How much happiness can 2 million USD buy? with Elizabeth Dunn (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Chris Anderson:
Hello everyone. I'm Chris Anderson. Welcome to the TED Interview. This season we're delving deep into the concept of generosity, which I've come to believe is the single most crucial idea that our modern world needs. It's an idea that I've spent the last three years thinking about and researching for a book titled Infectious Generosity.

Now, today's episode is a special one for two reasons. First of all, I'm sitting in front of a live audience at TED 2024. The audience is full of brilliant people, and they will be helping co-create this episode by asking questions partway through. And then secondly, our guest today. She has played a catalytic role in developing my thinking about generosity.

Her name is Elizabeth Dunn. She's a social psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, and apart from delivering a beautiful TED Talk on the links between generosity and happiness, she also was involved in an experience which forced me to go ahead and write this book. Honestly. We will be talking about that shortly, but for now, please join me in welcoming Elizabeth Dunn.

It is great to have you here.

[00:01:41] Elizabeth Dunn:
Oh, thank you for having me.

[00:01:43] Chris Anderson:
Let's start by your sharing a little bit of your background and what drew you to the study of happiness, generosity, and related.

[00:01:51] Elizabeth Dunn:
Yeah, so I have been studying happiness for over 20 years now as a social psychologist, and I got into studying generosity primarily because I wanted to understand what made people happy and specifically actually when I got my first faculty job as a uh, professor at the University of British Columbia, I started earning more money than I needed to stay alive for the first time in my life.

And I was like, oh, I have disposable income. This is a novelty for me. You know? And so I wanted to understand how people could use money in order to enhance happiness, and I thought, “Generosity might actually be a pretty good way to go.” So we started running experiments, first small experiments, just here in Vancouver, and then built it out from there. So that's sort of where I started. And then my research has taken me in all kinds of different directions to try to understand what really matters for human happiness.

[00:02:40] Chris Anderson:
So typical experiment would be some students get given 10 or 20 bucks and told to do different things with it.

[00:02:48] Elizabeth Dunn:
Yeah. So in the first experiment we ever ran on this topic, we sent our research assistants out on campus at UBC armed with cash. We gave them five and $20 bills. We had them literally walk up and hand them to people.

Um, and we either told each individual to spend this money to benefit themselves or to benefit others. And then we called them at the end of the day, found out how their day had been, asked 'em to complete measures of happiness. And what we discovered was that people felt happier at the end of the day when they'd been assigned, basically by the flip of a coin, to spend this money on others.

[00:03:18] Chris Anderson:
And do you think they actually did spend it on others?

[00:03:21] Elizabeth Dunn:
You know, they gave us pretty detailed reports of like exactly what they did. So yeah, I'm pretty confident.

[00:03:27] Chris Anderson:
Give us some more headlines of big findings that have happened over the last decade or two.

[00:03:34] Elizabeth Dunn:
So another big finding for us was to show that this effect, you know, wasn't just limited to Vancouver to folks with a reasonable amount of disposable income.

We wanted to try doing this in countries around the world. Um, we explored this idea with the littlest humans, with toddlers showing that even two year olds get joy from giving their resources to others. Toddlers don't really care about money. We worked with toddler gold. Specifically goldfish crackers.

And so, you know, we've explored this idea in a number of different ways. We've also looked at other aspects that matter for happiness. In a project that grew out of a collaboration at TED, we've been examining how to increase social connections by bringing together architects and software engineers, um, to figure out how we can design physical spaces to, uh, bring people together in positive ways.

So I've done all kinds of different things, um, but along the way, happiness has been sort of my north star.

[00:04:26] Chris Anderson:
I mean, I think your team wrote a paper connected to a giant Gallup survey that was done once asking more than 200,000 people across the world about their happiness levels. Can you say a bit about that?

[00:04:40] Elizabeth Dunn:
Yeah, so in taking advantage of really amazing data collected by Gallup, what we discovered was that around the world, people who had donated money to charity in the past month reported greater happiness than those who didn't, and this wasn't a small effect. In fact, when we really dug into the data, what we saw was that spending or donating money to charity was basically equivalent to a doubling of household income in terms of its relationship with happiness.

[00:05:08] Chris Anderson:
People work their whole year to try to justify maybe if I could just get 20% more income, that's what would make all the difference to me and my family. Doubling of income rarely happens to most people. It's, it's like it's, it's not quite winning the lottery, but it's close and yet on the face of it just committing to being generous to charities could actually deliver you the same life happiness. That seems so implausible. Can that really be true?

[00:05:37] Elizabeth Dunn:
Well, first off, you know, in that particular study, it's important to recognize it's just a correlation, right? So people who give money to charity are happier than people who do not, right?

And you can imagine that people who are given to charity might differ in all kinds of ways. And we do our best as scientists to try to control for the obvious ones, like income. And that relationship still holds. But I wouldn't presume that it's entirely causal, that it's just about spending money on others leading to happiness.

Now, that said, it is still fascinating, you know, when we see this relationship emerge in experimental work as well. So we know there is this causal relationship, and yet it doesn't seem like people are always aware of it.

[00:06:15] Chris Anderson:
So it's a bit like the, uh, the riddle about marriage and happiness. Like all the stats show that on average married people tend to be happier, but did the marriage cause it or is it that the happier people get married? 'Cause no one wants to marry a sad old git.

[00:06:28] Elizabeth Dunn:
Well, yeah. And you know the really interesting thing with marriage is that the best longitudinal studies on this where you follow the same people over time suggest that people do get happier when they get married, but that boost in happiness last two years.

