You say that? Children don't impact what happiness possibly. I mean, that today, that what are you going to do? And that kind of got me worried, I have to say.
Dr. Tali Sherritt, a leading expert on human decision-making, optimism, and emotion. And her TED-TOT has received over 14 million views. I'm going to talk to you about optimism, kids and children, for happiest and most optimistic.
Then it goes down and reaches rock bottom in your midlife. I'm 30 now, so I'm heading right down to rock bottom as we speak. Any advice? Yes, absolutely.
So... One of the startling things is to talk about how one tiny move up on the optimism scale is worth an extra $33,000 a year in summary. It's quite something. So, optimists, this is what they usually do.
If something went well, they usually interpret that as something about them that caused this positive outcome, pessimists do the exact opposite. I got the job, but really because they didn't have any other pretenders. Is that negative explanatory style of the road to depression? You had a really tight link between depression and pessimism.
The question becomes, well, how do I enhance optimism? So there's a few ways to do it. I was thinking that everything you do is for happiness. But happiness is actually one of three factors that matter.
So one is happiness. The second is meaning. And then there's a third factor that's also really interesting, which is... On the back of your book here, the optimism bias that says, you're one of the most innovative neuroscientists at work today.
How would you sort of define or categorize your own professional background? So I guess I call myself a cognitive neuroscientist, which is really a mix of psychology and neuroscience, and I mix in behavioral economics as well. So it's really a mix of all of that. So I'm interested in how, why human behavior they do, and why do they have the thoughts that they have and the feelings that they have.
And I think to understand that, you do want to understand what's going on inside the brain but then there's other fields that give you a lot of really interesting insight, including psychology and behavioral economics. Even things like law as well, sociology, philosophy. So it's really a kind of interdisciplinary adventure. And you studied both neuroscience and psychology at university and post grad?
Yeah, so I did my undergrad in economics and psychology. And in fact, I did that because at the time, neuroscience was not available for an undergrad degree in Israel in the whole of the country. So that wasn't even an option. Yes, this was a kind of a long time ago.
And then for my PhD, I did cognitive neuroscience, which is neuroscience and psychology mixed together. What was compelling on personal level two about studying those topics? Why of all the things you could have pursued? Why those things?
Very early on, I was just really interested in human behavior. It's about understanding yourself but also understanding other people around you. And I think it's one of the most intriguing topics. And the brain was kind of a mysterious kind of organ that is orchestrating all of that.
So I think it was just an interest in the world around you and people in it. Are there some like, when you started studying neuroscience and psychology, whether some like fundamentals about the nature of life and the nature of human beings, that, I'm not sure there's so many of them, but whether any real fundamentals that were debunked or reversed as it relates to your own personal perspective, whether it's about personal responsibility or about, I don't know, agency or autonomy about how much control we have or how much influence we have over our happiness, whether anything foundational that had a real impact on your personal life. You know, there's one thing that recently is just something that I recently changed my mind on. And that was actually while writing the current book that I'm writing, which I'm writing together with Cass Einstein, who is the co-author of Nudge.
And it was actually in fact about happiness. Because, and I remember this clearly, I was in a workshop at the LSC and they did a survey. They asked who thinks that happiness is the most important thing, right? That everything you do is for happiness.
And you know, everyone had to stand on a scale. If you think like, it's all about happiness, stand here. And if you think it's not at all, stand here. And I was standing here, I was thinking anything that we do, we do for happiness and that, all that, that matters.
And while writing this book, actually, we both came to the conclusion. And for me, it was a change of mind. The happiness is actually one of three factors that matter. So one is happiness.
The second is meaning. A lot of things you do because it gives you meaning. And it doesn't necessarily give you happiness. Sometimes the two go hand in hand, right?
But sometimes it doesn't. So you could do work that's meaningful and it doesn't necessarily give you happiness and sometimes it does. And then there's a third factor. There's also really interesting, which is called the psychological rich life, which is basically variety.
A lot of people just do things for diversity, for variety, to try a lot of different things. And again, sometimes it goes hands and hands with meaning and happiness, but sometimes it doesn't. And that kind of explains why many times we make choices that we understand is not necessarily going to gain us more happiness. But it will gain us some other thing, one of these two other things, that together, I think, is what brings a good life, right?
And that is something I think I changed my mind on, that we're not actually motivated for happiness, probably defined as a good feeling, kind of joy. Why variety? Why do humans care about having variety in their life? I mean, there's kind of the unconscious evolutionary reason.
Give me that one. So I think it's exploration, right? To move forward, both as an individual and as a society, we have to explore a lot of different things. Some of these things are not necessarily going to give you happiness immediately or for you at all.
But a lot of times, if you explore a lot of things, you will find something that is going to be very important, maybe for yourself, maybe for our species. I always give kind of the really simple example of our ancestors leaving Africa to explore the rest of the world, right? They had, I mean, why would they do that? I mean, either they thought there was something better for them to find, right?
And it was probably very hard to do. But that's just kind of an example of exploration, right? You're trying different things. And I can see it in my own life, right?
I often do something and then I kind of, okay, I had enough with this. Let's try something else. And so variety is kind of a factor that I'm trying to maximize. It's kind of a balance, right?
It's exploration and exploitation, right? So you need to do a little bit of exploitation because if you found something that works and something that you're good at, you don't want to just leave it be. But on the other hand, if you just stick with one thing, you may be missing a whole other, a lot of different things. It's like farming and hunting.
So the analogy from that book, who moved my cheese. When I think about variety, my brain was going to lie to some people that get so caught up in their comfort zones, that they never go exploring. And so the thought that would be motivated or fulfilled by variety, by new things, by adventure seems to sit in conflict with a lot of people that I know that are like stuck in a situation and maybe not happy. But they're more comfort in the known than they are leaving that place and venturing out.
Right, because exploration is risky because there's uncertainty. You don't know what's going to happen. Risk means that there's a high likelihood of both good and bad and you just don't know where it's going to go. And so that can cause fear.
