스크립트
00:00:00We have a natural instinct to surround ourselves with people who are just like us, who think like us,
00:00:05who live like us, who see the world the way that we do. But in this flat world, we're being bombarded
00:00:10by more and more examples of people who are not like us. One of the great joys of my life is that
00:00:16I study people. When I'm in a weird conversation, like a really awkward conversation, I become a
00:00:21researcher. So if you start talking to me and you've got really, really strong political views
00:00:25and they really disagree with mine, you're going to notice that I'm going to do something. I'm like,
00:00:30tell me more. It actually makes us happier in the long run. When we do the thing, it's harder.
00:00:33It's much easier whenever you go to the gym, but it's better for you. And the case that I'm going to
00:00:38make is that bridging social capital, where you're looking for commonality of humanity across big
00:00:45differences in our characteristics is actually better for your prosperity. It's better for your
00:00:50intellect. It's better for your happiness, even though it's not natural and it's harder as a result
00:00:57of that.
00:01:04Hi, friends. Welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. I'm a professor at Vanderbilt University
00:01:09and a columnist for the free press. Most importantly, I'm a behavioral scientist dedicated to lifting
00:01:14people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. And
00:01:19that's what this show is all about. If you're a regular watcher or listener, thank you. Thank you
00:01:23for staying with us. Thank you for sharing these ideas with other people, maybe sharing the link.
00:01:28That's how we spread our movement of happiness science and how all of us can be happiness teachers.
00:01:33That's what I've dedicated myself to. And I want to invite you to joining me in doing that to lift
00:01:38other people up as well. So please do like and subscribe this episode, this show. Make sure
00:01:43it's sent to you directly as soon as new fresh episodes are out every Monday and encourage other
00:01:48people to subscribe as well. Also, make sure that you rate the show. That gives us a lot better idea
00:01:54on how we're doing and feedback to us as well. Please send me comments or questions or criticisms or
00:01:59anything you want by writing it in the comments below, wherever you're watching or listening to the show
00:02:05or send us an email. The email address is officehours@arthurbrooks.com. If you want to go a little bit deeper in
00:02:12anything that we talk about in behavioral science and human happiness, you can actually get my
00:02:17newsletter that comes out every Friday morning and it's completely free. It's three to 500 words on a
00:02:21new provocative topic every week that you can spread around to people that you love. If you find it
00:02:26especially interesting, you can get that by going to my website, arthurbrooks.com slash newsletter.
00:02:31And if you're interested in retreats, in-person experiences where we look at this material,
00:02:35you make friends that are also interested in it. Make new friends for life based on your shared love
00:02:41of the science of happiness. You can do that by going to retreats.arthurbrooks.com. All right.
00:02:46You'll find all sorts of other cool stuff on the website as well. Surveys and tests that you can
00:02:50take and all kinds of things that you can read as well. All right. What do we want to talk about
00:02:55today? I want to talk about a bit of an irony in modern life and how you can understand that irony
00:03:02and use it to live a better life yourself. That irony is as follows. We have a natural instinct to
00:03:08surround ourselves with people who are just like us, who think like us, who live like us, who see the
00:03:13world the way that we do. But in this flat world, we're being bombarded by more and more examples of
00:03:19people who are not like us. We're being more and more exposed because of the way that we use
00:03:24technology, because of the way that the media and methods of communication have become so much more
00:03:31democratic, that we're getting more information about people who are not like us. It's almost as if
00:03:36we're living in these very diverse communities. So we have a natural biological tendency toward
00:03:42diversity. Hmm. That has actually led a lot of people to be really uncomfortable. And I want to
00:03:53talk about that discomfort with the whole idea of diversity, focusing on one kind of diversity in
00:03:59specific, which is diversity of ideas. And if I do my job in this episode, I want you to be a lot more
00:04:05comfortable with it by understanding it and knowing actually how to make it something that is, is, is
00:04:12enriching in your life as opposed to something that bothers you a lot. So what I'm going to talk about
00:04:17today is basically three things, how diversity naturally affects us as homo sapiens. I'm going to
00:04:22talk about how to make it work for us. But between those two things, I want to talk about why idea
00:04:29diversity, differences of opinion about social issues, politics, you name it, why those are
00:04:36especially hard for us to cope with. If, if you struggle with that in your family or your friends
00:04:41or at your university or in the workplace, you're not alone. And I'm going to show you why. So again,
00:04:46what do we want to do today? I want to make life easier and better for you so you can be a better
00:04:50leader, but also a happier person. So let's start off with, um, the significance of May 21st. Now,
00:04:56what is the significance of May 21st each year? That is, um, according to the United Nations
00:05:01World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development, AKA Diversity Day. Yes, my friends,
00:05:09there is a diversity day that has been, um, declared as such by the United Nations on May 21st. Now,
00:05:15I want you to know that I always celebrate May 21st. It's a big celebration day for me. I have a cake
00:05:20and sometimes even a party. Um, but the reason for that is that May 21st is also my birthday. I don't
00:05:26celebrate diversity day from the United Nations. As a matter of fact, I didn't know that until
00:05:31recently. I'm skeptical of any celebration day that's declared by the United Nations or for that
00:05:36matter, any other government body. But you know, that doesn't mean that you should be too. It just
00:05:41means that I'm kind of a, an iconoclastic grump. Um, I'm even a little resentful that the last
00:05:46Thursday in November were, were asked to all celebrate by the government and be thankful.
00:05:53As my son jokingly says, I refer to it as the state mandated thankfulness holiday. That's me. Uh,
00:06:00you do you. Don't think less of me for that. Write into the comments if you think I'm being too grouchy
00:06:05about it. But the whole point is this, that sounds sort of like diversity is spinach or the United
00:06:10Nations wouldn't be declaring it as such. I want to think about it in a different way. If you're a regular
00:06:14viewer of this show, you know that anytime something's hard, that's an opportunity. Anytime
00:06:18something is irritating, that's a, that's a, that's a really big opportunity as a matter of fact, for
00:06:24making your life better, for actually becoming happier. And this is an absolute case in point.
