00:00:01
I research people's happiness um and what I found across the work is that time plays a critical role so for
00:00:08
instance I've looked at what's the effect of merely drawing people's
00:00:12
attention to time as opposed to our other lovely resource of money how does that impact people's levels of happiness
00:00:19
how does age and more specifically the amount of time people feel like they have left in life influence both how
00:00:28
people experience happiness as well well as the types of experiences that elicit
00:00:33
greater happiness so for example the things that I have found is that focusing on time leads to Greater
00:00:42
happiness than focusing on money and the way that I explored that was building on
00:00:48
prior work which has tracked how people spend their days and also how people feel over the course of their days
00:00:55
finding that people are happiest when they are connecting with other people there least happy when they are doing
00:01:02
work or commuting and so I wanted to see would thinking about time versus money influence people's Tendencies to behave
00:01:09
in particularly happy or unhappy ways and so in one study I looked in a context um in which
00:01:19
people both connect with others as well as do work namely at a cafe and so what I did was as people were entering a cafe
00:01:27
asked them to fill out a survey and on survey was a sentence and scramble task which surreptitiously exposed them to
00:01:34
time related words or money related words and they were thaned they went into the cafe and unbeknownst to them we
00:01:40
observed how they spent their time at the cafe noting the extent to which they were connecting with other people at the
00:01:47
cafe talking to others or on the phone um the extent to which they were doing work so either on their computers or
00:01:54
reading books um and as they left the cafe we we conducted another survey asking how happy they felt and those who
00:02:03
were led to think about happiness or time rather going into the cafe spent more time connecting and left happier
00:02:11
than those who were led to think about money going into the cafe in the other work um I have found that age influences
00:02:22
how people experience happiness so the way we looked into this initially was looking at how people Express feeling
00:02:31
happy on their personal blog so we looked at millions of blogs any any time someone wrote I feel or I'm feeling
00:02:39
happy we looked at the content of that emotional expression and what we found was that there's really two forms of
00:02:45
happiness that emerged one that's really tied to feeling excited and the other
00:02:49
that's tied to feeling calm and based on the blogger's profile information we
00:02:54
could see who it was that was expressing these different types of Happiness so what we found was that people people in
00:03:00
their teens and 20s were significantly more likely to express excited happiness than calm happiness people in their 30s
00:03:06
were actually equally as likely to express one or the other and then people in their 40s 50s 60s and above were
00:03:13
significantly more likely to express feeling calm happiness than excited happiness suggesting that the way that
00:03:20
we feel happy um changes over the course of our life um in other work we're looking at the types of experiences that
00:03:29
are associated with greater happiness Finding that again actually age has an impact so comparing the happiness that
00:03:37
people extract from extraordinary experiences you know those bucket list type events like um in credible
00:03:44
vacations um life Milestones graduation getting married um versus ordinary experiences those mundane everyday
00:03:53
events um and what we found was that amongst younger people or people who felt like they had a lot of time left in
00:04:02
life it was really those extraordinary experiences that led to Greater happiness but interestingly as people
00:04:08
got older those ordinary experiences produced greater happiness such that amongst older
00:04:15
participants um they felt as much happiness from ordinary experiences as from extraordinary
00:04:27
experiences well I thought I was really interesting that when a 20-year-old says
00:04:33
I feel happy and when a 60-year-old says the very same thing I feel happy they're
00:04:38
likely feeling very different things um one excited you know an excited feeling and the other um a greater sense of calm
00:04:49
um I also think it's uh surprising and actually quite nice that these ordinary
00:04:56
experiences those little moments um that sort of pop up every day can produce as
00:05:03
much happiness as extraordinary moments and I think that's really powerful in
00:05:08
terms of where people find um the happiness in their life so an interesting implication for
00:05:19
consumers or really anyone who's interested in feeling happy is to shift attention away from money which is a
00:05:28
resource that tends to absorb most of our attention and our sort of thinking and planning on a daily basis and shift
00:05:34
it to this other sort of I would argue fundamentally precious um resource of time and in making that shift it will
00:05:46
remind you and motivate you to behave in ways that are happier and to spend your
00:05:51
time in more fulfilling ways um another implication is to understand that what makes you happy
