MBA Masterclass Designing a Good Life

- So actually I think the way the webinar is set up is right at eight o'clock, it'll let 'em in, the way our slate system's set up... OK, there we go. Welcome those who have joined already. It'll take just a minute or two for everybody to enter the webinar. So if you would like to share, we'll use the Q and A, a lot throughout the session. So if you want to let us know in the Q and A where you're joining us from, I believe we have people from all over the world. And myself and my colleagues today are all in the Chicagoland area. So you can feel free if you would like to let us know, you can let us know -- also Chicago, great. Argentina, that sounds lovely right now. OK, Israel -- from everywhere, this is awesome. Again, welcome everybody those who are just logging on, we'll start in just a minute or two. We're just kind of sharing where we're all joining from today.

- The only problem with asking people where they're from is that I'm seeing about 30 places I'd rather be than in the cold of Chicago right now.

- Absolutely. Yeah, I didn't realize just looking out. I didn't realize this was a snow, we've more snow ... We have got more snow than I expected here in Chicago for those who are I know some of you might have not experienced snow before in life, so hopefully when you come here, it's actually lovely. You can embrace winter, I promise. There's plenty to do outside. I went ice skating this weekend, it was lovely. Which is all about having good gear, basically.

- All right, Andrew from Calgary is probably the only one who's colder than us right now.

- Probably. See if we're great.

- Andrew from Calgary is it never not snowing?

- That's a great question.

- In Calgary.

- So Michigan too pretty much is always snowing up the side of the lake. Great okay I'll probably give it just another minute or two, it seems like the numbers are still climbing here. OK, I think we're slowing down just a little bit. OK and before we kick off I think what we'll try to, what we'd prefer so we can answer questions, typed questions in real time as well as throughout, let's try to focus on the Q and A. We'll keep an eye on the chat as well but the Q and A for those questions, OK? So we will go ahead and get started. Bear with me one second here. My tab is open ... OK. Well, welcome again. We're thrilled to have you join us here. Good morning, good afternoon depending on where you in the world, we're thrilled to see such a diverse geographical representation for today's class. My name is Kara Northcutt I'm a senior director of admissions at Booth. I have been here a little over 13 years and very proud to represent this school. And hopefully you'll be as excited as I am after you see today's session, which I think you will. And on behalf of all the admissions teams, executive full-time, evening, and weekend, I'm really thrilled to welcome you to today's masterclass, "Designing A Good Life" with professor Nick Epley. We are also joined by principal researcher, Margaret Echelbarger, who will assist with the Q and A. So again, I mentioned again, try to use the Q and A to ask any kind of real-time questions about the material that Nick is presenting. And with that, Nick Epley is the John Templeton Keller Professor of Behavioral Science and Director of the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He studied a social cognition, how people, how thinking people think about other thinking people -- to understand why smart people so routinely misunderstand each other. He teaches an ethics and wellbeing course to MBA students called "Designing A Good Life," which you're gonna get a snippet of today. So it's really our goal, is to let you know, a little bit about the faculty at Booth, of course, and our research assistants and what a snippet of the class might be. So hopefully when you join us, you'll be enticed and attend this class longer for the full session. And with that, I will turn a it over to Nick. Thanks everybody.

