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TED Talks Worth Sharing, Michael Norton: How to buy happiness

Michael Norton: How to buy happiness

So I want to talk today about money and happiness, which are two things that a lot of us spend a lot of our time thinking about, either trying to earn them or trying to increase them. And a lot of us resonate with this phrase. So we see it in religions and self-help books, that money can't buy happiness. And I want to suggest today that, in fact, that's wrong. (Laughter) 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 that don't, in fact, make us happier. We had a little natural experiment. So CNN, a little while ago, wrote this interesting article on what happens to people when they win the lottery. It turns out people think when they win the lottery their lives are going to be amazing. This article's about how their lives get ruined. So what happens when people win the lottery is, number one, they spend all the money and go into debt, and number two, all of their friends and everyone they've ever met 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, everyone instantly 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." (Laughter) And another person wrote, "I would fill a big bathtub with money and get in the tub while smoking a big fat cigar and sipping a glass of champagne." This is even worse now: "Then I'd have a picture taken and dozens of glossies made. Anyone begging for money or trying to extort from me would receive a copy of the picture and nothing else." (Laughter) 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 5:00 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 5:00 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 20 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 if you give undergraduates five dollars, it looks like coffee to them and they run over to Starbucks and spend it as fast as they can. But some people bought a coffee for themselves, the way they usually would, but other people said that they bought a coffee for somebody else. So the very same purchase, 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 20 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." They basically went out on a date, and he says at the end that he didn't "achieve" her up till now. Here's a guy from Canada. Very similar thing. "I took my girlfriend out for dinner. We went to a movie, we left early, and then went back to her room for ... " only cake -- just a piece of cake. Human universal -- so you spend money on other people, you're being nice to them. Maybe you have something in mind, maybe not. But then we see extraordinary differences. So look at these two. 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 $10,000, 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 happening lately. 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 15 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 15 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 15 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 15 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. (Laughter) This was a huge criticism that we got to say, if you can't show it with dodgeball teams, this is all stupid. So we went out and found these dodgeball teams and infiltrated them. And we did the exact same thing as before. So some teams, we give people on the team money, they spend it on themselves. Other teams, we give them money to spend on their dodgeball teammates. 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. DonorsChoose.org is a non-profit for mainly public school teachers in low-income schools. They post projects, so they say, "I want to teach Huckleberry Finn to my class and we don't have the books," or "I want a microscope to teach my students science and we don't have a microscope." You and I can go on and buy it for them. 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. Go to the website and start yourself on the process of thinking, again, less about "How can I spend money on myself?" and more about "If I've got five dollars or 15 dollars, what can I do to benefit other people?" Because ultimately when you do that, you'll find that you'll benefit yourself much more. Thank you. (Applause)


