i 'm at a business school so that 's what we do so that 's wrong and in fact if you
think that you 're actually just not spending it right so that instead of spending it the way you usually spend it maybe if you spent it differently that might work a little bit better and before i tell you the ways that you can spend it that will make you happier let 's think about the ways we usually spend it
find them and bug them for money and it ruins their social relationships in fact so they have more debt and worse friendships than they had before they won the lottery what was interesting about the article was people started commenting on the article readers of the thing
and instead of talking about how it had made them realize that money doesn 't lead to happiness everyoneinstantly started saying you know what i would do if i won the lottery and fantasizing about what they 'd do and here 's just two of the ones we saw that are just really interesting to think about one person wrote in when i win i 'm going to buy my own little mountain and have a little house on top
and so many of the comments were exactly of this type where people got money and in fact it made them antisocial so i told you that it ruins people 's lives and that their friends bug them it also money often makes us feel very selfish and we do things only for ourselves well maybe the reason that money doesn 't make us happy is that we 're always spending it on the wrong things
and in particular that we 're always spending it on ourselves and we thought i wonder what would happen if we made people spend more of their money
on other people so instead of being antisocial with your money what if you were a little more prosocial with your money and we thought let 's make people do it
and see what happens so let 's have some people do what they usually do and spend money on themselves and let 's make some people give money away and measure their happiness and see if in fact they get happier so the first way that we did this on one vancouver morning we went out on the campus at university of british columbia
and we approached people and said do you want to be in an experiment they said yes we asked them how happy they were and then we gave them an envelope and one of the envelopes had things in it that said by five zero pm today spend this money on
yourself so we gave some examples of what you could spend it on other people in the morning got a slip of paper that said by five zero pm today spend this money on somebody else also inside the envelope was money and we manipulated how much money we gave them so some people got this slip of paper and five dollars some people got this slip of paper and twenty dollars
we let them go about their day they did whatever they wanted to do we found out that they did in fact spend it in the way that we asked them to we called them up at night and asked them what 'd you spend it on and how happy do you feel now
what did they spend it on well these are college undergrads so a lot of what they spent it on for themselves were things like earrings and makeup one woman said she bought a stuffed animal for her niece people gave money to homeless people huge effect here of starbucks laughter so
just targeted toward yourself or targeted toward somebody else what did we find when we called them back at the end of the day people who spent money on other people got happier people who spent money on themselves nothing happened it didn 't make them less happy it just didn 't do much for them and the other thing we saw is the amount of money doesn 't matter that much
so people thought that twenty dollars would be way better than five dollars in fact it doesn 't matter how much money you spent what really matters is that you spent it on somebody else rather than on yourself we see this again and again when we give people money
to spend on other people instead of on themselves of course these are undergraduates in canada not the world 's most representative population they 're also fairly wealthy and affluent and all these other sorts of things we wanted to see if this holds true everywhere in the world
or just among wealthy countries so we went in fact to uganda and ran a very similar experiment so imagine instead of just people in canada we said name the last time you spent money on yourself or other people describe it how happy did it make you or in uganda name the last time you spent money on yourself or other people and describe that and then we asked them how happy they are
again and what we see is sort of amazing because there 's human universals on what you do with your money
and then real cultural differences on what you do as well
so for example one guy from uganda says this he said i called a girl i wished to love
up till now here 's a guy from
only cake just
this is a woman from canada we say name a time you spent money on somebody else she says i bought a present for my mom i drove to the mall in my car bought a present gave it to my mom perfectly nice thing to do it 's good to get gifts for people that you know compare that to this woman from uganda
i was walking and met a long time friend whose son was sick with malaria they had no money they went to a clinic
and i gave her this money this isn 't dollar ten thousand it 's the local currency so it 's a very small amount of money in fact but
enormously different motivations here this is a real medical need literally a life saving donation above it 's just kind of i bought a gift for my mother
what we see again though is that the specific way that you spend on other people isn 't nearly as important as the fact that you spend on other people in order to make yourself happy
which is really quite important so you don 't have to do amazing things with your money to make yourself happy you can do small trivial things and yet still get these benefits from doing this these are only two countries we also wanted to go even broader and look at every country in the world
if we could to see what the relationship is between money and happiness we got data from the gallup organization which you know from all the political polls that have been happeninglately they ask people did you donate money to charity recently and they ask them how happy are you with your life in general and we can see what the relationship is between those two things are they positively correlated giving money makes you happy or are they negatively
correlated on this map green will mean they 're positively correlated and red means they 're negatively correlated and you can see the world is crazily green so in almost every country in the world where we have this data people who give money to charity are happier people that people who don 't give money to charity i know you 're all looking at that red country in the middle
i would be a jerk and not tell you what it is but in fact it 's central african republic you can make up stories maybe it 's different there for some reason or another just below that to the right is rwanda though which is amazingly green so almost everywhere we look we see that giving money away makes you happier than keeping it for yourself
what about your work life which is where we spend all the rest of our time when we 're not with the people we know we decided to infiltrate some companies and do a very similar thing so these are sales teams in belgium they work in teams they go out and sell to doctors and try to get them to buy drugs so we can look and see how well they sell things
as a function of being a member of a team some teams we give people on the team some money for themselves and say spend it however you want on yourself just like we did with the undergrads in canada but other teams we say here 's fifteen euro spend it on one of your teammates this week buy them something as a gift or a present and give it to them
and then we can see well now we 've got teams that spend on themselves and we 've got these prosocial teams who we give money
to make the team a little bit better the reason i have a ridiculous pinata there is one of the teams pooled their money and bought a pinata and they all got around and smashed the pinata and all the candy fell out and things like that a very silly trivial thing to do but think of the difference on a team
that didn 't do that at all that got fifteen euro put it in their pocket maybe bought themselves a coffee or teams that had this prosocial experience where they all bonded together to buy something
and do a group activity what we see is that in fact the teams that are prosocial sell more stuff than the teams that only got money for themselves
and one way to think about it is for every fifteen euro you give people for themselves they put it in their pocket they don 't do anything different than they did before you don 't get any money from that you actually lose money because it doesn 't motivate them to perform any better but when you give them fifteen euro to spend on their teammates they do so much better on their teams that you actually get a huge win on investing this kind of money
and i realize that you 're probably thinking to yourselves this is all fine but there 's a context that 's incredibly important for public policy and i can 't imagine it would work there and basically that if he doesn 't show me that it works here i don 't believe anything he said and i know what you 're all thinking about are dodgeball teams
the teams that spend money on themselves are just the same winning percentages as they were before the teams that we give the money to spend on each other they become different teams and in fact they dominate the league by the time they 're done across all of these different contexts your personal life you work life even silly things like intramural sports we see spending on other people has a bigger return for you than spending
on yourself and so i 'll just say i think if you think money can 't buy happiness you 're not spending it right the implication is not you should buy this product instead of that product and that 's the way to make yourself happier it 's in fact that you should stop thinking about which product to buy for yourself
and try giving some of it to other people instead and we luckily have an opportunity for you
the teacher writes you a thank you note the kids write you a thank you note sometimes they send you pictures of them using the microscope it 's an extraordinary thing
生词表: