×

We use cookies to help make LingQ better. By visiting the site, you agree to our cookie policy.

image

Happiness, 5.02 (V) Week 5 Video 2 - Instinctive distrust and proactive trust

[MUSIC] I was once at a cricket game, and the batsman hit a terrific shot. I was looking at the ball, and I was wondering why it kept getting bigger. And then suddenly, it hit me. » [LAUGH] » Hello, it's great to see you back. In the last lecture, I provided you with some evidence that trusting people can provide a big boost to your happiness levels. Now, if you are like most people, you're probably telling yourself, I would, of course, love to be able to trust others. But the problem is that people are not trustworthy, and I don't want to be the one to stick my neck out and get hurt. So let me share with you some findings on what happens if you do stick your neck out and trust others. Imagine that you're part of a study in which you're paired with somebody else. You and your partner are kept in separate rooms, and you're told that you will never get to meet each other, as part of the experiment. The experimenter gives you both $10 and tells you that you get to act first. You must decide whether to send the money over to your partner or not. If you choose not to send the money, the game is over, both you and your partner walk out with $10 each. If you choose to send the money over to your partner, however, the experimenter will quadruple the amount for your partner. So that now he will have $10, the original $10, plus 4 times 10, so $40. So 10 plus 40, $50. Your partner can now either keep all the money, which means that he walks away with $50, leaving you with nothing, or he can send half the money back to you, which means that each of you now will end up with $25. Imagine that you're given all this information before you're asked to make a decision. You have to decide whether to send the money over to your partner or not. What would you do? Your decision would, of course, depend on how much you trust your partner. If you send him the money, and he doesn't reciprocate, you would go home empty handed. But by sending him the money, both you and your partner now stand to make $15 more than you otherwise would. In this situation, it's easy to take the cynical point of view, that you should not send the partner the money. This view is based on the logic that once your partner receives your money and makes his $50, he has little incentive to split the money with you. But is this kind of thinking and logic valid? Do people who receive money from their partners in experiments like these, walk away without sharing the money? As it turns out, a vast majority, 95% of participants, believe it or not, don't walk away. Rather, when you trust them, they end up sharing the money. In other words, people who are trusted, it turns out, tend to behave in a trustworthy fashion. Researchers have even found that there is a biological reason for this. When you trust others a hormone called oxytocin is released. Some researchers call this hormone the trust molecule. It's the same molecule that gets released when two people are in love with each other. It's also the same molecule that gets released when a mother is feeding her baby. And because this hormone gets released when you trust others, they generally tend to repay your trust with trustworthy behavior. This suggests that if we could somehow proactively trust others, in other words, if we could somehow trust them without really knowing whether they are trustworthy or not, we would build a culture of mutual trust. In other words, given how trustworthy people seem to be based on this Swiss experiment, it seems like a good idea to trust others proactively. But the problem most of us run into with this idea is that we are hardwired to be more distrusting than trusting of others, particularly strangers. And there's a good reason why we are hardwired this way. It is more dangerous to be trusting than it is to be distrusting. As Jonathan Haidt argues in his insightful book, The Happiness Hypothesis, imagine that you were designing the mind of a fish. Would you, as the designer of this fish, have this fish respond as strongly to opportunities, say, for example, the opportunity to eat a yummy looking fish, as you would to threat? Say, a yummy looking, but dangerous fish. No way, right? Here's what Jonathan Haidt says in his book, and I quote. The cost of missing a cue that signals food is low. In other words, the cost of missing eating out on something that looks yummy and actually turns out to be good food is low. Odds are that there are other fish in the sea, and one mistake won't lead to starvation. But the cost of missing the sign of a nearby predator can be catastrophic. So even though people are actually trustworthy, particularly if you have just trusted them, as we saw in the trust game that I just described, many of us can't bring ourselves to trust others proactively because we are hardwired to be distrustful. But sometimes, we get lucky, and we meet someone who is proactively trusting, and these experiences provide us with an opportunity to personally experience what would happen if we could all somehow overcome our instinctive distrust of others. I had such an experience when I was a kid. I was about ten years old at that time, and like most kids my age, an avid stamp collector. I would spend several hours every week poring over my stamp collection, dreaming of having an even bigger one eventually. Naturally, I was very protective of my collection, and I would rarely get it out of sight, particularly if other stamp collectors were in the vicinity. One day, a kid who had recently moved into our neighborhood invited me into his house to view his stamp collection. His collection was far superior to mine. He had stamps from several exotic locations like Malta and Zanzibar, and some of the stamps, like the ones from Bhutan, even had 3D images. Although it wasn't unusual for someone to have a better stamp collection than mine, many of my friends did, what happened next was unusual. This kid offered me a chance to pick any one of his stamps for free. That is, he told me that I could choose any stamp from his awesome collection and he would just give it to me with nothing expected in return. And guess what I did? Like the participants in this first study, I repaid his trust by cycling back home as fast as I could and bringing over my own stamp collection to his house to make a reciprocal offer. The lesson that I derived from this experience is that I needed to be a little more proactively trusting than I had been up to that point. So I started doing that, being more proactively trusting. And I'm happy to say that so far, it's worked out really well for me. Ind in the process of being proactively trusting, I've learned some really important insights about some of the hidden benefits of being proactively trusting. In the next video, I will tell you more about these hidden benefits. [MUSIC]