00:06:29I want to think about a better way to think about diversity, what it is, and even in the hardest
00:06:34cases, how it can make us happier every day as people. Now, this discussion starts off with a,
00:06:40a kind of an academic concept that you've probably heard before, but have never really thought
00:06:44about it that much, unless you're a social scientist nerd like me. And that concept is
00:06:49social capital. Social capital is the glue between people, the, the, the invisible glue of civil
00:06:56society. It's not something that we're required to have to be together. On the contrary, it's
00:07:01not a law that puts us together all in one place. It's the linkages between people that naturally occur,
00:07:08especially people who are not in the same family. There are people in communities. Why are they
00:07:12linked up together? This was made very popular, this whole concept by my colleague at the Harvard
00:07:19Kennedy School named Robert Putnam. If you haven't heard of him, you'll, he's a political science
00:07:23professor now retired. He wrote a very famous book in the year 2000 called Bowling Alone. It wasn't
00:07:30about bowling. It was about the fact that if you go back to the 1950s, bowling leagues were unbelievably
00:07:36common and popular. And what he found in his research is that people tend not to bowl in bowling
00:07:42leagues anymore. They tend to bowl all very often actually by themselves or just with one friend or
00:07:48something. And he said that that was, that was a kind of a, a symptom of the breakdown of civil
00:07:53society, of the social capital, of these unspoken linkages between people where people would bond
00:07:59together. Now that's an ancient idea of how important that is to, especially American life. Not all of you
00:08:03watching or Americans, but you'll recognize this if you spend any time in the United States is kind
00:08:08of common. Um, if you go back to 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville, a French noble comes to the United
00:08:13States and he travels around and he's just amazed by this weird country that has a vast frontier and a
00:08:19relatively small population and is doing really well. And he concludes that the secret to American success
00:08:25in 1835 is these civic bonds where people band together as individuals, but voluntarily. And he
00:08:33found that everybody in this early nation belonged to a whole bunch of associations, large and small,
00:08:40dedicated to charitable works and works of mutual interest, et cetera, that, that didn't exist in the
00:08:45countries that he knew the best, which were France and Great Britain. He said in, in France, you have a
00:08:50nobleman and in Great Britain, you have a bureaucrat and those are the ones who organize everything, but
00:08:54it's American citizens who voluntarily organize everything. And, and that was the secret to American
00:09:00greatness. That was his belief in 1835. That's the book that he wrote. You're probably aware what I'm
00:09:06talking about is called Democracy in America. And he felt that democracy as exemplified in the United States
00:09:11was, was largely due to the fact that we have these weird voluntary associations that other countries just don't
00:09:17have. He thought that was the glue of our society. And that's the same thing that many years later,
00:09:22165 years later, Robert Putnam believed in his book, Bowling Alone. And he sent up the alarm that
00:09:28that that was fraying, that that was, that was eroding in American life. Okay. Now I'm not going to deal
00:09:33with whether or not there's more or less social capital. You decide for yourself. You can look at the,
00:09:38the book Bowling Alone. You can look at the literature that's gone on since then. And it's a big raging debate.
00:09:43What I want to point out is that this social capital per se can either give us less diversity in our
00:09:50lives or more for the following reason. There's two kinds of social capital, civic bonds, glue.
00:09:57There's bonding social capital and there's bridging social capital. Now bonding social capital is more
00:10:03or less what Putnam was talking about. And for that matter, a lot of what de Tocqueville was talking
00:10:08about. People were similarly placed. They're from the same town. They're kind of from the same
00:10:13tribe, if you will. And they're doing things together because of their commonality. They, they, they see
00:10:19each other in kinship because of the commonality between them. That's bonding social capital. And you see
00:10:24this a lot. You have a lot of it in your life. You went to the same college as somebody. You like the same
00:10:28football team as somebody, for example. But that's not the only kind. The other kind of social capital is
00:10:33called bridging social capital. And that social capital where we make civic bonds, where we glue
00:10:38ourselves to other people across differences. And that's a very different kind of experience.
00:10:45In a way you'd see that actually also at a football game, because you'll see all different kinds of
00:10:51people who all like the Seattle Seahawks. And, and if you follow my show, you know that all thinking
00:10:56sensible people know that Seattle Seahawks are the greatest football team. And, and everybody loves
00:11:01each other because they have that in common as the Seattle Seahawks, but they're very different kinds
00:11:04of people bonding across their differences for some particular reason. Now, maybe it might be,
00:11:12we love our city. We love our church. We love America. We love the human race and we're all super
00:11:20different, but we have that common love across these differences. And that's what actually bridges us.
00:11:25So bonding social capital is demographic similarity. Bridging social capital is a kind of a values
00:11:33commonality across demographic difference. You see what I'm talking about there? Now, quiz, which is
00:11:41harder? It's a question that answers itself, right? Especially if you look at modern American life,
00:11:47where there's tons of bonding, you know, people are like, if you're like me, you're like me. And we're
00:11:51finding ways that we have the same identity, identity, identity. Everybody's talking about identity.
00:11:54They're talking about demographic identity. And we bond to each other with these identities. Bridging social
00:12:01capital is getting harder and harder because people are not actually gluing themselves to each other across
00:12:07differences, especially doing it on purpose across differences. And that's a major difference in the
00:12:15way that we see the world. And it's actually quite deleterious given the fact that bridging social
00:12:19capital has gotten so hard for us to have an understanding of what it means to be together as
00:12:25different kinds of people. And I'll give you a perfect case study of this. I've been a college professor for a long time.
