Hello everyone.
I'm Catenya McHenry, Communications Director
here at the McCombs School of Business
and you are joining us today on our
work from home edition of our Big Ideas Show,
where we delve deeper into faculty research happening
here at the McCombs School of Business.
Joining us today is Amit Kumar.
He's assistant professor in our marketing department
and today we're talking about his brand new paper called,
"Spending on doing promotes more moment-to-moment happiness
"than spending on having."
Welcome to the program today, Amit.
Good to see you.
- Good to see you too.
I wish were together in person but this works pretty well, I think.
- Yeah. It's just nice to see people's faces.
(laughter)
There being (inaudible). - And to hear people's voices.
I feel like that the house is so quiet. - Yes, yes.
Yeah, well, let's talk a little bit about your paper.
So, it really focuses on spending money on experiences rather than on objects.
So, tell me a little bit of background about your research and what
your motivation was for even wanting to research the topic.
- Sure. I've actually spent several years sort of thinking about this broad topic
of how people spend their money and how that can influence how they feel
and so, the particular distinction that I've been focused on has to do with,
as you mentioned, experiential and material purchases.
So that's sort of money that you spend on doing, on things like outdoor activities
and recreation, tickets to events, travel to places, which is unfortunately
restricted at the moment, versus money that you spend on having.
So, that's on things, on stuff like clothing and accessories and
jewelry and furniture, electronic goods, things like that.
And a lot of our work we sort of already found that people derive
more happiness from their experiences than their possessions when
they're sort of looking back on them and when they're looking forward to
the experiences that they're going to have.
So, what we were interested in hearing is that happiness is this term that can be
defined in lots of ways and so, how robust is the result like this?
One thing that people have thought about is sort of this distinguishing between
what they call anticipatory utility,
experience utility, and remembered utility.
And so we've sort of focused on anticipatory and remembered utility.
What we were interested in here is what about the happiness that comes
from the here and now and you're actually consuming
something that you spent money on.
So, that's what motivated the research that we conducted here.
- So, can you talk a little bit about just when somebody purchases
an object versus purchasing a trip or looking forward to the trip,
what happens in your brain?
What happens in your overall, I guess, endorphins?
Like how is your brain affected with one versus the other?
- Ah, so, we didn't look at those types of measures
but the thing that we tend to find in our research is that experiences
are more associated with social stuff.
They kind of have more social value and that tends to make people happy.
We know that loneliness is really problematic for sort of
psychological wellbeing, which actually is related to
physical wellbeing as well.
So, when you're stressed out, that affects your immune system,
for instance, and that can be problematic.
What we did here though is we kind of tried to do this in as naturalistic a way
as possible.
So, this isn't like a laboratory study where we bring students in or
anything like that, although there's benefits to studying things
that way.
What we did here is we got a huge sample.
We got thousands of participants.
We pinged them sort of throughout the day.
So, they're randomly receiving prompts throughout the day.
We just ask them questions about, "Hey, are you consuming anything
"that you spent money on right now?"
And then we ask them-- they say yes or no.
We then ask them what they're consuming and what we find is the consumption of
material isn't associated with much more happiness than sort of where they are
at baseline, when they haven't spent money on anything but
that experiential consumption is associated with significantly
higher ratings of happiness.
So, people, when you just randomly contact them throughout the day
in this kind of naturalistic way, are telling us that,
"I'm a lot happier when I'm doing things than when I'm using something that
"I purchased."
- Yeah.
So, let's focus a little bit on where we are in the age that we are
when it comes to just stay-at-home orders.
So, we kind of have had to redefine how we achieve happiness.
So, can you talk a little bit about how you would adapt your research
to where we are in the time frame that we're in.
- Yeah.
Obviously it's a tough time.
People don't have lots of money to spend.
One thing that we are all really hopeful for is
that this isn't going to last too long, it's going to last as long as it takes
for us to sort of be safe again but as I was sort of alluding to earlier,
sort of the real takeaway of a lot of this research is that
it's social stuff that makes you happy and so this is a time when this term
"social distancing" is being used, I think "physical distancing" is
probably a more appropriate term to use.
We do need to maintain space between us and other people
but you can do things like this, have Zoom conversations,
video chats over FaceTime or Skype or all these other resources that we have,
that's probably going to make you happier than some other types of
like online shopping that you could be doing now.
- (inaudible) shopping too.
(laughter)
- Yeah. I guess looking back at some earlier research as well,
there's this benefit of sort of looking back on experiences that you've had
and looking forward to experiences that you're going to have as well
and so this is a time when you can chat with other people that you have
travelled with in the past and sort of reminisce about those memories,
that is likely to make you happy as well.
I'm certain that I can think back to revisit a delicious meal that
I had in Barcelona or the time I hiked at Machu Picchu,
things like that.
If you're having conversations about that, that's going to make you feel good.
You can also start planning, I think, some of the experiences that you'll engage in
once this is all over.
Just thinking about that and talking to other people about what you'll do
when the the time comes is also a potential source of happiness right now.
- And one of the things that you've talked about is
the reasoning behind some of your research and you talked about something called
"social value."
