Another happiness intervention had to do with kindness—we asked people to
do acts of kindness. Now, I think in most or all cultures, there is sort of, this notion
that
being a generous, good person is good, that it makes you happy.
And I have a famous Chinese Proverb here: If you want happiness for an hour, take a
nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a month,
get married. And obviously, they had not read that study that showed it is actually two
years that marriage gives you happiness. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a
fortune. And if you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody else. Now, notice the
wisdom of this Chinese Proverb: the first two things are just momentary pleasures, going
fishing, or taking a nap. Obviously, it is not going to make you happy forever. Getting
married and inheriting a fortune are major circumstantial changes in life, but even those
things people tend to adapt to over time, you know, you sort of, adapt to, or get used
to,
a new level of happiness, or a new level of wealth, and then you sort of, want more. You
now, it’s part of human nature; it’s actually an important part of human nature that it
is
adaptive. But, then the last, the last item, helping someone else, that’s an activity
you can vary, that you can get lots of, sort of, lots of good stuff can accrue from helping.
And in fact— oh, I love this quote
from our former president, who agrees with the Chinese about the benefits of helping,
so when you are kind and generous to others, you see yourself a generous person, so, it’s
good for your self-perception, it helps you see yourself as kind of, as interconnected
to others, it makes you interpret other people’s behaviour more charitably, it relieves
distress, or discomfort over other people’s misfortune.
37:00> I think maybe the biggest, the biggest factor in helping are the social
consequences. When you help others, you might make new friends, other people might
appreciate what you have done, they might reciprocate in your times of need. So, what
I
often say is, “Helping others leads to a cascade of positive social consequences, sort
of,
lots of, good, social things happen when you are generous and kind to others.” Okay,
so,
this very simple study
we asked again, students, to do acts of kindness on a regular basis, and they were asked
to do five (5) acts of kindness per week, over—this was also a period of six weeks.
here we had three different conditions—again the control group, unfortunately, just didn’t
do anything, but then we had people either do their five (5) acts of kindness all in
one
day, okay so, what’s—tomorrow is Friday, so, tomorrow, go out and do five (5) acts
of
kindness; things that you don’t normally do, right, sort of, over and above your normal
sort of, acts of kindness. Or, you could spread them across the week, sort of, next week
do five (5) acts of kindness.
These are again students—I’ll show you some of the
things that they performed in our study. My favourite one is: told a professor, “Thank
you” for his hard work, but actually it’s funny, this is—there are a lot of cultural
differences here. I once gave—showed this list to an audience of people from different
cultures and they were like, horrified, of this list. And they said so, “Visiting Grandma
in the hospital is an act of kindness, you know, that you did?” You know that’s just,
your
duty, I mean, that’s something you are expected to do. So, obviously, people define,
quote, “acts of kindness” differently, but I think we all can identify; we can all
define
that to ourselves and we can all try to do more acts of kindness. My own, my own thing,
which I am not very successful at is, being nicer to telemarketers. I just cannot find
it
in myself to be nice on the phone and—so I try, you know, I really, I try to do that.
So,
that’s, that’s—again maybe I shouldn’t call that an act of kindness. That should
just be
a thoughtful, sensitive person we should do that, but anyway, we can all, we can all kind
of, have our own subjective definition here.
Okay, so, these are changes in self reported helping over the six (6) week study from
before to after—the control group again, you see, they’re actually helping less over
the
course of the study. And again, I think it’s because they, they have more work to do,
they’re getting busier, so their you know, they have less time for others. But, people
even during this sort of, this sort of—we are on the quarter system at UC Riverside—
even during this really, really busy quarter people— the students who have been asked
to
either do five (5) acts of kindness on a single day, or across the week, they are, they are
doing it more.
And then here are the results for happiness: so, again, interesting finding—we were
successful in making people happier, but only in that condition where the students did all
their acts of kindness in one single day. So, again, like tomorrow you go out and do
five
(5) acts of kindness—and I think it is because it was more powerful, you know, just sort
of, five (5) acts that tended to be pretty small things, not all of them were big things.
It is just very salient that you go out and it makes you feel really good, spreading the acts
of kindness across the week might have just made them not as distinguishable from the
other things we tend to do.
Our findings from this study, and many other studies that we have done; other researchers
have done attest to the important role of
motivation, effort, commitment, and fit. So, you need to choose the strategy wisely that
you do, you need to be motivated, committed to it; put effort into it. It’s just like
any
other goal
in life.