by Paul Dolan
Perhaps you like to think of yourself as too busy to care more, when it really comes from not making the time rather than not having the time, as I argued earlier. Or perhaps you consider yourself to be a generous person when, in fact, you don’t behave as generously as you think you do. And consistent with the fundamental attribution error I discussed in chapter 4, we might blame others’ dispositions for how they are and therefore think that helping them will not make any difference.
For all these reasons, it is not surprising that research has shown that we have a “blind spot” for virtuousness.44 We need to consider how to turn the blind spot into a “sight spot” that will help us spread some happiness around.
Decide
Given our proclivities to mistaken desires, projections, and beliefs, and recalling the discussion in chapter 5, you could look for feedback to ensure that your expectations more accurately match reality. Try reminding yourself about how happy you were the last time you were caring about or for others, and then use this information when thinking about what caring will be like in the future. You can see how a DRM might be helpful here. Even simply remembering instances of when we have been kind to others has been shown to increase how happy we say we are.45
You could also make salient the impact of your contribution to redistribution. A group of willing donors to UNICEF were randomly divided into two groups, one where they were told about the general priorities of the children’s charity and the type of work it did, and one where they were specifically told about the impact of their donation, including the statement “every $10 collected purchases a bed net for a child in Africa.” Larger donations were associated with greater life satisfaction among only those who received the specific information. Charitable giving seems to have the greatest impact on your happiness when it’s clear to you where your money is going and who and how it will help.46 So if you decide to give time or money, you’ll reap more happiness if you know some of the specifics of how it’ll help.
With deciding generally, if you make a note of the contexts within which you care about and for others, you can look to reinstate those contexts in the future. For example, if you find that your workaholic self is too busy to do more for others during a typical working week, you might decide to plan visits to your stressed-out sister on weekends or holidays, when you’re more likely to experience happiness when giving her a hand. You might also consider not thinking too hard about it. In games where players can earn more money if everyone cooperates, the quicker people are asked to make decisions about their moves, the more likely they are to cooperate.47
Design
How can you design a better distributional landscape? Well, you could try to prime yourself with cues to encourage you to care more for others. Princeton students who were asked to write a list of the behavior, values, lifestyle, and appearance of their favorite superhero and were then introduced to a charitable campus organization volunteered twice as many hours to it than students who listed characteristics of their dorm rooms.48 And a group of students from the University of Arizona donated more than twice as much change to an American educational charity after writing down thoughts and feelings about their own death as opposed to writing about dental pain, a result dubbed the “Scrooge effect.”49 So the next time you select a movie, new screen saver, or banking password, choose something that might nudge you to care for others more. One of my friends uses the name of a wandering monk, a character from a book that embodies altruism, as her banking password. It’s up to you to experiment and choose what works for you.
Also bear in mind that your happiness will affect your charitable giving. Rob Metcalfe, Dani Navarro-Martinez, and I conducted an online experiment with people living in and around London. Participants earned money by completing a boring but demanding task involving moving as many sliders as possible to their midpoint in forty minutes. A randomly selected sample of participants were then told that they had done well on the task (irrespective of how well they had actually performed). At the end of the experiment, all participants were offered the chance to give some of their winnings to charity. You can guess what’s coming, right? Those who were told they had done well gave considerably less to charity than those given no feedback (34 percent compared to 50 percent).50 This suggests that donation behaviors depend on motivations to regulate the way we feel. When we feel good, we have less incentive to do good. Recall that this is an example of a permitting spillover. One way to create some benefit from this spillover is to give to charity when you are feeling less happy, which will give your happiness a boost.
You can set up defaults here, too. If you want to donate to charity to reduce inequalities you care about, select your favorites once and then set up a monthly direct debit that comes out on payday so you never miss the cash. Consider also the commitments you make. Deciding to end world hunger is a noble but lofty goal that may wind up making you more miserable than before because you can’t attain it right now. Instead, make smaller and more manageable commitments, such as pledging to spend an afternoon at a soup kitchen. By caring for others like this you can work toward acting on the fact that you care about reducing inequalities. And remember that making your commitments public makes it more likely you will keep them.
