Happiness Design with Laurie Santos

And one trick with self-monitoring, though, just from a nerdy research scientist perspective, is like, how would we normally test what's happening with it? We'd have some people self-monitor and others not and see what they did, but then the problem is that we can't really track what they did. - Yeah, we're just not monitoring. - Yeah, exactly. So the intervention and the measurement. Welcome to the Behavioral Design Podcast hosted by Samuel Salter and myself, Ali, the wholesworth. So, Sam, how happy would you say that you are? - In this moment? - Oh gosh, that's a tough one. Yeah, because there's the current happiness, the reflective happiness, there's the life satisfaction in the-- - Yeah, it's a complicated question, but I love the question in the sense that I feel like more and more often these days when we jump into a app of sort, that's oftentimes what we're prompted, like in a journal app or in a lot of apps where asked, like, how are you feeling? How are you happy? - It's not bad. - Yeah. - I would say, I will give myself a smiling emoji, like not the blush smiling, just kind of like the gently smiley emoji. - So on a 1 to 5 scale, you're like a four, or so would-- - 3.4. - 3.4. - 3.4, man. Okay, well, maybe we can work on that. Maybe we can take some of Laurie's advice to get you up to at least a 3.5. - That'd be awesome, yeah. I think so. I think so. I really enjoy this episode. So maybe you can introduce our guests. - Yeah, yeah, I love to. So in this episode, we speak with Laurie Santos. She's a professor at Yale, and in addition to her research on primate decision making, Laurie is an expert on the science of well-being, and her teachings on the psychology of the good life are some of the most popular of all time. So not only at Yale, but also on Coursera. She has developed a free curriculum for high schools, and she even has her own podcast. - Yes, and this was a really, really fun conversation with Laurie. We discussed so many happy topics, and that included exploring shared living spaces. How do they affect our life satisfaction? How can we make them better? We explored topics that we touched on in previous seasons of the podcast, which is how happiness compares to psychological richness, the pros and cons of self-monitoring, which I think is a super interesting question. And it's a special bonus for you, listener. You get to hear Laurie's expert edition of a primate's pant hood, which I didn't know what it was before this, but it's truly a revelatory thing. So that's certainly something to look forward to in this episode. Same with we jump into things like journaling, mood tracking, streaks. We have two really fun segments, I would say, for this season, would you agree? - Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, because we have new segment called "Wooden Replicate," which is a lot of fun. And then we provide a final question to ever guess in this season, which is, what is their most controversial opinion in Bavila Science? Okay. With that said, let's get that episode started. - Let's do it. So I'm very happy to welcome Laurie Santos to the Bavila Science Podcast. Welcome. - Thanks so much for having me on the show. - Yeah, welcome. - Yeah, it's really exciting to have you here. And we're going to, in some ways, jump straight in. And given that what we try to focus on is this, you know, behavioral science in the wild, the real world, it's always interesting to hear if there's any real world application on behavioral science, some form of intervention, something that's been done in the real world, either good or bad, that sticks out to you of, of, kind of, behavioral designing the wild, yeah. - Yeah, I mean, you know, so many, so many examples. I mean, these days I spend a lot of time thinking about, you know, well-being and happiness and these kinds of things. And I think one of the, one of the things that I've learned in doing this work is that, you know, this is a domain in which people have these really terrible intuitions, right? You know, we have all these theories about the kinds of things that will make us happy, but a lot of those theories are like wrong. And I think this is where behavioral design really can help us out, right? If you get smart designers who know the science, who aren't falling prey to these intuitions, they can set up these really fantastic interventions to get people to do stuff that they might not naturally do on their own, but that might really help them feel better. And so one of my favorite direct interventions is one that comes from Nick Eppley, who's a professor at the University of Chicago. He's been really interested in this phenomenon that he calls under-sociality, this idea that we're kind of not as social as we should be if we're trying to promote our happiness. You know, Nick finds that, you know, giving people compliments makes people happier than they expect is less awkward than they expect. You know, like telling people you're grateful for what they did is less awkward than people expect and makes them happier than they expect. But my favorite intervention that he's done is just getting people to be social period, like literally just getting people to talk to one another. Especially strangers. Especially strangers, right? I mean, what's sad is like, you know, talking to strangers is one of the easiest hacks we can do to improve our well-being, but we all think it's like going to be terrible. Like we think it's terrible. Totally. I mean, I'm with you, right? You know, one of my my harrowing moments of realizing I wasn't putting the behavioral science into practice was, I'm on a plane, you know, and I'm always like, I don't want to talk to the person next to me, even though, you know, all the research suggests I would be happier if I did that. But I'm on this plane, not talking to the person next to me, checking my email. I get an email from, you know, a student who took my class who's like, you know, I took your class and I heard all this stuff about, you know, being social, talking to strangers, and you know, I decided, you know, on my next flight, I'm going to put this into practice. So, you know, much against my better judgment, I started talking to the person next to me. And she said it was amazing. You know, we really connected and like, you know, we turned out we had friends in common. And then when I got to the airport, like my ride wasn't there, and the person was like, oh, I'll give you a ride. And like, we ended up going out for dinner. I made this lifelong friend like, thank you so much for this, you know, and I was sitting there and I was like, look to the person next to me and I was like, okay, close my laptop, you know, and just talking. But Nick's, but Nick's study where he shows that this is really