Uncertainty is a state that usually people don't like and don't enjoy. And that's definitely something that keeps you in place. And in fact, one of the points that we make is that it seems that people are not making enough change in their life. That a lot of times if people think about changing something in their life, maybe it's a relationship, maybe it's a profession, it could be something stupid like the color of your hair or something like that.
There's a great, fun little study that was conducted by the Freakonomic Stephen Levy. What he did, he wanted to see if, on average, making a change, when you think you might want to make a change. This is not just like, oh, I think you should get divorced when you're not even thinking about it. But when you're thinking about a specific change, on average, are you more likely to be happy if you go ahead with a change or not?
And this is a tricky thing to study because normally you could say, well, let's test people. Let's ask them how happy they are before and after they decide to make a change after they made a change. And then also let's do the same for people who didn't make a change and see who's happier. Well, that's not going to work because people who go on and make a change, they probably had more reason to do it, right?
So it's not kind of a good experimental design. So he wanted to randomize whether people are going to make changes or not. So what he did is he had people go online and he asked them, are you thinking about a change? And it could be small and it could be big.
And they said what the change was. And then he had them flip a virtual coin. So heads, you go with a change, you know, you take the new job, tails you don't. The likelihood that people would change if they got to the heads, the change was 25% more than the people who didn't.
So basically people were thinking about a change, they did it, they flip the coin, if they got the change, they're more likely to have a change. And indeed people who went actually and committed and did the change were happier than people who didn't. So that kind of suggests that we're probably not making enough changes than we should be. Potentially because it's scary, right?
Trying something new is scary and sometimes it's not going to work. I think that's so much in friends of mine and lots of DMs from young people who are in a situation where it's certain but it's miserable and they have a potential option to like go through that dark chasm to this potentially better place but they're choosing to stay in a certain miserable situation, whether it's a relationship, a job, whatever it might be. And I've always felt that our relationship with uncertainty has a huge sway on our overall outcomes. And what I mean by that is people who are okay with jumping into that sort of dark hole where there isn't certainty about their outcomes and just persisting because they'd rather not be in certain misery, end up having better lives.
But I don't know how to get people to have a better relationship with uncertainty. I mean, that's a compelling argument. I can say to them, but you know, just that's in fact, because I read your books aren't enough. There needs to be some kind of emotional pitch to them, to get them to dive those first and second to any advice.
Yeah, that's a really good question. First of all, I mean, you're absolutely right. There's individual differences on how comfortable we are with uncertainty and how comfortable we are with taking risks. So I think probably it would be something like, to some extent, helping them through the change.
So it might be difficult to change people's relationship with uncertainty in a global general way, but perhaps every single time when there's a specific issue in front of them of what they want to change, kind of like helping them along the way with that change, holding them in their hand, you know, so to speak, is probably the only thing that you can do, right? To be like, I'm here for you, whether it's a friend or a mentor. But in their mind in that moment, the thing that's causing the resistance, you describe it as fear, right? Yeah.
So what's the opposite of fear? Is it hope? You know, it's not an opposite, but I think it is something that will be likely to drive you to take that step. And it's not so much just hope.
It's optimism, which kind of takes us to some of my research. So okay, what's the difference between hope and optimism? So hope is you want something to happen in the future, right? I want to get that job.
I want to find that relationship. Optimism is believing that I'm likely to get that job. I'm likely to find that wonderful relationship. And it's absolutely true that if you're optimistic, you think this is going to go somewhere good, then you're more likely to go ahead and try that, which makes sense, right?
Because my expectation is going to change my actions. And my actions is going to change my outcomes, right? Because if I think, well, I am going to try for this competition, because I think I'm likely to get something, then I go ahead and I try. If I think, well, there's no chance I don't try, and so of course I'm not going to get it.
So it's a bit of a self fulfilling optimism. And so then the question becomes, if I go back to your question, then the question becomes, well, how do I enhance optimism, right? So there's actually, and it's a good idea, because enhancing optimism will cause you to take more risk. I want to know how to enhance optimism with my team members, my companies.
So there's a few ways to do it. One way is a sense of control. We are more optimistic about things that we believe we have control over, because we do think that when we have control, that means we can steer the wheel in the right direction, right? And so if we can cause people to get a sense that they have control, and if it's about your team, for example, let's say there's a project that you want someone to work on, so you can just tell them to do that project, or you can have them choose to do that project, right?
And you can guide them to the choice that you think is correct. But if they believe that they made the choice, that enhances the sense of agency, enhances the change of the sense of control, and they become more committed to that option. So you can give them, oh, well, there's two options, two projects you can work on, which one do you prefer? And again, you can frame it in a way that maybe perhaps will make them more likely to choose one over the other.
But once they made the choice, it's amazing. We've done studies on this, where we give people options, for example, going on holiday. Do you want to go to France or Rome, Thailand or Hawaii? If they make a choice, there are two things that are exactly, they want it the same.
They really want to go Hawaii, they really want to go to Florida. But once they make a choice, seconds after making a choice, they now believe that Hawaii is much better than they did just a few seconds ago before making a choice, and the Florida is not that great, right? Because once you make a choice, immediately, your preferences change. You rationalize why that choice was great, and now you're more committed to it.
So that's true for holidays, but it can be true for work as well, right? Should I go work on project A or B? If I make the choice, I become more committed, and it doesn't work if someone else makes a choice for you. If someone else makes a choice for you, don't get into this rationalization mode, where you have to rationalize your choice, because it wasn't your choice.
And once I feel I have control, then that also enhances my expectations of how good it's going to be. But it also boosts your happiness, right? Because I read about the study in Care Homes, where they had an agency floor in the other floor, where people didn't feel like they had a lot of agency and choice over their lives, and there was a pretty significant impact on levels of happiness, right? Yes, so what they did is they gave them some plans.