Now that's an average. Individuals vary. So, like if you went to your friend's wedding two years ago, you don't need to send a little, you know, condolence note. But it's certainly, that's the, the sort of fundamental force that we as happiness researchers are working against is this thing called hedonic adaptation, where whatever wonderful thing we have, we adapt to it.

So it's super exciting to walk down the aisle. It's less exciting to walk down and see your spouse at the breakfast table.

[00:07:05] Chris Anderson:
One thing I've learned about you, Liz, is that you have all the skepticism that you would hope for from a scientist, and recently you've been involved in work trying to address what's been this, you know, crisis in social science, that all these weird and wild experiments that were reported, some of them didn't replicate, talk about the work you've been doing recently about that?

[00:07:26] Elizabeth Dunn:
Yeah. So this is really important and I think it's something that many, uh, people who are interested in psychology and behavioral science don't realize is that there's really been a revolution in behavioral science over the past decade where we came to realize that some of the really neat, exciting effects that some of you might have heard about just don't replicate.

And so my lab has been involved, um, along with many other people in my field in trying to change that, trying to create a more replicable, reliable, robust science. And so one of the big things that we've been involved in doing is pre-registering our studies. So, I'm gonna get a little nerdy for a second, but I promise it's gonna be worth it 'cause it's super important.

So in science sometimes it's like we throw a bunch of darts against the wall and then we draw the bullseye on afterward and say, “Hey, look, we found what we expected to find.” Right? And there's an obvious problem with that because you don't know how many darts we actually shot. Um, and so this is a problem not just for our psychology, certainly not just for happiness research, for really all of quantitative science.

And so now what we're trying to do is pre-register our studies and say, “Upfront, we're gonna call our shot ahead of time and say, this is what I'm going to do, this is how I'm gonna test it, and I'm gonna prove myself wrong if that shot doesn't land.” And so one thing that I've been doing is going and trying to reassess the happiness literature in particular, to try to understand, you know, how good does it look when we apply these these newer approaches.

Another really key piece is using larger samples. So, if you look at some of the older, um, psychology studies out there, they'll often have a teeny, tiny number of participants. Um, and this can leave us with a situation where those effects don't actually replicate. You can get little weird fluky findings when you only study small numbers of people.

So increasingly in my field, we're using much larger sample sizes and that gives us much more reliable conclusions.

[00:09:16] Chris Anderson:
And your work found that actually quite a large percentage of some of the earlier work probably wasn't that valid?

[00:09:21] Elizabeth Dunn:
Right. I mean, we don't know for sure which studies would fail to replicate, but we found, we looked at some of the most widely reported ideas about happiness in the media.

So we looked at strategies like getting out in nature, practicing meditation and mindfulness, as well as exercise. Very popular strategies. For promoting happiness, and we found that 95% of those experiments really did not meet our current standards. It doesn't mean that those things like you're, if you're super into meditation or exercise, I'm not saying like give those things up and just watch Netflix 'cause whatever.

Like those, those things, there's good reasons to believe those strategies should work, but it's just remarkable that we don't actually have the kind of evidence that we would consider the kind of modern gold standard to support them.

[00:10:05] Chris Anderson:
Huh. I mean that seems like really important social science to do. I mean, as someone who loves being in nature, I would really like to know that my impression that it brings happiness wasn't just my imagination,

[00:10:17] Elizabeth Dunn:
Right. And I mean, you may know, right? Like one of the wonderful things about happiness is that you can experiment on yourself, right? And you can see, hey, does, does this make me happy? And that that's great. So if you find being in nature makes you happy, then do it.

But if we wanna make broader recommendations and really push forward policies and stuff, we wanna know what has the most reliable and the biggest effects for the most people. It turns out that if you do little things, like you say, oh, let me analyze the data a little bit differently. Let me control for gender.

These people seemed like they weren't really paying attention. I'm gonna cut them from my study. Then you can quickly actually create an effect where none really exists, and that is what we are trying to change. And I think where our field has come so far over the past decade.

[00:10:56] Chris Anderson:
So wearing your full skeptical hat, you and I, we had a conversation in 2020 about a crazy idea that happened because there was a donor in the TED community who wanted to give away a million dollars and, and, and to do some social science in the process.

Talk about what happened.

[00:11:15] Elizabeth Dunn:
This was like the coolest phone call I've ever gotten, where Chris called me and said, “You know, I've got this interesting opportunity. Is this something that your lab would like to study? Where we could potentially, I think initially that we would give 10,000 US dollars to a hundred people in multiple countries around the world and study what happened.”

And I, I was blown away. I was very excited. I was like, “Count me in.” And then we got to talking more and we thought, oh, it'd be interesting to vary, you know, to have a couple of different conditions or groups. So give these groups some different instructions and be able to, to test what kind of difference that made.

And so we thought, well, maybe we could take that a hundred people and split it into two groups of 50. And that's where I gave you like a boring lecture on statistics and how like when you have 50 people per group, it's actually not necessarily enough to detect these effects in a really reliable way. So I said, “Is there any way we can have two groups of a hundred people at, you know, would $2 million be possible?”

And I, let me tell you, as somebody who like applies to academic funding agencies, I just expected the answer to be no. But I was like, “Ah, you might as well, might as well mention this.” And, and, and you can.

[00:12:22] Chris Anderson:
This is the, the TED community is full of surprises. Yeah. It really is full of surprises. And I'm so, but also be careful what proposal you put to Liz Dunn, but so yeah, so, so, so ended up being 200 people, getting $10,000 each. That was the plan. How did you structure the experiment?

