]Sorry.

[00:38:41]I mean sometimes you'll hear psychologists and philosophers distinguish between happiness and contentment or you mentioned satisfaction and then there's joy and I think one can parse those those terms but I mean it's in in some degree semantics I guess is what you're saying >> we sure have a lot of words and you know psychologists know it's a mistake to assume that there is a real thing to which every different English word corresponds.

[00:39:11]There aren't, you know, my mom called me Danny, my wife calls me Dan, my ex-wife called me Daniel. Those are three words, but they all refer to exactly the same thing. It would be a mistake to go, where are the other two guys? Right? And I think this is true when we talk about satisfaction, contentment, joy.

[00:39:31]There's a lot of words that try to capture nuances of the feeling we're having, but I think it's fine to call all of them uh you know the positive emotional states or huga, right?

[00:39:44]>> Or what?

[00:39:44]>> Huga. That's that Danish word you know that you when there's candles and a fire burning and you have tea and you feel cozy. Uh >> right.

[00:39:54]>> You've you've come across this.

[00:39:56]Bestseller in Denmark. Yeah. Same stuff.

[00:39:58]At any rate, uh who do we have next, please?

[00:40:04]>> Um you mentioned that, you know, from these sufferings and failures we have in life, we derive very localized lessons and we don't get wiser as we grow up.

[00:40:13]And I was curious, why don't we have like mandatory programs in schools and places that helps us do this? Like it feels like a waste of all these lifetime.

[00:40:23]I don't know if everybody heard the question because you weren't holding the mic very close, but the the summary of the question is um why don't we have mandatory programs that help people get wiser about happiness? Um we do. Let me be careful about the word mandatory. I I'm an American. I don't think anything should be mandatory, right? Um, but I do think it would be wise for us to be training people from the time they're very little in how their own minds work.

[00:40:56]I mean, just imagine you you can't get out of high school in America without knowing trigonometry and chauer, but you can get out without knowing the first thing about an emotion or a thought or a feeling or a relationship or about all the other things that will be the most important parts of your life and your happiness. We provide almost no training in this. We hope parents do, but you know, leave it to parents. So, I'm with you. I'm totally with you. I think introduction to psychology should be as close to a mandatory course as any student can take in their first year.

[00:41:40]Before you learn about anything else, you'll learn about yourself.

[00:41:43]And I think that the training in subjects like psychology should start much much earlier in some Go ahead.

[00:41:54]>> Oh, because psychology is better.

[00:41:59]Well, why not any other subject? Because I think psych I think all of these subjects look I love many different subjects, but psychology is an owner's manual for a human mind.

[00:42:13]It's the most complicated thing in the known universe, the human mind. And psychology is just a discipline that says, "Oh, here's how it works."

[00:42:23]I don't think philosoph I don't think any philosopher would say that's our goal to explain to human beings how their brains and minds work. They'd say, "No, we have something to say about that that's useful." And they do, but that's not our main goal. That's all psychology is. That's all we do. So I don't know.

[00:42:44]>> Yeah, mandatory psychology.

[00:42:46]>> You know, on a positive note, I think it's encouraging that actually >> positive note, >> there are schools that are teaching kind of emotional intelligence and and they've done this, you know, from early age on in in a way. My my kids have both been through this and they know more about how their minds work and their emotions work than I do. Um so that's progress any rate. Um please sir, >> thank you. Um so you often talk about this like return to baseline. Um like something that is upsetting might not upset you forever. Something that is happy might have diminishing returns. Um and in my a capella group we check in on a scale of 1 to 10 every time we meet.

[00:43:37]And I've noticed that some people's baseline or like threshold for I'm happy is much lower than others. And so I was wondering if maybe that's just people being pessimistic or optimistic or if these baselines are just kind of arbitrary or what your insight was on that.

[00:43:56]>> What a great question. No, people do have baselines. I mean, if you if we measure thousands and thousands of people over time, we'll see. First of all, everybody goes up and down. That's the nature of emotions. They come and go. We have good and bad moments. But some people are going up and down here and some people are going up and down here. And the question is why? What put you there and you there? And the answer is predictably it's a combination of experiences, things that have happened to you. You've been through terrible experiences in your life. You you may be fluctuating down here. Uh and also biology. You know, emotions are just generated by neural activity. And the map for your brain is contained in the DNA of your parents. And so, some of you were born with brains that just seem to want to be happy all the time, right?

