The Enemies of Gratitude

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. If you make at least $30,000 a year, congratulations. Your income is 10 times the global median and in the top 5% of incomes worldwide. If you are older than 35, congratulations. For much of human history, many people died before they were 30. If you have a job and stable income, live in a democratic country, and have a college degree, you are in a rarefied group in the history of humankind. If you enjoy good health, good friends, nice vacations, you really ought to get down on your knees and thank Providence. So, are you on your knees yet? Why is it, even when our lives are objectively better than the lives of most people who ever lived, We are all prone to seeing the clouds, not the silver lining. This is true not just when it comes to global and historical statistics, but in our daily lives. We notice small delays at the airport, but ignore the miracle that we can literally fly across the world. We take our health for granted and only notice the gifts of our limbs and our senses when they are taken away from us. We zero in on annoyances in personal relationships, And rarely pause to acknowledge what is wonderful about our friends, families, and coworkers. Our ungratitude for our good fortune is so automatic and ubiquitous that it seems obvious there must be an underlying psychology to it. That's the topic of today's show: the enemies of gratitude and how to fight them. This week on Hidden Brain.

I need a lawyer.

New CBS Thursday. We're taking on Silicon Valley lawsuits no one else will. The fight—

Objection!

Overruled. —is real. I know these companies. You're being surveilled. From the creators of The Good Wife, These tech bros need guardrails.

We're the disruptors now.

Comes a new series critics are calling compelling and insightful.

Is anybody not paranoid?

Now we just gotta win.

Cupertino is all new, CBS Thursday, 10/9c, and streaming on Paramount+.

Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. The brain isn't fixed. It's flexible. That means we're always capable of transformation. A master's degree from SNHU can help you build the skills to become whoever you want: a leader, career changer, dream chaser. With no set class times and low online tuition, SNHU makes grad school possible because it's never too late to learn something new. Get started at snhu.edu/brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states. If you try to measure the size of an ant using a telescope, You won't get very far. If you try to gauge the distance between stars using a microscope, you'll be hopelessly lost. What's true in the physical world is also true inside our own minds. The tools we use to evaluate our lives shape what we see and whether we see. At Cornell University, psychologist Thomas Gilovich studies how we think about our successes and failures and why we often get important things wrong. Tom Gilovich, welcome to Hidden Brain.

It's a pleasure to be on your show, Shankar.

I want to take you all the way back to high school, Tom. Between your junior and senior years of high school, I understand a friend of yours who was on the football team invited you over to take a look at a cool new gizmo he had acquired.

Yes. The gizmo up to that point didn't seem cool to me. I didn't really have any interest in riding a motorcycle. It always seemed dangerous to me, but my friend was much cooler than I, and when he rode it, it seemed kind of cool. So I asked him if he could give me a lesson, show me how to do it.

Uh-huh.

So we're in his front yard, and he's showing me the different brakes. This one brakes the rear wheel. This one brakes the front. Here's the accelerator, et cetera, et cetera. And right before I'm about to start driving, he says, oh, this is really important. People often want to Press with this brake, which is going to brake the front wheel without hitting the rear brake, and people just go flying over the top. So whatever you do, if you get into trouble, make sure you're pressing the rear brake, which on this motorcycle was foot-activated.

Tom got on the motorcycle and zoomed off. He quickly accelerated. About 40 yards into his expedition, he realized he was going too fast.

I'm heading out of his yard across the street. No problem, I say to myself. Just find the rear brake and you'll be okay. And my foot is moving around trying to find it. I can't. And I've just got this mantra, don't hit the brake for the front wheel. And I go farther than I expect. I hit this fence in the yard across the street.

Oh, no.

Plow right through it. The motorcycle hits a sturdy tree. I fly over the handlebars. If you've ever fallen off a bike and time seems to slow down and you say, okay, that definitely happened here. I knew something significant was about to happen and And my head goes smack right into the tree.

My God.

And, you know, some kind of primal panic sets in.

Tom was not wearing a helmet. His friend rushed over.