[00:12:40] Elizabeth Dunn:
Yeah, so we had one group of a hundred people who were told to share their participation in this experiment publicly. So they were told to share this with their social networks on Twitter at the time, now X.

And then we told the other hundred to just keep this on the down low. You know, you can tell a couple close friends and family if you need to, but basically keep this news private. And so this allowed us to look at whether sharing this news publicly would make a difference for how people spent the money or how they felt about it.

And also in one of our early conversations, I said, “You know what would be really great is if we could have a control group of people that don't get any money, and we could study them all along the way.” And you're like, “Okay, Liz. Yep, sure, we can do that too.” So we had a, this control group of folks that were chosen at random.

So, um, after recruiting people, um, making sure they qualify, we randomly assign people to either get this money, share it publicly, get this money, keep it, keep the snooze private, or not get any money, but complete all of our surveys and get a small fee for, for completing the surveys.

[00:13:42] Chris Anderson:
And specifically, what they were told is that this money was up to them as to how they could spend it.

Well, first of all, they, when they were recruited, because I, I, I got to play a role in recruiting people and, and we basically, I put out a tweet saying, “Hey, do you want to participate in an interesting experiment? Could be stressful, could be potentially life changing. We'll take quite a bit of time. What do you think?”

But we no mention of money. So we got people not knowing really what they were signing up for. And then when we told them they were getting $10,000, like some of them were like. “Oh, it's a scam.”

[00:14:17] Elizabeth Dunn:
And I think that was one of the biggest challenges, right? Because if you go to the spam folder of your inbox right now, you can probably find an offer like this, right?

So we had to, I think one of the biggest challenges was convincing people it was real. And so you, you made a great video of yourself, just like kind of a low production video.

[00:14:32] Chris Anderson:
Yeah.

[00:14:32] Elizabeth Dunn:
Explaining to people what was happening. And I think that was really important in kind of convincing people like, no, for real, we're gonna send you $10,000.

[00:14:40] Chris Anderson:
The only real strings attached then was that they just had to report back to us. They had a fill out a survey every few months, basically.

[00:14:47] Elizabeth Dunn:
Once, yeah, every, every month for three months, and then again at the six month mark. Yeah.

[00:14:51] Chris Anderson:
Right. So what did we discover?

[00:14:55] Elizabeth Dunn:
Well, we learned a lot from this experiment, and I just wanna say one of the really beautiful things about this whole experience was that we were able to conduct this experiment at a scale that I never would've thought was possible.

And the donors were so committed to doing the science really carefully too. And so we were able to address several long standing fundamental questions in behavioral science and I, I think the one that was probably the core question, um, that we started with was, how would people spend this money and would they use it in ways that benefited others?

I think one of the remarkable findings from this study was that people used the majority of this money over $6,000 of the $10,000 windfall in ways that benefited other people. Now, we were defining, benefiting other people in a broad way, as you know, any way that was, you know, it could be anything from taking friends out for dinner, to making a donation to charity, to treating a loved one, to something special.

So, perhaps in that sense it's not so surprising that that number was big, but even when we look at a much narrower definition, we look just at charitable donations, we still found that people spent almost $1,700 on average, on just on charitable donations. And you know, that that kind of blew me away.

[00:16:10] Chris Anderson:
In general, people, I think on average spend two or three or 4% at most of their income on charity and that that's a massive increase. So what's going on there?

[00:16:22] Elizabeth Dunn:
Well, I mean, I think one important component here is that it was a gift, right? So, it wasn't like people earned this money, per se, it wasn't something that they were expecting. It began with an active generosity. By the donors, and I think that's still very interesting, right? That one powerful act of generosity and in some cases, the kinds of donations that people were making could themselves create other opportunities, could have these incredible ripple effects into some of the communities. To me that was, that was one piece of it that was just so powerful.

[00:16:55] Chris Anderson:
Was there a difference in the behavior between people who were on social media proudly boasting of the amount that they were giving away to those who were keeping it private?

[00:17:07] Elizabeth Dunn:
Yeah. So we expected that there would be a difference. We thought people who were sharing this publicly would spend more on others.

If you, everyone knows you've got this money and whatever you can imagine, you would spend it more generously. We pre-registered that prediction, so we said up front, “Hey, this is what we think we're gonna find. This is how we're gonna test it, and we were wrong.” So we found that it did not matter whether people publicly sharing this information or not.

Either way, we found these very high levels of generosity, which you could call a failed experiment, but I call like a beautiful testament to humanity that like even when they're spending choices private, they still chose to spend the majority of the money in ways that benefited others.

[00:17:46] Chris Anderson:
So it really was, this was a response to generosity. It wasn't an attempt to boost reputation, it seemed.

[00:17:54] Elizabeth Dunn:
Yeah, I mean, we can't, of course it's possible that some people were, you know, taking friends out for dinner in a, in a way that can have reputational benefits. So we can, we can almost never erase reputation and that's part of it.

And something that I love in your book is that you say, you know, it's not necessarily bad if people are engaging in generous behavior. To enhance their reputations. Like what a wonderful feature of humanity that that's something, a way that we would wanna increase our, enhance our reputation. But yet we designed what we felt was a very powerful manipulation of reputational concerns, and it did not matter. So that tells us, to me, my takeaway from that is that, you know, perhaps reputational concerns are not a necessary or driving force behind generosity.

[00:18:36] Chris Anderson:
And have you heard from other social scientists that they, they view this as a contribution to the science?