- Thanks Kara. And thanks everybody for joining this morning or this afternoon or this evening. There are lots of things that are awful about the pandemic, of course. One silver lining is that you get to reach out and connect to folks who you wouldn't otherwise be able to connect to. I've never spoken in Kazakhstan, for instance, but this morning from Chicago, someone is listening as tuning in from Kazakhstan this morning and so, so that's great, that's a nice silver lining. The goal here of this session is just to give you a little sense of what our classes are like here. Now, ideally our classes aren't happening this way over Zoom although they have been more frequently over the last couple of years. Ideally if you come and join us next year, we'll have you in person in the classroom where we can see and connect each other more meaningful, in a more interactive classroom setting. I'm one of the behavioral scientists here. I'm one of the psychologists here. We have one of the larger groups in the business school. We've got about 20 to 25 psychology faculty here who teach classes, ranging from management to leadership, to negotiation, to what I teach, which is an ethics course. All of the courses that we teach here are designed really with two fundamental goals in mind. One is not to necessarily tell you what to think about X, Y, or Z, but rather to give you tools to help you think a little better about the problems that you're going to face. In the behavioral science group what we're trying to do, is trying to teach you to think a little bit more like an experimentalist. That is to think a little more like a scientist, about many management or leadership problems. And you'll see some of that in the lecture for today. In my classroom, I have students run a lot of experiments. I have them participate in a lot of experiments and we analyze the data from those to collect some insights that we might not have gotten otherwise about human behavior and how we might make choices when we're out in our working, in the working world or just in our lives that help us be a little wiser interacting with each other. The second thing our classes try to do is to help you achieve your goals a little bit better. That is all classes are designed to give you some information that will help you achieve some important goal in your life. My class is oriented around an assumption that I actually think a lot of classes, maybe all classes here at Booth are organized around. And that's an assumption that although we're all different, lots of different ways, there are some basic things that we want out of our lives. And in particular, the assumption of my class is that we want to live a good life. A good life, not in a simple, obvious, hedonistic sort of sense. That is, not in a simple sense of the term, but rather in a complicated, multi-faceted sense of the term. In particular, my presumption is that when you grow up in life, you want to live a good life in at least three senses of the term. One sense of the term, a way in which I presume you want to live a good life, is that you want to be good at work. That is you wanna succeed at work you wanna do well in your chosen profession. What does it mean to do well in your chosen profession? Well, Milton Friedman knew what it meant to do, do well or to do good at work. This is a famous Chicago economist, University of Chicago economist, whose office was right across the street from where I am today. Milton Friedman once wrote that, "There is one and only one social responsibility of business -- to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits." That is success or doing well at work means making money. Now, I presume we all want to make money. I presume that's, that's a goal that all of us want. The question is, is that, the main thing that we want out of our lives? Is that the main way we would define success at work? Well, one way that we go about answering questions that we have is we ask people, is we collect data on this. And so I'm gonna collect some data right now. I'm gonna ask you to fill out a poll with this, answering this question. So, to what extent do you agree or disagree with the following: Making a lot of money is my most important goal. OK, I'm gonna go ahead and launch this poll. You tell me your answer to that. Making a lot of money is my most important goal. Strongly disagree; disagree; agree; or strongly agree. All right ... and the results are nearly all in. All right, I'm gonna go ahead and stop it there. What are the results? Well, most of you disagreed with this. Only about 30% of you agreed with this, but about 70% of you disagreed with this either strongly or just disagreed with it. You guys may be unique in lots of different ways, but you're not so unique in this particular way. When we ask people this question -- which actually comes from a psychopathy survey -- when we ask people this question, these are the kinds of results that we tend to get. These are the results I get when I ask my MBA students to do this. So these are the results from 805 students I've had in my class over the last couple of years who have answered this question. And this is the result that I see from my students who sign up for my class. In this case about 80% of them disagreed -- about 70% of you did -- a smaller percentage of them agree and smaller yet strongly agree. It's not that making money is not important, or for some the most important, but for many of you, for most of us, even for those of you who agree, my bet is there are other things that you want out of your job as well. What are some of those other things? You can pile 'em into the chat window right now, if you'd like. What are other things that you want out of your job? What are other ways that you would define "doing well"? What are other things you're seeking at work? Impact; purpose; challenge; satisfaction; learning new things, having some purpose; growth; personal fulfillment; work-life balance; connecting with the community. Whew! Okay, Margaret, we gotta code these at the end of this. All of these are obvious things that we want out of our work; we're complicated creatures. We don't just want one thing, we want lots of things. Money is one of them but it's not the only thing. Doing well at work doesn't just mean making money: It means other things. And it ties in many of these things -- social impact, learning and growth, connecting with others, learning about yourself, making a difference -- connects with the second way in which I presume you wanna live a good life. And that is I presume you wanna be good. That is I presume that you want to be proud of the work you do. To do work that you can feel good about having done. That is, you wanna be ethical in the work that you do. You don't wanna succeed by hook or crook. You wanna succeed in a way that you can be proud of, in a way that you can tell your kids about in detail as they're going to bed at night: how it is that you do your job. What does it mean to be good? What does it mean to be ethical? Well, this sounds like a complicated question but it turns out it's, I think, not so complicated. All ethics it turns out are social: They deal with how we treat each other. When you're being ethical, you tend to be treating other people well -- fairly in some way. When you're treating other people unethically, you're treating them poorly, often benefiting yourself, either out of indifference to another person or at the expense of another person. This is not ... We're not the first people who have have thought of this. The Dalai Lama noted our prime purpose in this life is to help others and if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them. Even Milton Friedman knew that we, that there was more to a business's responsibility than just making money. In fact, he knew that in order to make money, a business first and foremost had to be behaving ethically. And you can see that in the second half of this famous quote, that's often left off when this is quoted. "There's one and only one social responsibility, of business -- to use its resources and engage inactivity designed to increase profits ... so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud." That is: There's only one social responsibility of business, as long as it's already being ethical. That is, as long as it's already behaving, honestly and fairly in the terms of the marketplace. You see people's desire to be ethical showing up all over the place in the psychological literature. You see it in kids, by six months or a year of age, preferences for interacting with other people who are kind rather than self-interested. You see it in adults who, whose happiness and wellbeing is strongly driven by, by how well they're treating other people. And you see it at even the most extreme of human behavior. You see a desire to be good and an aversion to being unethical -- to treating other people, to harming other people, to treating other people poorly -- even in times of war. One of the most amazing books that I've ever read is this one right here with a rather grim title: "On Killing" by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman. He's a Lieutenant Colonel, was a Lieutenant Colonel, in the US military. And he's a military historian, and what he has done, is he had studied essentially kill rates over the course of human history. And what he finds is that people in times of war -- even when they're dehumanizing the other side, even when the other side is trying to kill them -- have a shockingly hard time killing other people. Have a strong aversion to killing. In World War II he found that only about 15 to 20% of soldiers were actually able to discharge their firearm. "When left to their own," he wrote, "the great majority of individual combatants appeared to have been unable or unwilling to kill." There were fox holes, trenches littered with guns that had never been fired. In the war, people couldn't shoot. Once they were shooting, he found that people couldn't kill, people were reluctant to killing. In the American Civil War, the kill rate was only about one to two minutes with 200 soldiers who were standing only about 30 yards apart, who were using weapons -- muzzle loaders in this case -- that could hit a pie plate at 70 yards without any trouble whatsoever. The kill rate should have been much, much higher. In the Native American "Indian Wars" as they called them, 25,000 musket balls were fired in one particularly awful massacre. 99 Native Americans were killed, wounding one per every 252 shots. Most of these were by one or two soldiers who seemed to be somewhat psychopathic, it seems. World War I and World War II, only about 5% of soldiers were responsible for nearly all of the killing. Most shots were over the enemy's heads. Even in the midst of war, people have a strong aversion to harming others. Military forces around the world have figured this out now, and now soldiers are trained to be able to kill instead of presuming that they're capable of doing it from the start. "Indeed," now Grossman writes, "From a psychological perspective, the history of war affair can be viewed as a series of successively more effective tactical and mechanical mechanisms to enable our force combatants to overcome their resistance, to killing other humans even when defined as the enemy." Most killing in war now is done from a trailer, flying a drone thousands of miles away, or with weaponry that allows killing at a great psychological distance. Our natural instinct, our natural inclination, is not so much to be completely self-interested. People care about others. People don't want to harm others. And often our automatic instinct when we're out in the world is to help -- not to just do good for ourselves. The second way in which I presume you wanna feel good, or to do good, is that to live a good life, is that you like to feel good. You'd like to be happy. That is, whatever it is you're doing in life you would like to feel happy about what you're doing. It's not a new insight. It's not a 21st Century sort of insight. This is an insight that's old, as old as human thought. Aristotle said, once wrote "Happiness is at once the best, the noblest, and the pleasantest of things." And we might quibble with the grammar a little bit, but we certainly don't quibble with the sentiment there. And our founding fathers certainly didn't when they wrote into the US Declaration of Independence, here in the United States, that there are "certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Presuming that this was a basic primary motive that people had. Alexandra Pope, famous philosopher, once wrote, "Oh happiness! Our being's and aim." Pope presumed that all of human behavior could be described as an attempt to increase happiness -- and that any choice that we make could be described as an effort to choose the thing that we think in one way or another will bring us the most happiness over the long run. And Blaise Pascal, French enlightenment philosopher, once wrote that there aren't exceptions. "All men seek happiness." And I presume that if Pascal were writing today, he would write "all people." We don't, as far as we can tell, presume this is just something limited to men. All people seek happiness; there are no exceptions. As far as we can tell, Pascal's right about this. Psychologists have yet to find a people group that revels in misery or unhappiness, that systematically tries to make themselves unhappy. And so if this is what we want out of our lives -- we wanna live a good life in these three senses of the terms, in this complicated sense of the term. We'd like to succeed at work. We'd like to succeed in a way that we can feel good about: that is, to be ethical. And we'd like to be happy about what we're doing. Can we get this? Mick Jagger famously sang that "You can't always get what you want but you get what you need." Yeah, can we do better than Mick suggested? Can we actually get what we want out of our lives here? And that raises a basic question about whether these goals are compatible or incompatible with each other. Do these goals compliment each other or do they compete with each other? So we can ask this question: Does being good at work does being ethical, lead to success at work? This is a basic question about whether ethics pays at work. Now I spend a good chunk of the first lecture in my class going over this question with a lot of data. The answer to this turns out not to be so simple. In the end, it's simple to say but it's not so simple to show. We spend a lot of time showing data that addresses this question. But I think this is an important ... this is the important take-home insight. Remember all ethics are social. They deal with how we treat other people. All of you are gonna be working in jobs or you have to work with other people. You have to get along with other people. Other people have to be willing to help you. Other people have to be motivated when they come into work -- to be satisfied with the work that they are doing -- and treating people well, whether it's your colleagues or your employees, or your boss or your clients, or your ... or other people in your business network. Treating them well comes back to you in positive ways. Reciprocity is just a profound feature of social life. This was described perhaps most clearly by Gill, who was an industry analyst, describing why ethical behavior tends to pay in the long run in business. He noted, "Well-treated employees show up happier and more dedicated to company's success. They steal less and work harder. Customers who receive what was promised to them and who are treated with respect will return more frequently for more business and recommend more friends to patronize the business. Anyone who needs a study to prove these common sense observations about the impact of good ethics on good business is beyond help," he wrote. I actually think you need some help. You need some help in the form of data. So I show you a lot of data if you come to my class. But the way in which ethical behavior influences business success is not a surprise. The business case for ethics is not short-run profitability, it's sustainability for the long run. And business leaders are increasingly recognizing this. Many businesses have shifted from a shareholder model to a stakeholder model; that is, not just trying to make the most money for its investors, but actually trying to create value for all of the stakeholders in our business. That's not just investors: That's also employees, customers, broader network partners and so on. Larry Fink, head of BlackRock, noted this just in his annual letter that he released, I think a week or, or two ago to CEOs. He wrote, "Stakeholder capitalism is not about politics. It's not a social or ideological agenda. It's not 'woke.' It is capitalism, driven by mutually beneficial relationships between you and the employees, customers, suppliers, and communities your company relies on to prosper." The business case for ethics is one of long-run sustainability. We bring you here to Booth in the hopes that we can help you realize your vision to create, ideally, an organization that does good and creates value in the long run: not just for the people who are investing in it but for everybody who's part of your organization. And those two things cooperate with each other, they don't compete with each other. We then spend the bulk of my course talking about the second thing: How do we design organizations that help people be good -- that help people be better than they might be -- if ethical behavior, treating people well, is the key to long-run success? We have to think through carefully, how would we go about create organizations that help people do that. spend a good chunk of the class -- in fact, nearly all of the class -- talking about how to do that; thinking about ethics as a design problem and how you design organizations that help people be better than they might otherwise be. But what I want to spend the last part of this lecture on is the relationship between wants number two and number three. That is: Does doing good feel good? Does being ethical, does treating other people well, lead to happiness for the self, or do these two things compete? Does doing good feel good? Well, remember all ethics are social and it's not immediately obvious what the answer to this is. When you're treating other people well, sometimes it can come at a cost to the self. And so maybe doing good for others can diminish people's own wellbeing. Thomas Jefferson once wrote that, "I believe every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to one another." That's one perspective. And yet I think we can all resonate with this other perspective, too, which is there are times which just feels pretty good to be pretty naughty, right? Where just getting on top and winning at, whatever -- me, me, me! -- is the way to feel better. I think we can resonate with this intuition as well. So, which is it? Well, we can go to the data and we can look to see what happens when people do good to others versus do good to the self: what leads to more happiness or wellbeing. There's a hard question to answer. I'm gonna spend just a couple of minutes here. I spend a lot more time on it in class, but I'm just gonna show you a couple data points that are helpful in addressing this issue. The first one that we're gonna assess is what happens when people pursue the thing that's good for themselves