powerful is he, he, he finds commuters on the train. I think it's like in the, on the L train in Chicago. And get some, you know, hey, do you want to be in a study? You know, commuters say, yes, you know, it's, I'll give you a $10 Starbucks gift card. And everybody says yes, because $10 Starbucks gift cards are like the engine of all of social science research. Yeah, yes, anything for $10 Starbucks gift card. And so he says, okay, you know, in one group, you know, for the next, for the rest of the train ride, I want you to really try to make a social connection with a person. You know, don't just talk to someone about the, well, they really try to get to know them. That's one condition. Or for the rest of the train ride, I want you to completely enjoy your solitude. Please don't talk to anyone, you know, just enjoy the time you have in your own headspace, right? Or nothing, you know, do what you would normally do on the train. And what he first does is have people predict a different group of subjects predicts. What do these conditions are going to make you feel best? People predict that enjoy the solitude condition and the control will feel fine. People predict that the talking to stranger condition will be like miserable, like below, like not just like no boost in well-being, but like actively drop your well-being. But what he finds is that when people actually do this, you see just the opposite pattern. Basically, people who talk to someone else are happier than those in the enjoy the solitude condition. And, you know, people kind of like don't expect it to go well. They think it's going to be awkward. They predict it's going to not be fun in part because of its awkwardness. But in fact, the people really enjoy, you know, talking to you. The other person gets something out of this too. And so, you know, that's, you know, one of my favorite interventions on the happiness side because, you know, it does everything that I think behavioral science work can help us do well in the wild, right? It takes some intuition that we would get wrong otherwise. Kind of forces us to do something different. And immediately you get the positive benefit that comes from doing that. And immediately you can see the effect on your own while being. I love the study too. And it's especially funny to me because even after you know that you still don't even, you know, from where the professor is still doing this stuff. And I'm on the point looking at the dude next to me like, okay, you know, knowing is not enough. And dude. Well, it will also funny because I'm based in Stockholm, Sweden. And I don't know if there's been any follow-up studies in Sweden. I was recently in the UK. I think both of Sweden, the UK perhaps has in common of like social kind of awkward and distance in general, like pre-pandemic. We're very distant already. And I'll be curious to see some follow-up research here. I know $10 in the UK right now is like so much more money than he used to be so many US dollars. That's a huge one. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think there's this really interesting question about cultural differences. I think one of the things I know Nick gets asked all the time about this study is, are there personality differences? Like, yeah, you know, that intervention where you talk to the stranger on the train might be fantastic for somebody who's an extrovert, but maybe, you know, it's totally miserable for introverts. And Nick actually looked at that and what he finds is that the spot where the introverts and extroverts differ is on their predictions. So the introverts predict it's going to, you know, not just be pretty terrible, but like, you know, the most terrible thing they've ever experienced. And you know, the scale doesn't go low enough. for people to say how terrible this is going to be for their well-being. But in terms of the actual effect, he finds that personality variables don't affect things that, that much. In fact, extroverts and introverts show the same level of effect. And I think this is something else that I love about this work. And I find so telling, right? Because it's our predictions about what's going to happen and how good things are going to be that affect what we choose to do. If personality variables are affecting our predictions, in some cases, negatively, like we're predicting something that's really not going to happen, that's kind of a problem because it means it's going to be affecting our behavior. And we never get the reinforcement schedule, right? You know, Sam and introvert, I predict their talkness, a stranger's going to be horrible. I never try it. I never get the benefit of like, oh, it wasn't as bad as I thought, maybe it was kind of good. And so I can never update my behavior. So I think that's something else these behavioral science interventions can do is that they can give us the data that we might be able to use to make a better decision when there's no choice architecture, when there's no designer around us fixing things for us. All right, I want to talk a little bit about self-monitoring, thinking about the benefit versus the burden of tracking. And this is sort of coming from in your good life course and the science of well-being program that we made with pattern. You ask people to keep track of their activity every day to basically monitor their activities and thoughts in a journal. And this is really a, this is a common element in many behavior change programs. So it's not like new or anything. And for good reason, there's lots of benefits to self-monitoring. But on the flip side, also as behavioral scientists, we often try to minimize the tracking burden, try to get people to do less and decrease that friction to behavior change. So I'm very curious on how you kind of balance these two things. If you see that there is attention between this benefit versus the burden of tracking or self-monitoring. Yeah, this was something we thought about a lot when we were developing the pattern health app and the kind of precursor app that we called REY. On the one hand, we really wanted students to have some reminders about what they were doing and a little gold star as they started to engage in some of these activities. On the other hand, we didn't want it to be too time consuming. We feared a lot about the switch from these rewards that we're hoping are really intrinsic and shunting them into the extrinsic bucket. And so we kind of thought carefully about this. One thing we did was turn it into an app form, which was kind of a pain in the butt. But especially for our college students, they're interacting so much with their phones anyway. The hope was that the engaging with the pattern health app could almost be like a substitute for TikTok or some other crap that they're doing on their