[00:18:42] Elizabeth Dunn:
Yeah. We've gotten an amazing response to this from the scientific community. And I think because we had the opportunity to scale this up, to have this diverse worldwide sample to work with amounts of money that our, you know, deeply meaningful.

So, for folks who were in lower income countries who participated we were essentially doubling their annual income with this gift. So, it was a huge amount of money. In contrast, the kinds of experiments my lab has done throughout my career are usually more on the order of $10. And so one might say, well, sure people feel happy when they give away a few dollars, but they don't really care.

And so this shows us with very large amounts of money. People are giving a lot and, and as we'll, I'm sure, talk about more, getting a lot of joy from it.

[00:19:25] Chris Anderson:
Hmm. So, so talk about the first paper you published.

[00:19:28] Elizabeth Dunn:
Yeah. So, so Chris started out of course, with this interest in how generously are people gonna spend the money and I wanted to know the answer to that too, but I was like, this experiment can answer a lot of fascinating questions.

And one thing that I wanted to know was just how much happiness can $2 million buy when it's distributed across a large, diverse group of people as opposed to, you know, concentrated in the hands of one affluent couple?

And so in a paper that is entitled Wealth Redistribution Promotes Happiness, we demonstrate and quantify just how much happiness $2 million dollars can buy. And, and one of the things that we demonstrate is that by giving this money away to this diverse group of people, this couple provided 225 times as much happiness as they could possibly have found for themselves from this money.

[00:20:19] Chris Anderson:
And that that's a, that's an incredible number. And one level, when you think about it for a minute, it's kind of obvious, I mean. When someone's rich, how much happier can a bit of extra money actually make them? Not much. But when it's shared out, we know that that can make a lot of difference to a lot of people. I've just been hit so many times since thinking about this work and, and writing the book of just how big a deal it is that generosity is fundamentally asymmetric.

This is a really, really exciting feature about things we normally think of the world in zero sum terms. You know, the reason people don't give is because of loss aversion.

You don't want to give away, you lose it. It feels like you know you are gain my loss. No, thank you, but, but actually there are so many circumstances when that is not the case. There's, there's so much inequality in the world and that money is sitting there and, and, and the cost to the richer person literally is pretty low.

And in fact, you could argue, and, and, and in fact some of the, the other days you've shown is that the actual act of generosity doesn't cost them any happiness either. It actually boosts their happiness. And so it's this kind of thinking, which, which really gave me no choice but to write this book and if there was a culture of generosity, everyone benefits in the most amazing way.

And we're all connected and so it should be easier to do this than ever. So, so how on earth is it that we're actually experiencing being in a world that's getting meaner?

[00:21:44] Elizabeth Dunn:
Well, you know, I don't know if we are living in a world that's getting meaner. I think that, you know, we have that perception, but I think one thing that we've been seeing already just this week at TED so far is is how much of that may be an illusion and how much good really is happening.

And that's one thing that I love about this experiment is that it really highlights, like when we did the science very carefully and tracked exactly what happened, you know, we were discovering that people were spending this money in ways that benefited others, paying this act of generosity forward.

And so I actually, especially after doing this experiment, I feel pretty good about humanity's potential for, for goodness.

[00:22:26] Chris Anderson:
So part of the riddle is that we are filtering the stories we tell each other about humanity in a way that's very destructive. Social media algorithms are probably helping with this and that when you actually pull the camera back and look for actual data about what's happening in the world, really different pictures can amaze and certainly what you know in doing research for this book.

My brilliant researcher is actually here, Kate, Kate Honey spent a couple years researching and looking for stories under the radar and there, there are so many stories of people doing kind things that create these amazing ripple effects.

Are they on your newsfeed? They are not. And, and, and so it's tragic because there's, there's a saying. We are shaped by the stories we tell ourselves. I mean, there's evidence for this yes?

[00:23:15] Elizabeth Dunn:
That's right. And I think it can also be a kind of self-reinforcing cycle where if we feel like the world is this terrible place where nobody's doing anything good, then why should I step up and do something positive?

Um, and so I think flipping that script is incredibly important.

[00:23:45] Chris Anderson:
Well, one of the joyful things was that after the experiment was done and the science was sort of locked down, I got to write to some of the people who'd participated 'cause they'd told us, you know, what they'd done. And, and I got to ask them, “Why did you do that?” And it was, it was an amazing, consistent picture that came back.

People often use the same language. A typical thing that people said, and, and this, this surprised me, was I felt seen, you know, the act, this is weird to me, like being given. $10,000 by a stranger on the internet. They felt, I felt seen and I felt like I, I, I needed to let other people feel, seen the way I had felt seen. So this was quite a powerful, you know, biological thing that, that really surprised me. But several of them said, if I'd won this money in a lottery, I wouldn't have behaved this way.

[00:24:38] Elizabeth Dunn:
Well, and that's a really interesting hypothesis, right? So is it the case, you know, that they wouldn't have been so generous had we described the source of the money differently?

And I think you and I had a conversation after we collected the data, after we'd run the experiment and you said, “Oh, I wish we'd, you know, had this other condition where we told people the money was, you know, from a lottery or they'd earned it or something.” And I was like, “Welcome to being a scientist.”

This is the experience you always have after you run the experiment you wish you want the next thing. But that's also the beautiful thing about science is that we're each, each question we try to answer propels us toward the next one. And I think that's a really, really fascinating one.