- - primarily good for themselves -- the thing we spend most of our time pursuing at work, that's good for the self and that is money. And so what happens when people pursue a lot of money for themselves does that bring happiness? So this is really touching on the age-old question of whether money buys happiness. Let's look at some data here. So these data are some of the best that I, that I know of; still these come from Danny Kahneman and Angus Deaton, both Nobel prize winners in economics, neither of them economists. Danny Kahneman is a psychologist and Angus Deaton's a sociologist. And what they did here was they analyzed data from about half a million Americans that were surveyed by Gallup in 2009. And what they did was they measured just a whole bunch of attributes of these people and also measured their wellbeing in a number of different ways. And these are the four ways that they focused on: First they measured people's reported positive affect on a given day: essentially, how happy they reported feeling on that given day. They also reported out, measuring, how negative people reported feeling. And what I'll show you here is the inverse of that, the percentage of folks who were not feeling worry or sadness in this case. So higher numbers here mean less negative affect. They looked at people's stress. Again this is the inverse of this, the percentage who did not report experiencing much stress the previous day. And then there's this measure, which is a ladder measure, which isn't really a happiness measure per se. It's a social comparison measure. I'll show that to you here as well. And one of the key questions that they were addressing here is whether money is related to happiness. So they measured these things. They looked at how much money people were making, and then they, you just correlate it you just plot it out, does making more money increase happiness? Well, here's the figure. So down on the X axis here is the amount of income that people reported making that year. And on the Y axis here is the percentage of people who reported experiencing these things. Positive affect, not negative affect, feeling stress free, and then this ladder measure. And what can we see here? Well, does making some money increase your happiness? Are the people who are making more money, happier? Feeling more positive affect, less negative ethic, less stress? And the answer is ... hell yes. Yeah, obviously: Does money buy happiness? It sure does! That's like a one-item IQ question. Yes, money buys some happiness. But note there are a couple of interesting things about this. One is that, it doesn't seem to buy it forever. That is, there doesn't seem to be a strong linear effect here. Instead, most of the action is coming down here on the bottom end. And this we find in one survey after another; there's some caveats to this. It turns out that as you go further and further out, there does seem to be slight increases in happiness. But dollar for dollar, all of the action here on money and happiness is at the bottom end. It's not so much that being rich, making a lot of money, makes you happy. It's that being poor is miserable. Anyone who tells you that money doesn't buy happiness has never stood a bread line before. Being poor is miserable; that's what these data show and what we see time and time again. But the second interesting thing about these data -- not actually this part to me -- what's interesting for me is that this survey also allows them to compare how money is related to happiness, compared to other things in a person's life that might also be related to happiness. Money is just the amount of money we make, it's just one attribute of our day-to-day lives. There are lots of other things as well -- and they measured lots of those other things so we can compare effect sizes, right? So what has bigger or smaller effects on our happiness compared to money? And that's what they reported in table one of this paper -- which is I think the most impressive feature of this data. My guess is you probably didn't see this when you read through the paper yourself. So I'll unpack this one for you here. Table one shows the effect of money compared to other things. And it does so just by calculating a ratio. So what they do is, they do a median split on income and look at how high- and low-income people fare on positive affect, negative affect this negative score here, 'cause it's not reverse scored. So more money means less negative affect stress and this latter measure as well. And what, let me just show you this first column here, positive affect. What this means is that folks in the -- this is a regression coefficient -- folks who are above the median in income report having more positive affect day to day than those in the, in the bottom half of the distribution. That is positive, is what matters, is there's not a very big effect, but there it is. What you can then do is take this effect size, this regression coefficient of 0.03 -- that's the difference between high and low income -- and compare that effect size against the effect sizes, the differences between, the top and the bottom of all of these other dimensions as well, and create a ratio to see how much high-versus-low income, this is a difference of about $58,000 in this data set, about four-fold increase between those that are high and low in income. You can see how much that four-fold difference in income is related to the effect sizes that come from being high or low on these other measures as well. And that's what's reported here, these ratios. So in this top line, high income, right? High income, the ratio of high income to high income, is obviously one. Let me show you some of these others, though. Let's talk about insured here, this 0.4 figure. What does that mean? That means that the difference between those who are above the median in terms of the amount of insurance they have versus below the median, that that does have an effect on positive affect. But it's about 40% of the size of being high or low on income. So it's positive, but it's smaller effect than the effect of high-versus-low income. Being old is about 80% of the affect size of high or low income. Good news for everybody on this call that's planning to grow older in their lives: Looks like happiness over the course of your life just continues to inch up and up and up: one survey after another, after another, after another has shown that. Your best days, thankfully, are ahead of you. Whether you've graduated or not turns out to be about the same effect size or turns out to be much smaller effect, sorry, than the effect of high-versus-low income. Religiosity is a little bigger than a four-fold increase in your income. So those who tend to be religious versus those who tend not to be religious, there's a bigger effect on happiness than on income there. But notice in this first column, what's the big effect on positive affect in your day-to-day life? Write it in the chat window, what is it? What's the big affect there? The big affect is -- yeah -- is loneliness, just being alone, right? Whether you're alone or not. Look at that affect. Seven times bigger, whether you reported feeling alone yesterday or not: seven times bigger than a four-fold increase in your happiness. We see that time and time and time and time again in the data. That if you really wanna know how happy people are, income matters. But what really matters are the quality of relationships with other people. Here's another survey that shows this, it's a survey from Ed Diener and Marty Seligman that was replicated just recently as well. This is the original data set. They surveyed several thousand undergraduates here and looked to see what distinguished those who are most happy day to day versus those who are least happy, and here's what you find. So they split these groups, the folks who report being very happy and those being very happy in those in the middle and what they find is it's the quality of relationships -- the quality of their social relationships -- that differentiates the happy from the unhappy people. So very happy people report having stronger relationships as close friends than very unhappy people; better family relationships than very unhappy people; and better romantic relationships than very unhappy people. You also see that these people's friends, people who know them, rate happy people as having better relationships than those who are very unhappy. And you also see it in how they spend their day. Very happy people spend less time alone than very unhappy people. And they spend instead more time with family, friends and romantic partners. As Diener and Seligman wrote, "No variable was sufficient for happiness, but good social relations were necessary." That is, they found that good social relationships were the one necessary ingredient for happiness in their data set. So ... this brings us back to this question "Does doing good feel good?" Remember all ethics are social. They deal with how we treat other people. Treating other people well, creating strong social relationships, is a key to our happiness. So it suggests that in fact, the kinds of behaviors that we would think of as ethical -- treating other people fairly, decently, kindly, with compassion -- are the kinds of things that might also feel good for us. Well, let's see if we see evidence of that in the data. Liz Dunn... These are data that come from Liz Dunn, who wondered whether money, if it doesn't bring a huge amount of happiness, might bring happiness depending on how you spend it. Money's just a tool that allows you to do certain things as I saw somebody in the chat window report as well. So maybe how you spend your income might have a meaningful effect on how happy, how much happiness you do derive from it. Well, here's a national survey.