I remember a loud sound and, you know, the kind of physical force that you feel when you're tackling someone in tackle football, only it was associated with a greater sense of worry. I didn't initiate this. The motorcycle did. And I— you don't tackle a tree. You tackle another person. So this had a greater sense of anticipatory dread.

And did you actually get up after this impact? I mean, so you hit the tree. You presumably— you've flown off. What happens? Do you land? What happens? Are you knocked out?

No, I did get a concussion. I wasn't knocked out. The thing that I remember the most clearly is that afterwards, my friend and I peeled off a portion of my scalp from the tree. And I had heard about people having spinal cord injuries because of motorcycle accidents. And so it felt like an incredibly fortunate near miss.

My God.

And I I just afterwards had this incredible sense of good fortune. We read about people who have accidents like that and either die or lose important body functions. And that didn't happen to me. And I had some other experiences like that, close calls where you say, wow, why am I so lucky? How did I survive this?

Some years later, Tom experienced another moment of good fortune. The Vietnam War was raging, and Tom was eligible for the draft.

And for me, that happened during a period of the war where enthusiasm for going in the United States had waned. So this is a real problem. I may go and be in harm's way, which would be fine for a good cause. At this point, it was widely thought of as not an especially good cause. So this was a terrifying prospect.

Hmm. And what came of it? Did you end up getting drafted and going?

I did not. That was the year that President Nixon's Vietnamization program had really taken hold. More and more of the fighting was being done by the South Vietnamese, and therefore, there was less need to send young Americans over there. And I didn't have to serve. That I look back on as a lucky break that people just a little bit older than I was did not enjoy.

I want to fast forward to a 3rd moment in your life when you felt very fortunate, and this is your wife and you were trying to have a child. Tell me the story of what happened.

Yeah. Like a lot of young couples, we thought it's time to have a family, and so we did what people do to make sure Sure. That the most romantic moments are happening at the optimal times. But a couple years passed and it wasn't happening. It became clear after a while that we might be good candidates for in vitro fertilization. So we went to the famous Howard and Georgina Jones Clinic in Norfolk, Virginia. And eggs are harvested from the potential mother. And they're in Various conditions. And every time, it was kind of like it didn't work. And we tried this a number of times. Each time, it didn't work. It was just crushingly bad news, some of the saddest moments of our lives.

And the process is really difficult, right? It's not a trivial process.

For the woman, it's not a trivial process at all. Women have to take hormones so that it's not just one egg that matures and can get harvested. And of course, it has to be surgically removed. So yes, It's a big deal. So these were difficult experiences. We had done this a number of times, and it became clear that, well, it makes sense to do this one more time. And if that doesn't work, then that just seemed like we shouldn't do this anymore.

Hmm.

That time, the eggs just didn't— there weren't as many. They didn't seem as high a quality. And they often, in that case, they'll say, you know, We'll just put them in anyway. There's nothing to lose here. But for whatever reason, they decided, no, these don't look good enough, and we don't want to even do the transfer, which at the time was devastatingly bad news. But a bad news story turns into one of the best stories of our lives. If they make the transfer, they give the woman a shot of progesterone to create the right uterine environment. But that means that even if it doesn't take, you're going to lose a menstrual cycle. And in a bizarre and delightful turn of fate, we conceived our own first delightful child, Alana, that month. So that if the doctor had said, okay, let's put it in anyway, what's the harm? The possibility of her life would have been scratched. You know, every life, of course, is incalculably unlikely. It could have been the other sperm cell that inserted itself in there. And we think that all of us have to recognize just how unlikely it is that we ever existed. But this concretized that whole thing. It's another reason to celebrate our good fortune.

I mean, what a wonderful story. I mean, and you have in some ways in your daughter almost a tangible representation of the thing that you should be grateful for, right? So some good things happen, but they don't walk around in front of us. But your daughter is right in front of you. And it's sort of almost a daily reminder of how fortunate you were.

Yes, absolutely. That's beautifully said, Shankar. And I'm going to make sure my daughter listens to this so she can point out to me, see, Dad, I'm a walking embodiment of your good fortune.