Is that the study? Yes, absolutely. So when we feel we have control, we have agency that enhances well-being. When we feel our agency has been restricted, that causes anxiety, right?
And this is one of the reasons that people are quite anxious on planes. It's not just because we fear the worse, but because we have no control at all, right? No control about when are we going to get there? What are we going to eat, right?
And that causes a lot of anxiety. So by enhancing agency and control, you are lifting people's well-being, happiness, and reducing stress and anxiety. Yeah, and that study with the plans, it works with kids as well, right? You can give kids some plans to take care of, or have kids make their own salads, they'll be more likely to eat it.
So that's just a few examples. What could, I mean, we're not part of the innovation team at any airline or anything, but I was just wondering in the planning example, what could we do then to reduce anxiety for passengers? I was thinking, you know, if we told them before take off, listen, if you need to land for any reason, it's not that we necessarily will, but as you say in that study with the care homes, it's about giving them the perception that they have control versus actually giving them control. Yeah, okay.
So there's a couple of things that they do, and some of them work for also some of the reasons, but in a funny way, it also enhances sense of control. So one thing that the other ones do that I think is great is when you can see the equipment, the pilot view, you know, that for some, I mean, obviously you don't have control, but first of all, it reduces uncertainty. I mean, I really like to look at that, like what height am I in? So that's, and although you know you don't have control, that gives you a sense of reducing certainty in some weird way, also enhances a sense of control.
I have to say, I was on a plane one day, flying, I don't want to see the airline, but I was flying, and I woke up in the middle of the night on a plane, and I was turbulent, and I was convinced that we were going down. I was convinced, I looked out the window, and we were getting closer and closer to the clouds, and I did my quick math. We're flying from New York to London with roughly 3000 to the flight. We're going down, that means we're going down in the sea, and I have about 10 minutes on that plane where I have completed that.
We're getting closer to the clouds. Why would we be getting closer to the clouds? And then I click on the little thing that you've described, the little flight map thing, and it says we're at 30,000 feet, and we're not moving. And I go, I'm going back to sleep.
Very relaxing. The clouds are getting closer to us. Yeah. I mean, whoever thought that was a good idea, obviously, understands psychology.
The other thing that I like that they do is, actually, they did, and I mentioned that in one of the books, and it's not really related to control, but it relates to another really important part of psychology, which is, so normally at the beginning, you're about to go to get on the flight, and they have to go over all the safety instructions, and normally no one would listen, right, because it was all about in the state of emergency, then you have to do this and that, and no one wants to think about the state of emergency, right? So you kind of like shut down. They're like, OK, Twitter, Facebook. And so what they did is, they, and especially Virgin, did this, they switched it.
So it was very entertaining, very light, and it was all about the destination. It was all about, it wasn't about being in the sky and having an emergency state, which is negative, and I don't want my attention to go there. I don't want to think about it. It was about let's think about when you land, and it's going to be the islands, and the beach, and so on.
And they kind of put the information that you need to know within this very light entertaining, positive, humorous video. And the number of people that watched that, that attended, has gone up really tremendously. And in fact, people started watching it at home before they even got a click, right, on YouTube. So that's another really interesting thing.
And that goes to another principle that we find a lot in our work, which is that people take in positive information about their own future, much more than negative information about their own future. So if I'm starting, if I will tell you, you know, I think your podcast listening numbers is going to go down, you'll be like, well, she doesn't know what she's talking about, right? But if I say, oh, I think this is great, and it's only going to go up more and more with time. You'd be like, yeah, she's probably right, and become more confident.
So that's on average. People tend to take positive information to update their beliefs more than negative. It doesn't mean that we don't listen to negative information about our own future, but on average, we see that you learn more from unexpected positive information about the future. That somewhat confirms some of the things that I read in your second book, The Influential Mind, where I remember watching YouTube video where you were in it and they were x-raying.
Is that what they call it when they look at someone's brain? Scanning someone's brain. Scanning in an MRI. Yeah, like an MRI scan.
Scanning someone's brain. As you told them that you agreed with their beliefs versus when you told them that you kind of disagreed with their beliefs. And when you agreed with their beliefs, their brain lit up and seemed to be really receptive. And then when you told them you disagreed with their beliefs, their brain seemed to kind of just be frozen.
And this is really useful for when you're thinking about having a conversation, trying to influence or have a conversation with your partner, or get through to someone, that starting with a great ability or something where you make them feel heard and seen and understood is a good way to open them up to information. Yeah, so this relates to something that's known as a confirmation bias. So the confirmation bias is our tendency to look for information that confirms what we believe and to use information, that confirms what we believe, to become even more confident and even more kind of in our belief. And yeah, so we did a study where we had people come into our lab in pairs and they had to make a financial decision together.
In this case, they had to assess the value of a real estate. So they made the decisions and we did scan the brains at the same time and they were just in two separate scanners but they could interact over the Wi-Fi. And they saw like a real estate and they had to stay how much it's worth and they could see what the other person said and if they agreed with them or not. And it's exactly what you said.
I'm agreeing with you. When they agreed, your brain is like, well, when they agreed and they gave them more information about how confident I am and so on. So when someone agreed, the other person's brain showed activity that suggested they were encoding the information coming from the agreeing partner. They were using it to update their beliefs and they were becoming more confident.
But when someone disagreed, they kind of as you exactly let you said, they shut down, they weren't listening, they weren't using this information. They were like, well, they don't know what they talk about and they were, that's it. And as you said, we feel that like in real life all the time. You know, and it's a problem because really are kind of instinct when someone disagrees with us is usually to say, well, listen, you're wrong.
Let me explain. I'll explain why you're wrong here. Look at the data, look at the figures and so on. And what happens, the person in front of us is shutting down.
A lot of times what they're doing is that the other person is starting to think about other reasons why actually they're right and the other person's wrong. But if I start with something where we have common ground, then you're more likely to listen to me. You're more likely to see me as an agreeing partner and be more open to what I'm going to say next. And there's one example that I really like is actually about vaccines.