- - this is from Gallup poll again -- that measured how happy people feel in general. There's just a simple, single-item, happiness measure here. Then looked at how they spent their money: how they, how much they spent on themselves; bills, expenses, gifts for the self on averages, is what people tend to spend money on. But also how much they spent on others: pro-social spending. Spending that we would think of as ethical that's intended to do good for somebody else. And then looked at how much, also, how much money they make overall and then measured their happiness: and then related these factors to happiness. Well, what do you see? First, the amount of money that people reported spending on themselves, their house, their taxes, whatever -- all those other gifts for themselves -- is not in fact positively related to happiness. It's not meaningfully related happiness of at all. If anything, in this data set, it was slightly negatively related, but this is not different from what we'd expect from chance one at zero. How much you spent on yourself, wasn't related to your happiness. How much money you made, though, consistent with the Kahneman-Deaton data I showed you before, was in fact related to happiness. This is the positive regression here. Yes, folks who make more money tend to be a little happier. But notice that what was just as important was how you spent your money. So pro-social spending -- that is, those who tended to spend more on others, controlling for the amount of income that they make themselves -- so regardless of your income level, those who spend more money on others tend to be happier. So some indication, that doing good for others does, in fact, maybe bring some happiness. It's not great data, though. There are obvious problems with it. The most obvious is that this isn't an experiment. It's a correlation. That is we measured a bunch of things at once -- happiness and how you spend your money -- we related them together and we can't tell when we do this, what's causing what. You learn this in your sophomore statistics class. Sadly, we often forget about this when we're actually evaluating data in the world. We don't know "what's causing what" here. Could be that how you spend your money is causing happiness. That could be; this is just a relationship. But it could also be that happy people just tend to spend more on others. Could be that the causal error is going the other way. Or it could be there's some other third variable that's causing these two things. Maybe people who are healthier are also happier and they're better able to spend money on others. They don't have to spend as much on themselves as, as folks who are unhealthy, something like that. They deal with those who confounds in lots of ways, it's not that confound. Nevertheless, we can't tell from a correlation what's causing what. In order to figure out causality, we have to use science's gold standard. And that is an experiment: a randomized, controlled experiment. And so that's what, that's what Liz Dunn did in a bunch of subsequent experiments. This is one of the first ones that they conducted that I'm gonna show you here... is they gave people money and told people how to spend it and then looked to see how it made them feel. Now, it can't be the case the happiness is affecting how you spend your money because we're manipulating how they spend their money and measuring happiness afterwards. So this is what they did: They brought folks into the lab for what is probably the best experiment any of these people have ever participated in, whoops, any experiment they've ever participated in. They gave them money, either $5 or $20, and then told them to go out and spend it. Either on themselves, get yourself the gift, do something nice for yourself, or on somebody else. Get somebody else a gift, spend this $20 on someone else, do something nice for somebody else. And so here's another poll for you: Which condition would you rather be in? Which condition you think would bring you more happiness: spending on yourself or spending on others? Don't put this in the chat window; I'm gonna show a poll in just a minute. Spending on yourself or spending on another person? Or spending $20 or spending $5? Okay so here, let me launch this. Oh, poll. Sorry, it looks like I was sharing that the whole time. OK: Which would you prefer: spending on yourself, spending on others? Getting $5 to spend or getting $20 to spend? Go ahead and start filling out that poll. Sorry, I don't see anybody sharing that poll. Margaret do you know?

Margaret: I do not see the poll and.

- Nope okay. Well let me try it one more time. Can you see it now? Margaret?

Margaret: I cannot see the poll.