00:12:30When I started teaching at the university in the late 1990s, I know I'm old, it was,
00:12:36it was largely a bridging social capital experience. People would come from all different walks of
00:12:41life. They came, you know, different races, different religions, certainly different socioeconomic
00:12:46backgrounds in different parts of the country. And they would all come together. And what they had in
00:12:50common is that they were all taking these classes in common and they had been randomly assigned to live
00:12:56together in dorms. And what they found was that they, they found it an incredibly interesting and enriching
00:13:03experience. And people really loved the fact that they were in this diverse milieu. It was actually
00:13:07really good for them, as a matter of fact. I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll even talk about that a little bit
00:13:11today about why it was so good for them to do that. But now college is a lot more than it has been in the
00:13:17past about bonding social capital, where the college experience is often characterized sociologically as
00:13:23one of finding particular identities and finding groups where you have common identities, whether
00:13:31they're racial identities or religious identities and certainly ideological identities and, and, and being
00:13:37with those people. And furthermore, seeing people who don't share those things as kind of out groups.
00:13:43I've seen that a lot more in the college experience. And that's one of the reasons, in my view as an
00:13:47educator, that college has become less happy than it was in the past. That in point of fact, when we went
00:13:53from bridging to bonding, it created more antipathy between groups. It created more activism
00:13:58between groups and it created a lot less happiness for them.
00:14:01between groups. Now, again, back to the question, which is easier bonding or bridging? That's a
00:14:06question that answers itself largely because of evolution, evolutionary biology. I go on and on and
00:14:11on about, you know, the psychology and, and biology that, that stems from our human evolution. And I
00:14:17often refer to the fact that our brains were largely in their present state starting about 250,000 years
00:14:23ago in the middle place to scene. At that point, we, many of the patterns that we still see today that are
00:14:28often paradoxical in modern life were established because they were appropriate to life.
00:14:33David Gardner: 250,000 years ago. Now, how were we living at that point? All the human
00:14:38race basically lived in bands of 30 to 50 kin related individuals. Now it was a dangerous time.
00:14:45There was wild animals. There was other bands. They wanted your animal skins and buffalo jerky. They
00:14:51would raid you at any moment. And you were bands because you were banding together. What were you banding
00:14:56together over? Well, common interest in, in your security and the ability to pass on your genes and
00:15:02survive the winter. And how did you do that? By relying on each other and trusting each other. And
00:15:08the way that you trusted each other was through commonality. The way that you saw somebody as
00:15:13trustworthy was how they were just like you. They were just, they looked like you. You grew up with them.
00:15:18You spoke the same language. You, yeah, you, you were obviously the same race, the same set of beliefs,
00:15:27such as it was 250,000 years ago. And that's wired itself into our instincts on how we're most
00:15:33comfortable. That's called a homophily bias in evolution. We love people who are like us naturally.
00:15:40We prefer to hang out with people who are like ourselves because there's a shorthand because it's
00:15:45just easier. And all that stems back to, you know, caveman days, as a matter of fact, that's broadly
00:15:51true. And we see this again and again and again for race, for age, for education, for job, for gender,
00:15:59for attitudes, for values, for personality, we have a homophily bias. So, so now we get into the
00:16:06paradox that gets even a little bit deeper, which is to say that it's kind of good for us and, and it
00:16:12broadens our perspectives. It, it actually makes us happier in the long run. When we do the thing,
00:16:17it's harder. Now that actually shouldn't be so strange to you. There are lots and lots of things
00:16:21where life is harder, but your life gets better when you do the harder thing. It's easier to sit on the
00:16:26couch than to go to the gym, but sitting on the couch is not as good for you as going to the gym.
00:16:31I mean, look, the couch is good too. You can't be in the gym 23 hours a day, but you get my point.
00:16:36It's much easier whenever you go to the gym, but it's better for you. And the case that I'm going to
00:16:40make is that bridging social capital where you're looking for commonality of, of humanity across big
00:16:48differences in our characteristics is actually better for your prosperity. It's better for your intellect.
00:16:53It's better for your happiness, even though it's not natural necessarily with respect to evolutionary
00:17:00biology, and it's harder as a result of that. So that's what I really want to dig into and how we
00:17:06can think about it. And I want to talk about the hardest kind of diversity of all, but we're not
00:17:11quite there yet. Okay. Now it's even interesting, by the way, this homophily bias,
00:17:18it leads to all sorts of sort of paradoxes that we see in human life and behavior. For example,
00:17:23you'll often notice that people who are very sheltered in their, in their groups, they even
00:17:28have a hard time distinguishing people from outside groups. So for example, you might say,
00:17:33ah, my grandfather, I mean, he can't tell people of a certain race apart. It's just so,
00:17:38it's mortifying. It's so embarrassing. Well, there's actually neuroscience research that shows that if you
00:17:42haven't seen too many people from your out group, you haven't seen them very much, that it takes a
00:17:47little while for your brain to start distinguishing between the people that don't have your racial
00:17:51characteristics. That's true for everybody, by the way. You know, and it's interesting because
00:17:56I've experienced this firsthand. Esther and I, we have two of our children are biological,
00:18:00and so they kind of look like us. And one of our children is, is adopted from China. And, um, and,
00:18:07and she grew up with us and it's been our whole lives together, the best. And, and, and the weirdest
00:18:13thing about that is since we have, uh, of, uh, a direct family of origin member in common, who's
00:18:21technically a different race, it's very hard for us to sort of distinguish when we're around people
00:18:27of Han Chinese descent. It doesn't occur to us since then that there's a racial difference because
00:18:33there's not a, there's not a difference that we see between our daughter and our sons. So it's weird
00:18:38that that actually obscures the differences for us as opposed to exacerbating the differences,
00:18:43which would make it harder to tell people apart. What, by the way, when we went to adopt our, our,
00:18:49our daughter from, from China, I actually went by myself. I was in a large group of American families.
