by Paul Dolan
Hanging out with highly motivated people will certainly help you create the social norm to procrastinate less by unconsciously guiding you to be more like those in your reference group. Take procrastination over retirement savings. If colleagues working in the same department as you are offered $20 for attending a fair about planning for retirement, you are three times more likely to attend—even though you will not get paid yourself—than if your colleagues are not incentivized to attend. Moreover, you will also be more likely to open and keep open a tax-deferred retirement account.20 When you have a project to complete, spend some time with the purpose engines in your friendship group. Equally, when the pressure is off, hang out with the pleasure machines.
Do
And finally, how might you pay more attention to what you are doing? We generally procrastinate over purposeful activities, like work or study, and awkward situations, like delivering bad news to someone.21 You therefore need to get right into engaging in these activities. If you have to deliver some bad news to different staff members, for example, set aside some time to do so in one hit rather than spreading it out over a day. I am not especially prone to procrastination but, in getting this book finished, I forced myself to get up before the rest of the family and get in a couple of hours of work while they were still sleeping. In so doing, I have turned myself from a night owl to a morning lark (though having kids had pretty much forced me to be a morning person already).
Also think about how you can better attend to others. Being with others when you’re doing almost anything increases pleasure and purpose, so remember to pay attention to the people you may be with when you finally get around to whatever you have been procrastinating about. But don’t let them distract you, of course, so perhaps consider giving each other feedback on the tasks you’ve been procrastinating about. Employees who report that they receive information about how well they are performing at work are more likely to say that they experience high meaningfulness while they are working, so this is a purpose-driven route out of procrastinating.22 Also recall that conversations about experiences are pleasurable, so conversing about your experiences getting work done could be a way to promote pleasure, too.
Distraction will, of course, interrupt attending to experiences; one survey reported that over half of a sample of three hundred online survey participants reported using the Internet to procrastinate—and these are just the people who would have been consciously attending to doing so.23 So this is yet further reason to work offline when you can. There are plenty of coffee shops without the Internet and apps that prevent you from accessing the Web.
Distribute more
Many of us might be happier from doing more for other people. I am not suggesting that you immediately start giving more money to charity or rush out to volunteer but these are certainly the kinds of activities you could consider doing, even if you ultimately decide against it.
All of us care about our own happiness, but we also care about the distribution of happiness among other people. This is distinct from the effects that others have on what you do and how you feel, as discussed under social norms in chapter 6. Rather, it refers to the effects that other people’s happiness in itself has on you.
There are many good reasons for wanting to spread happiness around. First of all, you could be made happier by reducing inequalities in society that you consider to be unjust, without any direct concern for any specific groups or individuals. This is caring about others. Second, you might feel happier from directly helping others, without any explicit concern for the impact this has on inequalities in society. This is caring for others. Let us first consider these motivations in turn, since the distinction affects what we might do in addressing them.
Concerns for inequalities
In the figure below, the cake on the left is bigger than the one on the right, and the light gray slice on the left is bigger, too. So if only size matters, you would prefer the slice on the left. But the light gray slice on the left is smaller than one of the other slices and this might upset you. So you might well be happier with the smaller slice on the right because it is the same size as the other slices. If the cake on the right were any smaller, though, you might prefer the slice on the left. Herein lays the trade-off between size on the one hand and distribution on the other.
With many wonderful colleagues over many years, I have conducted numerous studies that show that we care greatly about the health of other people.24 I got into this research because, along with other academics around that time, such as Alan Williams, I recognized that citizens and policy makers care about who gets which slices of health benefits, as well as how big the cake is overall. If I were doing these studies now, I would focus more directly on the distribution of happiness, but I was much more immersed in health issues a decade ago. Fortunately, though, health is an important input into the happiness production process, and what we know about people’s preferences regarding the distribution of health in society can inform what we infer about their preferences for distributing other key inputs, as well as happiness itself.