[00:25:12] Chris Anderson:
Hmmm

[00:25:12] Elizabeth Dunn:
That, you know, if anyone wants to donate $2 million, I'd love to pursue.

[00:25:18] Chris Anderson:
But there, there was, um, there's, there's a third paper you’re working on. Tell, tell us about that one.

[00:25:23] Elizabeth Dunn:
Yeah, so in the paper that we're currently writing up, so you all are among the first to hear about it, um, we were looking at the choices that people made about how to spend the money in terms of the implications for their own happiness.

So we painstakingly coded each and every spending description to assess how people had spent the money. So we placed each purchase into 17 different possible categories ranging from paying for utility bills, buying durable goods, buying purchases that would save you time, all kinds of different things.

And then we looked at how much happiness each purchase provided, um, participants. And so what we discovered is that out of all 17 categories, the type of spending that provided the highest level of happiness was in fact making charitable donations. So it confirmed what we had seen in previous research, but with much larger spending amounts.

If you're curious what some of the others were. Second place was buying experiences, so, you know, going on trips, going out for special meals. These also provided a lot of happiness, one that hasn't popped up in previous research, but that we discovered in, in this study, produced particularly high levels of happiness, was spending money on education.

And as a professor, I like that one.

[00:26:37] Chris Anderson:
Liz, one thing I'm puzzled by is that, I mean, in one level it makes sense why being generous would bring happiness with it. If you think from an evolutionary perspective, you would want there to be a reward for cooperative behavior because there's, there's obviously, you know, the belief is that species that learn to cooperate, get benefit from it, and so you need that, that reward to do it.

And yet, unlike with other types of happiness. It doesn't seem to be advertised. So if I'm hungry, I know that if I eat, I will feel better. And you can say the same for most other sort of obvious sort of biological urges. But on this one, I think a lot of people don't know that they're going to be happy.

It becomes a matter of sort of wisdom passed down by the elders in your community or something like that, or something that you eventually discover. Why do you think that is hidden?

[00:27:36] Elizabeth Dunn:
Yeah, I mean, I think it's actually surprisingly difficult for people to figure out what makes them happy. Um, for one thing, you know, we can notice that we feel happy after, you know, helping a friend, engaging in some active generosity, but we might say, oh, it's because, you know, my friend was in this particular situation and I'm, I'm glad that I was able to help her out with that.

But we don't necessarily make the right broader inference of like, this is about generosity as a whole. And I think there's also just a lot of smoke screens in our society where that's not the, necessarily the message that we hear.

Although it's interesting because I have gotten, you know, letters from people saying, why did we need you as a social scientist to tell us that giving makes us happy? This is something that is, you know, taught to us in religious tra traditions by grandparents and so forth. So those messages are out there.

But I think it's really interesting the point you make about, you know, feeling hungry. Because I think it's when people are in the moment that they don't necessarily realize, oh, this is the best thing that I could do with this money, is, is use it to benefit somebody else. And in fact, we've run studies where we say, “Hey, we can give you money and we want you to tell us what would, what would make you the happiest?”

And they, they don't tend to think of using it to benefit others. So there's, there does seem to be something about money in particular that puts people in this mindset of looking out for themselves. Um, and so that, that may actually serve to distract us from this broader knowledge that we have maybe picked up from important people and traditions in our life that may get lost when we're faced with that, you know, wallet.

[00:29:05] Chris Anderson:
In your wonderful TED Talk, you said that generosity doesn't always bring happiness. What matters is how it's done and that generosity that is done where there is direct contact, for example, with a person, when you can feel or see the human impact of it works a lot better in terms of bringing happiness.

Could you say a bit more about that?

[00:29:32] Elizabeth Dunn:
Yeah, so I would say there's sort of three key ingredients that are pretty essential in turning generosity into happiness. So one is feeling a sense of connection, ideally with it, you know, the individuals or the cause that you're helping having that actual, in my case for example, we were able to privately sponsor a family of Syrian refugees to come to Vancouver and we were literally picking them up at the airport and hugging them. And so that's like the ultimate form of contact. But even if you're a little bit more removed from that feeling, that sense of connection is, is critically important. And I think a lot of charitable giving opportunities don't offer that.

And that there's this beautiful space for innovation and figuring out how to create that, particularly when we're giving to people far away. So connection's probably the number one. Um, but also impact matters. So being able to really understand, or at least vividly imagine how your generosity is making a difference.

And finally, choice matters. So feeling that you have a sense of choice, of autonomy, of agency, there's no better way to rob people of the joy of giving than to back them into a corner and make them feel like they've been forced to give. And so I think, you know, we wanna keep these ingredients in mind because ideally, we are building a future that is filled with opportunities to give in these joyful ways that involve, you know, the connection, impact, and choice.

[00:30:46] Chris Anderson:
So help connect the dots here because that makes a lot of sense to me. But it also seems to contradict another piece of advice that feels important, which is that we want people to bring their minds to their giving. So, so much of you know, life is this battle between our instincts and then our reflective selves. And, um, Paul Bloom, who's been on this podcast series, you know, wrote a book called Against Empathy, where he was arguing that, you know, we have these powerful feelings of empathy. You see someone suffering, you want to help them, and quite possibly that does bring with it most, most happiness, but it may distract us from the wisest spending of money.

So many people, their charitable lives are limited to, oh, I saw some need on TV of some disaster, and so I'll, I'll text the money there and then you forget about it. And, and part of what we want to argue for is for people to be reflective and, and almost strategic about their giving so that they can spend the money wisely. Now, that may mean that that doesn't make them as happy because you're not triggering those, those instance sort of human instinctive selves. How might we bridge and get the best of both worlds here?