And this was before COVID. So it was about childhood vaccines. So a lot of parents don't want to vaccinate their kids because of the alleged link to autism. And so usually they would go to the doctor's office and the doctor said, well, look, there's no link between the two and here I'll show you the figures of data, the science.
And it didn't really work. The parents usually didn't change their mind. So instead, there's a group of scientists that said, let's see if we can go a different route. We won't actually mention anything about what we disagree, which is the relationship to autism.
Instead, we will simply highlight what we already agree on, which is that these vaccines protect kids from potentially deadly disease, which is not something that the parents disagreed on, but that seems to have been forgotten in the debate, right? While they were focusing on what they disagreed on. So by focusing on that, on what they agreed on, which is the vaccines will protect kids from deadly diseases, they were three times more likely to change the parents' intention of vaccinating the kids. So I think this means if we're in a conversation about should we invest in this company or that company and we're kind of disagreeing about something, is there a different route to get to the decision that we want without focusing there?
Are there other things that we agree on that would take us to the same point? And then there's another method, which is just to highlight the commonalities between us. That's also helpful. You know, perhaps there's something, I mean, we have a goal in common.
We have a motivation in common. Maybe there's something in our background, which is similar. And that also always makes people more likely to listen to you and to use what you're saying. So I was actually, as you were saying, I was thinking about a tweet I saw the other day where Mark Cuban was having an argument with someone else on Twitter.
And he started his response to them with wrong, full stop, and then make his point. And you see that a lot where someone will start a sentence with I disagree, full stop, and then make their point. I'm just going to be completely honest because who can, I mean, I'm somebody that is imperfect and full of full. When someone does that with me, when they literally start a sentence with wrong, or I disagree, it's instant combat.
And like, I'm well aware of it, so maybe it doesn't come up as much in me, but I remember, I can go back, I can remember three years ago, where I was when someone said to me, when we're having a conversation, and they went wrong, full stop. And then they made their point. Regardless of what comes next, it's combat, the minute you do that, the minute you kind of close the door and like pull up the drawbridge, which is exactly what that sentiment does, it's combat from then on. It's like, it's this war of proving that you're right.
And that's not helpful for either party, right? It takes someone with a certain self-security, I guess, and not fragile ego to be able to be greeted with that, sort of conflict, and turn to what we have in common, and what we agree on first. But it's a real powerful skill for someone to master. If you're disagreeing with me, for me too.
You know why I like this as well in my relationship? Because me and my partner, we might not agree on something. We might have like very fundamentally different beliefs about the world. She's very spiritual and very sort of scientific and how I think, but I know that I get through to her when I first understand how she's feeling.
I don't have to agree with it. But even if I understand how she's feeling and kind of like validate it, anything that I say next seems to get in behind. Does that make sense? Yeah, so I mean, the difference is that what you're doing in the last kind of example is you're using what we call theory of mind, right?
Theory of mind is our ability to kind of think about what other people are thinking or feeling. So basically take the point of view of the other person, right? If, and there's a huge variability in the ability of people to do that. There's like tests, relatively simple tests actually, that can measure your ability to do that.
And so if you do that, the likelihood that you will answer by wrong is very, very low, right? The reason we start by wrong, your mistaken is because we do the opposite. We come from our point of view, which makes sense because our brain is here and our eyes are here, right? So it makes sense that we come from our point of view.
It's like, this is wrong. This is not right. But of course, the best way to get your message cross is to try to see things from the other person's point of view and then think like, okay, what can I say from that point of view, not from my point of view, from that point of view? Super difficult to do.
I'll give an example. So my partner was upset about something and feeling stressed about something, which is just to do with her environment. And my first response was very logical and scientific, and also psychological, kind of like it's just in your head. I'm trying to just kind of gaslight it.
That's not exactly what I said before I get canceled. But it was referring to the fact that I think you can kind of think your way through this. I was trying to help her feel empowered and not letting her environment get the best of her. Now that didn't work.
The response there was like, not good. My next approach was to completely understand how she's feeling and kind of go around her side and say to her, do you know what? You're only going to be here for five minutes anyway. And then it'll be fine.
And that completely worked. It was like she was glued on me as I said that. And she looked at me and nodded and went, yeah, you're right. The first approach you're trying to play with logic and like, no, no, no, it didn't work.
But then when I said, I understood. But then off of the solution from that place of understanding, she was really open to it. And that was like an hour ago. So it's not to mind for me.
Yeah, so I think this is a problem a lot of times with campaigns, like political, but also different campaigns, where people try to get a message across using data figures logic, which are important. I mean, we need all the science. And we need all the data to know what's true. But once you know what's true, the data is not enough to convince people of what is true.
And in fact, the things that work are things that you're talking about, which is emotion works really well, stories, anecdote, example. And science, the worst thing we can do is use one anecdote. So we don't want to get a conclusion based on one anecdote. But in order to get our message across, in fact, a single anecdote is really helpful.
And to my mind, we actually have to embrace that. That's the way the human brain works. So I think if we just go ahead and say, well, I don't like that. I don't like how the human brain works.
So I'm going to give them data and figures anyway. Well, the message won't get across. So we really need to embrace, if we understand how the mind works, and then we embrace it to get the important information across. And again, another example that I kind of write about is this was years ago with a 2016 campaign, where Trump was one of the candidates for the Republican Party.
And Dr. Carson was another. And they were debating, and the debates turned, again, to the vaccines and autism question. And so they were asked about, you know, Trump says that there's a relationship between childhood vaccines and autism.
Dr. Carson is a pediatrician. And he was asked, well, what do you think about this? And Dr.
Carson said, look, this is not true. We have a lot of data. We have a lot of science. And I'm sure that if Trump reads the science and data, he will be convinced otherwise.