00:18:54There was about 20, uh, people there. I think there was nine families with 20 people. Most of them are
00:18:59couples. I was the only single parent there. I wasn't a single parent. My wife was back taking care of
00:19:04our kids, our biological kids. And we were in this group and the, our guide, the guy who was helping
00:19:10us from the adoption agency in China, great guy, spoke pretty good English as a matter of fact,
00:19:15but he'd never been outside China in his life. And, and he made us all wear this one weird thing in
00:19:22common on our shirts. And, and, and I said, why do we have to, I mean, it's like, it's obvious who we are.
00:19:27He says, sorry, I can't tell you apart because he hadn't seen that many Westerners as a matter
00:19:33of fact. So you get the idea that even our brains have this homophily bias where once again, you can
00:19:38get past that super, super fast. You can train your brain. We did. You probably have as well,
00:19:44but it's not necessarily evidence of, you know, evil that we see. If you want references on this,
00:19:49I'm going to put them in there on interesting article on this, um, similarity in relationships
00:19:55as niche construction, choice, stability, and influence within dyads in a free choice environment.
00:20:00What does that sound interesting? Right? Anyway, there's all go in the, there's all go in the,
00:20:03um, the show notes, um, like anything else. So we will necessarily like people who are more like
00:20:10us with respect to kin or clan. And that probably kept your ancestors safer than they would have been.
00:20:17But today that's really, really maladapted. The idea is like my people, blood and soil.
00:20:23That's really adapted to modern life. Not just because it's hard for us to get along as,
00:20:29as a society politically, that's obvious, but because it actually makes us less happy. It makes
00:20:34us less successful than we would be otherwise. Meaning that we need to get into the gym of
00:20:39diversity more than we ordinarily do. Now I've got the data to show that it is good for you.
00:20:45I'm not just making some sort of, um, politically correct point on this. It's absolutely the case
00:20:49that studies that look at cross group friendship, cross group, that is racial group, religious group,
00:20:55social group, and ideological groups among college students, scholars have found a much greater
00:20:59diversity of friendships. When they find that greater diversity of friendships, they also see
00:21:05increases in academic and social skills and improved satisfaction with college.
00:21:09Okay. That's why the old days in college were better than the new days in college,
00:21:14precisely because we were cultivating and celebrating these differences that people
00:21:18were experiencing often for the very first time in their life. And that's how the American university
00:21:22system was set up was to actually mix people up in this cool, beautiful way with common humanity,
00:21:28but different demographics, which was really great. Interesting study on this racial diversity matters,
00:21:33the impact of diversity related student engagement and institutional context. That's from
00:21:36the American educational research journal from 2009. Okay. Read it because it's actually really interesting.
00:21:43Okay. Now let's talk about different types of diversity, the types we typically talk about,
00:21:48and then the types that we often don't talk about that we should, that are actually the hardest and most
00:21:53important. Okay. So let's start with racial and ethnic differences. That's what people are always talking about,
00:21:59right? This is definitely beneficial. Absolutely. The article that I just referred to was mostly about ethnic and racial differences.
00:22:06But that definition actually tends to be, believe it or not, easier for most people. I know there's a lot in the news
00:22:13about people who are, you know, racially unbelievably undiverse and intolerant, etc. But that tends for most people across the political spectrum to be the easiest type.
00:22:24Um, and, and interestingly, there's one study, and this is going to probably amuse you as people who like amusing paradoxes,
00:22:31which is why you are interested in behavioral science, is that people who say that they value diversity, personally value diversity,
00:22:39they're more likely than others to have friendships with a high variety of race, religion, and sexual orientation differences.
00:22:45They absolutely do. People who say they value personal diversity. Good. However, this is the ironic part.
00:22:52These people were also most likely to have non-diverse friendships when it came to political attitudes and social values.
00:23:01Okay. So in other words, lower diversity than average, more homogeneity with respect to how people think.
00:23:07And so what this basically tells us is that the celebrate diversity bumper sticker generally refers to looking different while thinking the same.
00:23:17And that leads to the second kind of diversity, which is less popular and harder for almost everybody, but has the most benefit.
00:23:26Okay. And that is diversity of attitudes, really, really super beneficial, really super hard.
00:23:32And people who talk about diversity often really, really don't want it. And so the kind of diversity they're talking about is the easier of the two.
00:23:40And they're overlooking what diversity can, and I believe really should, mean, especially in modern life.
00:23:46And this gets back to the college experience that I was talking about. This is the kind of thing that we actually see most as the balkanization of political views.
00:23:52It's also true in almost any other community. A lot of that has to do with the accelerant of social media, which is putting people into silos,
00:24:01into echo chambers politically where your algorithms will deliver to you what you already thought.
00:24:08It will connect you to people who agree with you already. And platforms are specializing in people who are all the same views.
00:24:16Oh, I love diversity, unless you think differently than me. And that's what the world is serving up to you.
00:24:22It can make you feel really good about yourself, but the truth is that you're probably not that diverse at all.
00:24:27If you're like me, you've got to be drinking when you're in the gym and you have to be drinking something clean without any calories that will actually give you electrolytes and all the good stuff.
00:24:34For me, that's Element. LMNT. You probably knew that already. It's a great product that helps you stay hydrated without sugar and a bunch of dodgy ingredients that are found in a lot of popular electrolyte drinks and sports drinks.
00:24:49No sugar, no junk, just electrolytes that actually work. Give it a try. I like it. It's science-backed and made for athletes,
00:24:56fasting, keto, or happiness scientists like me. Anyone who sweats.
00:25:01So, how do I use it? I use it in the morning, 4:45 in the morning.
00:25:05I don't like to drink anything with caffeine or anything that peps me up because I like to be real clear and I drink my caffeine later.