[00:31:59] Elizabeth Dunn:
Yeah, I think the key to bridging those worlds is to focus on impact, because obviously impact is what matters when we're kind of thinking with our heads, but we also see in our research that people get a lot more joy from giving when they can see or vividly imagine the impact that they're having.

And so I think making it possible for charities that really do have a genuine impact, bringing that out in a way that potential donors can see it, understand it, vividly experience it. I think that is an opportunity where our heads and our hearts meet and can center around impact.

That said, you mentioned, you know, is this the wisest use of your money? And my favorite part of your book was arguing that maybe that's not the right question. Maybe we shouldn't be trying for the wisest use of our charitable donation money or our, our pro-social spending, because that puts us in a, a trap, and I've experienced this myself where I'm like, I have to find the best charity doing x, right?

And then I don't get around to donating or I just get in my head about it. And so I, I love your book for sort of freeing people to say. Is this a good use of the money? And if the answer is yes, then maybe green light yourself to, to go ahead and, and donate.

[00:33:20] Chris Anderson:
Yes, I like that. We have to really know ourselves and figure out, one, how to avoid that trap.

Two, how to feed some of those human instincts. So say you discover, make an intellectual conclusion that an organization is a wise one to support. Don't just stop there. Give your humanness a chance to actually see the impact. So the statistics coming outta that group won't be enough, but maybe if you, you know, actually can meet and get to know some of the stories that are actually behind those statistics and, and perhaps join a community of other people who are supporting them.

That is the kind of thing that can carry you on and turn a sort of short term intellectual decision that's smart into an emotional thing that actually brings with it joy and habit making. And

[00:34:11] Elizabeth Dunn:
Yeah, and I think for folks working in the nonprofit world contemplating not just how can we get donors to give more money, but how can we make the experience of donation more joyful is potentially a way to.

[00:34:25] Chris Anderson:
Right.

[00:34:25] Elizabeth Dunn:
You know, tackle that question, um, from a different perspective.

[00:34:28] Chris Anderson:
Well, okay, so TED audience, this is your turn now.

If you have a question for Liz, please raise your hand. A microphone will come to you and we're, we're gonna get through as many as we can.

[00:34:41] Sara:
Hi. Yes, Sara. So I'm wondering is there a direct correlation between the amount of happiness and the amount of generosity? Do you get so much more money, happiness out of giving a million versus out of giving a thousand? And what does that sort of ratio look like?

[00:34:54] Elizabeth Dunn:
This is actually a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Um, certainly there is a, a relationship and in fact there's a relationship. What we see in the data from the mystery experiment is that just in general people get more happiness from more expensive stuff, so like the more money they spent on a purchase the more, the higher, they tend to rate it, not perfectly in terms of happiness, but certainly that relationship is there.

So I would say overall, larger amounts of money spent charitably do provide more happiness, and yet it is not at all like a perfect or super strong relationship because people can also spend a pretty small amount of money, but do so in a way that provides a ton of connection, a lot of impact, something felt freely chosen, and that can deliver a big boost in terms of happiness.

So it's certainly not just like a dollar for dollar kind of relationship. And I will say too, I just wanna mention there's more to discover in these data and we have, um, done a lot of work on our side to make these data, um, accessible to researchers.

So researchers need to come to us, we'll, we'll check their credentials and everything, but we think there are unanswered questions. So if you are a scientist or a curious philanthropist and wanna try to figure something out, one thing we've talked about is trying to make these data, um, as much of a gift to the scientific community as we can by allowing people to use the data to answer their own questions.

[00:36:18] Berenice:
So I'm Berenice. Thank you for this. This is fascinating. So I work in the US but I live in Europe and my question is to what extent does culture impact how generous we are? Because what I've seen is that in the US it's a very giving culture when it comes to making a check, supporting your local charity, donating your time.

In Europe, it's very, very different and it's really hard to find local charities, not even for children or, um, I tried to put something together for my daughter's school and everybody was so shocked, you know, and I think they even doubted my, my intentions. It was really crazy. So I had a thought and I'd love to know what you think.

So in America, we pay fewer taxes really. And there isn't this social safety net. So maybe there's, we have to do this because we have to fill the gaps. And maybe in Europe that's not the case and we pay a lot of taxes. That's a theory, but I think it's probably more complex in that, so.

[00:37:19] Elizabeth Dunn:
Mm-Hmm.

[00:37:19] Berenice:
What are your thoughts?

[00:37:20] Elizabeth Dunn:
I mean, certainly we see big cultural differences when you look, for example, in the Gallup world, uh, data that Chris mentioned, we, there are substantial differences between different countries in terms of how much people give to charity. I would say the fascinating thing in, in this particular experiment was that, you know, we had people from three lower income countries, so Kenya, Indonesia, and Brazil for higher income countries the US, the UK, Australia, and Canada.

And we didn't have enough people within each country to treat each country separately, but we compared the lower income countries with the higher income countries and we expected that perhaps people in the higher income countries would spend more money on others 'cause they have a lot more disposable income on average.

Um, but we didn't find that, we actually found people in the lower income countries spent just as much on others compared to those in the higher income countries.

[00:38:11] Philanthropist:
First of all, let me say I'm 100% on giving. I'm a philanthropist. I work with my local community foundations. The first challenging question I have is this is, since you're measuring a happiness, I wanna focus on that word because I want to talk about happiness versus joy.