00:06:00
and even the way that you feel Happyness um will or has changed over the course of your life so not holding
00:06:09
your um in evaluating or assessing your level of Happiness not holding yourself to a standard that was either you know a
00:06:18
concept that you had when you were younger um and allowing yourself to accept and sort of appreciate that it is
00:06:27
maybe those Quiet Moments those calming moments um where you really will find happiness
00:06:32
it doesn't mean that you're boring if you're fired up about you know a Friday
00:06:36
night on the couch watching TV or movies um that allowing yourself and realizing
00:06:43
that that's actually perhaps if that's what you want to be doing that that is a
00:06:48
happy outcome yeah so it has um tremendous implications for marketers in two ways
00:06:59
first you see more and more examples of marketers through their campaigns um and
00:07:06
S branding of trying to really connect with consumers on this fundamental level by promising happiness and what it
00:07:16
suggests is that they should think about um first of all who they're targeting what
00:07:24
demographic are they trying to speak to older or younger individuals um and Ed L
00:07:30
how should they be communicating that happiness that they're promising is it
00:07:35
this excitement these like loud colors um high energy um intense color um or is it should they be conveying happiness as
00:07:47
a more sort of tranquil Serene calm type of Happiness to really connect with and
00:07:52
resonate with an older consumer um it also has more implications for marketers who are more
00:07:59
and more there's this trend towards dialing up the experiential aspect of your product or brand and it's
00:08:06
suggesting that again um they should consider who they're looking to connect
00:08:12
with and speak to um in terms of in order to inform the types of experiences that they are really positioning
00:08:20
themselves with respect to so is it this exciting extraordinary those types of experiences or is it those more everyday
00:08:29
main experiences that will really resonate um with their target consumer well uh there is the news story
00:08:40
from a couple of weeks ago when six Iranians were arrested for posting on YouTube a video of them dancing and um
00:08:50
to the Fel song Happy um and I think it what it does is first of all the the fact that the F song happy has become a
00:09:00
phenomen phenomenon in and of itself suggests that this emotion of happiness is so fundamental and so motivating and
00:09:09
so resonant with people um and the fact that uh there's been such an outpouring
00:09:16
of support and care for these young Iranians who were arrested for that the act of celebrating um and sharing their
00:09:27
happiness um just goes to show how um effective uh this emotion um of happiness is so what it suggests is that happiness
00:09:44
is not a singular thing that people you know are pursuing and will someday get there um
00:09:53
instead and on the other hand it's actually not idio purely idiosyncratic and something different to everyone um
00:10:01
instead there is predictable regularity in how people experience happiness as well as the experiences that elicit
00:10:09
happiness and there's a systematic shift over the course of people's lives
00:10:14
whereby when people are younger happiness is more about feeling excited as people get older happiness is more
00:10:20
about feeling calm it suggests that we should be shifting our attention um away from
00:10:30
money and towards time so there is a lot of attention within the business school
00:10:38
of Wharton and research um on money in the bottom line and also within psychology and happiness research that's
00:10:44
looking at this relationship of does money buy happiness and I would argue in my research would argue that um that
00:10:53
there is a lot of value in shifting attention altogether um towards this other resource um that is so fundamental
00:11:01
to us and that is time I exploring several different sort of paths all related to time and
00:11:11
happiness um one is what are happy ways of spending time we've been looking at
00:11:17
whether people should be filling their days with more variety versus less variety so um and so far it suggests
00:11:26
that in general actually variety is a spice of life people um enjoy greater happiness from a more varied activities
00:11:33
but that is not the case when you get to smaller partitions of time like an hour
00:11:38
um and in some cases even a day where too much variety makes you feel like you haven't gotten anything completed um in
00:11:46
other work I am looking at um with a doctoral student of mine we're exploring
00:11:51
the impact of giving time on the extent to which people feel connected with other people so specifically find ing
00:11:59
that when people give experiential gifts the gift of time um people the recipient
00:12:05
feels more connected to their gift giver than um receiving a material gift uh and
00:12:11
finally I'm doing work looking at whether people would prefer feeling happy over
00:12:19
the course of an hour or their life or whether they would prefer feeling happy looking back on that hour or life so
00:12:29
this preference between experienced versus remembered [Music] happiness