Chicago Booth Review Podcast Do Other People Make Us More Happy, or Less?

Thomas Talhelm: What I'm trying to say is that there are different sources of happiness, and in the West, in individualistic cultures, we're drawing a bit more on those internal feelings and standards, and in more interdependent cultures, people are paying a little bit less attention to how I'm feeling moment to moment, and more on these sorts of global assessments, like, am I doing better than other people? Am I worse off than other people?

Hal Weitzman: Humans are social animals, being with other people can make us happy, but it can also make us unhappy, depending on how we interact and think of each other. So, do others make us happier or less happy? Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you ground-breaking academic research in a clear and straightforward way. I'm Hal Weitzman, and today I'm talking with Chicago Booth's Thomas Talhelm, who's interested in how different cultures think about happiness. Talhelm's research looks at the differences between regions in China that grow rice versus those that grow wheat, and how happy their populations are. What he finds out about rice-growing communities in China sheds light on the behavior of social media users in the West, and raises the question of what we are really measuring when we try to measure people's happiness. Thomas Talhelm, welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Hal Weitzman: So, we invited you here because you have some fascinating research about rice-growing versus wheat-growing, and all sorts of implications of what the societies are like in those areas. So, tell us a bit about what you did and what you found.

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah. The basic idea here is that rice farming and wheat farming are two very different forms of farming, lots of parts of the world have relied on one or the other historically, and a lot of research in the past had looked at how cultures subsist in style, so the way they make a living is influencing their cultures, even in the modern day, even as people are no longer farming. A lot of that research has looked at herding versus farming cultures, and one of the things I did in my research is to say, well, farming is a pretty large category, there are very different types of farming, one very common type of farming historically was rice farming. And rice farming was very different from other forms of farming because it required a lot more coordination. So, rice farming was based on flooding the fields, and so rice villages had these irrigation networks where they had to coordinate when we fill our fields, how much water we use, stuff like that.

And so, what that does is that links the farmers together, so they depend more on each other, and what that is linked to in the modern day is cultures with a history of rice farming are more interdependent. Relationships are more important, people are less likely to put their own needs first, or express themselves when those needs might conflict with other people. Wheat farming did not rely on irrigation historically, in most places, it required less labor, and so wheat farming had more of the freedom we'd associate with individualism. So, wheat farming cultures tend to be more independent, individualistic, that sort of thing. And these two groups are largely different in China. So, Northern China is traditionally wheat farming, also millet, which is grown similarly, Southern China farms rice. And so, you see cultural differences within China that map onto rice versus wheat farming.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. So, rice farming cultures in China are more interdependent.

Thomas Talhelm: That's right.

Hal Weitzman: Because of the water. So, what about, in America you have rice growing areas, well, not many, but some, and you have a lot of wheat. Same kind of patterns?

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah. So, nobody's really ever tested rice in the United States.

Hal Weitzman: Ah, okay.

Thomas Talhelm: But I think it makes sense to view Western culture as essentially being a wheat farming culture. Wheat and other similar crops have been really important in Western culture throughout history, the West also tends to be quite individualistic in cross-cultural studies, and I think the history of wheat farming, among other subsistence styles, plays some role in that. It's not the only reason, but I think it can help explain why the West is a bit of an outlier around the world in terms of individualism.

Hal Weitzman: So, tell us, how did you become interested in this topic in the first place?

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah, so I lived in China after I graduated from college, and one of the places I lived was Guangzhou. Guangzhou is in Southern China, it's near Hong Kong. And as somebody who was interested in culture, I was often observing the behavior of the people around me, and Southern China to me felt very much sort of what I expected China to be like before I ever went there. So, people were often shy around strangers, people were often slow to warm up, it was difficult for me to make friends, I often felt like in conversations I didn't really know what the true attitude of the other person was, they seemed to be more careful in what they said. And then, the next year I lived in Beijing, which is in the north, and it just felt like night and day to me. Strangers would walk up to me, if I'd eat dinner alone in a restaurant, maybe a third of the time somebody would come up to me and say like, "Hey, what are you doing? Where are you from? Are you going to go home for Chinese New Year?"

People would just start conversations with me, and much more sort of freewheeling and outgoing. In a way it feels sort of more Western in that sense. And so, I was curious where these differences come from. We think of China as a very unified culture, but to me, on the ground, it was very clear that there were cultural differences here, and it was also interesting to me that Southern China where I lived first, in Guangzhou in particular, was noticeably wealthier. I think a lot of people have the intuition that wealth causes cultures to become more individualistic or more Western, and yet it was interesting to me that the wealthier place, the more developed place, felt less Western.

When I say Western, I mean things like talking to strangers, and being direct in your attitudes and opinions and things like that. So, that was another thing that, a little puzzle that stuck out to me while living in China. So, I eventually, in grad school, did more research into it, found out that one of the differences between the north and the south were these histories of rice farming versus wheat farming, and the more I read about rice farming, it seemed to make perfect sense with the behaviors that I was seeing. If you have to rely on other people to get food on the table, then it would also make sense that you might stifle your opinion because you have tasks that you're trying to accomplish that are more important than me telling you that you're wrong, for example.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. So, that's kind of where you got your interest in it, it seemed to make sense. And so, were you the first person to connect what you were seeing on the ground with farming?

Thomas Talhelm: So, there are studies in the past connecting culture to farming, I also think people broadly in China tend to agree about these differences, I'm not the first person in the world to say, hey, the north is different from the south. But to connect those to a history of rice and wheat farming just wasn't really in the research, and so definitely when I came out with that research, there were definitely plenty of people who said that I was a dummy, or why would this have to do with rice farming? Especially because for a lot of people, these cultural legacies have deep roots, and it's not obvious, even if you're in the culture, to think that, oh, I'm behaving this way because of rice farming. I've never farmed rice, why is that relevant to me? But I think that's the fun thing about culture is that it can have these roots in ways that are not obvious, so yeah, so that was one of my contributions, was to say, hey, this is a plausible cause of these cultural differences.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Now, not only did you identify this connection between the type of farming and the culture, but you've connected it to happiness, something that is a big topic, particularly in psychology in the United States. So, tell us what is that connection?

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah. So, I was interested in a paradox in the data, which is, so decades of research find that social relationships are a strong consistent predictor of happiness. So, where people have good relationships with other people, they tend to be happier. Research across cultures has also found that the cultures around the world where relationships are the most important tend to be less happy. So, to take East Asia as an example, these are cultures where, cultures like Japan, Korea, or China, are cultures where people seem to place a lot of importance on social relationships, they seem to prioritize it over individual needs. And yet, in international studies of happiness, those are some of the cultures that are performing worse than they should be, even controlling for things like economic development, wealth, and things like that. So, that seems to be a paradox, if relationships are good for happiness, these cultures emphasize relationships, why are they less happy than cultures that don't seem to emphasize relationships?

And so, rice farming and wheat farming within China got me interested in this question because I thought, well, that could be a window to answer that paradox. We can find a variation in how people think about relationships with other people, yet we can limit it to a single nation. So, now, we're not comparing Denmark as a very happy place to Japan, but we can compare different regions within a culture. And so, I got interested in that question because I thought maybe China offers us a nice test case, where we can start to unpack the relationship between happiness and people's social relationships.

Hal Weitzman: So, we would expect that the South would be happier?

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah. So, just based on if relationships are important and that makes people happy, then the southern rice farming regions should be happier. But if we take China as a sort of a microcosm of the larger global phenomenon of happiness, then it should actually be less happy. Cultures that are more interdependent, that are more collectivistic tend to be less happy. And so, if Southern China is more interdependent, then maybe it will, like the rest of the world, tend to be less happy. And that's what we found. So, people in Southern China were less happy on average. So, people in rice farming areas less happy than wheat farming areas, despite the fact that rice farming areas are on average wealthier. So, the people in the wealthier areas were actually telling us they were less happy, which contradicts a lot of the research on wealth and happiness.

Hal Weitzman: Absolutely. We are sort of led to believe that there is a point... Money correlates with happiness up to a certain point, and then after that it's been, in the past it was $75,000 of income, it's probably more nowadays, and then at some point, the more you earn, it doesn't make you happier. But you're saying actually there's maybe no connection at all.

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah. So, money tends to make people happier, and yet it seems like a paradox that there are a fair number of wealthy, A, countries around there, but also B, regions within China that are wealthier but don't seem to be happier. And so, that was again, sort of a paradox, it suggests that there's something else going on besides money here.