I noticed that you use those two terms, I guess, interchangeably too, and I'm gonna ask you how you define happiness in order to measure happiness?

[00:38:34] Elizabeth Dunn:
Thank you for asking that. 'cause it is helpful to clarify the definition. So we define happiness as subjective well being. That's like the technical jargony term. If you wanna Google research in this area. And, um, broadly in my field of social psychology, that is the dominant way that, that we think about happiness. And so subjective well being has three core components. And so we have positive affect and that can include feelings like joy, although it's sort of, it's very central.

It's like capturing sort of the core elements of just feeling good basically. We have negative affect. And so we're looking, you know what, just to be clear, even happy people experience negative emotions. Negative emotions are healthy and they're, they're good. They're part of who, who we're meant to be as a species, but uh, you know, very happy people tend to experience a lot more positive emotion than negative emotion on a typical day.

And then the third component, which is really important, is life satisfaction. And that is a more cognitive, evaluative, more reflective judgment of like, am I leading the kind of life that I want to have? And the remarkable thing about this experiment is that we saw substantial changes not only in positive emotions and negative emotions, but also in life satisfaction.

And in fact, when my lab reviewed all of the pre-registered experiments that have ever been conducted on happiness, we found that this experiment had the largest impact on life satisfaction that's ever been found.

[00:40:03] Chris Anderson:
So I think what the question is getting at is that we want to feel that there's a difference between the kind of the temporary pleasure of eating strawberry ice cream versus the sort of the deeper life satisfaction or joy of that can come from giving, and I, I mean it does science support the fact that there's, the, the form of happiness that you get from generosity, you know, it goes to that deeper happiness, it's longer lasting than just the sort of temporary positive effect that you might otherwise get?

[00:40:27] Elizabeth Dunn:
Yeah, I mean, we see it, uh, in this work and in in other studies we see that the effects of generosity are pretty broad and robust.

So we see them both in terms of this immediate increase in positive mood. But also that over time this seems to result in actual changes in people's satisfaction with their lives.

[00:40:46] Question Asker:
When I'm giving, should I be giving a dollar a day to get my happiness, uh, or quarterly? What's the, what's the cadence? And then should I be paying attention to the percentage of my income or the percentage of the receiver's income?

[00:40:57] Elizabeth Dunn:
I would say, again, it's not so much about the exact number of dollars, but I would say looking for opportunities to give where you really feel a sense of the impact.

[00:41:05] Chris Anderson:
I, uh, in the book. I suggest to people who are well off that we could do worse than look at what the religious traditions are and the expectations are, which in Christianity and and Judaism are 10% of income, and in Islam it's two and a half percent of net worth annually, and I say if you really want to embrace the notion that as secular people, many of us here at TED, probably secular people, do we do, we want our moral standards to be at least as high as those of the religions?

If so, there's an argument that you should try and get to the position where you can commit to the higher of those two standards, 10% of income, or two and a half percent of net worth.

What what amazed me in doing the book is that if you accept that, embrace that and do the math at what that would raise. It would transform the world, and we could switch the conversation around philanthropy from being this slightly awkward thing to being one of thrilling imagination and possibility.

[00:42:01] Question Asker #2:
Is there a difference in happiness experience between giving away your money and giving away your time? And do you get exponentially greater happiness by giving away both at the same time?

[00:42:12] Elizabeth Dunn:
Hmm. Yeah. Fascinating question. You know, I can't think of an experiment that has directly contrasted those, but there's really strong, robust evidence that does meet these kind of gold standards of, uh, modern behavioral science showing that using money to benefit others promotes happiness.

And interestingly, the research on vol volunteering, for example, is one way of giving time, strangely, that literature hasn't produced the strongest results. And I'm curious about why that is. And I, I would love to see, you know, more large scale work on that topic. But I especially love your insight about bringing the time and the money together in part because I think putting in some of the time can maybe unleash the benefits of the money.

And in my TED Talk, I described a local charity just down the street from here where folks, uh, in Vancouver will get together, donate money to this organization, and then you go and you make dinner for people on the downtown east side and you get to meet them, talk to them, and then the money doesn't just buy them dinner.

It also helps to deal with the food security problem more broadly by providing lunches throughout the week. And so that, I think, is a beautiful model of a program where it bridges the money and the time in the way that creates genuine, meaningful connection for both donors and recipients.

[00:43:27] Preet:
Hi. Just Preet here.

Is generosity really a function of feeling needed because it one feels better after giving? So is that my own, for my own satisfaction that I'm doing or it's just happiness a label for it?

[00:43:42] Chris Anderson:
Hmm.

[00:43:42] Elizabeth Dunn:
I love the answer you give to this question in the book, so I think you should.

[00:43:46] Chris Anderson:
So I have been dismayed at how the conversation around generosity, especially in, in, in terms of philanthropy is happening in the modern culture where it feels like every opportunity is taken to poke at people and to criticize and snipe at decisions of generosity of saying, “Oh, there's mixed motivation here. Oh, they're only doing it to make themselves feel good or to boost their reputation.” Or, “Oh, couldn't they have given more?” Or, “Oh, how did they make that money in the first place?”

All these things as, as are said, and, and I think it's toxic. I think generosity has actually always, there's no such thing as pure generosity.

I think the philosopher Immanuel Kant is wrong on this. Even when I was brought up, it was give and you shall receive, you know, even our parents, you had to apply these other incentives to give. And I think as a philosophy student, I used to agonize over this. It was like, but I give to satisfy my conscience, but it feels good to satisfy my conscience.