00:25:11Element is just the ticket that I need. Give it a try yourself.
00:25:15Right now, you can get a free sample pack with any purchase at Drink Element.
00:25:19That's drink, just like it sounds, LMNT.com/Arthur. Try it risk-free.
00:25:25If you don't like it, they'll refund your order. No questions asked, but you're going to like it.
00:25:30As you know from listening to this show, I've never been a super naturally happy person.
00:25:36That's exactly why I've spent much of my life and my career trying to understand human happiness,
00:25:41not just academically, but in a way that I could use very practically, and you can too.
00:25:48I don't do research. I do me-search. Well, and you-search.
00:25:51My time in academia has reinforced the lesson I continue to rely on today.
00:25:56Happiness, well, and energy are best managed through deliberate habits and discipline.
00:26:01I take my personal habits seriously. I need to.
00:26:05I have a morning routine. I've talked about it on this show.
00:26:08It involves prayer and exercise and healthy eating and a lot of coffee.
00:26:13Well, taken at the right time.
00:26:15But in my creative work, I've long looked for a gold star supplement to that routine that helps me take
00:26:22charge of my day.
00:26:22I came across Magic Mind. Now, I was skeptical at first, honestly, because there's a lot of noise in the
00:26:29supplement space, and most of it really doesn't hold up to the science or human experience.
00:26:34But Magic Mind has ingredients that I like. Adaptogens, nootropics, such as lion's mane,
00:26:41ashwagandha, cognozine, L-theanine. These are clinically-backed compounds with real research behind them.
00:26:48Magic Mind is a two-ounce shot that you take in the morning. You don't get jitters. There's no crash.
00:26:54It's just your brain working the way it's supposed to. Calm, sustained, and focused.
00:26:59If the same cup of coffee every morning has started to feel more like a crutch than a ritual,
00:27:04or if you're just tired of it, it might be worth trying something that actually works with your
00:27:09neurobiology rather than against it. Right now, you can go to www.magicmind.com,
00:27:16that's all one word, and get 50% off your first order plus a 100-day money-back guarantee. So,
00:27:23you really have nothing to lose by trying it. You can also find Magic Mind in stores near you
00:27:28using the store locator at magicmind.com. Now, that's really important. It's been really,
00:27:34really important in my life, indeed. And part of the reason is because I've been an academic,
00:27:37lifelong academic, and I think very differently than a lot of academics on a lot of different issues,
00:27:44especially on economic and sort of economic freedom types of issues. It's not to say that I'm right,
00:27:50and one of the reasons that I'm very humble about the fact that I'm not right in all the things that
00:27:54I think is that I love and respect my colleagues who, not uniformly, but in the great majority,
00:28:00differ from me on these particular attitudes. I've always been kind of the odd man out. I've never
00:28:05suffered meaningful discrimination, as far as I'm concerned, but it's been pretty obvious that I've
00:28:11thought differently than other people. So, I had to get comfortable with it or bail out, I guess.
00:28:16And by the way, this is not just where I work. Often, very often through the years,
00:28:20especially as my kids have grown into adulthood, I'm the only one who votes the way that I do in
00:28:24elections in my whole family. This has happened a bunch of times, you know? These are the people
00:28:29that I literally love the most in the world, and we don't see things politically, or at least at election
00:28:35time, in the same way. And it's no problem. I've learned to live with that. On the contrary,
00:28:41I've actually learned to love that. And it's helped me to question my own views and to have greater
00:28:47humility, which, and greater humility is one of the great secrets to happiness, of course. Now,
00:28:50am I humble enough? No. But has that helped? Yeah. I mean, when I'm around the dinner table
00:28:56and everybody's calling me a, you know, a freaked out hippie because of the way that I vote, with some
00:29:01justification, it actually helps me to interrogate my views a little bit more. And it helps me to
00:29:07steel man their views a little bit more in the world. So I'm not going through the world thinking,
00:29:13oh, those people, there's something morally defective about those people, which is the essence
00:29:17of how you stay in your filter bubble, stay in your silo about this. Now, what is the benefit of being
00:29:23around people who think differently than you? And there's a bunch of interesting management science
00:29:29on exactly this. There's one very interesting study that I'll put in the references. This is
00:29:35from Nature Human Behavior that talks about politically polarized teams. There's actually one
00:29:41really interesting study that was undertaken at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
00:29:46and the University of Chicago, where the researchers looked at, believe it or not, Wikipedia entries,
00:29:53and they analyzed the Wikipedia entries with respect to the ideological diversity of the people who
00:29:59actually made the entries. So you know that in Wikipedia, to make an entry in Wikipedia, you can do it
00:30:06yourself if it's obscure, but pretty much it's going to be teams of people who actually do that. And what they
00:30:11found was that those that were collaborative, but ideologically diverse, had the highest quality
00:30:18entries, as opposed to the teams that were most uniformed politically. A politically uniformed team
00:30:23had a biased entry in Wikipedia that wasn't very accurate, compared to if it was a team of rivals, sort of
00:30:29like they talked about Lincoln's cabinet, where he got a bunch of people who disagreed with him and disagreed
00:30:34with each other, and they would just argue. And his cabinet, it's not entirely clear that that's
00:30:40completely accurate. But the idea is exactly that, that they were testing in this UC Chapel Hill study.
00:30:47You want the highest quality work, the bottom line is you got to have people, one, who collaborate,
00:30:53and two, who disagree. And that's the essence of bridging social capital. Exactly what we were
00:30:59talking about. It's like, that's why it's so good. And by the way, when you get that, you get a culture
00:31:04of that, that's really fun, and people actually like it, even though it's kind of hard to, it's kind
00:31:09of hard to achieve. Too many forums don't have that because it's hard, and they don't actually look for
00:31:15that. And, and, you know, you also have a lot of people who are in the world today, in the activist
00:31:20world today, in particular, right and left, who are dark triads. These are people who want to manipulate
00:31:25you. And one of the ways that it's easiest to manipulate you is saying the people who disagree
00:31:29with you are immoral. The people who disagree with you are evil, that they're corrupt. You're,
00:31:35you've been, when you hate somebody for political or ideological reasons, you've been productized.