So then he turned to Trump to see if he was convinced. And of course, he wasn't convinced. But then what he did, he used the absolutely opposite approach, which is he told a story, a story of someone who worked for him, who had a little baby, and he said the baby got the vaccine, and he used to induce emotion. He used, like he said, it was a horse size syringe, right?
And after a few weeks, the baby got autism. And now I'm not saying that we should communicate false information using anecdotes and emotion. But me, I remember I was actually watching that. And my son was a few weeks old, and he was next to me on the sofa.
And I'm a scientist, and I know the data, and I know that he was wrong. But my reaction was like, ooh, maybe I should think about this twice before I decide whether to vaccinate my little son here. And I felt like that, for at least I would say a few minutes, a little bit more. And kind of that feeling made me think, look, if I'm thinking that, because Dr.
Carson just said there's data and figures and science, and Trump just told a story that got me feeling quite anxious, and he was much more influential. What about everyone else that's watching? People who are not more scientists who don't have training in science. And it really kind of hit home how powerful it is.
Now, you could use these techniques, obviously, to spread misinformation and to do harm, of course. But if Dr. Carson had to use some of these techniques as well, he could say there's a science. But together with that, you know, maybe using some kind of anecdote to maybe use some hope and optimism in motion, right?
Something like that. He would maybe have caused many, many people who are watching it to vaccinate their kids and therefore to save lives. So I think there's like, you know, if you don't understand human behavior and you don't use it, because maybe you don't like it, you know, like you don't like that, that's how the brain works. You'll be missing on something.
This is why I can say there is flourish in social media, right? Because what I need to do is get one anecdote, one low-context video, one picture, one screenshot of something and posted on Facebook. And regardless of the science, whether it's climate change or vaccines, whatever, that one little screenshot from a telegram group that says something happened to one person somewhere out of eight billion becomes way more sort of believable and plausible and powerful than all of the science. I've seen that over the last couple years.
It's why like the misinformation feels like a bit of a losing wall, really, because we're bringing like facts and figures to an emotional fight and the facts and figures just won't ever win. Like even below the social media channels now, we're putting the little tag on posts to say, well, actually, please go says this isn't true. It's like, he goes, oh, crap, it hits something in the feelings. But it also speaks to the, you know, you talk a lot about this in your book, The Influential Mind.
It speaks to how it's business people or in sales, or whenever we're trying to be heard and understood or influenced others, coming with facts, figures, graphs, and charts is not going to be as compelling as coming with a really great emotional story. I've always impressed upon people as much as I can, that like your facts and figures and charts really don't really matter when you're trying to convince people. And that's what your book really speaks to. Right.
And it's terrible for scientists, of course. Because all I do all day is gather data and do analysis. But yeah, so it's interesting question. So why do these stories?
Why are they so effective? And so I think there's two major reasons. One is they off well-free, actually. One is mostly they induce emotion.
And what emotion does, it gets you to focus. Because emotion tells your brain this is important, right? And it gets a whole brain noticing. It's like a little reds kind of light in your brain going, emotion, pay attention, right?
So if you say something that's emotional, people are going to pay attention, and they're going to remember better. So emotion enhances the likelihood that you will remember things. Then the second reason is, if you think about it, how humans, how do we learn? If before we had science, before we had all these ways to get so much data, we would live in relatively small groups and we would learn from observing others, right?
Observing like a friend or someone who lives nearby, it was learning from stories. That's how we evolved to learn from a small n, right? Only now do we have these techniques and big data that we could really figure things out. But our brain is still a brain of these humans that didn't have the internet, that didn't have all the math that we have now.
And so we're still learning from stories. That's kind of our instinct. Now, we are sophisticated creatures. We can overcome this.
We can look at the data we can learn. But it really aren't instinct is to learn from a single story. The first reason I think is that stories are often novel. Like, you've never heard the exact same story in that kind of way.
Again, novelty causes you to pay attention and causes you to remember. It's another signal if something is important, right? Well, data figures, you kind of heard it before if someone says, well, there's no relationship between autism and vaccine or whatever. I mean, you've already had the science.
It's usually doesn't, it doesn't sound so novel. And really, our brain cares about the headlines, right? What's new? It's like a newspaper.
We don't care about what's been the same. We care about this is new means that we should pay attention. And then maybe it's important, maybe not. That last point really resonated about the shin itch that stories are in essence, novel.
You've never heard about Debbie and Newcastle before, but also, you know, now it makes perfect sense as to why politicians in the House of Parliament every week say I spoke to my constituent Dorothy in Burnley, and then they'll tell the story about Dorothy struggling to to hit her home versus just coming with facts. And when you hear about Dorothy who can't hit her home, you feel way more like God versus hearing 24% of other people can't hit their home. For example, when I think about motivation, though, does the same rules apply? So if I want to motivate my team, should I be telling them the driver's CEO has done 20 million downloads this month?
Or should I be telling them a story of Dorothy who listened to the podcast and it changed her life? I think in this case, both things will work. I mean, seeing progress is something that really motivates us. And seeing progress with numbers is an easy way for us to see progress, right?
This is why all these kind of like track your steps work, right? So I think to motivate, I mean, it's always lovely also to hear a story, I mean, even for yourself, you know, it doesn't matter how many people watched your podcast or that when you get like, you meet someone, they tell you about like, how much you touch them and really change their life and they decide to make a decision because of you, they heard you do something, you really remember that, right? That like causes so much joy and motivation. Numbers are great too, right?
When you look and you're like, oh, I have one million people listening to my podcast. That's great too. So I think both things work. And when if you do use numbers, it's really great to kind of show the progress, right?
A really great way to change behavior is to show people progress. And numbers is just one way to show it, right? If they can kind of see it going up, up, up, up, that's really helpful. And I mean, we know it in sports, but it can be true for anything, right?
If it's like, you can do it's money, investments, right? Seeing that go up. Relationships as well. As I feel like I do that sometimes with my partner where we might be facing some kind of issue and one of the most compelling things we've ever done when we're facing an issue is we look at all the issues we've overcame together and how we're here.