Hal Weitzman: So, what is the other thing? Tell us.

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah, so my explanation here is that when you have an interdependent collectivistic culture, yes, people emphasize relationships, yes, they prioritize relationships over individual needs, and that can be a good thing for people, but interdependence also comes with some things that are not great for people's happiness, one of those things is social comparison. So, we know that interdependent cultures around the world tend to do more social comparison, and we also know that social comparison just tends to not make people very happy. So, that's the explanation that we looked into in the study.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. And?

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah, so we looked at... Well, it's a little bit difficult because we wanted to find large-scale survey data, but the problem is those large-scale surveys don't ask directly about social comparison, and so we had to infer it. One way that we inferred it was to look at things that people often socially compare, and so I guess I can ask you, what are some common things that people socially compare?

Hal Weitzman: Well, I guess things like possessions, like cars or houses, right? Looks, I guess.

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah, looks is definitely one. But money is, like you said, first, money and wealth, those are very common things that people compare themselves to other people on. And so, that's what we looked at in the data, we said, okay, let's take money and then let's see how well money predicts people's happiness in these different rice farming and wheat farming regions. And so, across the board, wealthier people tended to be happier, but wealth was a much better predictor in the rice regions than in the wheat regions. And so, again, this thing that people tend to compare each other on is a better predictor of happiness in the rice regions, which is suggesting that people are perhaps comparing themselves more. We did a similar analysis for things like, other things that people compare themselves on, things like education, occupational prestige, so basically, do you have a prestigious job or not? And again, these things that people compare a lot were better predictors of people's happiness in the rice region than in the wheat region.

So, this is consistent with this idea that, hey, people are comparing each other more in interdependent regions, and then I guess the other element that we found on top of that is that even for the people who were doing better in the rice regions, that wasn't actually making them better off in terms of happiness, right? Money was a better predictor of happiness in rice regions, but the overall level of happiness was lower. So, even if you're on the top end of that social comparison spectrum, you're not better than people in a place where they're doing less comparison. So, the net effect of social comparison seems to be just everybody's less happy, even if you're better off relative to other people.

Hal Weitzman: So, it has to do with relative wealth, it has to do with wealth, but it has to do a lot with what you see around you, is that right? So, happiness is a product of me looking around and saying, well, yeah, I'm doing well, but I'm not doing as well as my neighbor, therefore I'm less happy.

Thomas Talhelm: That's right. Yeah. So, social comparison seems to make people less happy. Although, what this is suggesting is that in the wheat region, it's not that people aren't comparing, but they're probably comparing less. And so, they're probably relying a little bit more on things other than social comparison. One thing that research has found around the world is, so you can ask happiness in a bunch of different ways, one way to ask it is to say, over the course of several days, to say, hey, how happy are you right now? How do you feel right now? Are you sad? Are you angry? Are you happy? And you can do that right now, or you can do that for the past week, or you can track people over several days. And then, at the end of it, you can ask people, in general, how happy are you? And so, you can see how well do those moment to moment feelings correlate with your overall happiness.

What they find is that in places like the United States or the UK, those moment to moment emotions are stronger predictors of people's happiness, the overall happiness, than in places like China or Korea. So, in places like China or Korea, people seem to be relying less on those internal cues, my day-to-day experiences, and more on global things like, am I doing well in life? Am I doing better than other people? So, what I'm trying to say is that there are different sources of happiness, and in the West, in individualistic cultures, we're drawing a bit more on those internal feelings and standards, and in more interdependent cultures, people are paying a little bit less attention to how I'm feeling moment to moment, and more on these sorts of global assessments, like, am I doing better than other people? Am I worse off than other people?

Hal Weitzman: If you're enjoying this podcast, there's another University of Chicago Podcast Network show that you should check out, it's called Capitalisn't. Capitalisn't uses the latest economic thinking to zero in on the ways that capitalism is and more often isn't working today. From the morality of a wealth tax to how to reboot healthcare, to who really benefits from ESG, Capitalisn't clearly explains how capitalism can go wrong and what we can do about it. Listen to Capitalisn't, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. So, Thomas, we were talking in the first half about this fascinating study you've got about rice growing areas versus wheat growing areas, and what makes people happy, or unhappy, but you actually tested this, didn't you? You tested this social comparison directly. Tell us what you did.