[00:44:52]And you're and some of us are born with the opposite kinds of brains. So, some of us are Eeyors and we wait does is Winnie the Pooh like do we all know Winnie the Pooh?

[00:45:04]>> Oh, I just love to find out which things survived the generation gap. You know, I'm glad Winnie is there.

[00:45:12]Um, yes. So, some of us are Eors and uh, you know, we wake up in the morning and we feel a little gloomy. Others are piglets. We wake up and we just want to squeal and do fun things. And yep, those are the cards you're dealt.

[00:45:24]You're not trapped in that biology, however. I mean, if you are born with a brain that wants to be on the down side of the scale rather than the up, you can still learn to get further up the scale than you naturally would be. You may never be where Piglet is, but you could probably get where Pooh is.

[00:45:46]You You want to follow up? I can see.

[00:45:48]>> So, the the key is to just pick good parents.

[00:45:51]The key is to pick the right parents.

[00:45:54]>> Very well said. Pick the right parents.

[00:46:00]See, go ahead.

[00:46:04]I was just trying to look up. Um, so thank you so much for the talk.

[00:46:08]>> I was wondering see you again.

[00:46:10]>> Um, I I feel like there are a lot of trends in terms of increased anxiety, depression. Um, a lot of people are talking about that now. maybe tying it to smartphone usage and social media. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on sort of these trends we're seeing where maybe especially younger generations are actually less happy than we would expect, maybe trending downwards. There is a lot of controversy about why there is no controversy about the fact that we in the United States now have a generation of young people who are uniquely anxious and depressed. You know, one of your great economists at Dartmouth, Danny Branchflower, I mean, we know for generations we've seen this curve where young people are happy, old people are happy, and middle-aged people in the middle are less happy. For the first time, we've now seen the part of the curve for young people dip down so that they're about as unhappy as middle-aged people are, which is really unhappy for a 20-year-old. So, there's no doubt that it is happening. And the question is why? It's not an easy question to answer. Nobody knows for sure. But, you know, people like John Height argue that the data pretty clearly point to life in an online world and the cell phones that bring it to you. Uh, other people like Candace Owens say, "No, that's a misreading of the data." I'm not an expert. I can't adjudicate.

[00:47:39]As a non-expert, when I look at the data, I find Height's interpretation pretty darn persuasive.

[00:47:47]that really what's what's with the life that you have been forced to live on a cell phone has a played a big part in your generation's malas.

[00:47:59]One of the ways we know this is when we take away your cell phones, not take them away, but if you volunteer to be part of a program and you get offline for three, we just see happiness go up.

[00:48:10]And so the real question is why are you carrying around this poison thing in your pocket looking at it every 20 seconds when you know that it's making you less happy. And the answer young people give is I wouldn't do it if everybody else wouldn't do it. And it's true. It's a social trap. You can get off social media. You might be happier.

[00:48:32]But you're now going to miss all the parties and you're not going to know about cool things that are happening that everybody's talking about. So to stay current, you have to stay trapped.

[00:48:40]This is this is exactly how Silicon Valley designed these devices. They love the fact that you're all going, "I hate this thing, but I can't stop." That's what your grandparents said about cigarettes, right? Okay. Now you're saying it about your cell phone.

[00:48:54]Wonderful. I'll tell you this. I know I won't name, but I know people who are the CEOs of the biggest social media companies you've heard of. their children are not allowed to do these things. That tells you something.

[00:49:10]They're selling it to you, but they don't want their kids to have it.

[00:49:15]>> I can't remember what your question was, but it was fun answering. Thanks.

[00:49:18]>> Let's get back to happiness.