- Okay well, we will just skip that. You can think about this for yourself. Which condition would you prefer to be in: Spending money on yourself or spending money on others, spending $5 or spending $20? Okay. Liz Dunn and her colleagues were interested in this as well and so they asked people before running this experiment to say which condition they thought would make them the happiest. And what you see here is that people think the way they normally spend money would make them the happiest: that is, about two-thirds said that they would be happier if they spent on themselves than if they spent on another person and -- no duh -- 86% said they would be happier if they spent more money rather than less. That's fine. Those are people's intuitions, those are their expectations. But what happens when people are actually put in this experiment and they go out and do this? What actually brings them the most happiness? Well, I'll show you. So, this graph here shows the change in happiness from time one to time two. Positive numbers here indicate an increase in happiness from baseline at the start of the experiment. Negative numbers indicate if anything a slight decrease in your, a decrease in your happiness. And what do you see here? So first, you see the red bars are higher than the black bars. That is, those in the pro-social condition who are asked to go out and spend money on others, came back feeling happier than those who went out and spent on themselves -- who actually, if anything, felt a little worse. So were people happier spending money on themselves? No, exactly the opposite. They were happier spending this money on others. Were people happier spending $20 than spending $5? Turns out here they weren't, either. Turns out it didn't matter. These differences here aren't statistically significant. Whether you're spending $5 or spending $20 didn't matter for your wellbeing. Maybe these differences are too small. That could be one of the things we find in research on wellbeing, though, is that small acts tend to have a pretty sizable effect on people's wellbeing. That is: Our emotional reaction is often insensitive to the magnitude of the action or the event that we are experiencing such that small acts -- small acts of kindness in this case -- can have disproportionately large effects on our wellbeing. I'll touch on that again later. So this is some experimental evidence that doing good for others can in fact lead people to be happier. So this raises an important question for how we live our lives. My guess is you haven't taken money out of your wallet recently and just spent it on somebody else. Some of you maybe have, but many of us don't do that: Why not? Might we undervalue the positive impact that doing good to others, connecting with others in positive ways, might have on our wellbeing, in ways that undermine our ability to be as happy as we could? Might we happier at work if we had an institution that was designed to make it easy to do good for others? Might we be happy in our lives if we did good for others a little more often than we might otherwise be inclined to? Connected to others in positive ways a little more often than we might be inclined to? Well, this is a question that's driven my research for probably a decade now. And it started with an observation that I made actually riding the train right over here just to the east of me, which I did this morning, coming in in the snowy Chicago weather. This is what the train looked like around the morning when we started doing this kind of research. And I had an observation one morning that led to a whole bunch of research; I'm gonna describe some of it to you just right now. In particular, every day when I get on the train, I see the same sort of behavior, whether it's before the pandemic like this was or during it now, and likely will continue after the pandemic as well. We all participate in the same routine. Highly social creatures made happier and healthier, the data suggests -- with brains uniquely equipped to connect with others -- get onto this train and behave this way. We get on and we line up here, we line up along the outside window. We crowd the outside window. I was sitting here on this particular day. God forbid you to actually sit next to another person who didn't know you, creep; somebody will probably call the police on you. Sometimes people do sit next to each other -- this couple here, sitting next to each other. They're not actually talking to each other, but they're married to each other. And so they apparently have to do this. There are some seats that are arranged to help people actually connect with each other. They are never used this way. You see this, these two people up here, they're not actually talking with each other. They are staring past each other. What then happens is we go down to the next train next to the stop. People get on, they pile in, they line up here in this second set of windows. They are now cheek to jowl with another human being who is also made happier and healthier by connecting with other people. And they then, we then, start on a 45-minute ride into downtown Chicago and what do people do on that 45-minute ride? They completely ignore each other here. Now I understand it's different in different parts of the world. We can talk about that in the Q and A if you'd like, I'm very interested in that. But here's a weird kind of context and it's not, it's not an unusual context. There are lots of times out in the world where we're around strangers, around other people we could connect with and we seem to choose not to. Why not? Well, I don't think Chicago's totally unique in this. Lots of other places, trains or others, you see folks when they're around strangers just be a little reluctant to reach out and connect with some stranger. Maybe it's a modern phenomena. Certainly the pandemic hasn't helped us, but maybe it's a modern phenomena that all of these tools of distraction that we now carry around with us, keep us from connecting with other people. That could be, but I don't really think that's the thing. It was even long before the iPhone came along and had us staring at screens for the better part of eternity, we still had some anxiety about connecting with others. Often when we were in the presence of other people, we didn't reach out connecting. We didn't try to be civil and decent and have a nice conversation with somebody else: We kept to ourselves. I'll skip over this, this data from the 1970s, that also find the same thing in New York. And so this raises a very basic question: Are we pro-social enough for our own wellbeing? Do we do enough good for others, connect with others in positive pro-social, civil kind, decent, nice ways? In ways that optimize our own wellbeing? Well, how would we find out about this? Well we go back to the trains -- it's one thing we do -- and we'd run an experiment there, which is what I did. What I did: My colleagues and I did this some years ago. So this was my graduate student Juliana Schroeder at the time, and also Jasmine Kwong, one of, my lab manager at the time. We went to the train line that in fact I ride in every day, we live down here in Flossmoor where we're right about here off of Rayburn Avenue in Flossmoor . We went to Homewood, Illinois; train station there actually has a basement. So on a cold day like this in February -- which was January and February, which is about when we were running these experiments, the first ones -- the research assistants don't freeze to death. This is Jasmine Kwong, she was my lab manager at the time. She then, is one now is one of our MBA alums. We went down to the trains and we recruited people for a commuter survey, told them they would get $5 in a Starbucks gift card if they were, if they completed the experiment. And then after they indicated they were interested in participating in the experiment -- then and only then after they'd indicated that they were interested -- Did we tell them what we wanted them to do in the experiment? That's important so people aren't selecting into conditions in the experiment. We asked them to do one of three things. In one condition we told them just to keep to themselves, don't be social just keep to yourself, enjoy your solitude on the train today. Just think about your day ahead; don't have conversations with others. In the control condition we asked them to just do whatever they normally do, right on the train. So they could do whatever they want. The third condition we told them to do something radical. We told them to be a little more social to when somebody else comes down and sits next to you on the train -- this is early in the train line -- We told them to try to make a connection with this person, try to have a conversation, try to get to know a little something about this person. Try to make a connection. That's our connection condition. We asked them to be a little social, right? Well, what happened here? So first: Were people optimizing their wellbeing on the train normally? Well, normally people don't talk to strangers. In fact, in surveys that we did on these trains only about 5% of people report ever talking to somebody on the train and overwhelmingly that's with people they know, not with people that, not with strangers. Was talking to a stranger unpleasant on this train? And the answer is no, not at all. At the end of their commute, we asked them to report how happy they felt after their commute, how sad they felt after their commute and how positive they felt on their commute compared to normal. We then, they fill out that survey, they put it in an envelope and they drop it in the mail. Now we do it on people's phones. But it, at that time, we did it in the mail, got about 85% response rates back on this. What did people say after their commute? Those in the connection condition actually report a more positive experience. These, we average these three items together. They report a more positive experience than do those in the solitude contrition with the control falling in the middle. The control condition bounces around a bit from one experiment to another. So it doesn't seem to be that people are optimizing their wellbeing on the train. We also asked them, by the way, to report how productive they were on their commute that morning. People expect that if they talk in the connection condition level, a less productive commute. In fact, that's not what we find. People don't report differences in how productive they are on the commute on the way in the morning; I think that's mostly because people aren't being very productive anyway and talking seems productive once you've done it. So people don't seem to be optimizing their wellbeing here on the train. One question is why aren't they? Why aren't they engaging with other people? Why aren't they being more social, being friendlier, being nicer, being kinder to other people, having a conversation when a person comes and sits next to them? Well, one possibility is they, they think it'll be unpleasant. They think the other person doesn't want to talk to them and it would be an unpleasant experience for them. To find out whether that's going on: Remember, you saw earlier in the Liz Dunn data I showed you that people underestimated how they thought they would feel happier if they spent money on themselves, rather than spending money on others. Maybe we have that phenomena going on here as well. Maybe people just don't recognize that they would be happier if they connected with another person. To figure out whether that's going on we have to run another survey where we -- another experiment, where we ask people to report how they expect they would feel if they were in each of these conditions. And so that's what we did in another experiment. We had people imagine that we, while they were on the trains, imagine that we had assigned them to one of each of these three conditions and to predict how they, they thought they would feel at the end of their train ride in each of these conditions. How did people expect they would feel if they were in each of these conditions? Well, this is how they predicted they would feel: These are their expectations. They actually expected they would have the least positive commute in the connection condition compared to the solitude condition. That is, their expectations weren't just wrong: They were profoundly wrong, they got them backwards. We see this not just on the trains: It's a similar experiment that we ran in with the buses in downtown Chicago, same sort of effect. People are actually happier when they connect than when they don't, but they expect they'd be happier keeping to themselves. So in this way, people are behaving rationally on the train. That is, they're behaving in line with their expectations as Gary Becker, one of our famous Nobel laureates here at the university of Chicago, wrote in his Nobel prize-winning address. "The Rational," when he is describing what rationality entails. "The rational analysis assumes that individuals maximize welfare as they conceive it." That is, their behavior is consistent with their expectations, "Their behavior is forward-looking." So people are behaving rationally here in line with their expectations. It's just that their expectations are profoundly wrong, they're backwards. They'd be happier if they connected; they don't seem to realize that. They undervalue the extent to which being good to others -- having a nice, kind, civil, pleasant conversation -- will actually feel good to themselves as well. And when I present these data, as I know have for a while since we've collected this, inevitably -- and my guess as many of you are thinking, if you're not writing it in the question and answer window or the chat window right now -- that yeah, yeah that's in Chicago. People are nice in Chicago, but what about elsewhere? Often, in at least when I give these talks in the US, people say, "Yeah, yeah but what about New York?" People are: That would never work in New York. People are animals there! That'll never work. What about there? Or what about in London? We've got some Londoners, on the train, in the session right now. Oh, God forbid you tried to talk to somebody on a train in London -- whoo! We know about Londoners. They're not friendly, right? We know that The Independent tells us that of the seven