phone that might not be as good for their well-being. The second thing is that we really tried to keep the external rewards low. And so the pattern health app has these gold stars that you can kind of check off. But we purposely in the context of the app design made them as teeny tiny as possible. They don't come up. You have to go to kind of a special screen to see them. So the idea is that you're tracking your activities, whether you're engaging with meditation or you're doing more gratitude list or something like that. But it's not in your face of like, oh, you won. Or you reach some hurdle or things like that. And that was in part because I do really worry about the possibility that these things can become extrinsic rewards. I was really humbled to read one of my favorite pieces on the problems with self-monitoring is a fantastic David Sideris article about-- he calls it-- the essay called The Fitbit Life. Oh, with the Fitbit. Yes. I do. He gets a Fitbit spoiler. He goes a little bit-- [LAUGHTER] Oh, I love it. I love it. I love it. The Fitbit. Yeah. Yeah. So we wanted to find a way that there was a real balance with that. We'd have some people self-monitor and others not and see what they did. But then the problem is that we can't really track what they did. Yeah, we're not a true man. So yeah. Exactly. The measurement. Yeah. So it's a little bit tricky. But what we try to do is to not put it in people's face to have the extrinsic reward parts or the kind of gamification parts is marginalized as possible. So mostly what we're doing is getting people to kind of report what they're up to. Nice. And I work a lot in specifically the little health, usually the little health apps. And one of the things that I think is one of the most commonly seen features in apps across the board really is that you have mood tracking, in some ways, tracking your mood. And I'm curious there what you think of that as a feature and where it has its place in some ways. It seems sometimes unrealistic for me that you expect, like for some apps that I help with, they have expectation that the user should use that for a long time, like a long, long time. And by having this mood tracker there, I'm just curious what you think is kind of the optimal use of a mood tracker. Should it be there? What is the benefit of it? And if it's there, should it be there forever? Is it useful to have in a certain period of time to create a baseline and so on? What is your shot zone on this? Yeah, I mean, I think again, it depends on what-- you're using the mood tracker for as an app developer. We had people self-reporting their both their mood levels, but then also doing a standard happiness survey. And that was our purpose for tracking data, for collecting data, pre-imposed. You could also imagine using these mood trackers, simply to just be getting people in the habit of mindfully noticing what's going on with their mood. And I think if it's the former, you got to ask people, because that's part of our survey technique, right? But if it's the latter, I think you should creatively think about ways that it doesn't just have to be doing the mood tracking, right? One of the things I've seen is instead of kind of having people track that, again, if the app doesn't need to collect data on it, just do a quick reminder for people to do a check-in. So your phone bings and it says, hey, take a second to notice what you're feeling. So now you don't have to log into the app and select the little emoji face or whatever. But you just have a moment where you're kind of doing some work of noticing. And so I think the big question for app designers is, what's it therefore? Is it really trying to be a reminder to get people to be mindful and notice? Or do you really want people to be able to see over time what's happening, see that the mood tracking is changing? So I think you want to use different techniques, depending on what the ultimate goal is. Yeah. And in terms of this as well, one other very common component in many apps is a habit tracker as well. And in terms of streaks, it's kind of interesting concept to discuss because it's obviously very widely used for kind of this combination of obviously adding some tracking element, but also this investment that you have made into this habit becomes almost like a visual representation of the habit. And it's clearly has some form like this short-term retention benefits. But I'm curious to see what your thoughts are on streaks and potentially also the color of the backfiring or the dark set of streaks to have any thoughts on that? Yeah. I mean, it's also kind of colored by my own personal experience with some of the stuff, because I'm a real streak backfire. I got a good run going on, do a Lego, for example. And there's just one day I was too busy. I didn't do my Greek homework. And then I was like, I will never study Greek again. I think that if the app had little cobwebs in it, it would like-- yes, I think part of the thing I think app designers could do is I definitely think, I'm not sure there's great data on this. Maybe you guys know. But I don't think there's great data on this. But I think they're big individual differences here. I think some people really show this kind of backfiring effect a lot, whereas others don't. And my lay sense is that people kind of know, like I know I'm a big backfire. I know it will cause me to short-term do it, but then I'll develop the resistance. And so I think one thing the app designers might want to think about more is giving people a little bit of choice over what these things look like. I would do a lingo to celebrate my streaks. But if I mess up to instantly have the owl show up and be like, it's cool. People mess up all the time, a little bit of self-compassion. Let's get started. We'll combine it with your other one. Well, those kind of things. And so I think adding things in so that if you're prone to this kind of resistance of the backfiring, you can have a different view on it or engage with some self-compassion about it. I think those things can be really powerful for the people who are prone to this. Yeah, I really think that. And yeah, I always think they kind of rub salt in the wounds under a lingua. You get this sad owl. I know when the sad owl comes, I'm like, do we, like, you know, I've got enough pressure in my life owl. Can we not? Yeah. Well, yeah, it's funny because I feel-- well, first I'll just say I haven't used Duolingo in a very long time because I did break my streak. So I'm just thinking about-- but I do. I feel like from a behavioral design perspective, people often bring up Duolingo and talking about streak repair. And maybe it's that, like, once your streak has been or streak-freeze, whatever they're calling it, at some point, there's just no forgiving. It's