[00:49:21]>> Just a followup, Dan. Um, what mechanisms like why would smartphone use contribute to unhappiness? Like what do you think are the psychological? I it's not what I think, but what I'll tell you what what Height's argument is that first of all, it's a much bigger source of unhappiness for girls than boys. Uh when boys are online, young boys are online, they're spending a lot of the time playing games, that may be a waste of time, but it doesn't seem to make you anxious and depressed. What are girls doing? They're on Instagram comparing themselves to others, seeing the fun holidays other people took. uh people are insulting each other and ganging up and swarming and uh it's just what you would think but the other thing so it's just what you would think you might have thought that I think the thing that height points out that's very interesting it's not what cell phones are doing it's what they're stopping you from doing which is if you're little going out and playing if you're bigger it's going and hanging out with your friends getting involved in real face-to-face relationships so even if there There's nothing noxious on your phone. You're spending too freaking much time on it. It's taking away your real life. I mean, you look at the statistics of, you know, how much time teenagers spend in face-to-face interaction. It's like over the last 10 years. It's stunning. And as a result, they don't have sex. They don't drink.

[00:50:52]They don't Now, you might say, "Well, isn't that good?" These are all, sorry, but adults have sex and drink. So these are all ways of moving towards adulthood and young people aren't doing them.

[00:51:03]They're 19, 20, 21 years old. They've never done any of the things that in our generation were the gateways to adulthood. It's getting crowded out by cell phones. So I wish John were here to answer what's in his book rather than me. But >> well, he'll be back. You know, you said something.

[00:51:21]>> You said face to face, and I think that's crucial, right? Um because it turns out that the face tof face matters more than the social interaction you get, you know, through the ether that you don't get the same oomph, right, uh from being in social connection in a um in an online world that you do being face to face.

[00:51:42]>> There's there's no doubt that electronically mediated communication is not the same as face to face. If you've ever done a Zoom call, you know that it's uniquely unsatisfying, but it's it's not that far from face to face.

[00:52:00]>> What is far from face to face is two thumbs doing this to each other. That has that's not even a conversation, right? If it doesn't have punctuation, it's not a conversation.

[00:52:12]So yes, most socially med electronically mediated social communication is barely like a conversation. It's not a substitute.

[00:52:26]>> I have a question about political and social engagement. Uh and there's a sort of trope that when people are very happy, they might be complacent, but if people are very depressed or unhappy, maybe they'll also not uh create change or be activists.

[00:52:45]So, how does happiness relate to our ability and our desire to be politically active?

[00:52:53]What a great question. So, we do have this and I'm so glad you use the word trope because it's something we all hear and you're asking, yeah, we all hear it.

[00:53:00]It's out there. Is it a true trope or is it one of those false tropes? Um, as far as I can tell, it's false. That is the idea that if people are happy then they're kind of medicated. They just sit in place and smile and it's only unhappy people who create social change. We think of you know great depressives like Abraham Lincoln or Mahatma Gandhi you know people who out of their anger and out of their depression created actually it just looks like on average happy people are more creative they're more productive they're kinder to those around them.

[00:53:38]I don't want to say there's no place for outrage and anger, things that make you go, "We need to stand up and do something about this." That's probably not. You're not happy in the moment you're saying that. But I think that probably there are more happy warriors than unhappy warriors in the scheme of things. So yeah, it's not I wouldn't say if you want to create social change, go out and be damned miserable. I'm not sure that's the recipe. Yeah, good question.

[00:54:11]Not better than any of the other questions, mind you.

[00:54:15]>> Hi, thank you so much for coming. I wanted to ask a question about like why people with children are like less likely or like statistically less happy than people without children. I just thought it was confusing to me because usually children represent like really positive and qu like high quality relationships for the parents and also you can't really like change your decision on having children once you've had them. So so like why are they less happy?

[00:54:43]>> It's called murder.

[00:54:44]>> Oh, what a great question. Okay, so two two parts to your two-part question. The first is why would people with children be less happy than people without?

[00:54:54]If you're asking that question, you have never spent six straight weeks with a 5-year-old. I mean, they're wonderful.

[00:55:02]We love them beyond all measure, but they're hard work. That's that's part of the reason why the biggest hit to happiness from children, is for women, not for men.