So, how would that apply to where we are now and
looking forward to like going somewhere or even having a conversation with someone
in this format, this Zoom format or Teams format or however
you're reaching out to people, or even FaceTime.
Talk a little bit about the value of that from a social standpoint.
- Yes, so, obviously we're very concerned about our physical health right now,
given everything that's going on, it turns out that our psychological health
is really important as well and related to our physical health.
So, there's really interesting research from epidemiologist, for example,
that loneliness, when you look at the relationship between loneliness
and things like morbidity and mortality, it's similar to like smoking 15 cigarettes
a day.
It can be more problematic than things that we care a lot about,
like obesity and air pollution.
We work hard to prevent those things, we need to be working hard to prevent
loneliness as well and experiences are a way to connect with other people.
One way that you can use your money to advance your social connections
but social connections more broadly are going to be beneficial for
our mental health for our psychological wellbeing.
One of the other things that I'm working on now,
that hopefully we'll talk about it sometime in the future, is
how we connect with other people.
So the fact that we're talking right now is really meaningful.
We could do other things.
We could send emails back and forth.
We can send text messages but connecting with our voices in this way,
using things like Zoom and Skype and FaceTime and all these tools
that we have available, that's going to enhance our sense of connection
more than other ways that we might connect with each other.
- Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about that too, the importance of not just
the interaction but when you see someone's face or when you hear
their voices and you hear the inflection in their voice and their tone in
their voice and just be able to observe their body language like
how important that is from a connection standpoint.
You even talked a little bit about, just in preparation for this call,
that you're reaching out to your mom more because she's a doctor up East.
So, just, can you talk about how much more important it is now and how
important it is that we're seeming to do it more often now because
of what's happening.
- Yeah, so, I'm actually doing research on that right now.
It's sort of different than this particular paper but
my mom certainly likes that I'm calling her more and
importantly it's the fact I'm calling her actually.
So, what we find is that some of the body language stuff actually
doesn't add a whole lot above and beyond
the other things that you were talking about,
inflection in your voice, sort of tone, volume,
pitch, things like that.
They reflect a humanness-- we feel connected to another human
when we can hear what they're thinking and feeling.
And so, these voice ways of connecting with each other, including audiovisual way
of connecting obviously, tend to enhance wellbeing more than
some of the text based media that we might use otherwise.
- Yeah, yeah. Awesome.
Is there anything else that you would like to add
for what we could be doing now that reflects some of the research
that you've done in regards to this paper?
- So, one thing that probably is worth noting is that our results
weren't-- they still held even when you were controlling for cost,
for sort of the price of the purchases the participants were consuming,
so this is a rough economic time for people, so I think even some
experiences that you can engage in that aren't as expensive as taking
a trip somewhere, could be beneficial for wellbeing.
So, for instance, some rest-- I love living here in Austin.
Last night, I got-- it wasn't just takeout from one of our great restaurants but
what they did is sort of this thing where they give you the ingredients
for a meal that they cook at a restaurant and you can create these experiences by
cooking this meal that uses these videos from the chefs that work there,
things like that.
Obviously, people are watching lots of movies and tv shows and things like that.
If you're doing that by yourself, it may not have as much value
but if there's somebody else living in your household with you or
maybe if you're doing it simultaneously with other people and then talking to
each other about a movie that you watched, those sorts of things can be connecting
as well.
So, I think promoting social interactions, social connection, that's really something
that people ought to be doing now and to the extent that obviously,
income, discretionary income especially, when you go beyond sort of the basic
necessities that you have, when it's harder to come by, you have
to make more trade-offs to that how you're going to spend it
and so, you don't want to spend it.
I think in ways that aren't going to advance your happiness much,
and so you might be thinking about shifting your spending a bit from
sort of material consumption, something that can be shipped
to your house and then sit somewhere in the corner of your house, to more
experiential consumption, things that you're doing somewhat actively and
things that can connect you to other people in your life.
- Yeah and last question, how do you think the coronavirus will
shift just how we, in new ways, define happiness?
(laughter)
- Well, I do think we'll probably be even more appreciative of some of
these experiences that we can't have right now.
So, certainly, I feel super grateful and lucky that I've been able to
engage in the travel that I've engaged in over my life or to see these bands in
concerts or theater performances or eat at amazing restaurants.
Once we can do those things again, I think that it will feel, it might even
feel even better.
We might appreciate them more than we would otherwise but
we do already appreciate those things a lot,
we did before this, and I think we will again after this as well.
- Yeah, excellent.
Thank you so much for joining us today, Amit.
This has been so great.
It's been so great to talk to you.
(laughter)
Sort of face-to-face but it's really good to just expand on your research.
I mean this is something that's important, I think, to every single individual
whether you're an adult or a teenager or even an adolescent.
So, I think it's relevant for every single human right now,
so I appreciate you and your time, too.
- Yeah. I hope to see you again in person soon, too
(inaudible) - Yes!
- (laughter) - Absolutely!
Hopefully soon!
(laughter)
Well this paper again is called "Spending on Doing Promotes More
"Moment to Moment Happiness Than Spending on Having"
And we will have a link there in the bottom.
Thank you again for joining us today on our
Big Idea Show, work from home edition.
We will see you next time.