stereotypes of British peoplel about British people that everyone believes, number five is that British people are rude. Whoo! What if you did this in London? God forbid, well, we went to London and found out in collaboration with the BBC, who got us into the train stations in London. This was not the tube; these were the commuter trains coming in from the more distant suburbs, Cambridge, Colchester into London and then going back in the evening, we conducted the, replicated, this experiment in London. And what do we find there? Well, these are just people's experiences. You see in Chicago. These are the data from Chicago: Folks reported a more positive experience in the connection condition than in the solitude condition. In the London study, we've got about three times the amount of data there and so we can do more things with the data than we could here in Chicago. We've got about 300 people who did this in London. We can look at those who actually did what we asked them to; that is, followed the instructions. A good number of some people, about 10%, reported that they couldn't have a conversation because they couldn't find somebody to talk to. But if we just look at those who actually had a conversation, we see if anything, the effect in London is bigger than it is in the United States. Turns out Londoners like talking to people, too. Who would've guessed? And if we just look at all the data, whether they followed our instructions or not, the data, the effects, are basically the same as what we saw in Chicago. That is those in the connection condition report a more positive experience than those than the solitude condition. Turns out, Londoners are people, too, Who would've guessed? We see this, not just in terms of connecting with others in positive ways in conversation, we see it in more explicitly pro-social actions as well. So these data here come from a class exercise and experiment that I run in my class and now have for five years. We've got over a thousand people who have done this and in my classes, and in other settings as well, where I've done this. I have people write a gratitude letter. My guess is that you can think of somebody who you feel grateful to, who you haven't told you feel grateful for, just yet. You can ask yourself, "Why haven't I thanked this person or expressed the deep gratitude I feel for this person yet?" Turns out expressing gratitude is one of the best ways to increase your mood on any given day. People feel meaningfully happier when they express gratitude: Why aren't they doing it? Maybe we undervalue the positive impact of gratitude not just on ourselves, but on others as well. So here's the first experiment that I ran like this. This is within my Good Life class. Here we had 120 MBAs fill out this survey where I asked them to write a gratitude letter to somebody that they feel grateful to; to send that gratitude letter off to them; and then to predict how the recipient would feel as well -- report how they would feel and also predict how the recipient would feel. We then asked them to give us the recipient's email address. They don't have to but 101 folks gave us the recipient's email address. And then I sent them a note saying that we were running an exercise and in my class you received a letter for one of my students the other day. We would love it if you could go and tell us how you experienced that, that letter. Eighty folks responded to that survey we sent to them. These surveys were anonymous when they filled them out, of course. So what do they write about? Well, that's pretty personal stuff. This is most meaningful thing I do in class. One of the great things about teaching MBA students -- the thing I love the most -- is that when we give you something to do, particularly students here at Booth, they take it deadly seriously. These are, these are super-touching letters, overwhelmingly very personal stuff, but they take it very seriously. How did my students feel afterwards? Well, the answer is they felt pretty darn good: much better than they felt before writing their letter. This is the difference between the reported mood before writing the letter and after writing the letter significant increase in mood. Here are the data from this. This is how folks felt before writing their gratitude letter. This is how they felt at the beginning of class that day. I'm sad to say people weren't overwhelmingly thrilled to be in class. No, pretty normal spread around on the scale. Minus-five, the scale goes from minus-five, much more negative than normal is how I feel. Plus-five is much more positive than normal how I feel. Zero is no more positive or negative than I normally feel. So mostly are feeling, people are feeling how they normally feel, maybe slightly better than normal. How did they feel after writing their gratitude letter? Well, that's how they felt. That's what a positive mood induction looks like. People tended to feel more positive than normal. OK? Big effect before versus after, OK. Did they know how their recipient would feel or did they underestimate how positive the recipient would feel as we've seen in other data? The answer is they had some sense, but there were also some meaningful gaps. We asked people to predict how surprised they'd be to receive the letter, how surprised they'd be about its content; to predict how the recipient would feel on that same minus-five to plus-five scale that I showed you a moment ago. I've added five to it so it's on the same zero-to-10 scale as all of the others. Zero to 10 on these others going from zero, not at all to 10 being very surprised. And also to predict maybe a negative outcome, like how awkward or weird will the other person feel from zero not at all to 10, very awkward. This is how my letter writers expected their recipients would feel. They thought they'd be, moderately surprised to receive it. A little less surprised about the content. They thought they, the recipient would feel really good. This is an average of about three on that minus-five to plus-five scale. So this is close to the ceiling of that measure already, that people aren't idiots. You know that when you express gratitude to somebody, you know they're gonna feel good. And they also thought they'd feel a little weird, that it'd be a little awkward. Turns out, though, when we compare these expectations, these predictions of how the recipient would feel, with how the recipient actually feels they're significantly miscalibrated: statistically significantly miscalibrated on all of these, in a consistent direction. That is, they underestimate how positive the recipients go to feel overall. Recipient is more surprised to receive it than they guess, more surprised about its content than they guessed. They know their recipients gonna feel good; they feel even better than that. And the recipient doesn't feel nearly as awkward; doesn't feel as, doesn't feel as awkward, I should say, as they expect. They think it's gonna be good to express gratitude. Turns out it's even better than they expect. How do the recipients actually feel this is on that minus-five to plus-five scale They feel great. That is, their maxing out our scale. If anything, we're underestimating the positive impact of expressing gratitude on somebody else here. And these are the data now that I've collected from everybody who's ever done this. We have 634 complete expressor recipient pairs. These are very robust effects. We don't just see it with gratitude letters we see it with all kinds of pro-social behaviors. So here's an experiment -- also, we, I did it in class -- where we had people do random acts of kindness and predict how their recipient would feel; predict how big the act would seem to the recipient. Is this a little deal or a big deal? How much time, money and energy was invested to predict how the recipient would feel again on that same minus-five to plus-five scale; and also to predict how awkward the recipient would feel. Again, they're under value on how, how positive an experience this will be for the recipients across the board. Lady Montagu, 17th Century aristocrat, once said that, "Civility costs nothing and it buys everything." I think these data suggests that most of us don't calculate the value of civility, of decency, of being, treating other people well, being ethical towards others, as being as valuable as it actually is, OK. Doing good feels good -- turns out to feel surprisingly good. All right, so how to? How to create a "good-er" life a, a more positive life, how to achieve this good life that you are seeking? Well, let me just wrap up quickly. Normally in class, we spend nine weeks going over this and I go over conclusions in much more detail. First, when we're thinking about how to make people be better. ... Being good out in the world, being decent towards others, being the kind of person that connects, positively, favorably with others, is critical for success at work and is also critical for your own happiness. How do we design organizations? How do we create organizations that help people be better at this, to do this more often? One of the key insights from behavioral science is that if we're gonna try to change behavior, we need to think about the context that people are in. That is, instead of treating ethics as a problem with people's beliefs -- people don't know what's right or wrong, or we have to teach them what's right or wrong in a given context -- we instead need to think about it as a design problem. How do we design environments or context that help people be better, right? How can we design environments that make it easy to be good and hard to be bad? That is, easy to avoid temptation. A lot of this has to do with aligning incentives, getting motivations right. But it also has to do with getting people's thoughts right. We need to structure environments in ways that help us keep our good intentions top of mind. Are your ethics top of mind in your organization, are your ethics visible? Do you see them around? Do you see the good that you wanna be doing? Are you reminded of that day to day? It can be easy to forget when you're in the short-term mindset often that we get into at work. So in class, for instance, I have you right at the end. One of the things you get outta my class is a first step in keeping ethics top of mind for you. I have you write a personal responsibility statement. Here's what mine looks like. This is an ethical value or principle that you want for your own life that you'd like to have top of mind going forward. The idea is if you had this top of mind, you'd likely behave better. We then give you a framed copy of that in the hopes that you put this somewhere where you actually see it, or others will see it. This is my home office where I've been working for the last two years. I have it somewhere where I can see it. Second, doing good feels good. That's critical for success. So can we design our lives with prosociality in mind? Turns out that we need to treat happiness not like a trait, but rather like exercise. That is, something we need to do routinely over and over like a habit. So we need to design our lives in ways that make it easy for us to do prosociality on a regular basis, right? One of the problems with our good intentions is we don't, like exercise, always follow through on it. Happiness is a mood. It fluctuates, it goes up and down. In order to keep yourself feeling good and happy it's something you need to do routinely. We need to practice prosociality to make it a habit like exercise. Nobody thinks that they will exercise once. You're there -- whoo, whoo, really good exercise! -- and then you'll be fit for the rest of your life. No, no, no. And yet that's often how we think about happiness. If I get that house, I get that job, get that marriage that's great, kids go off and do great in their lives, I'll be happy. That's not how it works. Happiness fluctuates because it's a mood. So there are lots of daily activities that you can do, like exercise, to keep yourself doing a little more prosociality: keep a gratitude journal, do a daily random act of kindness. Buy a plus-one when you're at Starbucks for somebody else who's behind you. Open meetings in certain ways that highlight good news or gratitude. Talk with strangers more routinely, make that a habit. Smile more often; this even works in the pandemic. Turns out you can tell a genuine from a fake smile not in a person's mouth: You detect it in their eyes, turns out, so you can even make people happy by smiling at them and yourself if you make it more of a habit. Finally, sweat the small stuff. Happiness is fleeting. That is, wellbeing is fleeting. It's not like height. It's not a trait that is stable over time. Much of that day-to-day happiness in your life is up to your choice: what you choose to do, the context that you are in. And the good news is that happiness is highly sensitive to the actions that we take. Even small ones, turns out the positive impact that we get from prosociality isn't a function of the magnitude of the prosociality but rather the frequency of it. So a happy life is not one that's full of big major events. It's one that's full of day-in, day-out, habitual decency and kindness, positive connections with others in ways that are good, that create goodness at work, and also lead to happiness in your own life. It's not just the big stuff that matters. The small stuff does too. Understanding these core features of human psychology, underlying motivations, underlying cognitions, how our behaviors are guided by the context we're in and how they affect our wellbeing, is not gonna make it easy for you to design organizations or design your own life in ways that always make you happy. But the idea is that understanding and insight will make it easier for you to do this than you might otherwise, it will bring you some wisdom. And that's what we're really hoping that you'll get out of our classes. That should be a little wiser than you might have been otherwise. And that you'll be able to go out in the world and do a little more good than you might have otherwise. I hope to see you in my class someday. And with that, let me go ahead and stop the lecture and we can turn it over to Kara, who I think is gonna run us through a little question and answer in the 20 or so minutes that we have left.

- Yes, absolutely thank you, Nick and it was really great to see.

- Oh, Kara, I think you might be muted I can't hear you. OK, go for it.

- Can you hear me now?

- Now I can, sorry. I had my computer----

- OK perfect, that's OK. There was great discussion in the chat much like I'm sure you experienced in the Booth classrooms. It was just great to see that, the back-and-forth and dialogue. But I did pull a few questions that were coming up somewhat frequently. So there were two under this umbrella related to the pandemic. So the pandemic has revealed that people who thought they were happy in their jobs were in fact not happy. How has happiness been measured and how do you feel? And I can see this changing going forward. And kind of a follow-up to that was, are you hearing from businesses, like getting advice on this, like reaching out to you or your colleagues about the happiness and this kind of Great Resignation that we're at least experiencing here in the United States?

- Yeah, so let me say just two quick things. One is, I would not say that people are learning that they were actually unhappy in their jobs. Our jobs have changed in a way that has stripped a lot of the happiness out of it. That's true in my job. My job is not nearly as fun, not nearly as rewarding and pleasant as it used to be. Margaret is on this call. She's one of our post-docs here. She's one of my research collaborators. Normally when we're doing research, Margaret comes into my office and we go back and forth and we not only talk about ideas, but we've gotta, we have a positive social exchange as well. When I teach classes, you're all in front of me. I can't see a one of you right now. Not a one of you is gonna come up to me and shake my hand afterwards. I'm not gonna be able to connect meaningfully really with any of you in this format. That's hard, that's hard, that's not great. I'm hopeful that won't be the way it is when all of you come and actually are in my class next year. But that way it is now. So it's not so much that people are hiding that they're not happy they weren't happy in their jobs. It's that jobs are stripping out, jobs are losing, a lot of the things that made them rewarding before. And that is a lot of the social interaction. So I think that's a big thing behind the Great Resignation. Second thing I would highlight,

- - obviously there are other things but that also just say that's, I think, one of them. ... The other thing is that companies are really struggling with what to do in terms of coming back to work or not. And lots of employees are saying, "I don't wanna come back to work. I wanna work from home." And I think our data suggests that that's not necessarily a wise thing to do. Either for the company or even maybe for the wellbeing of the people working from home. Now, there are miserable jobs that are hard to come into, yes, but a lot of the meaning and purpose and value that people derive from the job comes from being there and connecting with others. And so when you, so -- and people don't seem to realize that. That as we find time and time again, that people underestimate how important those social connections and engagement engagements are with other people. And so when people say that they don't really wanna be around others at work, or they'd rather be at home, I think they're missing something important in their own lives. We find that in our data. So I think my suggestion for any CEO here, or any anyone thinking returning to work, is to be careful about listening solely to people's preferences right now, instead of thinking about how do I create an enriching environment once people are in fact back, they're gonna have to be back. We can't run hybrid like this, it just doesn't work. How do we bring people back in a way that's rewarding for them, that keeps up their motivation, keeps up their excitement, keeps up their enthusiasm and keeps up their happiness? We don't have to go back to old habits. I think we can do even a little bit better, so.

- Great, thank you.

- I don't see working from home being sustainable in the long run.

- Yeah, yeah and for those of you that are applying or already applied, we have been for the most part fully back in person for the full-time program and majority evening-weekend and the plan is to return fully in person as soon as we safely can, so we're all excited. I share your sentiments, professor. Different, shifting topics a little bit. Do you view "doing good" as typically always proceeding feeling good? Or are there situations where the inverse is expected; i.e, one feels good and therefore does good?

- Yeah, both of those things happen it turns out. So there's a cycle here, a self-fulfilling kind of cycle. And we know two things. We know one, if you randomly assign people to do good, they feel better afterwards. So we got that causal link is just powerfully established. Liz Dunn has looked at prosocial spending around the world and finds it pretty much everywhere on the planet. But we also know that the inverse happens as well, which is when people feel good, they tend to be more sociable. And in particular, they tend to, feeling good, tends to lead to more approach-oriented behavior, is what it does. And people are happier when they approach others. But having that positive signal also makes approach more likely. So there is this cycle. But what that also means is that isolation and disconnection and the unhappiness that comes from it is also a cycle. So loneliness is characterized by a pretty vicious cycle of disconnection from others, that decreases mood, that makes you disinterested. That can make you disinterested in reaching out and re-engaging with others. It turns out in part because you think others don't actually wanna be around you. So it's actually some misguided social cognition. We find that in our train studies: The reason why people are reluctant to talk isn't because they think they don't enjoy connecting with others. It's that they think other people don't wanna talk with them and that's what they're wrong about. But that's the vicious cycle of loneliness, which is the opposite side of sociality and happiness. Isolation, breeds unhappiness, and happiness encourages miscalibrated social thinking, which decreases your, makes you a little more reluctant to reach out and connect with others. And so, yes, but both of those things go on we know both of them.

- Great, thank you. And this question was posed really at the top of your session, thinking back to the beginning. If everyone inherently wants to do good, then why does inequality exist?

- Oh, well. So inequality is, yeah ... Inequality is different from just doing good. You will always have inequality. I mean, it just, you have inequality in height for lots of lots of reasons. But we can, I can lemme just rephrase this a little bit. If people want to do good why do people sometimes do bad? Right? That is a core question that we tackle in my class from start to finish. So there are a few things. One is just because people have the motivation to do good doesn't mean they always do, right? So it's not always the case that the first thing that's coming to mind is good that you're gonna be doing for others. Sometimes you don't, you're not aware, of the good you be doing to others. So in the case of our gratitude or kindness experiments for instance, people underestimate how much good they can do. And if you don't think it's, you're gonna be able to do much good, then you don't go ahead and do it. The other thing that happens is that the context that you're in can shift your attention to what you want or what you're focused on or what you think you should be doing. And lots of organizations shift attention towards short-term, narrowly self-interested goals in ways that orient people away from this other motivation that they could have, which is to connect positively, to do good for others. And so in class we spend a lot of time talking about, how do you design organizations that maintain people's motivation to do good for others in the long run and particularly keep a long run perspective in mind? How do you design organizations that shape people's cognitions, their thoughts, so that they're both aware of the good that they wanna do -- that the good that you expect them to be doing is clear and accessible in their environment -- and to make it clear that you expect them to do good in their environment. So that's what we spend the bulk of the course talking about. How do we shift, design organizations that shift people's perspective, keep it focused on the good that they need to be doing and keep it from being focused just on themselves? They can have both perspectives.

- Yeah, that's helpful. So many questions coming in here. This might be, you address a little bit, but it's come up a few times. So with regard to self-reporting happiness levels, isn't overestimation a common issue? Ergo, most people think they are doing OK, hence report better scores. Like I think you address that a little bit, but that's come up a couple times.

- Yeah. So first, so let me first say that there, there's no field that's more skeptical about self-report than psychology. I mean, we're deeply skeptical of self reports. However, there's a qualification there. Self-reported ... self-reports that is on surveys, you can do this terribly, right? You take them publicly, they're not anonymous. Right? If I ask all my students in the, on the last day of class in, when we're in class all together: Raise your hand if you like this class, right? Obviously that's not a good way to assess how people actually feel about my class. So we can design surveys that are smart or we can, and that actually get what people think, or we can design surveys that aren't so good. So obviously we, these surveys are conducted anonymously. That's how you do them. So we think about survey design, we're wise about this. The second is, turns out self reports are really very good. In fact, the best and cheapest way in many respects to get to one particular thing: and that is people's experience. If I wanna know how you're feeling about something, turns out the best way to find it out is to ask you in a way that you can honestly report. And psychologists have tried all kinds of other ways to get at happiness or reports of experience. We do skin conductors. We measure brainwaves using EEG on the scalp. We do neuroimaging to look at blood flow in the brain. We measure heart rate. We pay people for accuracy. And it turns out that if you wanna know how people are feeling, you just can't do better than ask them in a way that they can report honestly. So anonymous surveys without desirability demands and so on. So don't think people overestimate their happiness. That's not in the data. What we don't wanna do, though, is ask people "why?" questions very often. That is, "Why are you feeling this way?" So it turns out people are pretty good at reporting what, you know, what kind of, what they're experiencing in their body. They're terrible at explaining why they're feeling something. So we're good reporters, but we're terrible interrogators of ourselves. When we ask people why they're feeling good or bad, they often point to factors in their environment that have nothing to do with it. When they explain their behavior, they're often rationalizing making sense of it. You ask somebody, why did you cheat on that exam? Or why did you commit that fraud? Forget it. Not only are people -- not only are there big desirability concerns there but people also aren't able to do that. That is we don't have access to the causal mechanisms in our brain that report that. So when we ask about experience, self-reported experience, as far as we can tell that's about as good as we can do to get it. Most people tend to be reasonably happy, but there are things that you can do to make them meaningfully happier or meaningfully less happy. We deal with that by asking people questions we know that they can answer: these certain kinds of happiness measures in context where they can tell us honestly what they're feeling. So that's how we address that. But I don't, don't ask 'em why they're happy about it.