So there were so many other times where we thought this, you know, we couldn't solve it. You should live on the other side of the planet. I lived here. We both didn't want to move.
I've had exactly the same. That was a problem for years and years. Early. Yeah, I remember the bit of things that in a bar and my partner was talking about an issue, something that we were struggling with or whatever.
And I remember saying to her, like, look how far we've come from where we were here to where we are now. So there's nothing that's going to get in the way of us, you know, and that seemed to be compelling because I guess it was an emotional story of all the previous issues we've overcame. Getting back to the optimism bias. The optimism bias from what I'm saying is that bias to believing that the future will be good.
Is that accurate or is that accurate? Yeah, kind of. So optimism on its own. I mean, no, no, no, you're not wrong.
I think what you mean is right now. I'll just give you the scientific condition. So, yeah, so optimism is believing that positive things will happen. The optimism bias means that you're either like, you believe these optimistic things, these good things will happen, but the evidence suggests otherwise.
So it's actually a mistake, right? The optimism bias. So usually we define it as overestimating the likelihood of positive events happening. So you're overestimating how much money am I going to get with my first job when I leave graduate school, right?
Or overestimating like how long my marriage will last and so on. So overestimating the positive in light of the evidence that is in front of us and underestimating the likelihood of negative events happening. So underestimating my likelihood of getting COVID, of getting cancer, being in a car accident, going bankrupt, whatever it is based on whatever evidence is there. So optimism bias doesn't mean mistakes.
So the word bias means a systematic mistake. So obviously when you think about the future, we can't be right, most of the time, because the future is uncertain and we don't know what's going to happen. So we're going to be wrong a lot of times when we predict the future. But the optimism bias means that the mistakes that we make tend to systematically be that we expect it to be better than it ends up being.
So that's basically the optimism bias. I expect it to be better than it ends up being, which sounds like a bad thing, but it's not necessarily so. I mean, the word bias people usually because it is a mistake, people usually think that that means it's not a good thing, but it's not necessarily so. We can actually have both positive and negative outcomes to it.
So if you think about the positive, if I expect good things in my future, specifically good things, even though I'm overestimating the likelihood of these things happening, even if I think, oh, I'm going to make one million in the next year, and of course that's way more than I'm going to, but that then motivates you. So having these positive expectations motivates you to try harder. It's a bit like, I think I'm going to get the gold. I'm more likely to get the silver.
So that's kind of the idea. And it also enhances your happiness and well-being, right? Because how you're feeling now is a lot to do, not necessarily with what you're doing at the moment, but what you think you'll be doing later. How you're feeling now is like, okay, you might maybe feeling nice talking here, but a lot of it is, what do I think I'm going to do later on this evening, next week, next month, in a year?
Are expectations of where we will be in the future, if texts are happiness today, right? And so if I have these positive expectations of the future, even if they're not going to happen, they make me happier today. This is why there's a really cool study that was done at Harvard, where they were asking people who are about to go on vacation, how happy they were every day before vacation, and every day during vacation and every day after vacation for a week. So a week before vacation every day, a week during vacation every day, a week after vacation every day.
So what was the happiest day, do you think? The day before they were? Exactly, right. The day before vacation, they were still in the office, working on the computers.
But on their minds, they were already on vacation. In their mind, it was wonderful. And when they went on vacation, it was good. But it wasn't as good as it was in their minds the day before.
So it's the anticipation of these goods. So it's an optimism bias, because they thought the vacation's going to be better than what it ended up being. But that brought them the happiness beforehand, right? And also probably, in hands of likely, they will go on vacation, which is a good thing as well.
So does that mean that we should, in our relationships, in our teams, et cetera, we should try and give people things forward to? Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that there's two things. You kind of want things in the diary, right?
So having a vacation in the diary that's going to happen in month and weeks, so whatever it is, whatever you're doing for that matters to your team, have what I call anticipatory events, right? Things that they can look forward to that will make them happy today. But also, I think, a lot of times, I do motivate my team by telling them that I think this project is going to work really well. I mean, I think it's going to work pretty well, but I might exaggerate a little bit, because that enhances motivation, and who knows?
Maybe it will work even better than I expected. So it's good to kind of enhance the expectations and also to have these things that people can look forward to. And of course, it works the other way. So also, if you're dreading something that's going to happen to more next week, right?
You have to go to the dentist or whatever bad thing is happening is going to get there and it's going to affect your mood today. So dread of things in the future and anticipation of the good stuff is all affecting how we feel at the moment. How contagious is optimism and conversely pessimism in life generally? If I'm around a group of pessimists or I'm around a group of optimists, what kind of contagious impact is there on me?
Yeah, any emotion is contagious. Anything sadness, anxiety, joy, everything is contagious, fear. And it happens really, really fast and in an unconscious way, right? It could be even like you're sitting in the tube and someone in front of you is looking fearful.
You straight away will feel fearful yourself. First of all, you will mimic the expression of the person that's in front of you without noticing it. So if you look fearful, I'm going to start mimicking the same facial expressions. Yeah.
And that facial expression will make me feel fearful, right? Because our brain is learning from how our face, right? It's a signal and it goes both ways, like a feedback loop. And there's a good reason for it because if someone is afraid, there might be something dangerous around us.
So I should... I've seen them on the case of the David Albert documentary. That start. They know that.
They know that the other monkeys are taking a cue from them. And then when all the monkeys run off, they go and get the food. Because they've got to level two where they realize that they're all taking cues from each other. And I remember that documentary thinking, wow, like, you know, because all the monkeys would run in the minute one monkey made a reaction.
And that's pretty much what you're describing there, right? Yeah, exactly. And it works for good things as well. If someone looks excited, you're like, you will feel excited as well.
You don't know why. But if they're excited, there might be something good around, right? It's just put them together. It's just mimicking.
It's just mimicking. We do facial expressions. We mimic any kind of facial expressions. And bodily expressions as well.
Yeah, I'm trying not to now. But, okay, so why is this really important to think about? Because let's say you want to, you're managing your team. If you're stressful and you're going to start like, I don't know, even like shouting or raising your voice or they're going to get more stressed as well, right?
So it's, it's, it's true. It's a bit like the monkeys. You can actually change at least how you look in terms of the emotions. You need to think about what is my, what emotion am I conveying?
Because the emotion that you are conveying is going to then affect how people around you feel. So there's a little bit of kind of emotional control that is helpful too. You mentioned that you might exaggerate a little bit the belief in a positive outcome to your team members. And I think that's- And I hope they're not listening.
Yeah. Well, I think we all do sometimes. I mean, I usually believe it because I think I have a bit of a bias, an optimism bias myself. But that's in part because of, I guess, chapter three, an optimism bias where you talk about how self-fulfilling optimism is.
And there was some really, really staggering statistical sort of studies and experiments that have been done to prove that optimism really is a self-fulfilling thing. And it kind of makes me think about this concept of manifestation. People always talk about manifestation. In my mind, it's kind of pseudo-science-y.
You just think about something and then it happens. What's your view on manifestation? Is it true? Yeah.
So it's not magic. It's not that I'm thinking something in my mind and the waves are going to change what happens in the world. The reason if you believe something, the likelihood that will happen is higher is because you then change your actions, right? You think, I think, you know, my startup is going to really succeed and that then changes your actions.
You're more likely to go out there and tell other people, right? So if you think it's going to succeed, you're more likely to convey that information to investors and so on. They can see your kind of confidence. They'll be more likely to invest in you, right?
You put more time and you put more effort in and that's why it can have an effect on the outcomes. So it's not kind of a magic kind of thing. It's just that what we believe in our minds changes the way we behave and the way we behave in the world changes the world. So that's why that is.
And then that's kind of like the study of self-fulfilling prophecies is linked to this concept of stereotyping where one of the real startling things I read in your work was that if a woman is reminded of her gender before a math exam, then her performance on that math exam will drop. Right. So our expectations, where do they come from? I mean, to some extent, I mean, they're coming from around us as well.
Not only we can have like confidence even if the people around us do not, but other people's expectations, whether it is your friends, your family, society will impact your own. And so, and again, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? If you're told, females are not good in math, they're not good in science, they can't PCOs and so on, that will change the way that you think. Even if it's momentarily, even if you're trying to fight it, it will change the way that you think and what you believe and that will then change your outcomes.
And I think maybe in that, I mean, we don't know exactly why reminding females about the type that the females don't do well with math changes, the exam results, but it could be things like maybe the enhanced anxiety. You start self-doubt, right? I mean, if you go to an exam and there's self-doubt, well, that's not helpful. And there's, you know, there's all these classic studies where there was, in a class, they would tell the teachers at the beginning of the semester who the talented kids were, but it was random.
They randomly selected kids and they said, these are the talented ones. By the end of the year, they did better with these kids, right? Because the teachers believed that they were talented, they would treat them in that kind of way, they would maybe put more time, they could say their expectations to the kids and leaving that they're talented, and that gave them confidence and they performed better. And of course, it works the other way, right?
If a teacher believes or is told, this is, you know, the naughty one, this is, you know, the non-intelligent one, that will then change how the kids behave, what they believe. And this is where stereotypes are, you know, coming to play as well, because sometimes it's about not specific individuals, it's about a whole group of individuals. And one such example is the study where African Americans were found to be significantly worse on IQ tests compared to Caucasians, people that were white, when race was emphasized before the IQ test. Yeah.
But did as well as white people when no stereotype was mentioned before. So just by mentioning that I'm black before I do a IQ test will lower my performance on the test versus if you hadn't mentioned it. Because the association here reminded of ethnicity and you're doing this exam and then you know that maybe in your society, there's a stereotype, and again, that can cause self-doubt and anxiety and so on. And what I think I like is that I think after I talk about that study, I have to talk about another study that after Obama was elected, grades went up for African Americans.
Because again, it's a self-continent thing. It's amazing how these, you know, little things, I mean, it's not little. The fact that Obama got elected is not little, but then the fact that then impacts your self-confidence. You know, the little impact on self-confidence then changes your grades.
It's quite something. But it also changes your, the other things are really starting. It also changes your salary. You talk about how one tiny move up on the optimism scale is worth an extra $33,000 a year in salary over the long term.
Right. And I, okay. So that shows us a correlation. I think that's, so we still don't know for sure if it, is it's that because I have specific traits, I'm more likely to be optimistic and therefore more likely because of those traits also more likely to gain higher salary.
Right. So, you know, you can imagine I'm optimistic because I had a very privileged life and I did well in school. So I'm more optimistic. And for the same reasons, I'm then more likely to get a higher bait.
But in some cases, so we don't know if it's going one way or the other way, right? If it's a causation or correlation. One interesting thing that that has been found is that optimists are more likely to be entrepreneurs. I mean, that is quite clear, you know.
And again, we don't know, is it because I'm optimistic that I'm more likely to be an entrepreneur? Or is it something about being an entrepreneur that makes me more optimistic? But what they found is after you become an entrepreneur, you become even more optimistic. Right.
So that suggests that there is something, it is true that optimistic people are more likely to take a chance, more likely to take a risk, and therefore more likely to be entrepreneurs. And that experience of doing that enhances your optimism for a user, which is really interesting. It kind of goes both ways. Does that then explain how we can teach someone to become more optimistic?
Because if the pursuit of entrepreneurship is kind of self-reinforcing your optimism, it's making you more and more optimistic. One would assume that that's because you're gaining evidence about yourself in the world and what you're capable of as you're going, which is further sort of fueling you. And conversely, someone who I know maybe lingers too long in their comfort zone and is leaning out of opportunities, constantly being negatively reinforced in terms of their self-belief and their skills, et cetera. So they're becoming more and more pessimistic.