00:31:40I'm here to tell you that you have, you become the product. Somebody's profiting,
00:31:44it's not you is what I'm here to tell you on all that. In many communities, such as academia,
00:31:50there's so much ideological homogeneity today that there are no benefits of that kind of diversity
00:31:58at all. And, and, and the problem with that is not just that it's not fair. I think that a lot
00:32:03of times people are, who complain about the universities, they get it wrong. They say it's not fair.
00:32:07That's beside the point. The problem is, is mediocre. When over the years, all diversity
00:32:13is driven out, all ideological diversity is driven out. Look, the kind of diversity that matters the
00:32:18most in academia is idea diversity, because this is the essence of, of idea generation is intellectual
00:32:24communities. And when that very, uh, diversity is gone, you're going to get the mediocrity that
00:32:29actually comes from homogeneity and uniformity. Okay. Now what I really want to talk about, of course,
00:32:34for you is how you can get more of it in your life and be less uncomfortable with it. Because again,
00:32:38I hope I've made the case that the more you're around that, the more comfortable you are with that,
00:32:44the better your life's going to be. But I'm not going to, I'm not going to make the case that there's
00:32:49something morally corrupt about you. If it's hard, you're just a human being with a Pleistocene brain.
00:32:55Me too. You got to get used to it in the same way that you get used to getting up.
00:33:00Remember my five, my morning protocol, where you get up at 4:30 and you work out. That's super hard.
00:33:06So you get used to it, right? This is like that. This is like my morning protocol, but for diversity.
00:33:12So I want to tell you about three things to do that actually work to make you more comfortable with this.
00:33:19that have actually been tested, um, in the, in the behavioral science literature. Here's step one.
00:33:23If you want to become more comfortable with different kinds of people and, and all different
00:33:29kinds of people, I mean, all kinds of diversity, including the easier types, like, you know,
00:33:33race and gender and religion, but, but the harder types as well, like ideology, talk more to strangers.
00:33:40Just that, this is like step one, talk to strangers. Now that that's actually hard for a lot
00:33:46of people. And if you're an introvert, that's like excruciating. If you're an extrovert,
00:33:49you're probably already doing that. Um, that's not a problem, but, but here's the interesting
00:33:53thing from the research. There's two very distinguished social psychologists, Nick Epley
00:33:58and Juliana Schroeder. Juliana Schroeder's at Berkeley and Nick Epley is at the University of Chicago.
00:34:03Um, they've demonstrated that we tend to overestimate how awkward or unpleasant it will be to talk to
00:34:10strangers and meet new people. And they've done all these experiments in which they have
00:34:15a treatment and control environment where people, half the people are, are not induced to talk to
00:34:19strangers. They do whatever they want. And, and half of them are assigned to a group where they
00:34:22have to talk to strangers, no matter how hard it is for them. And then they figure out who's happier
00:34:27afterward. And they look at how bad you thought it was going to be compared to how bad it really was
00:34:32talking to strangers. And what you find, what they find, is that almost everyone thought beforehand
00:34:37that not talking to strangers would be more pleasant than talking to strangers.
00:34:41The results are the opposite. The opposite was true. The people who talk to strangers,
00:34:46talk to them about ideas, whatever, that they actually were happier afterward than the people
00:34:51who didn't do so. So that's an important finding, isn't it? What that means is once again, our
00:34:57evolutionary biology to stay yourself, to stay away from strangers, they might steal your animal skins.
00:35:03It's not right. It's maladapted to the current environment.
00:35:06Now, use this with appropriate prudential judgment, obviously. There are some strangers
00:35:10you probably don't want to walk up to and start talking to, but it might be a lot less than you
00:35:15think. That person next to you on the bus might actually kind of enjoy the conversation. Now,
00:35:19how do I know that they're going to enjoy it as much as you? Because that's another part of the
00:35:23experiment that, uh, that these scholars did by bringing in another psychologist in another paper,
00:35:28um, from the journal of experimental psychology in 2022, where they actually followed up with the
00:35:35people who had been spoken to by the people in their original experiment. How much did they like it?
00:35:41And the answer is that the people spoken to had a positive experience as well. They found it refreshing.
00:35:48Again, not everybody, but the truth is that people liked it more than being ignored. People actually
00:35:55liked being interacted with. You're going to like it talking to strangers, people you don't know,
00:36:00embracing a little bit of diversity, or at least breaking the ice. And you will like it if somebody
00:36:04does that to you as well. And that's the beginning of doing what we're talking about here.