like, no, no, you've really-- And then off to a week. Yeah. Yeah, I had this experience where I-- last time I used Duolingo, I got-- they actually increased. So I think they now have up to two or three freesys you can save in advance. And so I was looking at my streak. And I had-- I had in the last seven days, I'd done it once. And then between that was sandwiched three days that were frozen. So technically, my streak was alive. It was like, What is a streak and I'm like, well, at this point, I want to streak anymore. I'm actually losing. Yeah. Just reading. Yeah. But I think this is a spot where we can actually do some, you know, framing. I think I let FishBuck has some good work on this about how how you look at some of these streaks and where it kind of matters, right? In the beginning, when you're really in like fledgling habit mode, just any evidence that you've been doing it a lot is really good. Right. So I think we should get away from streaks and think about like a lot, you know, like is it kind of generally going in the right direction? You know, maybe we need to take inspiration from, I know, Dan Airelli had that like weight scale, like diet scale, where it wasn't showing you your weight every day, which just normally, by the way, it works, is going to fluctuate and go up and down. It's kind of showing you a running average. I mean, if Duolingo showed me a running average, where it was like, I kind of a little bit today messed up the running average, but it still looks great. I've still been, you know, doing Greek more often than not, right? So I think we might want to think about ways of having these forgiving streaks, right? At least for people in the beginning. You know, and then once people have an established habit, I think, you know, especially if there's kind of an ending point, you know, you want to show them, like you're getting to the ending point soon, you know, maybe you're almost at, you're almost at a month and you could have a perfect month, right? That can kind of motivate you to do it, right? So I think we want to find ways that give people the gist of, no, you've been doing it for a long time. I think sometimes in behavioral design, we can forget that, you know, people are going to beat themselves up, right? And I think if you can build in a little bit of self-compassion and getting people to kind of come to some self-compassion, like we're not perfect, there is this common humanity, right? You need to be kind to yourself. I think those things are powerful. Sometimes in our attempt to get people to strictly adhere, we kind of push people away. Well, we are doing something a little differently this season. We're picking out a product for each of our guests and asking to, you know, just do a little deep dive, how to think about how we would use concepts and methods from behavioral science to improve that product. And so we've picked out one just for you, especially for you. We would love to talk about communal living spaces. So if you think about dorms or commune or kibbutz, without maybe some of the very specific connotations that come with some of those, you know, the cultural connotations, at least, I'd love to just get your thoughts on, like, this space in general, before we start to improve the product, what might be a problem that you would want to solve using behavioral science with this sort of shared living space? Yeah. Well, starting with, like, one of the awesome things, right? Is it, you know, like, when you live with a bunch of people, it really cuts down on under-sociality, right? The people are in your face, they're in your bathroom, you know? And, like, you know, and I think our intuition is like, oh my gosh, that's going to cost so many problems. I'm going to hate that. But in practice, it's probably going to be a lot better than we think, right? I think we, you know, if I was today, you were like, oh, you can move to this wonderful dorm with all your friends and colleagues. I was kind of be like, oh, I'll practice. It might be better than I expect. But we want to analyze not, you know, the good parts of this that sounds like we want to, like, look at some of the downsides. And I think, you know, one of the downsides is that it comes with a little bit of conflict with negotiation, right? You know, these are communal spaces where, you know, somebody's got to clean the bathroom. There might be conflict over, you know, kitchen resources, right? Like, normal kinds of human conflict come up. And I think we have kind of natural cultural mechanisms, you know, sometimes when those conflicts come up within our families, it might be harder when those things come up, you know, outside a family unit, right? When, you know, in the case of dorms, right? Like, I'm a head of college at Yale. So I see the conflicts that come up would really start to live with each other the first time. You know, it's much harder if it starts out as a stranger, you know, or if it's somebody where you might come with different norms about cleaning and time use and things like that. And so I think the biggest conflict that comes up is really negotiation. Another one that I see at Yale a lot, and which can really affect people's wellbeing, is the extent to which some of these communal arrangements can mess with people's sleep. I think it depends on, you know, particular versions of this, you know, it could put everybody might not be in exactly in the same room, in the same way as like a big shared dorm room. But I think people's practices can sometimes really affect whether or not you're getting the right amount of sleep. And one thing we know from the Happy New Year's research is, you know, the easiest way to boost up your mental health is to make sure you're getting enough sleep seven a hours, and I, what we're all supposed to be getting. But, you know, somebody's alarm clock going off early or somebody staying up too late or having loud conversations, you know, these are the kinds of things that I think can really mess with sleep. So, this is a two quick problems I see, you know, coming up, you know, at least quite quickly. - Yeah, these seem kind of like different examples of solving for individual differences, right? Like people are different and they have their preferences and you put them all into the same space and suddenly those preferences have a conflict. So, you know, to your point about sleep, you might have an early riser versus a night owl and you put them in the same environment, even the same room and suddenly that can get really disastrous or even someone who prefers quiet versus, you know, they're trying to study versus someone else who always has to have some background noise. And so on, how would you design this kind of space to support those differences or maybe, yeah, account for them