And so is that generosity? Well, yes. It damn well is generosity. And so I, I think we should not look for reasons to ding generosity. We should look for reasons to celebrate it. And in the connected age, there are more reasons than ever. Why, you know, generosity can spread. It can change how you are regarded.

It can introduce your work to thousands of other people who may want to work with you. It can enhance your reputation. It can bring you happiness. It will bring you happiness, just as it's hard to decide to go and work out, but you know that long term, you know, afterwards, you'll feel good about it. This is in the same category.

We, it's hard to do, but we should celebrate it even though we know that there are rewards to the giver. And so, yeah, I've, I've got a title in the book called Imperfect Generosity. It generosity is the classic case in which the perfect becomes the enemy of the good. Let's not do that. And that way we'll have a lot more generosity in the world.

[00:45:50] Question Asker #3:
Religiously in their different traditions. I mean, the idea of having a sincere heart or is the action itself good enough? And I'm curious from the study, can I go in with really bad motivations and still get the happiness effect? Or does it change me? I'm curious.

[00:46:07] Elizabeth Dunn:
Well, we didn't ask people if they had bad motivations going in, so yeah, I don't know.

What do you think, Chris?

[00:46:14] Chris Anderson:
I mean, look, define bad motivations. There's definitely a level of cynicism at which something I guess you can't claim is, is, is, is generous. But I think if you see someone who needs something and you decide you would like to meet that need, there's enough good motivation in there for need to celebrate that act.

[00:46:36] Elizabeth Dunn:
Yeah, I mean certainly we do see that overall people are getting the highest levels of happiness from what we might call, you know, the purest form of giving of, of making charitable donations. But also, you know, there's this interesting little finding, I don't wanna make too much of it 'cause we didn't expect it's totally exploratory, but we saw that in the public condition where people had to share the decisions they were making along the way with this money.

We actually saw those folks getting a little bit less happiness from their charitable donations compared to those who are keeping it private. So it actually suggests that when you're trying to be a little showy about this, it might detract. Now, it doesn't mean we could never do this in a way that that would work, where we could both share it and feel happy about it.

But maybe it speaks to the idea that generosity isn't all about just looking good to other people, and that maybe when we're doing it in these more private ways, it can feel great.

[00:47:27] Marla:
Oh, hi, I'm Marla. I'm curious about the intake process for your research. Did you track previous generosity, previous charitable donations, et cetera?

And I'm also wondering if you're planning to track moving forward if they continue to be generous, and if so, how?

[00:47:46] Elizabeth Dunn:
We did not track people's previous, you know, charitable donations or other spending choices. We did ask them, you know, just as I think kind of a point of interest, we did ask them some questions to make sure it would be safe for them to be in this study.

So we did do a pretty careful intake process where we asked, you know, we'd like to tell you about some wacky things that could happen to you. Would any of these cause you danger or serious distress? And so like having a movie star show up on your doorstep, um, getting $10,000 out of the blue, you know, all of these things.

And so we, we did not include people who told us that it could be a danger to them, but we didn't assess, you know, their previous giving. I would love to know how this changes people in the future and follow up with them. Um, see, you know, how happy they are, what choices they've made down the road. I think that would be a wonderful, fascinating thing to do.

[00:48:34] Chris Anderson:
Okay. Liz, do you have any final thought you'd like to share from the mystery experiment or just in general, something from your work that you wish was more widely known?

[00:48:44] Elizabeth Dunn:
Yeah, I mean, I think this experiment along with a growing body of research has really dealt the final death blow to our notion of homo economists as this self-interested creature.

And it is time to leave that vision behind. And I think that that is very freeing. Um, I'll also just leave you with one other stat that didn't come up, um, which is that we found that people in lower income countries got three times the happiness boost from this money as those in higher income countries.

So again, in terms of an asymmetry, it suggests how we can really make the most of our money. That said, we found that there were detectable benefits for individuals making up to $123,000 per year. 99% of the world's population makes less than that. And so I do think it speaks to the incredible potential power of redistribution of wealth to promote happiness as we move into the future.

[00:49:42] Chris Anderson:
Hmm. Elizabeth Dunn, thank you so much. That was spectacular. Thank you.

Okay. Well, that's all for today. A reminder that if you'd like to dig deeper into this conversation about the power of generosity, please consider reading my book, Infectious Generosity or listening to it. Thanks to the incredible generosity of a donor in the TED community, you can claim a free copy of the book by heading to ted.com/generosity. Next week is our final episode of this season we'll be speaking with a visionary in the world of philanthropy, Natalie Cargill, whose work we actually just referenced here with Liz about the potential for truly big scale philanthropy.

She's on a fascinating and essential mission to replace pessimism about the world's biggest problems with plans for actually solving them.

And if you're keen to start your own generosity journey, but not sure where to start, I would love you to check out a new tool that we've created called TIGG. TIGG is an AI assistant that can help you brainstorm ideas for what you can do with a little generosity and creativity in your own life or community.

It's actually really fun to play with, and you can find [email protected]. The TED Interview is part of the TED Audio Collective, a collection of podcasts dedicated to sparking curiosity and sharing ideas that matter. This episode was produced by Jess Shane. Our team who are there at the back includes Constanza Gallardo, Grace Rubenstein, Banban Cheng, Michelle Quint, Roxanne Hai Lash, and Daniella Balarezo.

This show is mixed by Sarah Bruguiere, and it was co-created by you, our amazing live audience here in Vancouver. Yay. All right. If you like this show, please do share it with others wherever you can. Thanks so much for listening. Until next week.