Here as elsewhere, don’t underestimate the power of social norms. A study on the Hadza hunter-gatherer society in Tanzania showed that people who were willing to donate sticks of honey to other adults in their camp were more likely to have friends who were willing to make donations, too.51 Giving spreads. Another study in the UK showed that putting a smiley or frowny face on a postcard to reflect a street’s recycling performance improved recycling rates overall by activating a social norm for recycling.52
Social norms for status have a particularly strong effect on caring about and for others. Overall, we should all seek to actively encourage what I will call conspicuous caring—or what Jan Abel Olsen and I have previously labeled “conspicuous altruism.”53 We were somewhat less embracing of it in our work, but I think that was a mistake. The evolution of my work has taught me that our motivations are less important than if we behave in ways that have good consequences. I care only about outcomes, and most specifically about the outcome of happiness. If we nudge people into caring about and for others and into being happier themselves by tapping into their concerns for how others perceive them, then all well and good. Conspicuous caring is similar to the well-established idea of conspicuous consumption, which is when people buy luxury items that display their wealth to other people.54
When the names of donors are displayed for donations with ranges of donation amounts, the majority of donors donate at exactly the lowest amount in a given range. Carnegie Mellon University publishes the names of donors who have given between $1,000 and $4,999 but does not specify what amount donors give. Almost 70 percent of these donations in 1988–89 were exactly $1,000. A similar policy operated for donations to the “Cameron Clan” at Carnegie Mellon, where the names of donors who had given between $500 and $999 were published. The average donation to this fund was $525. The Harvard Law School Fund had the same policy in 1993–94 and 93 percent of the donations were exactly $500.55
We are more likely to purchase environmentally friendly products when shopping in public as opposed to private, and we are more likely to give money to our community rather than keep it for ourselves when others know we’re giving it away.56 Princeton University students who can earn money for the Red Cross by clicking on a keyboard make many more clicks when they have to tell others how much they earned than if they do not.57 We’re also more generous when we are competing with other people about who can be the most generous—and more so than when we are competing for personal gain.58
All in all, I can get a sense of how rich you are from your job, where you live, the car you drive, and the clothes you wear. But I have no idea how generous you are unless you find some way of showing me. We should generally look to celebrate the ways in
which we help other people a bit more, not in a “look at me, aren’t I great” kind of way but in ways that make us all feel better off from the contributions that we each make. Charity might begin at home but it is encouraged by being shown.
Do
In terms of doing happiness, pay attention to those around you who have a small slice of the cake and for whom you can do something, whether this is giving to charity, signing up to be a mentor for vulnerable teenagers, or simply listening to an unhappy friend. So that you pay attention to the happiness that comes from any charitable donations you make, look to get reminded of your donations through newsletters and e-mails from the charity.
You know that being with others helps you to feel good, so being charitable alone (e.g., by making online donations) will not be as conducive to your experiences of pleasure and purpose as doing so with other people. As we know from the American Time Use Survey, volunteering is associated with greater pleasure and purpose when done with someone else than when done alone. When caring about others by redistributing to reduce inequalities, consider making joint contributions with other people.
There is also some evidence that distraction can make it more likely for you to blame others for their misfortune. Imagine being asked to think about the level of compensation to award to a guy called Mike whose foot was broken when a light fixture fell on it at a baseball stadium—but when he was sitting in a seat that he had “stolen.” If you were asked to read and recall a list of words while thinking about this judgment as compared to cracking straight on with determining the compensation, you would be more likely to give Mike less and blame him more if you had to recall the words after making the judgment.59 Insofar as you think that being focused allows you to act the way you wish toward others, avoid being distracted when caring about and for them.
Efficient production
Maybe you never procrastinate and perhaps you care about or for other people to just the right extent so far as your happiness is concerned. But whenever you think the allocation of your attention is out of kilter with being as happy as you can be, the three Ds can be used to help you find equilibrium. Decide will help you answer whatever question it is you have about your happiness, design will make it easier to implement the answer, and do will ensure your attentional resources are running smoothly. These are flexible principles that can be applied to all of your experiences in life.
Conclusion
It feels like we’ve taken quite a journey together. I hope it has been as pleasurable and purposeful for you as it has for me, and that you’ve learned something about how to attend to your happiness more effectively. I also hope that you have a little attentional energy left for some final reflections.
Happiness is all that matters in the end. When asked enough times why something matters, you will eventually end up by saying, “So that I can be happy.”1 Audrey Hepburn was spot-on when she said, “The most important thing is to enjoy your life—to be happy—it’s all that matters.” Moreover, we know that happiness causes a range of other good outcomes and that it’s also contagious. The pursuit of happiness is therefore a noble and very serious objective for us all.
If you are going to pursue or improve something, it makes sense to be clear about what you are shooting at. Happiness has most often been measured by global evaluations of life satisfaction, but it should, in contrast, be measured according to your feelings over time. The evaluative self is largely constructed, and I agree with Daniel Kahneman that we give it too much of a voice in determining our behavior—more than we give to our experiencing self. If nothing else, I hope this book has convinced you to listen more to your real feelings of happiness than to your reflections on how happy you think you are or ought to be.