[00:55:16]Fathers, particularly older fathers, actually get happier when they have kids. But women don't. Why? Because in every culture on earth, women do the majority, somewhere between the majority and all of the child care. So, it's not surprising. Children are just nonstop hard work. And people aren't all that happy when they're non-stop working hard. Okay. So, that's the answer. It's no mystery. Um, uh, oh, but given that you can't put them back, shouldn't you go, "Oh, but I'm really happy." Well, actually, people do. I mean, when I give talks and mention that people without children are happier, there's a lot of people in the audience want to throw things at me. They think I'm saying you don't love your child. Of course you do.

[00:56:04]Beyond all measure, but that doesn't mean they're making you happy at every moment. Those are separate things. You can value something and love something and still say, "But God, I'm tired of saying answering the question, when will we be there? Is it my turn? Why can't I play? It's mine, not his." Right? Both of those things can be true.

[00:56:30]I do think if you could give children back, a lot of them would be given back.

[00:56:37]You know, this deep parental love, the bond we instantly see with parents is, I think, in part irrevocability. I mean, here we are. This is it going forward.

[00:56:47]Imagine you could go, "Yeah, back where you came from." I don't know. I mean, I'm really I'm looking at the older people sitting towards the back. How many of you look back and think there were at least times when I would have said, "Yeah, most of us." My mother loves to tell the story of when my sister was born, apparently about a week in, I came in to her bedroom and said, "I want you to take that baby back to the hospital."

[00:57:15]>> Asked for a puppy. I asked for a puppy.

[00:57:17]>> We are almost out of time, but I have a former student uh who's been waiting patiently and so he gets to jump the queue.

[00:57:23]>> Yes. Thank you. Hello, Professor Gilbert. I'm Nathaniel. I took the happiness course with Professor McMahon about two years ago. It's one of my favorite courses and um so I'd highly recommend it to anyone who's uh has a opening in their schedule.

[00:57:36]>> Okay. This is a plant.

[00:57:37]>> Exactly. Pay you after.

[00:57:40]>> Yeah. Um Yeah. And also I was just thinking I graduate in two weeks and so this is probably my last um event that I'll get to go to like this. So wanted to thank you for for coming and thank you for making it so memorable. Um, in terms of you said earlier in the presentation that you think of happiness as being this kind of attribution error where maybe I I think I'm going to get a 90 on my test and I end up getting a 95 and so I have this momentary feeling of pleasure um because the reward was greater than my expectation. Um, and in in the happiness course, we also spoke about how happiness is or pleasure is kind of this thing that leads us to good adaptive behaviors that increase our fitness and make us more likely to survive. And so I'm thinking about meaning and from a psychological perspective, what exactly is it? And why did we evolve in certain ways to pursue meaning?

[00:58:42]Well, so there are some things that make humans happy and make rabbits happy, right? Like good food, uh, warmth, a feeling of security, like nothing's going to eat me. But there are some things that are uniquely human, at least as far as we can tell. And the one you mentioned, meaning is I I think the best candidate. Human beings have stories about their lives. Now, if you've ever read a story and said, "What was this about? It wasn't about anything. It just didn't go anywhere. It had no meaning." You know that was a bad story. Unlike rabbits, we are telling ourselves stories about who we are, why we're here, what we're doing, what we're accomplishing. And so having a story, a good story, which is the same as having meaning in one's life, is a source of happiness for people. It doesn't doesn't seem very surprising that we could get happiness from chocolate, but also from a story in which we are the main character that's going well and is going to end well. That's isn't that what we mean by having meaning in our lives.

[00:59:59]We're talking about a good story. This all added up to and then I cured cancer or and then my children were well and happy and they went on to be doctors and lawyers. Maybe not lawyers, doctors and philosophers. Um, >> happy endings.

[01:00:17]>> I fear I've lost the question, but I think the question was something like why do we care about meaning >> and I think it's because we're storytelling animals. It's how we understand the world is in terms of stories and meaning is a component of that >> and we'd like to have happy endings.

[01:00:33]>> Happy endings.

[01:00:34]>> And with that, let me thank you all for coming. Uh, let me thank Dan.

[01:00:47]I wanted just to thank as well our co-sponsors and the Rockefeller Foundation and its director Jason Barnabas who allowed us to do this and D'vorah Greenberg who has been just the consumate host and uh a wonderful organizer. Thank you very much.