At the time I started this research in the mid 1990s, there were no large-scale studies of the public’s preferences about the distribution of health benefits. So I basically began asking as many people as I could get research funding for lots of questions about how to distribute health benefits. In various studies using a range of methods, including discussion groups and surveys, I have found that the general public do care about how much health can be generated by health and other policy interventions; they care about the size of the health cake. But they also prefer a more equal distribution of health: a more equal cut of the slices.25 Similar findings have been found in studies that investigate preferences for the distribution of income in society.26
More recently, and in one of the largest studies into what the public think about equity in health, Aki Tsuchiya and I, along with other colleagues at the University of Sheffield, conducted a study in which six hundred members of the UK general population were asked a series of binary choices. The basic setup was that one choice was preferred from a health-maximizing perspective and the other was preferred from another perspective, such as the reduction of inequalities. Encouragingly, the results suggest most members of the general public are sensitive to the trade-offs they are asked to make: they care about reducing inequalities in health when the sacrifice in overall health is not too great as they see it, but then they switch to maximizing health when they are asked to give up too much health.27
There have been far fewer studies that have focused on the general public’s preferences about the distribution of happiness itself. In work supported by the Office for National Statistics, Rob Metcalfe and I asked nearly one thousand members of the UK general public in face-to-face interviews the following question:
Which do you think is better, a policy which achieves a reasonable level of well-being for everyone, or a policy which leads to higher total well-being overall, but results in high well-being for some people and low well-being for others?
Eighty-nine percent chose the first option, suggesting that people care about the distribution of happiness more than they do about the total amount of happiness overall.
We then asked another one thousand people, this time in an online survey, two questions about efficiency-equality trade-offs in life satisfaction of the kinds that have been asked about health:
Imagine that, from policy 1, one person has a life satisfaction rating of 5 and another has a rating of 9. From policy 2, one person has a rating of 6 and another has a rating of 7. Which of the two policies brings about the best outcome?
Imagine that, from policy 1, one person has a life satisfaction rating of 2 and another has a rating of 6. From policy 2, one person has a rating of 3 and another has a rating of 4. Which of the two policies brings about the best outcome?
In both questions, there was a clear preference for narrowing the gap in happiness. Near
ly two out of every three participants chose the second option, with only about one in seven people strongly preferring the first (the remaining participants were undecided about which option to pick).
But—and it is a pretty big but—all of these studies are also subject to focusing effects because people are asked to think about how much the distribution of health and happiness in society matter in order to find out how much it matters, which (as you know by now) could make it seem like they matter more than they do. Along these lines, we have shown that people’s preferences about the ideal distribution of health depend on what the current distribution looks like.28 All of these issues are extremely important to consider when deciding whether and how to include public preferences in resource allocation decisions. The results of empirical studies need to be handled with a considerable degree of caution. As things stand, I am confident that we are affected by, and do care about, the distribution of happiness in society, even if I can’t be quite so confident about the precise trade-offs between the size of the cake and the distribution of its slices.
Fortunately, there might be more “factual” information we can rely on to make decisions. While economic growth is associated with a reduction in the gap between the happiest and the least happy people within developed countries, rising income inequality acts as a barrier to achieving greater happiness equality.29 Americans and Brits seem to be happier during periods when inequalities in income are lower.30 Happiness is also higher in Japan, urban China, and Latin America when inequalities are lower.31 In contrast, in rural China greater inequality has been associated with greater life satisfaction.32 This suggests that income inequality may sometimes serve as a signal of opportunity, depending on how fair the opportunities to earn more are perceived to be.
Overall, though, it makes sense from a happiness-maximizing perspective to care about helping those who are in the worst-off sections of society, especially when those with the smaller slice of the cake have little opportunity to get a bigger slice. And given that more equal societies are generally happier, we might not need preference data at all to show the benefits of caring about others.
Helping others
In addition to feeling better when unfair inequalities are reduced, we also feel better when we more directly care for others. We saw in chapter 2 that people who volunteer experience a fair dose of purpose from doing so. In other studies, people who volunteer, help others, and give to charity report greater life satisfaction and better moods than others.33 But, as elsewhere, we need to exercise some caution in making inferences about causality from studies that show correlations between happiness and other outcomes: those who do more for others might also be happier to begin with. Having said that, there does appear to be good evidence for the causal effects on happiness from caring for others. Imagine being given the luxury to spend $20 of someone else’s money today. If you were told to spend it on someone else, you would be happier than if you were told to spend it on yourself.34
There is also evidence that giving your time away to help others, as in volunteering, will help you to feel less time pressed.35 So devoting some of your time to purposeful activities can in fact make you feel as if you have more time overall. Caring for others by being with them can also help to reduce loneliness, both on your part and on the part of the people you spend time with. Loneliness, like happiness, is contagious: it spreads even more strongly than feelings of connectedness with others.36 Loneliness is also horrible for your health. Older adults who feel that they lack companionship, are left out, or are isolated from others are more likely to die in the next six years, largely because loneliness has a direct and detrimental impact upon their health.37 Simply giving others the opportunity to be with you is good for your health and happiness as well as for theirs.