in some way? - Yeah, I mean, you know, one thing I, you know, that kind of relates to some of the things we were talking about before with some of Nick's work is that I think people need some help having hard conversations, right? We just had, we miss predict kind of how such conversations are going to go, right? I think we often think that a person that we're negotiating with are more strongly entrenched in their preferences and their views than they really are. I think there's lots of evidence that, you know, every social interaction we just assume is gonna be more awkward than we think. You know, and there's also biases, you know, things like the liking gap, right? Where like people wind up liking us more than we expect and we kind of think like, oh, they're gonna be so annoyed with me, but in practice, they're not going to be. So I think one thing behavioral science might be able to help in those situations is finding ways to facilitate conversations, right? Giving people strategies to do that better. I think another thing that we get from the behavioral design is that, you know, we do things when they're in our calendars, right? If there's actually a moment in the calendar where we have to have these conversations, we do that more. And so I would use the behavioral science to maybe schedule, you know, I don't know, weekly, monthly meeting where everybody has to get together and the goal of that get together is really to talk through some of these kinds of issues. And so those are just some things that quickly come to mind that, you know, behavioral science and fusion into the dorm setting would be able to help with. - I like that. I actually, for the school of Shred, have been living in a co-living space for, I think I lived for about four or five years or so. So like after university ended up coming back to Stockholm, finding this really lovely kind of co-living space. And I happen to have one of the co-housemates be a fantastic psychologist. And she insisted on us having like scheduled debriefs. So like every four to six weeks, we had like a debrief. And I was like, - This was terrible. - Yeah, I was like predicting it was like, this is gonna be very, you know, boring and unnecessary. And like we figure things out, like why do you have to debrief on this regular basis and so on? But honestly, to your point, I think that was so fantastic. Like it was both a call it like proactive strategy 'cause it's solved for a lot of potential big, conflicts in early stage. And it also gave kind of more of this, yeah, regular space for talking about things that are a little bit harder that you wouldn't want to like stop someone to be like, hey, I know you're gonna go for work or you know, after work or whatever and say, can you say that, you know, when you clean, you're a little bit, like it's used to a little bit awkward when you do it in a random setting. But when you have space where you can actually talk about these things, it actually makes it much easier as well. - Yeah, I think another thing that the behavioral science can help with is finding ways that we can, you know, make sure we're kind of achieving our values. You know, these days I've been really into some of the work that you know, Marty Seligman and Chris Peterson have looked at on kind of our character strengths and these sort of values that we care about. And I think that having people do these sort of joint, like strength based kinds of tests can be really quite powerful, right? Because they can help you navigate, you know, potentially some of these kinds of conflicts that come up, right? You know, for you, it's really about your freedom and your whatever, where it's for the other person, might be about their like, you know, sense of purity and space or things like that, right? The idea is that if you know people's values, you might be able to preemptively come up with the spots where there might be conflict ahead of time or find solutions that allow people to kind of engage in these values straight away. - And that's something that exists a lot of information is symmetry within in terms of, most people don't really know what's other values in terms of, yeah, I didn't plan to do this a lot of information about me, but one more thing I happen to have met my partner through this Swedish dating app, which is about matching people based on values. So you kind of, that's the idea at least, to kind of start with, I didn't find, okay, what are the values that you care about in three different dimensions, and then based on that, you kind of get a little bit matched. And I don't know how effective it was in some ways, particularly to match people in that domain, but it certainly provided a useful opportunity to reflect on my own values in a time where I would be really valuable for me to think about them. Like I soundfinding a partner, it's obviously good to really be primed to consider your values. And yeah, I'm curious, have you experimented with this on your students at your college, or have you put this in practice in some ways? - Yeah, I mean, not would like IRB approve, like you know, it's a really, really, really good. As a head of college, you get to do these interventions that you know, we're not taking data, right? So, but no, I had my students annually fill out one of these standard value surveys and they kind of talk about them and what's most important to them. And I actually encourage students to engage with their roommates on what Seldman calls a strength state where it's like, you know, like, my strength is courage and you're a strength is learning something new. So we have to figure out something we can do together where we, you know, I get to do courage, you know, I need to do something courageous and you get to do something where you learn something. So we're kind of both engaging our values as we do some shared activity together. And they kind of like it. We usually, you know, use some college funds to let them go on these strength states. So they kind of like that part for sure. So I love that. Yeah, I remember. I think I first took the character strength survey many years ago as a result of your course, Lori. And it was interesting because once I had the results fed back to me, it seemed so obvious that those were the things, right? Like, yeah, I think I'm a brave, creative, curious person. But if you had asked me, what are the, you know, top three things that I, like the top three, yeah, it's strengths that I would use that I would characterize myself as, I don't think that I would necessarily come up with those. So I actually wrote these down on a post and stuck them in front of me and, you know, just kind of thought about it for somewhat regularly and tried to use these more. And I think that did kind of, I don't know, in some way helped me