How to find and make sense of happiness | Paul Dolan

foreign ly used survey questions that I'm going to base a lot of what I talk about evidence on is asking people overall how satisfied they are with their life these days or words to that effect you know kind of varies from survey to survey but that's the kind of essence of the question how satisfied are you with your life on a scale between zero and ten

that question about how satisfied they are with their life and then find out all sorts of other stuff about them what other stuff about them has the biggest effects on the scores they give the first thing to say is an academic is that we we always caveat what we say with we're trying to establish causal mechanisms right I want to show something causal about the effects

of jobs health housing income on happiness I don't want a correlation because that correlation could also mean that happier people have better jobs nicer houses and so on right what I want is a causal effect I want to I want to establish the treatment effect of having more money or or a better job or nicer house Better Health on people's happiness and it's hard to establish

causal mechanisms without randomized controlled trials right what I'd love to be able to do is to randomize people to different income levels or to different health status money doesn't make people happy unless you're poor poverty makes people miserable and I'm now going to start drawing attention to what I think is then going to be the fundamental thing that I want to say to you which is

about the role of attention the reason part of the reason why the lack of money makes people miserable is because they're paying attention to not having enough money they're paying attention to whether they can pay the bills feed the kids service to debt it's a very attention seeking condition as people get richer it's then it becomes truer that money doesn't make people happy when you get

to the average levels of income or a little bit above the relationship then between happiness and income becomes very flat because largely because you ceased to be paying attention to something in a negative way interestingly some of the evidence suggests and this is kind of a little bit um unclear or the evidence is mixed I should say that at very high levels of income happiness levels

might start to fall again and I think this is again due to an attentional phenomena that you then start paying attention to money have I got the right stocks and shares do I have the right portfolio have we bought a big enough house all these things that draw attention to themselves not always in positive ways and I think the income when you when say how people

should interpret evidence on income is that if anyone watches football or actually any sport where you have a referee often people will say the refs had a good game because he or she wasn't seen right so they didn't really notice the ref in the game and I think that's what income is like for us or ought to be like for us right when you're not paying

attention to it you probably have just enough money when you're paying attention to it you're probably not paying attention to it in good ways certainly not when you're poor maybe not even when you're rich so that's income largely dealt with but the fundamental point I want to make is that when you say anything does anything make someone happy I say well it depends on how much

attention you pay it so when uh people have talked about the determinants of Happiness they talked about the role of income in explaining happiness that's a bit like trying to explain how many widgets a firm makes by just looking at the inputs of land labor and so on but there's a production process in the middle yeah that converts those inputs into the outputs you can produce

more widgets by having more input and also by having a more efficient production process there's a production process of happiness that has been largely absent from our academic you know kind of conversations and I talk a lot about in happiness by Design which is the production process of attention right all of those inputs convert into happiness through the role of attention whether and in what ways

and for how long whether it's positively negative and so on the attention you pay to it determines how much that input affects your out your outcome of Happiness just like the production process of inputs producing the number of widgets so all the answers to all the questions will be it depends on how much attention is paid to it and in what ways and I think income

is one of those things you don't want to be paying attention to health is a fundamental determinant of people's happiness mental health in particular much more than physical health why because by and large not always and everywhere people get used to physical functioning problems in a way that they don't to mental health problems right mental health problems continually draw attention to themselves right if you've got

a if you were to have a injury that made you less mobile Enterprise that wasn't very painful in drawing attention to itself you would adapt relatively quickly to that but mental health problems anxiety depression you don't get used to them you don't get less depressed after a year than you were after a day it constantly draws attention to itself and if we're going to use happiness

data to inform policy that's not what I'm here to talk about today then we would give much greater priority to mental health conditions than we currently do because of the constant attention-seeking nature of those conditions housing quality how it's interesting we don't have much on housing quality we have we have on whether you rent or own lots of data on that some data showing that whether

people are some data sometimes showing that that people that own their own homes are happier than those that aren't but not always and everywhere what else there was jobs I mean unemployment is actually one of the biggest and longest lasting effects on people's happiness again if you're thinking about policy interventions then mitigating the harm of unemployment unemployment scars even when you're back in work again and

we think that's because again a kind of intentional phenomenon around security right if I've lost my job once I can lose it again even though I'm now back in work so from a standard economic metric you've got someone backing work everything's fine they're earning more money but from a well-being perspective they're less happy than they would have been had they not lost their job in the

first place I would advise you in Surprise this is going to be some sort of self-help class um if you're thinking about quitting something or doing something or you know leaving a job leaving a partner even that's where it gets a little dodgy um do it because because of our ability to make sense of stuff um actually I'll ask you to put your hands about something

else hands up if you're now with somebody as a you know as your partner boyfriend girlfriend whatever wife husband who's less good than someone you were with previously go and be honest no no one well yeah this really turns to whether you make it public or not that's a really uh of course but even in private even in private most people won't think they are because

we have an amazing capacity for cognitive dissonance we're able to interpret and understand things and explain things that's the key part to adaptation is explanation and when you have uncertainty you can't explain uncertainty there's no resolution to uncertainty through explanation so you have to resolve the uncertainty and then you can move on it's part of the reason why we see in the happiness data around marriage

and separation and then when you get the divorce is that there's an uptick after the separation ends because the separation is an attention seeking phase where we get back together again won't we divorce is final done move on we have an extraordinary ability to get over stuff in ways that we're not often able to forecast very very well that's uh good things and bad things but

the next the next layer beyond the conditions and circumstances is um ourselves and identities our personalities our expectations the kinds of people we are whether we're introvert extrovert um whether we have construct identities and stories a lot of our lives are lived in narratives and stories about ourselves and about our lives what role do they play in in our happiness we don't have actually lots of

good data on many of these identities it's much it's much easier to ask people questions about their income and about their health or it's just been more routine to do that over time than it has to ask them questions about um themselves their attitudes beliefs and so on um in the personality and I think people are familiar with the personality uh Dimensions you can you can

think of the there's a kind of big five um that you might think of as ocean which is openness conscientiousness extroversion agreeableness and neuroticism uh unsurprisingly neurotics are less happy extroverts report being happier than introverts we don't have very much good data but of course how we how we deal with our conditions are now and how we deal with our circumstances will be a function of

our expectations and the kind of people we are um we have you know some data showing this would be unsurprising that if you move up the social Mobility ladder there are some small gains but moving down the social Mobility ladder there are significant losses right much greater than the gains from moving up right moving down generally is a bad thing right to see your income Fall

by 10 compared to rise by 10 is much much more painful I want to then move on to the next layer which is what we do right and when we start measuring happiness in the ways that I advocate in happiness by Design which is much more experiential much more about asking people how happy they are when they're going about their daily lives right not when they're

reflecting on how satisfied they are with it whatever that answer might mean in the two seconds and it takes them to answer it but when we when we drill down into finding out what people do who they're with and what they're thinking about in their minds then I think we get a better and more rich rich measure of the flow of experience um and there's anyone

who's seen Happiness by Design knows that I talk about pleasure and purpose as the twin sets of experiences we're not only interested in being happy in a fun sense but we also want to be happy in a fulfillment worthwhileness meaningful sense unhappy lives are ones that contain the right balance between those two things but when we look at the activities that people engage in most of

the evidence is is really obvious but overlooked in the sense that everyone when I when I say the following things to you you're going to say no Professor the lse is telling me that um and I'll say well why aren't you doing more of it then right and again I need to be careful because there's significant variation across individuals right any anyone who says there's a

one-size-fits-all approach to happiness is probably sending you snake oil so my one size fits-all approach to happiness is to say that listen to more music I mean the the evidence on music is is overwhelming I mean it literally lights the whole brain up um in ways that no other stimulus can and not only at the time that you're listening to the music but but for some

time they're they're thereafter listen to music that you enjoy obviously that not someone else forces you to listen to um like your parents or something um I'm trying to get my kids to like the music it's really hard um I will win um in the end um so they can be their authentic selves uh what was I talking about right yes so music um laughter that's

a I mean that's a really it's really interesting that we can prescribe laughter on the NHS now social prescriptions for laughter is kind of good on good good on the one hand that it's evidence-based but a bit sad on the other hand that you need a prescription to laugh obvious but overlooked right we're not building it into our daily daily lives and daily experiences um going

Outdoors being around nature biophilia it's called that's you know that's kind of good for us even in ways that we might not predict having new experiences that's that's the reason why time passes so slowly for kids because every day is a new experience to them when you get to our ages if it takes a same it's like waiting for death um uh well yeah I've still

I've still got I still have to come to death don't worry um uh I'll finish finish on death at the end um leave you with a really positive note to go away um help other people I cannot impress upon you enough how selfish helping other people is and how we should be celebrating that selfishness much more than we do and actually this is where we do

have good randomized control evidence but if you tap into the personal benefits of pro-sociality you get more of it for longer if you draw attention to volunteers the benefits that they're going to get from volunteering they help other people for more and for longer and yet we have this narrative around charity of it being something that is a hierarchy that at the top of this hierarchy

is the sort of self-flagellation the cleanse of any personal benefit altruism I think that's harmful it's harmful for getting more pro-sociality so being more transparent it's really interesting that I can observe lots of things about you right um obviously age and race and so on but also probably your income levels and other other things but how generous you are is something that's unobservable right if we

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