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Happiness, 5.01 (V) Week 5 Video 1 - Distrusting Others and Why Trust is Important

[MUSIC] A daughter once asked her mom, Mommy, what's it like to have the most awesome daughter in the world? And the mother said, I don't know, ask your grandmother. That's a true story. Aloha, my friends and welcome to week five of ALOHAF, A Life of Happiness and Fulfillment. I hope that you've been finding the course useful and interesting so far. We are now down to the last three happiness sins, and the last three habits, and actually, the last two exercises. So, the end of the course is definitely in sight. In the first half l of this week, I will be discussing the 5th Deadly Happiness Sin, which is distrusting others. In a nutshell, the sin has to do with being more distrusting of others than one should be. It involves believing that others are distrustful until they are proven trustworthy. I'll soon get into why this is a sin. But first, let me briefly mention that the habit that corresponds to the sin, which is exercising smart trust. Exercising smart trust, as the name suggests, means trusting others in a way that maximizes the chances that you derive the benefits from trusting others. While simultaneously, minimizing the chance that you get cheated or hurt. So, that you don't go back to being distrustful of others by default. Now, returning to how distrusting others is a happiness sin. Let me tell you about Professor John Helliwell, a professor emeritus in the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia. Professor Helliwell has been studying the happiness of countries for a few decades now. And, what he finds, he and his co-authors including Robert Putnam who's written a wonderful book on trust called, Bowling Alone, what they have found is very interesting. They have found that perhaps the single biggest determinant of happiness of countries is how the citizens of the country respond to a question like, In general, do you think people can be trusted? It turns out that the more strongly the people of a country agree that the other people around them can be trusted, the happier the county. For example, in Denmark and Norway, two of the happiest countries in the world, close to 65% of the citizens believe that most people in the country can be trusted. Whereas in Greece and Russia, two relatively unhappy countries, the proportion is less than 30%. As you can see from this table, there's almost a perfect correlation between trust levels and happiness. The correlation is one of the most robust findings, as this graph, which includes many more countries, shows. One of the reasons why interpersonal trust matters so much is because the economy functions better in societies in which there's a lot of trust, as this other graph shows. Imagine that you couldn't trust your mailman, or your local grocer. Imagine that you could not trust your credit card company, or your telephone company. Which I am sure is the case for many of us. You would naturally be more reluctant to do business with them. The cost of doing business would also be higher as this book by Covey and Link called Smart Trust, argues. You will also need to be constantly vigilant when you're dealing with these entities. Perhaps, you will need to hire a lawyer to protect your interests, which would increase your costs, of course. Things would be even worse if you couldn't trust your neighbors and friends. Imagine that you couldn't trust your friends to split the bill at the end of a restaurant meal. Or, you couldn't trust your neighbors to return a book or a CD that they borrowed from you. Steven Pinker, in his book How the Mind Works, makes the case that a big reason why trust is so important to us is because it mattered for our survival in our evolutionary past. If our neighbors and friends weren't fair, say for example, you couldn't trust them to return the meat or the vegetables that they borrowed from you. You would be doomed. By contrast, if you could trust the people around you, you could chill out like this frog here. You wouldn't have to constantly watch your back. Instead, you could be confident that if you were ever to get into a sticky situation, others would have your back. So, no wonder that trust is so important to us. But, the question is, what can you do to build trust, and to be in trusting relationships? That's the question to which I will turn in the next lecture. [MUSIC]


[MUSIC] A daughter once asked her mom, Mommy, what's it like to have the most awesome daughter in the world? And the mother said, I don't know, ask your grandmother. That's a true story. Aloha, my friends and welcome to week five of ALOHAF, A Life of Happiness and Fulfillment. I hope that you've been finding the course useful and interesting so far. We are now down to the last three happiness sins, and the last three habits, and actually, the last two exercises. So, the end of the course is definitely in sight. In the first half l of this week, I will be discussing the 5th Deadly Happiness Sin, which is distrusting others. In a nutshell, the sin has to do with being more distrusting of others than one should be. It involves believing that others are distrustful until they are proven trustworthy. I'll soon get into why this is a sin. But first, let me briefly mention that the habit that corresponds to the sin, which is exercising smart trust. Exercising smart trust, as the name suggests, means trusting others in a way that maximizes the chances that you derive the benefits from trusting others. While simultaneously, minimizing the chance that you get cheated or hurt. So, that you don't go back to being distrustful of others by default. Now, returning to how distrusting others is a happiness sin. Let me tell you about Professor John Helliwell, a professor emeritus in the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia. Professor Helliwell has been studying the happiness of countries for a few decades now. And, what he finds, he and his co-authors including Robert Putnam who's written a wonderful book on trust called, Bowling Alone, what they have found is very interesting. They have found that perhaps the single biggest determinant of happiness of countries is how the citizens of the country respond to a question like, In general, do you think people can be trusted? It turns out that the more strongly the people of a country agree that the other people around them can be trusted, the happier the county. For example, in Denmark and Norway, two of the happiest countries in the world, close to 65% of the citizens believe that most people in the country can be trusted. Whereas in Greece and Russia, two relatively unhappy countries, the proportion is less than 30%. As you can see from this table, there's almost a perfect correlation between trust levels and happiness. The correlation is one of the most robust findings, as this graph, which includes many more countries, shows. One of the reasons why interpersonal trust matters so much is because the economy functions better in societies in which there's a lot of trust, as this other graph shows. Imagine that you couldn't trust your mailman, or your local grocer. Imagine that you could not trust your credit card company, or your telephone company. Which I am sure is the case for many of us. You would naturally be more reluctant to do business with them. The cost of doing business would also be higher as this book by Covey and Link called Smart Trust, argues. You will also need to be constantly vigilant when you're dealing with these entities. Perhaps, you will need to hire a lawyer to protect your interests, which would increase your costs, of course. Things would be even worse if you couldn't trust your neighbors and friends. Imagine that you couldn't trust your friends to split the bill at the end of a restaurant meal. Or, you couldn't trust your neighbors to return a book or a CD that they borrowed from you. Steven Pinker, in his book How the Mind Works, makes the case that a big reason why trust is so important to us is because it mattered for our survival in our evolutionary past. If our neighbors and friends weren't fair, say for example, you couldn't trust them to return the meat or the vegetables that they borrowed from you. You would be doomed. By contrast, if you could trust the people around you, you could chill out like this frog here. You wouldn't have to constantly watch your back. Instead, you could be confident that if you were ever to get into a sticky situation, others would have your back. So, no wonder that trust is so important to us. But, the question is, what can you do to build trust, and to be in trusting relationships? That's the question to which I will turn in the next lecture. [MUSIC]