become more of the thing that I already, that I already was, right? And liked about myself. Yeah. And I think, you know, if any listeners out there are curious, you know, there are these online tests you can do to kind of figure out your character strengths. One is called the values in action, character strength test, the VIA character strength test. One. Kind of log in and just do it. And it is, I mean, I think, you know, sometimes you can just look at the big list of them and some pop out, but it is helpful to really do, you know, these well validated surveys to kind of get the answers that way too. That's really interesting. And so I'm, I guess what we usually do in this action is to consider, you know, what will be an experiment that you would run to kind of thinking about it, like how could we apply Biel's science to this quote unquote product? So what could be an experiment to run? And I guess for you, you have already had some opportunities. I know, we, we, we, we, he has been running this experiment for, you know, 200 years of putting students in residential colleges. No, but I think, you know, I mean, one of the, you know, if I look at students, you know, there's always the roommate problems of the conflicts and these things that I think can be solved with communication. But another thing is I think we're not using these kinds of setups to get them maximum, like, social connection bang for our buck. And this was kind of shocking to me when I first became a head of college. You know, I, you know, I'm dating myself a little bit, but like when I went to college in the late 90s, like everybody was social in the dorms, right? You know, the dining hall was like the loudest place on campus because everybody was talking and really, you know, these days when I go to my dining hall in my residential college, it's like, it's not quiet, but it's much more quiet because a lot of students are, you know, wearing their big Bose headphones and like, you know, doing work. And so I think these days we can find ourselves in these social spaces, but not really allow ourselves to engage socially because there's so many temptations online and so on. And this was one of the cool things I saw in the context of COVID, you know, when COVID hit, we, you know, first students got kicked off campus, but then they were kind of back on campus, but they were taking all their classes on Zoom, you know, they didn't have dining halls, like, you know, they weren't allowed to be together because this was kind of pre-vaccine and they kind of, you know, could catch the virus and so on. And what I saw in that case is that students really wanted to be social, like within real life, like they really start for social connection. They didn't want to, you know, they spent all day on Zoom in classes, whenever they could, they wanted to like, be outside with their friends. And that felt different than non-COVID times. And so, you know, one of the interventions I would really like to do is to say, you know, okay, you're living in these social situations, but are you getting the kind of maximum happiness boost that you could be getting from social connection? So I would have people engage in the usual, like, kind of, aronson type questions with each other, you know, who know there's these kind of famous questions that aronson, you know, put together back in the day that were questions that you could allow you to get to know someone really well. There often, sometimes talked about like in, you know, pop culture terms of like, you know, the 52 questions that will help you fall in love or something stupid like that. And maybe they'll be fall in love. But I think they do help you, like, really get to know someone. You know, and I'd set up, you know, like interventions with, you know, with some food and good stuff and how students engage in these questions and try to see, does that make them feel better? Does that reduce anxiety? Does that lead to, you know, deeper connections versus a control where either students aren't engaging or they're not really doing deeper questions like this? I think these deep conversations are another thing that people assume will feel awkward and not very fun, but once you engage in them, it can be really a powerful boost for your well-being. - I wonder if you would have to, on top of that kind of generator of a false sense of scarcity about, you know, like tell people, you're not allowed to leave your room for two days. - Oh, yeah, yeah. - When you do, you can come out and have these conversations. - Yeah, hopefully we won't have to engine you in the entire global pandemic, but, you know, but it was funny. I mean, it was odd, you know, there were a couple things that I think you're not necessarily about communal living, but that I found so fascinating about the pandemic from behavioral science perspective. You know, one was just that I think social connection became much more valuable because it was this scarce resource. But another thing I found so fascinating is that the students during COVID didn't have the normal things that were draining their time, right? There weren't doing sports and extracurriculars and a million parties. They just had a little bit more time affluence, this kind of subjective sense that you had more free time. And I think it made them surprisingly happier, like, you know, like anecdotally, we don't have good data on this, but we actually had, you know, a fewer of the normal mental health things come up during that semester than other semesters. And I think it was just like, it could sit in the courtyard and read a novel. They weren't like frantic all the time in terms of all their other scheduled activities. So maybe we need to schedule free time into the communal living space, too, I'm not sure. But yeah, one thing that's interesting to hear your take on is comparing happiness to psychological richness. And so this is a little bit of a playback to season two, finale. We had a little bit of discussion on a paper that I came out on kind of this idea of psychological richness, claiming that perhaps it's kind of an additional thing beyond a happy life and a meaningful life, we should consider kind of a degree to which a person is experienced in a psychologically rich life. And that's characterized by specifically variety, interest and perspective change was some of the main, main things. And so playing it to you, you know, not sure if this paper has come across your desk, but in general, when we compare the likes of like a happy life, meaningful life, quote-unquote psychological rich life, is a happy, overrated versus kind of psychological richness underrated? Yeah, well, I think it, you know, it all kind of depends on your definition. You're saying happy life and meaningful life, you know, the way I think of