Recall that feelings are the sentiments of pleasure and purpose associated with an experience, rather than the more common but narrower definition of feelings as emotions only. We should all be seeking to maximize those sentiments from cradle to grave for ourselves and all those we care about. Policy makers should look to do likewise, properly accounting for the fact that we care about the suffering of the worst off in society. Love, life, and the universe are about the pleasure-purpose principle.
The PPP can also explain a lot of behavior that might otherwise seem a bit odd. Please allow me one last foray into the world of amateur bodybuilding. (I apologize but it’s one of the three main aspects of my life, alongside my family and my work.) On the face of it, the competitions make no sense. These guys (and it is mostly guys) spend a long time training hard and eating lots of food to put as much size on as possible and then spend about three months dieting hard to keep as much muscle as possible while getting down to about 3 percent body fat. The final couple of weeks before competition are especially grueling: the endeavor to keep muscle and shed fat involves days of eating chicken and green beans over and over again. Then, in order to look pumped up onstage, the diet in the couple of days before competition consists of a jacket potato and an apple, alternated on the hour, every waking hour.
All of this for a few seconds onstage flexing your muscles, so tanned that you make the tango man look pasty and—best of all—wearing a very small thong. And all safe in the knowledge that you are unlikely to win; and even if you do, your prize will be a tacky trophy worth less than the cost of getting to the competition itself. But bodybuilding does make sense if you think in terms of the PPP over time. The dieting is only ever painful but it is simultaneously purposeful. There is purpose in pushing your body to its limits.
Sometimes, though, activities will be neither pleasurable nor purposeful. You may of course be willing to give up your own happiness now for happiness later or for the happiness of those whom you care about, but if you are not expecting to benefit from your current course of action, and don’t expect others to, either, then the answer is actually quite straightforward—change course. As the old joke goes: “I went to the doctor the other day. I said, ‘It hurts when I do that.’ He said, ‘Well, don’t do it.’” Too often, I think, we treat happiness as if it is fungible—as if, like money, it can be moved around relatively easily. But while saving money for a rainy day that never comes is sad, giving up happiness now for later happiness that never comes is truly tragic.
The economist in me considers attention in terms of the allocation of a scarce resource. The psychologist in me recognizes that your attention will be unconsciously pulled around by specific contexts as well as being allocated consciously. There are many potential departures from being as happy as we can but the production process of happiness allows you to reallocate your attention to become happier by deciding, designing, and doing.
Take a look at this sentence and count the number of f’s in it: “Finished files are the result of years of scientific study combined with the experience of years.” Did you count three, or perhaps six? There are six, but if you counted three, you are like most of the rest of us: our brains do not notice the f in of. Figuratively speaking, if paying attention to those three f’s (inputs into your happiness production process) were to make you miserable, then you would be wise to ignore them. But, equally, they might make you happier if only you noticed them. So you first need to pay careful attention to every word in the sentence (to every input into the production of happiness) and then to decide, design, and do your way to greater happiness by making it easier for you to pay attention to what makes you happier.
I have learned to deal with having a stammer in part by deciding to have realistic expectations about myself and my fluency, by designing my defaults and commitments in ways that force me to confront my speech problems, and by doing activities that stop my mind from wandering to exaggerated fears about my speech and other people’s reactions to it. The impact of some of your own concerns in life might not be a million miles away from the impact of a stammer, and so the solutions to reorienting your attention in ways that make you happier might also be quite similar.
In general, you c
an see by now that it is a lot easier for you to nudge yourself happier in small but effective ways than it is to try to “shove” yourself into becoming a whole new person or into adopting a wildly different lifestyle. If you recognize that much of what you do is governed by contextology and not just your own internal psychology, you can approach situations that will make you happier and avoid those that will make you unhappy. We have some control over the situations we place ourselves in and much less control over our predisposition to act in particular ways once we are in those situations.
I’ve learned that the word “attention” comes from the Latin for “reach toward.” I really hope you are now better placed to reach toward the ultimate prize of maximizing your happiness according to the PPP. You can reach toward it from this moment on. The more time you spend attending to the things that make you happy, the happier you will be. And stop doing things that make you miserable. Change what you do, not how you think. You are what you do, your happiness is what you attend to, and you should attend to what makes you and those whom you care about happy.
A gentle warm-down
Before you run off to get a coffee or something stronger, there is one more thing that I would like you to do. Remember the exercise at the beginning of the book? I’d like you to do it again. Well, sort of: now we can distinguish between pleasure and purpose.
So from the same list of twenty items you saw before, repeated below, what are the two that would bring you the most pleasure? What are the two that would bring you the most purpose? Whatever answers you gave and however they’ve changed from last time, I hope this book has helped you understand more clearly what will bring you pleasure on the one hand and purpose on the other.
Bring me the most pleasure