A major part of why we all care for others is because it makes us feel good about ourselves. When Les, Poppy, or Stanley is feeling down, I feel down, too. So I try to cheer them up, partly because I care about them and partly because it makes me happier. As I think Mark Twain said, “The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer someone else up.” There is a suggestion in the literature on charitable giving that the “purchase” of warm glow—the positive feelings obtained from helping others—is the principal reason for giving.38 Warm glow strikes me as an excellent example of a good sentiment. And there is absolutely nothing wrong in saying that the reason you care for other people is because it makes you feel good. We feel good about helping others in much the same way that we feel good about having just finished a work project, with the added bonus that someone else benefits, too (which is not always the case with work projects).
Many of us do a great deal that feels purposeful and that is good not just for ourselves but also for our families and our friends. You may even feel from time to time that you are sacrificing your own happiness for those you care about, and that other people are doing likewise for you—and that none of you resent doing so. In my own family, Les and I feel we are making various sacrifices of our own happiness for each other’s happiness and especially for the happiness of Poppy and Stanley. It could be argued that having children in the first place is a sacrifice of happiness for the sake of the evolution of our species but, as you now know, I think the addition of purpose to our experiences makes it less of a sacrifice. But beyond that, it feels as if I sometimes give up both pleasure and purpose for my kids’ happiness, and Les definitely does. We are not especially self-sacrificing people, but we do care for our kids by attending to their happiness, and sometimes more than to our own.
I have no great desire to dig deeper into the underlying motivations for why people generally care for one another, since this has been done to death elsewhere. Suffice it to say here that it is generally to your evolutionary advantage to help other people on the assumption that, if roles were reversed, they would help you, too. Reciprocity—scratching someone else’s back if they would scratch yours—is good for your survival; being completely selfish or completely selfless much less so.39
In 1984, Gerald Wilkinson set out to demonstrate this phenomenon among vampire bats. Vampire bats die quite quickly if they don’t eat, reaching a dangerously low body weight in just twenty-four hours. Fortunately for them, they have the lovely habit of regurgitating blood into other vampire bats’ mouths. Usually they do so into their relatives’ mouths, but sometimes they share with non–family members. To find out whether reciprocal forces were operating among vampire bats, Wilkinson took nine mostly unrelated bats from California and put them in a small cage. Each evening, eight of the bats were allowed to feed and one bat had to go hungry. When the hungry bat was reintroduced into the group, some of the other bats would regurgitate into the starved bat’s mouth, even though they weren’t genetically related. Those who regurgitated were subsequently more likely to be fed by the bat they had previously fed when it was their turn to be left out of the evening feed.40 Not all researchers agree that there is conclusive evidence to state that reciprocity operates among nonhuman animals, but you get the point. If vampire bats understand reciprocity, there is nothing stopping us.
It is certainly possible to care too much, though. Children who care for people in their household who are elderly, sick, or disabled are consequently less happy with their lives, more likely to be bullied, and do worse at school than their peers.41 People who have dedicated their careers to caring for others in stressful situations, such as emergency care nurses and social workers, are at risk of overwhelming stress and burnout—an effect dubbed “compassion fatigue.”42 It is also possible that kindness could arouse suspicion in the recipients. For example, medical professionals are often suspicious that living organ donors who are not related to the organ recipient may be emotionally imbalanced. Even if they are related, there can still be lingering suspicions that their family is putting undue pressure on them to donate their organs.43
I will make the same point about your sacrifices of happiness for other peo
ple as I made about those sacrifices for yourself in the future. You need to be as confident as you can be that the sacrifice will be worth it: that those other people you care for so much really will be made happier from your own sacrifice. Fortunately, given that caring for others feels purposeful, you don’t have to dwell too long on the “tough choices” of sacrifices and can focus instead on the “easier choices” of making yourself—and other people—happier.
Departures from happiness
Since we generally get a little more pleasure and a whole lot more purpose out of our experiences when they are to the benefit of others as well as to ourselves, it’s intriguing why we don’t do more for others, especially those outside of our families and close friends. My strong suspicion is that we allow mistakes about the sources of happiness to get in the way of us doing more for others, such as the idea that personal spending will bring us more pleasure and purpose than prosocial spending. As evidence of this, people who heard about the experiment where participants were made happier by spending $20 on someone else rather than spending it on themselves thought it would have been the other way around.
We may also make mistaken projections when our attention is focused on a decision rather than its consequences. We focus on the financial difference between keeping $20 to spend on ourselves and giving it away by spending it an others rather than on the happiness we would experience from each of these actions. The label of the activity “helping others,” does not lend itself to thinking about our own happiness, either; rather, it mistakenly focuses attention on how happy other people will be from our actions.