Tom had much to be grateful for, for his life, for his family. Once Tom became a psychologist, however, he conducted a series of experiments and found that even when we have a lot to be grateful for, gratitude doesn't come easily to most of us. Increasingly, Tom began asking himself a question: why is that? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

I need a lawyer.

New CBS Thursday. We're taking on Silicon Valley lawsuits no one else will. The fight—

Objection!

Overruled.

—is real.

I know these companies. You're being surveilled. From the creators of The Good Wife—

These tech bros need guardrails. We're the disruptors now.

—comes a new series critics are calling compelling, Is anybody not paranoid?

Now we just gotta win.

Cupertino is all new, CBS Thursday, 10/9c, and streaming on Paramount+.

Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. A variety of psychological studies have found that gratitude is a powerful driver of human well-being. At Cornell University, psychologist Tom Gilovich says gratitude is an emotion that seems to unlock the best qualities in us.

There's just been great work on the subject that shows just how generally beneficial it is and how beneficial in a variety of different ways. One way to summarize it is that we often use the phrase that, you know, we try to live up to our Best self. We try to be our best self. And it turns out that it's easier to do that if you're feeling grateful. David DeSteno has done a bunch of great work on this subject where someone— you're in a bad situation and someone helps you out. You're just feeling so grateful to this person. And then you have an opportunity to take resources for yourself or give it to other people. third parties. You're more generous to other people. He's done the same kind of manipulations to make people feel grateful and then put them in a delay of gratification task where you can get a modest reward now or wait and get a greater reward. People find it easier to delay gratification when they're feeling grateful. I think a lot of the research can be summarized with this label of you're a better person when you're grateful.

Yeah. I mean, it's also been shown to improve your sleep and improve your health, perhaps even improve your relationships.

Yes, exactly. There's research showing that members of couples who are grateful for what their partners are doing and express it, that makes for healthier relationships.

To summarize then, we are happier, more generous, sleep better, and enjoy healthier relationships when we feel the emotion of gratitude. But Tom noticed that despite those benefits, even experts on human behavior found it hard to be thankful.

I remember being a young assistant professor at Cornell, and we would invite speakers from around the country and around the world to talk about their research. So these are some of the leading lights in the field, and I remember a couple of them talking about, boy, I've been mistreated in my life. Other people have gotten these breaks. I'm kind of on the outside. I'm an outsider. And I'm thinking, well, you're about as famous as a social psychologist can be. How hard has it really been? And I'm sure for them it was true. There were times that they'd faced various roadblocks on their career, but obviously they weren't that formidable. They must have, in addition to their talents, had a break or two to get where they were, but they were focused on the, in their eyes, mistreatment. And I was just struck by that, that, wow, I'd like to be that influential and famous as they. And if that should ever happen, I sure hope that I don't have that same feeling of—

Yeah.

Resentment of not having been appreciated.

Now, you were a junior professor at the time, so I'm imagining that if you were circumspect, you wouldn't have actually voiced these thoughts, but did you actually ask any of them why it was that they were not more grateful?

You are exactly right, Shankar. I zipped it up, didn't say anything, but I filed it away as, wow, this is really interesting that you can be that successful and still feel Resentment may be too strong, but something like resentment was brewing there, and I just thought that was really interesting.

When he became the head of the psychology department at Cornell, colleagues would often bring complaints to Tom.

Some complaints, of course, are legitimate, and as administrator, you do whatever you can to try to right any wrongs. But there are times that someone will register a complaint that seems so powerful to them, and nonetheless, to you, it can seem like, Pretty small-bore stuff. And you want to say, well, this is a very privileged job you have here, and go ahead and get a real job. Come back and then we'll talk about it. But again, I don't want to take away from the reality to the person leveling the complaint.

Yeah.

They aren't making them up. But what is it that makes this thing that can seem relatively small to the outsider So powerful and so unjust to the insider.

We all see the same thing in our lives. We know people who constantly complain and are resentful of others. Invariably, these tend to be unhappy people.