Is that like broadly true? I think it might be. Yes. I think you're gaining evidence that you can do things.
And I think even if you fail, you still gained evidence that you were able to try something new. And not die. And not die. You learn something.
Yes. I think you're absolutely right. So if you're able to get people to have these kind of experiences that then causes them to become more confident, that will then enhance their optimism. So how do we talk about all the positive upsides there being an optimist?
If I've got a friend that's a pessimist or a partner or a husband or whatever it might be, how do I get them? We talked a little bit about it there, but how do I get them to become more of an optimist? Because I want to be surrounded by optimists. I want my company to be full of them, like pragmatic optimists, but still people that believe that the future's going to be good and we're going to do great things.
For all the self-affirming reasons you described, what do I do? Okay. So first of all, I just want to mention that about 30% of how optimistic we are is genetically determined. This has been shown from twin studies, but that still leaves two firts.
I think the best studies on this comes probably from Martin Seligman, where he actually did experiments where he got people who were somewhat pessimistic, even slightly depressed. And the approach that he took is to change what he calls interpretation style. So optimists, this is what they usually do. If something happened and it went well, you sold your startup for a lot of money, you had a project and it was successful, they usually interpret that as a meaning that it's personally.
It's something about them that caused this positive outcome. And it is something in them that's quite permanent. Let's say my project went well because I'm a hard worker, right? And maybe I'm intelligent or whatever.
And then they say, well, if I have those skills, that means that a lot of other things are going to work well in life. If I'm a hard worker, if I'm a good people, that also means that I'll be a good dad, for example. When something negative happens, they tend to do the opposite. They tend to see it as circumstantial, right?
This negative thing happened. Okay. So I didn't put a lot of effort in this, but not because I'm not a hard worker. I just didn't put an effort because I was distracted by something else.
Or this other person just happened to have a better proposal. So it's circumstantial. That means that they don't take that as evidence of how am I going to perform in the future, right? So it's a really different interpretation of negative outcomes and positive outcomes.
And then pessimists do the exact opposite. When something bad happens, they say, this bad thing happened because of me, because of a trait that I have, and because I have this trait, let's say I'm bad with people, that's going to affect all the rest of my life and all these future projects. When something good happened, it's circumstantial. Good thing happened.
I got the job, but really because they didn't have any other people candidates. So what Martin Tsagman did is he taught people this interpretation slightly. He taught them. Something good happens.
This is how you have to think about it. You have to think about it. What is it about you that caused this positive thing to happen, right? And how is that positive trait or whatever skill or whatever you did?
How can it affect other parts of your life and other future outcomes and the opposite for negative? Something negative happened. I don't mean it don't take responsibility. But are there circumstantial?
It could be something that you did, but it doesn't have to be permanent, right? You happen to be in a really bad state because, I don't know, something else. Your parent was sick or something. So he teaches them the people to kind of interpret this, to find these reasons for the positive and negative, and it seems to work.
To some extent. Now, it's difficult. It's not easy to turn a pessimist into an optimist. But it had some effect on their well-being and even on their physical health as a result.
Is that negative explanatory style of saying, okay, this bad thing happens because of me. It's because I'm not good enough. Is that the road to depression? Yeah.
So there's a really tight link between depression and pessimism. So pessimism is a symptom of depression. It's an actual symptom. And so what we see is people with severe depression have a pessimistic bias.
They expect the future to be worse than it ends up being worse than the evidence in front of them is. People with mild depression have no bias at all. This doesn't mean they're accurate. They can make mistakes, but on both sides.
So sometimes they expect things to be better. Sometimes they expect things to be worse. But overall, they don't have a bias. Happiness.
One of the things we talked about before we started recording was Scott Galloway said on this podcast that happiness looks like a U-shape throughout our lives. As in, when we're young, we're at a high level of happiness and then we dip into our 40s. I think from what I read, when we hit our 40s, that's kind of the lowest. That's kind of a grim.
But that's our lowest point of happiness. And then it kind of curves back up again as we go into the last sort of chapters of our life. Is that accurate? Because Scott didn't provide any research and I've molded over.
Yeah. No, so this is true. It's based on many studies and studies involving thousands of thousands of individuals, you know, up to like 70,000 or more in a country. And it's been shown in many, many countries.
So not just in the western world, in many, many countries, almost all countries around the world. So exactly what you said, kids and children, they're happiest and the most optimistic. Then it goes down and reaches rock bottom in your midlife as well as optimism does. So actually in middle age, you stop having an optimism bias.
So optimism bias is greater. Greatness in children and kids cause go down, down, down. And then really there's no optimism bias in midlife on average, of course. And then it starts going up, you become happier and more optimistic until the last few years of life, which is counterintuitive to our image of the grumpy old men, right?
And it actually stays there until the last couple of years of life. The difference between countries is that the dip, the point where it's lowest, actually is a little bit different between country and country. I think in the US it's about 40, it's relatively early. I think in the UK as well, but then some countries as much, I think like Italy might be 50, Greece as well, like 50 to 60.
And then there's a few countries where you don't see that, Russia is one of them. Romania, and I forget, there's another one where you actually don't see, they actually just have less and less, less happy in those countries. We don't know why that is that specific case. I'm 30 now.
So I'm heading right down to rock bottom as we speak. Well, you've got time. You've got time. I'm about to turn.
So I'm looking forward. I'm in the way. Well, not quite yet, but I'm about on my way up. And this, you know, this links to, I think chapter five in your book where we say, where you talk about how the chapters called the humans are about predicting what makes them happy.
And one of the startling things is that you say that children don't impact our happiness positively. Now, I'm in the impression that children make us ecstaticly happy. Well, it's difficult, but from what I've heard from people, I thought children are something to really be looking forward to, but using to assert otherwise in your book. So this, first of all, I want to say this is just a research on the numbers.
And my, I'm not just saying this, but my one experience is the absolute opposite. Don't mind her child. It's absolutely true. No, but it's absolutely true.