Michael Norton: How to buy happiness Michael Norton: Wie man Glück kaufen kann Michael Norton: Πώς να αγοράσετε την ευτυχία Michael Norton: Cómo comprar la felicidad Michael Norton: Come comprare la felicità マイケル・ノートン:幸福を買う方法 Michael Norton: Como comprar a felicidade Michael Norton: Mutluluk nasıl satın alınır Майкл Нортон: Як купити щастя 迈克尔·诺顿:如何购买幸福 麥可諾頓:如何購買幸福

So I want to talk today about money and happiness, which are two things that a lot of us spend a lot of our time thinking about, either trying to earn them or trying to increase them. Así que quiero hablar hoy sobre el dinero y la felicidad, que son dos cosas en las que muchos de nosotros pasamos mucho tiempo pensando, ya sea tratando de ganarlos o tratando de aumentarlos. 所以我今天想谈谈金钱和幸福,这是我们很多人花了很多时间思考的两件事,要么试图赚取它们,要么试图增加它们。 And a lot of us resonate with this phrase. 그리고 우리 중 많은 사람들이이 문구에 공감합니다. 我们中的很多人都对这句话产生共鸣。 So we see it in religions and self-help books, that money can’t buy happiness. 그래서 우리는 그것을 종교와 자 조서에서 볼 수 있습니다. 그 돈은 행복을 살 수 없습니다. 所以我们在宗教和自助书籍中看到,金钱买不到幸福。 And I want to suggest today that, in fact, that’s wrong. 그리고 저는 오늘 그것이 실제로 잘못되었다고 제안하고 싶습니다. 我今天想表明,事实上,这是错误的。 (Laughter) I’m at a business school, so that’s what we do. (웃음) 저는 비즈니스 스쿨에 있습니다. 우리가하는 일입니다. (笑声) 我在商学院,所以我们就是这么做的。 (笑聲)我在一所商學院,所以這就是我們所做的。 So that’s wrong, and, in fact, if you think that, you’re actually just not spending it right. 그래서 그것은 틀렸고, 사실, 당신이 그렇게 생각한다면, 당신은 실제로 그것을 올바르게 소비하지 않습니다. 所以这是错误的,事实上,如果你这么认为,你实际上只是没有正确地花钱。 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. 因此,不要像平常那样花钱,也许如果你以不同的方式花钱,效果可能会好一点。 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 that don’t, in fact, make us happier. 在我告诉你花钱的方式会让你更快乐之前,让我们想想我们通常花钱的方式实际上并不能让我们更快乐。 We had a little natural experiment. 我们进行了一些自然实验。 So CNN, a little while ago, wrote this interesting article on what happens to people when they win the lottery. 不久前,CNN 写了一篇有趣的文章,讲述人们中了彩票时会发生什么。 It turns out people think when they win the lottery their lives are going to be amazing. 事实证明,人们认为当他们中了彩票时,他们的生活将会非常美好。 This article’s about how their lives get ruined. 这篇文章是关于他们的生活是如何被毁掉的。 So what happens when people win the lottery is, number one, they spend all the money and go into debt, and number two, all of their friends and everyone they’ve ever met find them and bug them for money. 所以当人们中了彩票时会发生什么,第一,他们花光了所有的钱并负债累累,第二,他们所有的朋友和他们见过的每个人都找到他们并骚扰他们要钱。 因此,當人們中了彩票時會發生的情況是,第一,他們花光了所有的錢並負債累累,第二,他們所有的朋友和他們見過的每個人都找到他們並騷擾他們要錢。 And it ruins their social relationships, in fact. So they have more debt and worse friendships than they had before they won the lottery. 因此,与中彩票之前相比,他们负债更多,友谊也更差。 What was interesting about the article was people started commenting on the article, readers of the thing. 이 기사에서 흥미로운 점은 사람들이 기사에 대해 논평하기 시작했다는 것입니다. 这篇文章的有趣之处在于人们开始评论这篇文章,这件事的读者。 這篇文章有趣的是人們開始評論這篇文章,也就是這篇文章的讀者。 And instead of talking about how it had made them realize that money doesn’t lead to happiness, everyone instantly started saying, "You know what I would do if I won the lottery ... 그리고 돈이 행복으로 이어지지 않는다는 것을 깨닫게 한 방법에 대해 이야기하는 대신, 모든 사람들은 즉시 "복권 당첨을하면 내가 무엇을할지 알고 있습니다 ... 而不是谈论它如何让他们意识到金钱并不能带来幸福,每个人都立即开始说,“你知道如果我中了彩票我会做什么...... 每個人都沒有談論它如何讓他們意識到金錢並不能帶來幸福,而是立即開始說:「你知道如果我中了彩票我會做什麼... and fantasizing about what they’d do. 그리고 그들이하는 일에 대한 환상. 幻想他们会做什么。 並幻想他們會做什麼。 And here’s just two of the ones we saw that are just really interesting to think about. 