00:36:07: Second, now let's go to the next level and say that you're around people, strangers or friends or
00:36:15family members with whom you actually disagree. And you're struggling with that. You're struggling with
00:36:20how to deal with that, how to enjoy that. The way to do that, according to the literature and common
00:36:26sense, of course, is to become a social scientist. Now, one of the great joys of my life is that I study
00:36:32people. And what that means is that when something is weird or hard or uncomfortable, I have a natural
00:36:39stance that I snap into, which is I start studying the situation. When I'm in a weird, like a really
00:36:44awkward conversation, I become a researcher because that's my background. I'm basically writing in my
00:36:49next article when I'm talking to somebody and it's, and it's, and it's really awkward or it's really
00:36:53stiff or, or when it's very tense, as a matter of fact. So if you start talking to me and you've got
00:36:59really, really strong political views and they really disagree with mine, you're going to notice
00:37:04that I'm going to do something. I'm like, tell me more. And why do you think that? And I'm going to
00:37:09go into listening mode and I'm start interviewing you. Now, of course, since you've watched this,
00:37:13you're going to notice if you're, you're sitting next to me on a plane and we start having this
00:37:17conversation. But of course, when you do this with somebody else who doesn't happen to be one of our
00:37:21viewers, they won't notice that. They'll just notice that you're an incredibly good listener and you're
00:37:26really smart too, because you say, why do you think these things? And you'll, you'll be authentically
00:37:33motivated to understand their particular point of view. Because by the way, when somebody says
00:37:37something that seems strange to you, that's incredibly interesting on why that would be the
00:37:42case. So don't freak out. Don't become defensive on the contrary, go on the offense by being genuinely
00:37:49curious about that other person. This means that you're going to go without fear because no matter
00:37:53what, you're going to have a pretty good experience. I mean, it can go wrong, but I don't see really how
00:37:58it can and it never has. For me, if you think of yourself as a human researcher like I do, and by the
00:38:04way, why is that not so weird? You're watching the show. You're listening to the show. You're an office
00:38:08hours consumer. You're interested in behavioral science. We're in this together. I dub you a researcher
00:38:15alongside me. Please, when you do this, write into the show notes about the experience that you had.
00:38:19I would love to hear more about it. And, and I'll probably get an idea for a new show on the basis
00:38:24of what you write in. This will set people at ease and give you a more interesting set of friends.
00:38:29And occasionally it might even change your mind, but one way or the other, it will expand your
00:38:33understanding and it'll help you embrace diverse points of view without becoming defensive.
00:38:39Now here's the third part. Here's the hardest part, but the best part of all. I recommend that we all
00:38:45start celebrating heresy. Now, I don't mean that literally. I don't mean that you should go out and
00:38:49start a, a religion and that's, that's contrary to your own religious beliefs. That's not what I'm
00:38:55talking about unless you want to, but, but when I'm talking about heresy, I'm talking about ideological
00:38:59heresy, not, you know, as we would think about it in the middle ages. I have had friend groups that
00:39:03explicitly encourage heterodox thinking. Um, some of the most rewarding social circles I've ever
00:39:09belonged to are those in which everybody's thrilled to hear weird ideas outside of their comfort zone.
00:39:15And this is a, not a new idea. If you go back to the American transcendentalists, if you go back
00:39:20to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, they used to hang out together and throw out crazy ideas,
00:39:26right? And so one of the things that I recommend is getting together with a bunch of friends or a bunch
00:39:30of strangers for that matter and say, I want you to, what, what's the topic of conversation at this
00:39:35dinner? Your most unpopular opinion that you're afraid to tell most people. And when you do that,
00:39:40I'm telling you, nobody's going to be mad. Everybody's going to be laughing and you're going to be bridging
00:39:45social capital divides like nobody's business. And you're going to really start digging in on the
00:39:52heretical nature of the things that you're actually hearing. You don't have to agree, but you celebrate it.
00:39:58There was a great American tradition of free thinking in the 19th century, including those,
00:40:03uh, those wonderful transcendentalists, but, but, but others that, that have largely been forgotten,
00:40:08but that it's worth remembering. Um, one writer, a very great writer, uh, at the time who was very
00:40:14famous now, not so much Robert G. Ingersoll. He was called the great agnostic for his willingness to
00:40:21question everything. And his greatest book was in 1877. 1877, by the way, between the civil war and the first
00:40:25world war, there was so much good stuff going on philosophically in the United States. I mean,
00:40:30there was these religious revivals. The church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was pouring
00:40:34across the, across the country as were the Methodists and the Baptists. And there was more and more
00:40:39Catholics coming in, but also the, the religion, the semi-religion called theosophy and occult ideas
00:40:44and self-improvement and like it or hate it, heretical or not. It was super interesting. And it really formed
00:40:51American culture as a culture of free thinking individualists. Not coincidentally, that was the
00:40:58entire period of the cowboys in American history. It was between the civil war and largely the turn of the
00:41:03century. That's it. That's when the cowboys existed. And why do we celebrate that? Because at the same
00:41:09time that we thought of ourselves as these incredibly free thinkers, I want that back. That's diversity
00:41:15that leads to bridging social capital. Anyway, Robert Ingersoll's 1877 book was called "Heretics and
00:41:21Heresies." Let me give you a quote. I'll put it in the show notes, by the way. "Heresy is the eternal
00:41:27dawn, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day. Heresy is the last and best thought. It is the
00:41:35perpetual new world, the unknown sea toward which the brave all sail. It is the eternal horizon of progress."
00:41:44My friends, people don't write like that anymore, and I wish they would. And as important as anything else,
00:41:49try it. You want to throw? You want to throw? Go into a conversation without the fences up and celebrate
00:41:59the weirdest ideas that you can possibly find without freaking out. Your life will change and you'll be
00:42:05happier. Now, there's a lot of ways that you can use these ideas in ordinary life. One of the things
00:42:10that I often talk about, as you know, I talk constantly about romantic love. I recommend that
00:42:14people try dating people with whom they disagree. Actually, the first thing I recommend is when you go on a date
00:42:19with somebody that you have a moratorium on no political discussions in the first four dates.
00:42:24And four dates is way beyond most dating relationships. In other words, you're probably
00:42:29broken up for better reasons than that or simply not continued. But what it does is it means that you
00:42:34kind of love each other a little bit by the fourth date. And at that point, it's safer for you to talk
00:42:41about your differences and you're more likely to see the charm and the differences as opposed to being defensive
00:42:47about them. Try starting a romance with somebody really different than you, or at least somebody
00:42:51whose ideas you don't know, and then talk about it later. And you can benefit from some of the ideas
00:42:56that I talk about here. Okay. Lots of ways that you can use this. And I would love to hear your comments.