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah, so in the first study, we're just inferring social comparison by looking at things like income and prestige, but later on we directly measured social comparison, and we did so in this unique little slice of history. So, in the 1950s, the government of China set up farms around the country, these are state farms, and they more or less randomly assigned people to these farms. My researchers, colleagues and I, we found two farms in Northwest China that were right near each other, one farms rice, one farms wheat, the reason they farm different crops has to do with the elevation of the two different farms, but otherwise, they're essentially identical. And the government more or less randomly assigned people to either the rice farm or the wheat farm. And that, to us, set up basically the best natural experiment we're ever going to get, because I can't bring people into the lab and make them farm rice for decades and see what happens to their social style and how they relate to other people, but here it was sort of in the wild.

And so, we went to these farms, we gave people measures of social comparison, we just asked them, how often do you compare yourself to other people, and on what do you compare yourself? And people on the rice farm told us that they compare themselves more than people on the wheat farm. So, that helps answer two questions, one is it gets that social comparison directly, so people are saying, yes, I do compare myself more, people in the rice areas, and two, it helps get at this question of causality because yeah, there's lots of differences between Northern and Southern China as a whole, but between these two farms, people were more or less randomly assigned to these farms, and we're seeing these social outcomes of that. So, people who are in this more interdependent activity are now more sensitive to their relative rank to other people around them.

Hal Weitzman: While you're talking, we've been talking a lot about China, and I asked you about United States and you said there hasn't been research on rice growing versus wheat growing here, and we are generally more of a wheat type kind of place. So, I don't know about your agricultural knowledge, but it does seem to me, when we look at these global surveys of happiness, the happiest countries seem to be the ones that we think of as more collectivistic, and less individualistic, like Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden... Whereas, the more individualistic countries like United States, UK, Canada, Australia, they all score lower on the happiness ranking. So, how does that mesh with your research?

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah. I think this gets to a question of what we mean when we talk about collectivism, and so you're definitely right that people think of places like Sweden, or Finland, or Denmark as collectivistic, but from a cultural standpoint, at least the way that cultural psychologists think about this, those are actually some of the least collectivistic places in the world. Now, again, it depends on how you're thinking about collectivism. So, from a cultural psychology standpoint, collectivism has to do with tight ties and duties and responsibilities to people that are close to you. So, people like family and close friends, right? Collectivism from a more political science background or philosophical background doesn't draw that distinction between close and far-

Hal Weitzman: I see. So, you mean it more in the sense of the village.

Thomas Talhelm: That's right.

Hal Weitzman: Whereas, these other ones, they have a strong safety net, that kind of thing, social safety net.

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah. Strong safety net. So, from a cultural psychology standpoint, those places are actually more individualistic, because in a place like Sweden, your close relationships aren't really very important, they don't determine how well you're doing in life as much, they don't determine what your responsibilities are, and things like a strong social safety net, those are systems that operate outside of personal relationships. So, it's actually the most individualistic cultures in the world that have these strong impersonal safety nets.

Hal Weitzman: Okay, fascinating. Now, there's something underpinning all of this, and everything that we run, I guess, in Chicago Booth Review about happiness, which is that happiness is important, that we should care about happiness. And maybe that's just a Western thing, maybe in other places, not in the West, they value other things. Or even in the West, there's this debate about whether it's really happiness that's important, or the meaning, or purpose that you have in life. Do you think we're too obsessed with the idea of happiness?

Thomas Talhelm: I definitely think that, at least as researchers, I think we take a little bit of a bias into this. A lot of the happiness research started in the West, and I think it's not an accident that people's definition or researcher's definitions of happiness or how we measure it taps into a version of happiness that's more predominant in the West. And so, when I talk about how individualistic cultures tend to overperform on happiness around the world, even after accounting for GDP or wealth, I think part of the reason is social comparison, which I talked about today, I think another reason is because of how we've defined it. The idea of happiness in the research really focuses on people's emotions, how you feel, you should feel happy, you should feel elated, you should feel ecstatic, and I think there's a lot of cultures around the world where it's not so much that people don't care about that, but they're trying to do other things.