그리고 우리가 본 것 중 두 가지만 생각하면 정말 재미 있습니다. 这里只是我们看到的两个非常有趣的思考。 One person wrote in, "When I win, I’m going to buy my own little mountain and have a little house on top." 一个人写道:“当我赢了,我要买下我自己的小山,在山顶上盖一间小房子。” (Laughter) And another person wrote, "I would fill a big bathtub with money and get in the tub while smoking a big fat cigar and sipping a glass of champagne." (웃음) 또 다른 사람은 "큰 뚱뚱한 시가를 피우고 샴페인 한 잔을 마시면서 큰 욕조를 돈으로 채우고 욕조에 들어갈 것"이라고 썼습니다. (笑声) 另一个人写道,“我会把钱装满一个大浴缸,然后泡在浴缸里,抽着大雪茄,喝着香槟。” This is even worse now: "Then I’d have a picture taken and dozens of glossies made. C'est encore pire aujourd'hui : "Ensuite, on me prenait en photo et on faisait des dizaines de photos glossies. 今はもっとひどいです:"それから、写真を撮ってもらい、何十枚ものグロッシーを作るんだ。 지금은 더 나빠졌습니다. "그럼 사진을 찍고 수십 개의 글로시를 만들었습니다. 现在情况更糟:“然后我会拍一张照片并制作几十张光面胶片。 現在情況更糟:「然後我會拍一張照片並製作幾十張光澤紙。 Anyone begging for money or trying to extort from me would receive a copy of the picture and nothing else." 돈을 구걸하거나 나에게서 쫓아 내려는 사람은 그 그림의 사본을받을 것입니다. " 任何向我要钱或试图勒索的人都会收到这张照片的副本,除此之外别无他物。” 任何向我要錢或試圖勒索的人都會收到一張照片的副本,而不會收到其他任何東西。” (Laughter) And so many of the comments were exactly of this type, where people got money and, in fact, it made them antisocial. (웃음) 그리고 많은 의견들이 사람들이 돈을 벌어 실제로 반 사회적으로 만들었던 이런 유형이었습니다. (笑声) 很多评论都是这种类型的,人们从中得到钱,事实上,这让他们变得反社会。 So I told you that it ruins people’s lives and that their friends bug them. 그래서 나는 그것이 사람들의 삶을 망치고 그들의 친구들이 그들을 괴롭힌다 고 말했습니다. 所以我告诉过你,它会毁了人们的生活,他们的朋友也会骚扰他们。 所以我告訴過你,它毀了人們的生活,他們的朋友也騷擾他們。 It also, money often makes us feel very selfish and we do things only for ourselves. 此外,金钱常常让我们感到非常自私,我们只为自己做事。 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. 好吧,也许金钱不能让我们快乐的原因是我们总是把钱花在错误的事情上,尤其是我们总是把钱花在自己身上。 And we thought, I wonder what would happen if we made people spend more of their money on other people. 우리는 사람들이 다른 사람들에게 더 많은 돈을 쓰게되면 어떻게 될지 궁금했습니다. 我们想,我想知道如果我们让人们把更多的钱花在其他人身上会发生什么。 So instead of being antisocial with your money, what if you were a little more prosocial with your money? 因此,与其在金钱上反社会,不如在金钱上更亲社会一点怎么办? 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. 所以让一些人做他们通常做的事,把钱花在自己身上,让一些人捐钱,衡量他们的幸福感,看看他们是否真的变得更幸福了。 因此,讓我們讓一些人做他們通常做的事情,為自己花錢,讓一些人捐錢,衡量他們的幸福感,看看他們是否真的變得更幸福。 So the first way that we did this. 所以我们这样做的第一种方式。 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?" 在温哥华的一个早晨,我们走出不列颠哥伦比亚大学的校园,走近人们说:“你想参加一项实验吗?” 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 5:00 pm today, spend this money on yourself." So we gave some examples of what you could spend it on. 所以我们举了一些例子说明你可以把它花在什么上面。 Other people, in the morning, got a slip of paper that said, "By 5:00 pm today, spend this money on somebody else." 其他人在早上收到一张纸条,上面写着:“今天下午 5:00 之前,把这笔钱花在其他人身上。” 其他人早上收到一張紙條,上面寫著:“今天下午 5 點之前,把這筆錢花在別人身上。” Also inside the envelope was money. And we manipulated how much money we gave them. 我们操纵了给他们多少钱。 So some people got this slip of paper and five dollars. 于是有人拿到了这张纸条和五块钱。 Some people got this slip of paper and 20 dollars. We let them go about their day. 我们让他们继续他们的一天。 They did whatever they wanted to do. 他们想做什么就做什么。 We found out that they did in fact spend it in the way that we asked them to. 我们发现他们确实按照我们要求的方式花钱。 We called them up at night and asked them, "What’d you spend it on, and how happy do you feel now?" 晚上我们给他们打电话问他们,“你花了多少钱,现在感觉怎么样?” What did they spend it on? 他们把钱花在了什么上面? Well these are college undergrads, so a lot of what they spent it on for themselves were things like earrings and makeup. 好吧,这些都是大学本科生,所以他们为自己花的很多钱都是耳环和化妆品之类的东西。 One woman said she bought a stuffed animal for her niece. Une femme a déclaré avoir acheté un animal en peluche pour sa nièce. 한 여성은 조카를 위해 박제 된 동물을 구입했다고 말했다. 一位女士说她给侄女买了一个毛绒玩具。 一位女士說她買了一隻毛絨動物給姪女。 People gave money to homeless people. Huge effect here of Starbucks. 스타 벅스의 큰 효과. 星巴克在这里的巨大影响。 (Laughter) So if you give undergraduates five dollars, it looks like coffee to them and they run over to Starbucks and spend it as fast as they can. (笑声) 所以如果你给本科生五美元,他们觉得这就像咖啡,他们就会跑到星巴克,尽可能快地花掉。 But some people bought a coffee for themselves, the way they usually would, but other people said that they bought a coffee for somebody else. But some people bought a coffee for themselves, the way they usually would, but other people said that they bought a coffee for somebody else. 但是有些人像往常一样为自己买了咖啡,但其他人说他们为别人买了咖啡。 So the very same purchase, just targeted toward yourself or targeted toward somebody else. 所以同样的购买,只是针对你自己或针对其他人。 What did we find when we called them back at the end of the day? 当我们在一天结束时给他们回电话时,我们发现了什么? 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. 这并没有让他们不那么开心,只是对他们没有多大帮助。 And the other thing we saw is the amount of money doesn’t matter that much. 我们看到的另一件事是,钱的多少并不重要。 So people thought that 20 dollars would be way better than five dollars. 所以人们认为 20 美元比 5 美元好得多。 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. 当我们给人们钱花在其他人身上而不是花在自己身上时,我们会一次又一次地看到这一点。 Of course, these are undergraduates in Canada -- not the world’s most representative population. もちろん、これはカナダの学部生であり、世界で最も代表的な集団ではありません。 当然,这些是加拿大的本科生——不是世界上最具代表性的人群。 They’re also fairly wealthy and affluent and all these other sorts of things. 他们也相当富有和富裕以及所有这些其他类型的东西。 他們也相當富有和富裕等等。 We wanted to see if this holds true everywhere in the world or just among wealthy countries. 我们想看看这是否适用于世界各地或仅适用于富裕国家。 So we went, in fact, to Uganda and ran a very similar experiment. 所以我们实际上去了乌干达并进行了一个非常相似的实验。 So imagine, instead of just people in Canada, we said, "Name the last time you spent money on yourself or other people. 所以想象一下,我们说的不仅仅是加拿大人,“说出你最后一次为自己或其他人花钱的时间。 因此,想像一下,我們不僅說加拿大人,還說:「列出您最近一次為自己或他人花錢的時間。 Describe it. 形容它。 How happy did it make you?" Or in Uganda, "Name the last time you spent money on yourself or other people and describe that." 或者在乌干达,“说出你最后一次为自己或其他人花钱的时间并描述一下。” And then we asked them how happy they are again. 然后我们又问他们有多开心。 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. 我们所看到的有点令人惊讶,因为在你用钱做什么方面存在人类共性,然后在你所做的事情上也存在真正的文化差异。 我們所看到的有點令人驚奇,因為在你用錢做什麼方面存在著人類的普遍性,而且在你所做的事情上也存在著真正的文化差異。 So for example, one guy from Uganda says this. He said, "I called a girl I wished to love." 他说:“我打电话给一个我想爱的女孩。” 他說:“我給一個我想愛的女孩打了電話。” They basically went out on a date, and he says at the end that he didn’t "achieve" her up till now. 他们基本上是出去约会了,他最后说他到现在为止还没有“成就”她。 Here’s a guy from Canada. 这是一个来自加拿大的人。 Very similar thing. "I took my girlfriend out for dinner. We went to a movie, we left early, and then went back to her room for ... " only cake -- just a piece of cake. 我们去看电影,我们早早离开,然后回到她的房间……”只有蛋糕——只是一块蛋糕。 Human universal -- so you spend money on other people, you’re being nice to them. 人类普遍性——所以你把钱花在别人身上,你就是在对他们好。 Maybe you have something in mind, maybe not. 也许你有什么想法,也许没有。 But then we see extraordinary differences. 但随后我们看到了非凡的差异。 So look at these two. This is a woman from Canada. We say, "Name a time you spent money on somebody else." 我们说,“说出你在别人身上花钱的时间。” 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." 我开着车去了商场,买了一件礼物,送给了我妈妈。” 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. “我在路上遇到了一位老朋友,他的儿子患了疟疾。 They had no money, they went to a clinic and I gave her this money." This isn’t $10,000, it’s the local currency. 这不是 10,000 美元,而是当地货币。 So it’s a very small amount of money, in fact. But enormously different motivations here. 但这里的动机截然不同。 但這裡的動機卻截然不同。 This is a real medical need, literally a life-saving donation. 这是真正的医疗需求,实际上是拯救生命的捐赠。 Above, it’s just kind of, I bought a gift for my mother. 以上,就是有点,给妈妈买了个礼物。 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. 然而,我们再次看到的是,你花在别人身上的具体方式远不如你为了让自己快乐而花在别人身上这一事实重要,这真的很重要。 但我們再次看到的是,你在別人身上花錢的具體方式並不像你為了讓自己快樂而在別人身上花錢的事實那麼重要,這確實非常重要。 So you don’t have to do amazing things with your money to make yourself happy. 