00:43:01I know for a lot of you, this is a tricky thing, but I promise you, you're going to like it when you
00:43:06try these ideas. It's really, really changed my life. And by the way, at very least, if you do these things,
00:43:12you're not going to be subjugated and productized by the politicians and media that want to divide
00:43:17us because we disagree because that's not just, that's just not right. Maybe that's how we should
00:43:23reframe diversity day. Based on all this is romance and adventure day. So next May 21st, um, we could be,
00:43:30we could reframe it as international date your opposite day or international heresy day or international
00:43:37have a friend who disagrees with you day or something more fun than diversity day. And, uh, you could also
00:43:42simulate by, by the way, by sending me a cake next May 21st. Let's talk about some audience questions
00:43:47here. Uh, we got a bunch of good ones today. Uh, here's one from Kia Washington who wrote into the
00:43:52website. How do video games affect adult happiness? I'm guessing this falls under the addiction, uh,
00:44:00spectrum, but you, but do you have a perspective on the trade-off with relationships and dark triads,
00:44:05activities, et cetera. So how do video games affect adult happiness? And that depends of course on,
00:44:10on, on the use. Um, you know, I've got data that shows that gambling, uh, at very moderate affordable
00:44:16levels, especially when done with other people can make you happier. You know, I've got family members
00:44:20who really like to go to casinos is not my thing. I can't imagine anything more boring than gambling,
00:44:25but you know, one of my sons occasionally likes to go and he likes to play blackjack and he never
00:44:28gambles more than he can afford. And he always does it with other people and he has a great time,
00:44:34but when you're doing it alone and you're doing it too much and you can't afford it, then it becomes
00:44:37a really big problem. That's just like alcohol. That's just like anything that you use as a matter
00:44:42of fact. And so you can have a life affirming relationship with video gaming, or you can have
00:44:47a life ruining relationship with, with video gaming. Um, and that's an important consideration and it
00:44:54requires a lot of honesty with yourself. Here's an anonymous question. Once again, to the website,
00:44:59I've lately heard the buzz about toxic positivity. I have someone in my life who denies that negativity
00:45:06exists. Hmm. It's quite a denial there. She doesn't take the negative and acknowledge it to gain something
00:45:12from it. It's all just ignored. Any research on positivity when it goes too far. The problem
00:45:17that we have is not toxic negativity or toxic positivity is denying reality is contradicting
00:45:22reality. And that's a fundamental lack of honesty with ourselves. Being toxically positive is not
00:45:29honest, of course, but being toxically negative is not being honest as well. People who constantly
00:45:33complain, who feel entitled and who are bitter are being dishonest. And, and one of the things that I have
00:45:38to recommend to people who have toxic negativity is to write gratitude lists, to actually be paying
00:45:44attention to the reality that their life is good. Fundamentally, there are things to complain about,
00:45:49but if we were being realistic, our negativity bias would not be overtaking our entire perception of
00:45:54the world. By the same token, um, toxic positivity is contradicting reality because you just don't
00:46:00like certain parts of reality. Honesty and accuracy are incredibly important. So there's nothing you
00:46:05can do about your friend who does that too bad for them, but what each one of us can do is to commit
00:46:10ourselves to honestly facing what we're going to see this day. And when we do that, we're actually going
00:46:15to wind up having a richer, fully alive experience of, of life on earth. And that is the happier life.
00:46:23Anonymous once, this is not the same anonymous, two anonymous in the same day. Funny that you're both
00:46:28named that. Writing at officehours@arthurworks.com. I feel as if my primary idol is pleasure. I wonder
00:46:34if you have some practical advice on how not to fall prey to this idol. Uh, yeah, for sure.
00:46:39If you go back and, and one of the episodes and I'll make sure that we put this in the show notes,
00:46:44pleasure is not the path to happiness. Pleasure is the path as a life goal. Pleasure is the path to rehab.
00:46:51It is not to say that pleasure is bad. It just means that you need to turn it into enjoyment.
00:46:56Enjoyment and pleasure are not the same thing. Enjoyment is pleasure plus people plus memory. That's why just a minute
00:47:03ago I said, don't be playing, you know, gambling in the casino by yourself. Because what you're doing
00:47:09is you're anesthetizing yourself and it's not a social experience. And what that means is you're
00:47:13not going to remember it. It's not something that you can manage. It becomes automatic. When pleasures
00:47:18are automatic, they're dangerous. When pleasures are done on purpose and they're managed by the prefrontal
00:47:24cortex, the executive centers of the brain, they can be very important. And so that's the key thing.
00:47:28Go back and look at that and we'll put something in the show notes that I've written about how to turn
00:47:33your pleasures into enjoyment. And then you can have full confidence that this is not a dangerous
00:47:39or addictive or deleterious part of your life. Enjoyment, not pleasure, is the key.
00:47:45Well, my friends, we're done. Please let me know your thoughts. You can write into the same email
00:47:50address that our friends just did, our two friends anonymous just did, officehours@arthurbrooks.com.
00:47:55Like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple to the show. Please leave a comment. Please share
00:47:59this with a million of your closest friends. Even if your comment is negative, I want to hear it
00:48:03because we want to make this show better because we're doing it for our audience. Please follow me on
00:48:08socials, on Instagram, LinkedIn, all the other platforms where we have a very original content and
00:48:13stuff you might be interested in. Order the meaning of your life to learn more. That's been out for
00:48:17three months now. Gratified to say that it did really well in the market. It got to a whole lot
00:48:22of people and I hope it gets to you too. So my friends, I'm looking forward to seeing you next week.
00:48:27I hope you've had a nice and very diverse experience today. Go forth and use these ideas,
00:48:33share it with other people, get happier, and I'll see you next week.
커뮤니티 글
아직 글이 없습니다. 이 영상에 대한 첫 번째 글을 작성해 보세요!
이 영상에 대해 글쓰기