what we want to do to kind of maximally boost our subjective well-being, or even what our subjective well-being is, I use the definition that Sonya Lubermerski often talks about where she says that, you know, being happy is all about being happy in your life and with your life. So being happy in your life is I think what you're referring to is like a happy life. And by that, she means, you know, lots of positive emotions, less negative emotions, not no negative emotions. Like, you know, you want, you know, like having a good life kind of involves some negative stuff, just being able to regulate it. And so on, but you want the ratio to be pretty good. That's kind of being happy in your life, but then there's the happy with your life, which is sort of a sense of meaning and so on. And so the question is, where, you know, the psychologically rich life fits into that? Is it its own construct? Or can we kind of account for it within these other two dimensions of happiness? And my sense is that, you know, some of the work on a psychologically rich life really shows that it does matter having a life with a lot of variety and a lot of, you know, nuance and kind of exciting things happening. That does matter a lot. But I think it matters a lot for the two variables that we were just talking about. Like, my sense is if you have a psychologically rich life that leads to in the moment a lot of positive emotions, right? You know, I'm doing cool things that can, you know, feel happy or I get excited, you know, experience joy. And I think having a psychologically rich life is often something that gives us, you know, a sense that we're satisfied with our life. We think our life is going well too. So I think that, you know, with the work on a psychologically rich life shows is that it's essential, but I'm not sure I'm fully convinced that it's its own construct that can't get kind of captured by these other two parts, or at least, at the very least, it interacts a lot with these other two parts. If you don't have a psychologically rich life, that might feed into your negative emotions in the moment and might feed into your sense that you're satisfied with your life and so on. Yeah, there must be quite a bit of overlap, for sure. But yeah, the one is they're not. But I hope, you know, I'm not like a constructs person. So, you know, if Oishi and their group like can kind of come up with a way to kind of pull those things apart, you know, I'm game for it. We're introducing a totally new and different innovative kind of speed around where we're going to present you with some hypothetical research findings. And you're going to tell us how robust you think these fake findings are. So, so we completely made these up. We call this game "Would It Replicate?" And it's really just kind of a thought experiment to take these concepts and make them concrete. And if you could just, you know, tell us what it replicate or wouldn't it replicate and maybe elaborate on that with a sentence or two? It's meant to be a speed round, but a little more. I'll open my studies in my head. I'm like, hmm, is that a study? Oh yeah. - Yeah, totally a study, so I'm really good at this. I'm ready. - Love it. - Awesome. - Okay, I'll get at every one. - Okay, I'll take the first one. - Okay, first one, too much savoring backfires. When people paid too much attention to their experiences, they began noticing inherent flaws and shortcomings of the experiences to which they were previously oblivious. - Definitely, we'll replicate. I feel like this is like where I make up studies in my head. I feel like there's the first study on this. But the one that's relevant, I think, is if you make people do too long a gratitude list, you're instead of three to five things, you have them write 50 things, they start thinking that their life is crap and they have nothing to be grateful for. So my guess is it will happen for savoring, too. So, yes, definitely replicates. - Love it. Capuchin monkeys are happy to share with other monkeys, but only when they know their behavior is being observed by others. - Not gonna replicate. I feel like animals don't care about audience effects, especially primates. They just, they go for what they care about and they don't really care about reputation. 'Cause as much as humans do, hard for us, he's humans to understand, but they don't care that much. - And while we're on the topic of primates, I've heard from a mutual friend that you have an excellent pantute. Would you? - Oh, I'm happy to do it, but, you know, like, they're wanting that you wanna turn your audio volume down before I begin. (laughing) Like click, click, good. chimpanzee pant hugo something like this, it goes, (laughing) - So everything's overmoded. I just destroyed my, you know, many downed all my phone. Thank you, Elaine. Awesome. - Yay, thank you. - Yeah, that's amazing. Next one, believing you have lots of time, a subjective time affluence has a larger impact on happiness than actually having lots of time, objective time affluence. - I think this one definitely replicates. I often think of time affluence as being about the subjective time. My favorite example of this is one time in my class, I was teaching students about time affluence, realizing that I really, Gail students have absolutely no time affluence, no free time whatsoever. And so I canceled class, you know, so I didn't tell them ahead of time they got to class and I was like, class canceled, you know, it tears what time affluence feels like. And it was only an hour in the scheme of a very busy semester, but students like lost it. Like, they composed songs, they went like, (laughing) - Wow. - And one student said, "Once student started crying when she heard this was happening," and said, you know, it was the first free hour she's had all semester. But I think we all get that, you know, sense, like, you know, if a Zoom meetings cancel, it's like, "Oh, you've, you know, "sorry, I forgot to put in your calendar." Like, yeah, no, meeting right now. You feel like a half hour, you know, has descended like, I can learn a new language and go skiing. Like, you feel like it's so much time. So, yeah, so I think it's not the amount of time. It's really our subjective sense. So yeah, totally will wrap up. - Awesome. Okay, this is a good one. Feelings into chairs. Are better at predicting desperation. - I can't. - No, no. Come on, come on. - Just leave. Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Feeling insurgers, yes. - Feeling insurgers. - Yes. (laughing) - I know, now I'm not gonna be able to get this. - Sorry, I'm sorry. - I'm sorry. - Yeah. - Feeling insurgers, and I am using air quotes, are better at predicting, get me out of here, action. So something like switching jobs, going to the hospital, moving, leaving a partner. So they're more predictive than socioeconomic variables, like income, education, marital status, or having children. - Yes, replicate with the caveat that, we don't need to use feeling insurgers, we can use what social scientists in the 1920s were already talking about in terms of measuring attitudes. So, with the caveat that we're rejecting, the units used, yes, totally will replicate. - Wonderful. And could you explain for anyone who hasn't heard the term feeling insurgers, what it comes from, what do you mean? - Yes, well, congratulations if you're hearing this and have it been on Twitter, and been doing somewhere you much safer. Yeah, so there was a recent PNAS paper that proposed this concept of feeling insurgers, basically just the well-being survey functionally, although very well-vetted, nicely controlled well-being survey, that was tracked with a bunch of real world measures, and used that to kind of explain all those variables that Aline was talking about. The psychology, it was a paper by economists and the psychology community got really annoyed at this idea that we can really show, that we can test what people are feeling and what people prefer, because again, as psychologists, we've been doing that, using well-validated metrics since the 1920s. - Yeah, we just reinvented the Likert scale. - Yes. - And everyone gives the round of applause. - There was a wonder, there was a wonderful, friends meme where Phoebe's Likert scale and Joey's Likert scale, and then it was Likert scale. Feelings and digits, but. (laughing) You had to see the meme, there was a good meme, so I'm doing an error for this. - Okay, the last one here, people who study happiness are more skilled than average non-happiness researchers at being happy. - Ah, trick question. I think they are more skilled at knowing what they're supposed to do, but they may or may not be more skilled at putting those things into practice. So I think if you were to survey them about what's the right answer on this quiz of, should you talk to a stranger on the train or should you stay silent, they would get it all correct, but whether or not they implement it in their own lives, I'm not so sure. - Awesome. - So it would be like a big replication fight, we'd have to come to terms with which measure we were using and so on. - Uh-huh. (laughing) And I feel like that's so true in so many aspects of obviously there's probably, and in language has some form of way of talking, but that's one thing to do things at work and then one thing to do things in your normal day today. But yeah, what would you say is like then the main barriers for researchers to implement it in their own life? - I mean, we often talk about this fallacy that I refer to as the GI Joe fallacy, that knowing is half the battle. You all too young to remember GI Joe, but GI Joe is his cartoon in the 1980s that involved Army guys, and they had this public service announcement at the end where the kids learned something and kids like, "Now I know, and knowing is half the battle." - Oh yeah, I know. - So you have to, I think, I think one of the things you have to do is a researcher is to remember that, you know, we all who are talking right now know a lot. Everyone who's listening for the most part, you all listen to this podcast so you know a lot, but that doesn't immediately translate into putting it into action. And so I think, you know, how do you put it into action? You calendar it, you tell a friend, you get some social support, you gotta like do the stuff that you're talking about. But the good news is that we also have good behavioral science tips for how to force ourselves to do that. But you know, there's a meta problem with these laughs. - Gotta actually do it. - Yeah. (laughing) - That's awesome. - Wonderful. Okay, we have one very last question for you, and it's a good one. What is your most controversial opinion in behavioral science? - Oh, so interesting. Should have got this one ahead of time, 'cause I feel like I should be thinking about it more. How about this one? - I think some of the situation is kinds of effects that are out there. This is like, you know, a lot of what folks are worried about with their replication crisis about things affecting you. I think those effects are gonna wind up being more robust than we think. I think the situation affects us a lot more than we expect. And so there's been like some low hanging fruit of like, oh, a warm cup doesn't affect us as much as we think or seeing some letters that you know, spell out, you know, freeways and fast things don't affect us as much as we think. And I think that's caused folks to say, there's no effect of the situation. We were wrong. And I bet there's gonna be a pendulum shift that says in a lot of cases we were right. But I agree that I believe all the replication effects that people aren't finding those effects right now, but I think we're not exactly looking at it in the right way. And we're gonna find that the situation was as profound as early social scientists thought back in the day. - This is a good reason for bringing you back again on the podcast to kind of, you know, in a few years, seeing some of the people like, "No, I was wrong." (laughing) (laughing) - Awesome. Well, this was so much fun. Thank you again for joining us and for sharing all of your thoughts and your expertise. - Yeah, thanks so much for having me. - Yeah, this was so much fun. And obviously we'll link to all of the one of the things you're doing. We can't obviously recommend enough your one for podcasts, your course. There's so many things that's fantastic that you're putting out in the world. So please continue creating great things. And again, thank you for joining the podcast. - Thanks so much, Ravney. Hey. (upbeat music) - Time to wrap up another episode of the Behavioral Design Podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. Oh, and I am an AI. Yeah, welcome to Uncanny Valley. Sam and Alene told me this is going to be an awesome season. So make sure to subscribe and help spread the word, maybe share the podcast with a colleague or friend. And if you want to show us some extra love, head over to Habit Weekly. Come and join our community. Pro members get access to a wealth of resources and the chance to interact with leading practitioners. It's a great way to support the podcast and deepen your understanding of behavioral design. Our fantastic show music is "Murgatroy" by the wonderful Dave Pizarro. And thanks to the team at Orange Wall Media for the production of this episode. For questions or ideas for future episodes, email [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks again for listening. See you next time. - Haven't some "Murgatroy" (singing) (singing) (singing) (singing) - Blow! (singing) (singing) [BLANK_AUDIO]