[MUSIC] I was once at a cricket game, and the batsman hit a terrific shot. I was looking at the ball, and I was wondering why it kept getting bigger. And then suddenly, it hit me. » [LAUGH] » Hello, it's great to see you back. In the last lecture, I provided you with some evidence that trusting people can provide a big boost to your happiness levels. Now, if you are like most people, you're probably telling yourself, I would, of course, love to be able to trust others. But the problem is that people are not trustworthy, and I don't want to be the one to stick my neck out and get hurt. So let me share with you some findings on what happens if you do stick your neck out and trust others. Imagine that you're part of a study in which you're paired with somebody else. You and your partner are kept in separate rooms, and you're told that you will never get to meet each other, as part of the experiment. The experimenter gives you both $10 and tells you that you get to act first. You must decide whether to send the money over to your partner or not. If you choose not to send the money, the game is over, both you and your partner walk out with $10 each. If you choose to send the money over to your partner, however, the experimenter will quadruple the amount for your partner. So that now he will have $10, the original $10, plus 4 times 10, so $40. So 10 plus 40, $50. Your partner can now either keep all the money, which means that he walks away with $50, leaving you with nothing, or he can send half the money back to you, which means that each of you now will end up with $25. Imagine that you're given all this information before you're asked to make a decision. You have to decide whether to send the money over to your partner or not. What would you do? Your decision would, of course, depend on how much you trust your partner. If you send him the money, and he doesn't reciprocate, you would go home empty handed. But by sending him the money, both you and your partner now stand to make $15 more than you otherwise would. In this situation, it's easy to take the cynical point of view, that you should not send the partner the money. This view is based on the logic that once your partner receives your money and makes his $50, he has little incentive to split the money with you. But is this kind of thinking and logic valid? Do people who receive money from their partners in experiments like these, walk away without sharing the money? As it turns out, a vast majority, 95% of participants, believe it or not, don't walk away. Rather, when you trust them, they end up sharing the money. In other words, people who are trusted, it turns out, tend to behave in a trustworthy fashion. Researchers have even found that there is a biological reason for this. When you trust others a hormone called oxytocin is released. Some researchers call this hormone the trust molecule. It's the same molecule that gets released when two people are in love with each other. It's also the same molecule that gets released when a mother is feeding her baby. And because this hormone gets released when you trust others, they generally tend to repay your trust with trustworthy behavior. This suggests that if we could somehow proactively trust others, in other words, if we could somehow trust them without really knowing whether they are trustworthy or not, we would build a culture of mutual trust. In other words, given how trustworthy people seem to be based on this Swiss experiment, it seems like a good idea to trust others proactively. But the problem most of us run into with this idea is that we are hardwired to be more distrusting than trusting of others, particularly strangers. And there's a good reason why we are hardwired this way. It is more dangerous to be trusting than it is to be distrusting. As Jonathan Haidt argues in his insightful book, The Happiness Hypothesis, imagine that you were designing the mind of a fish. Would you, as the designer of this fish, have this fish respond as strongly to opportunities, say, for example, the opportunity to eat a yummy looking fish, as you would to threat? Say, a yummy looking, but dangerous fish. No way, right? Here's what Jonathan Haidt says in his book, and I quote. The cost of missing a cue that signals food is low. In other words, the cost of missing eating out on something that looks yummy and actually turns out to be good food is low. Odds are that there are other fish in the sea, and one mistake won't lead to starvation. But the cost of missing the sign of a nearby predator can be catastrophic. So even though people are actually trustworthy, particularly if you have just trusted them, as we saw in the trust game that I just described, many of us can't bring ourselves to trust others proactively because we are hardwired to be distrustful. But sometimes, we get lucky, and we meet someone who is proactively trusting, and these experiences provide us with an opportunity to personally experience what would happen if we could all somehow overcome our instinctive distrust of others. I had such an experience when I was a kid. I was about ten years old at that time, and like most kids my age, an avid stamp collector. I would spend several hours every week poring over my stamp collection, dreaming of having an even bigger one eventually. Naturally, I was very protective of my collection, and I would rarely get it out of sight, particularly if other stamp collectors were in the vicinity. One day, a kid who had recently moved into our neighborhood invited me into his house to view his stamp collection. His collection was far superior to mine. He had stamps from several exotic locations like Malta and Zanzibar, and some of the stamps, like the ones from Bhutan, even had 3D images. Although it wasn't unusual for someone to have a better stamp collection than mine, many of my friends did, what happened next was unusual. This kid offered me a chance to pick any one of his stamps for free. That is, he told me that I could choose any stamp from his awesome collection and he would just give it to me with nothing expected in return. And guess what I did? Like the participants in this first study, I repaid his trust by cycling back home as fast as I could and bringing over my own stamp collection to his house to make a reciprocal offer. The lesson that I derived from this experience is that I needed to be a little more proactively trusting than I had been up to that point. So I started doing that, being more proactively trusting. And I'm happy to say that so far, it's worked out really well for me. Ind in the process of being proactively trusting, I've learned some really important insights about some of the hidden benefits of being proactively trusting. In the next video, I will tell you more about these hidden benefits. [MUSIC]