I think one of those other things is what I call security happiness, this is an idea that what's more important than me feeling good is me having security. Right? Now, that could be as literal as physical security, but more metaphorical as like I can provide for my family, or I think that my children or their children are going to be safe and secure, and if something bad happens, then I have enough of a resource backup to be able to provide for them. My guess is if we asked questions about that, then the results around the world might flip. I think then the US or the UK might start scoring a bit lower, and then you'd have cultures like China or Japan-

Hal Weitzman: So, it's almost like you need a different gauge depending on where you are.

Thomas Talhelm: Exactly.

Hal Weitzman: Happiness means different things in different places, which makes a lot of sense. Now, while you've been talking, I have two teenage girls at home, so obviously I was thinking of social media. And in the feature we wrote about your research in Chicago Booth Review, we drew this comparison with social media and rice farming, which, if people have been listening to this podcast, they'll understand. But of course, if you hadn't, that sounds absurd. So, how does this work on social media? Social media as, this is kind of a popular narrative, social media is making us less happy, it is damaging us. And is the mechanism there, the comparison? Is that what's happening? Is it the same kind of process?

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah, I think that social comparison is a strong element of why social media can be harmful. And to me, I think we can look to the past, of rice farming and social comparison in rice villages and how that can be bad for people's happiness, and see potentially a roadmap for our own future. I think that's the road that we're on right now, we have these little devices in our pockets that are like, hey, do you want to compare yourself to other people? Hey, do you want to compare yourself to other people? And it just doesn't seem like a recipe for happiness.

Hal Weitzman: And so, do you think we're hardwired to compare ourselves? That's not a cultural thing, everybody compares themselves to other people.

Thomas Talhelm: I think if you give people enough opportunities, they will definitely compare themselves to other people. We're also, by the way, hardwired, I think... Well, hardwired is a strong word. But people tend to socially compare up more than down. So, theoretically, social comparison shouldn't make people happier or sadder because if you're comparing up, that makes you feel bad, and if you compare down, that makes you feel better, and so it should net out to zero. Right? Well, when researchers actually give people opportunities to socially compare, they find that people tend to compare more up. So, if you're earning $100,000 a year, people are often more concerned about the person who's earning 150, they're not looking down to the person who's earning 50. So, people tend to spend more time looking up.

Hal Weitzman: This is reminding me of the old thing about the person who's least happy in the gold, silver, and bronze medals is the silver medalist, right? Because she didn't get the gold, as opposed to the bronze who's relieved that she got any medal at all. So, just that comparison thing is so strong, it seems quite bleak, Thomas, is there any way out, do you think?

Thomas Talhelm: Well, if I were in charge of social media companies or regulation, I'd try to change the environment in a way that's not eliciting so much social comparison. On a personal level, I do think there are choices that we can make to try to lessen the social comparison. One of the things I did, just speaking personally, when I was on the job market applying for jobs, there are message boards where people will say, oh, hey, this university, this is who... Their invitations for jobs are out right now, and you can see who is invited for a job, and you'd know immediately whether you were invited or not. And I made a decision just not to look at those.

I just didn't think that would make my life better, I didn't think there was really actionable knowledge that I could learn from who's getting the offers and who isn't, and so I just chose not to look at that stuff. Was I curious? Yeah. If it was in an envelope sitting in front of me and all I had to do is open that envelope, I might've done that, I might've opened up the envelope. But I was trying to make a conscious decision to say, you know what? I'm just going to let this process play out, I'm not going to worry about what other people are doing, and that probably made me saner in the end.

Hal Weitzman: So, to be aware of it is maybe to change your behavior when you know that it's not going to make you happy. And if you are going to compare, you compare, sounds like compare down.

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah, compare down. Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: Someone who's less good-looking and earns less than you will be ideal. All right, Thomas Talhelm, thank you so much for coming on the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Thomas Talhelm: Thanks for having me. I had fun.

Hal Weitzman: That's it for this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. For more research, analysis, and insights, visit our website at chicagobooth.edu/review. When you're there, sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss the latest in business-focused academic research. This episode was produced by Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe, and please do leave us a five-star review. Until next time, I'm Hal Weitzman, thanks for listening.