- That's really insightful.

- Unless you just want people's stories.

- Great, thank you Nick. Does being part of an extremely competitive school or work environment reduce the inclination to be happier? Have you looked at that at all?

- Yeah. Yes is the answer. Yeah, so when you put people in context where they ... Well, sorry, let me qualify this just a bit. Competition comes in many different forms. Sometimes competition -- I was a college football player of the American variety with the helmet and, you know, shoulder pads and every weekend we would go out and try to kill people on the other team. That's essentially how it was. That kind of competition was great and when you would win, fairly and honestly, you felt great. But that was competition that was on behalf of a team. And so it, so that kind of competition creates connection with other folks on the team. That the positive experience you get from that, the long-run positive experience, comes from the sense that in this competition, I'm actually doing good for people I care about, and I'm not doing bad, right? So when we played football my coach was always careful to tell us that football is an aggressive sport, it's not a violent one. Violence is when you harm somebody without their consent. Aggression is when you compete fairly and openly and honestly -- as Milton Friedman said businesses ought to do, right? So ethical competition that actually connects you with others? That can bring happiness. What undermines happiness is purely self-interested behavior that comes at the expense of others. And so in dyadic competitions, when people for instance ... so if we give you, if we give you $10 and we tell you, you can share it with some other people, folks who compete the most in that situation keep the most for themselves? At the end of that experiment are also the least happy and the most stressed. So pure competition just for its own sake, that doesn't have these other ethical or connecting components, tends to reduce happiness. When competition does create some wellbeing, it comes because you create some sense that you're doing good and you're connecting with others who are part of some team. So sorry, more complicated answer than what I started with.

- That's great, that's helpful. Thank you. I've got a couple more questions here, then we'll wrap up. So employers appear to be using ENPS -- employee net promoter scores, surveys -- to assess the satisfaction/happiness level of their employees. Do you think this is a right -- that is a right way -- to assess the health of an organization in terms of satisfaction, job satisfaction, and happiness? And we of course use these in academia as well the net promoter score, so, thoughts on that?

- I guess I would ask compared to what? So that's always what you wanna ask. Is it good? Well, almost any measure we take could be better. Any single measure is gonna be problematic, I would say, because it can do two things. One is it focuses narrow really on one thing. And it, and if that single measure isn't broad enough, it creates perverse behavior where you just try to maximize that thing and not anything else. So typically when you're looking at measurement, you're trying to get broader measures of a positive experience. So any single measure is gonna be imperfect but is it better than the alternatives? And I would say it's probably better than a lot of the alternatives, cause it's a, it's a more honest behavioral measure that people can't manipulate themselves. So it's probably better, but it's probably imperfect. But the key question to ask when you're asking these questions is not, is this a good measure? It's: Is it better? And I think that's an important thing to keep in mind when we're thinking about ethics and organizations, too. The insight I try to leave students with in my class is that, being good out in the world, isn't about being good at some level of perfection. Anything you do to try to help people be good is gonna be imperfect. The question is, can we live our lives, run our organizations in ways that help people be better and constantly have that focus? Can we make people better, and a little better, and a little better, and a little better? And perfection should never be an impediment to doing better. So when we talk about designing organizations in my class to help them be better, there are always gonna be imperfections in it. But question, is it better than the alternative? And oftentimes it is better. And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to do better each step.

- Give me one second here, OK. So we talked about this a little bit at the beginning of the Q and A but if there's any other ideas you may have. How can we design a good life for participants in a future of work that is inevitably going to have more of a globally, like globally-connected teams, and hybrid work environments. Do you have any thoughts on that and like the workplace, how to promote when we're not, some just will not go back in person, or have to work across countries, et cetera?

- Yeah. So I think one key is to recognize the importance of these kinds of interactions as best we can, communal kinds of interactions. So the big challenge with remote work is that we're never really totally with each other. Right? And that's hard. That's hard, we're just not with each other very often. And the ways we are with each other over Zoom, or over these kinds of media, are not actually that communal. So when you're are in a room with a hundred people, or a thousand people, like if everybody who is on this chat today -- we've got 407 folks here right now -- if you were all with me downstairs in room 104, which I hope you will be in the fall, there's an energy there. There's a sense of connection that we are in this together you don't have when you're over Zoom. How do you get that over Zoom? You don't get it with large group Zoom meetings: Those are awful. You get it more with one-on-one conversations. So in creating spaces like that, where you can actually meaningfully connect over these tools that we have, Zoom is great for dyadic interactions and conversations. It's not so good for group stuff. So we should be sprinkling our days, our work days, with a random lunch with somebody, right? Get a lunch, go to your desk at home and just have a conversation with somebody else at work, like you would if you were meeting, you know, in room 104, with whoever happened to sit down next to you. And the next it'll be somebody, a little different. Have those kinds of, those kinds of opportunities for connection. You need to work those, you need to be more deliberate in working those into your day-to-day organizations in order to, in your day-to-day activities, in order create a sense of connection over Zoom. Those are gonna be dyadic interactions. They're not gonna be group interactions.

- Yeah, it definitely is not the same, thank you. And then last question, I'm gonna shift gears and just kinda ask a more open question. So knowing that everyone and most people on this are prospective students or admitted students. So what would you share that's unique about the Booth MBA experience, or others, you know, maybe looking at other institutions, what stands out to you about Booth being a part of the family for so long? It'd just be great to hear your thoughts.

- Um, boy that's... Look, I can't really say. I haven't been at other business schools. I've been at this one. But I have certainly visited other business schools. And I know a little bit what the culture is like at other places. And I think the great thing about Booth, despite our reputation -- we've got a reputation around the world as being kind of a tough, quant-oriented, aggressive kind of place. And I've just not found that to be true meaningful at all. I mean, there's some -- you know, we take ideas seriously. But I've never been at a place -- I was at Harvard before this and Cornell before this -- and I've never been at a place that's so collegial. Where people get together and they engage in conversation, and we do it in the classroom, and we do it in workshops, and we do it for research. And you can, when you come here, you can raise your hand in a seminar and ask the same kind of question of a Nobel Laureate as you would of your colleague and nobody would bat an eye. And that kind of respect for each other and ideas? It's been harder during the pandemic 'cause we haven't been around, but the culture here is one where people come to work; they talk to each other in the halls; we engage seriously with ideas in ways that respect each other. And respect means not just being nice to each other. Respect means taking you seriously, taking your ideas and your capabilities and your capacity seriously. And being open to questions that are serious and meaningful, and debating those questions, and engaging with them honestly and openly -- and that's what I love about being here. And if it wasn't like that, if it was kind of competitive and unpleasant and, I would never stay. Ever. I would not have stayed here. I would've gone somewhere else. And so that's my hope that what the experience, that the experience the MBA students get here is one that's alive: alive with an energy and a respect for each other and a seriousness about each other's ideas. That's I think what makes this place special for me.

- Great, I really appreciate that and I couldn't agree more from the administrator's perspective as well. OK, well that's perfectly right on time. So please join me in thanking professor Epley and Margaret for sharing their insights. This was a great session and I'll hopefully be able to share the chat. I'd love for you guys to look through all the excitement that everyone had and the gratitude that was shared for you both throughout the session. So thank you all for joining, for anyone has any admissions-type questions, reach out to the admissions teams, never hesitate. We're here to help you throughout the entire process. And I hope you all enjoy the rest of your day or evening, whatever it may be, depending on where you are in the world. And thanks again, everybody. We really appreciate you, take care.

- Thanks everybody. Hope to see many of you in class. Bye-bye.

- Take care thanks.