所以你不必为了让自己快乐而用你的钱做一些了不起的事情。 You can do small, trivial things and yet still get these benefits from doing this. 작고 사소한 일을 할 수는 있지만 여전히 이러한 이점을 얻을 수 있습니다. 你可以做一些小的、微不足道的事情,但仍然可以从中获得这些好处。 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. 如果我们能看到金钱与幸福之间的关系,我们还想走得更远,看看世界上的每个国家。 We got data from the Gallup Organization, which you know from all the political polls that have been happening lately. 我们从盖洛普组织获得了数据,你可以从最近发生的所有政治民意调查中了解到这些数据。 我們從蓋洛普組織獲得了數據,你可以從最近發生的所有政治民意調查中了解這些數據。 They ask people, "Did you donate money to charity recently?" and they ask them, "How happy are you with your life in general?" 他们问他们,“你对你的生活总体上有多幸福?” And we can see what the relationship is between those two things. 我们可以看到这两件事之间的关系。 Are they positively correlated? Giving money makes you happy. 给钱让你快乐。 Or are they negatively correlated? 或者它们是负相关的? On this map, green will mean they’re positively correlated and red means they’re negatively correlated. 在这张地图上,绿色表示它们正相关,红色表示它们负相关。 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. 因此,在我们拥有这些数据的世界上几乎每个国家,捐钱给慈善机构的人比不捐钱给慈善机构的人更快乐。 I know you’re all looking at that red country in the middle. 我知道你们都在看中间那个红色的国家。 I would be a jerk and not tell you what it is, but in fact, it’s Central African Republic. 我会是个混蛋,不告诉你它是什么,但事实上,它是中非共和国。 如果我不告訴你那是什麼,那我就是個混蛋了,但事實上,它是中非共和國。 You can make up stories. 你可以编故事。 Maybe it’s different there for some reason or another. Just below that to the right is Rwanda though, which is amazingly green. 右下方是卢旺达,绿得惊人。 So almost everywhere we look we see that giving money away makes you happier than keeping it for yourself. 因此,几乎在我们所看到的任何地方,我们都会看到捐钱比为自己保留钱更快乐。 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. 那你的工作生活呢,当我们不和我们认识的人在一起时,这是我们度过所有剩余时间的地方。 那你的工作生活呢?當我們不和認識的人在一起時,我們剩下的時間都花在工作上。 We decided to infiltrate some companies and do a very similar thing. いくつかの会社に潜入して、よく似たことをやってみようと思ったんです。 우리는 일부 회사에 침투하여 매우 유사한 일을하기로 결정했습니다. 我們決定滲透到一些公司並做類似的事情。 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. 因此,我們可以看看他們作為團隊成員的銷售情況如何。 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 15 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. 我之所以有一個可笑的皮納塔,是因為其中一個團隊湊錢買了一個皮納塔,他們都四處走動,把皮納塔打碎了,所有的糖果都掉了出來,諸如此類的事情。 A very silly, trivial thing to do, but think of the difference on a team that didn’t do that at all, that got 15 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 15 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 15 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. (Laughter) This was a huge criticism that we got to say, if you can’t show it with dodgeball teams, this is all stupid. So we went out and found these dodgeball teams and infiltrated them. And we did the exact same thing as before. So some teams, we give people on the team money, they spend it on themselves. Other teams, we give them money to spend on their dodgeball teammates. 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. 我們給彼此花錢的球隊,他們變成了不同的球隊,事實上,當他們完成時,他們已經統治了聯盟。 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. 在所有這些不同的背景下——你的個人生活、你的工作生活,甚至是像校內運動這樣的愚蠢的事情——我們發現,花在別人身上比花在自己身上有更大的回報。 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. DonorsChoose.org is a non-profit for mainly public school teachers in low-income schools. They post projects, so they say, "I want to teach Huckleberry Finn to my class and we don’t have the books," or "I want a microscope to teach my students science and we don’t have a microscope." You and I can go on and buy it for them. 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. Go to the website and start yourself on the process of thinking, again, less about "How can I spend money on myself?" and more about "If I’ve got five dollars or 15 dollars, what can I do to benefit other people?" Because ultimately when you do that, you’ll find that you’ll benefit yourself much more. Thank you. (Applause)