Since a feeling of appreciation feels so good when you're having it, it's kind of a paradox that We don't embrace it more. And so why is that? I decided to jump in on the subject of gratitude. What are the things that prevent us from being grateful? Or stated differently, what are the things that lead people to experience the opposite of gratitude? Your one opposite pole is you feel resentful, and another is feeling entitled. If you feel entitled, you're not being grateful. And if you're feeling When you're feeling resentful, you're not feeling grateful. And those are kind of toxic experiences. If you reflect on times that you feel resentful, are you having fun at those moments? No, you're not. Think— reflect on a time you're feeling grateful. Are you in a good mood? Yes, you are. So to try to approach gratitude from the back door seemed like a promising way to study this interesting emotion.

One reason Tom found we are less grateful than we should be is that we are largely ignorant about other people's troubles.

First of all, other people's troubles are harder to notice than your own. And secondly, you are focused on the details of your own, so they loom a lot larger. All that anxiety that goes into figuring out what to do really burns it into the mind in a way that, oh, Shankar's going through some bad times right now. Even if I'm very empathetic, it's harder to feel it with the same intensity that you're feeling.

So let's talk a little bit about some of the things that prevent us from experiencing gratitude. And let's start with something that we've explored at length on the show before, but is relevant here again, which is the idea that we adapt to the good things in our lives. Can you talk a moment about the hedonic treadmill, Tom?

Yeah. That's just a fundamental property of how the mind works. It's sensitive to changes in states rather than the states themselves. And when it comes to bad things, that adaptation or habituation is one of our greatest allies. So we started this show talking about my Motorcycle mishap. If I had experienced, let's say, a spinal cord injury, we would call it not my motorcycle mishap, it's the motorcycle accident that would have changed my life. And like most people who have severe spinal cord injuries, it's hell at first. A lot of them say, you know, I just don't want to do this anymore. Life isn't worth living. Fast forward 6 months, a year, and the percentage of them who say that they're truly happy, really happy, is very high. A fair percentage of them say their life is close to their ideal. So something has gone on in that period of time. And what is it? It's our ability to adapt. And this feature of the way the mind works is Our greatest ally when it comes to bad things. When it comes to good things, it's a pretty potent enemy. A good thing happens to you, you say, oh, I'm going to appreciate this forever. I'm never going to sweat the small stuff again. Fast forward a few months and the small stuff is still driving you nuts and you get mad at people in traffic, et cetera. You worry about all these tiny things.

Can you talk about the notion of the asymmetry between what you called headwinds and tailwinds as being another source of our lack of gratitude? It's another enemy of gratitude.

Yeah, I think this is easiest to understand for anyone who runs or cycles for exercise or Kayaks, there are times that you're having to go out into the wind and you're aware of it the entire time. It's literally in your face and you can't wait until you can turn around and enjoy the wind at your back. And when that happens, you do appreciate it for about a second, but then you lose sight of it because it just pushes you along. And what's true When it comes to those type of athletic events is true of life generally. The barriers in your way, the things that are arresting your progress, you've got to pay attention to them so that you can overcome them. Those things that are boosting you along, you can just enjoy them. You don't have to pay attention to them. Just let them boost away. And in fact, that makes it hard to appreciate some of the things that we should be grateful for. Some of the things that we should be grateful for are our tailwinds. And we lose sight of them. They are inherently less salient. Conversely, it's easy to feel resentful because you're very aware of the headwinds that you have to face. And if you're aware that some other people don't have them, it's very easy to get in touch with a feeling of resentment.

Tom has run several studies showing how we easily recognize our obstacles but fail to recognize our privileges. Take family dynamics. In a survey, Tom found that most children thought their parents were harshest on them and treated their siblings with greater leniency. In another example, Tom looked at sports fandom.

One of the ways we looked at this was to look at the schedule of the National Football League. There are more teams than every team can play in a year. There are just too many teams. So you get to— your favorite team plays a subset of the teams in the NFL that may be different than the teams that your rival plays. And there's a day every year when the schedule is announced.

The Lions just had their schedule drop, and I'm not gonna lie to you, it doesn't look good. Let's go!

The NFL schedule makers have put the 49ers at a big disadvantage.

The NFL screwed the Buffalo Bills. The Bills have the 7th hardest schedule in the NFL this year.

And we just looked on Reddit to see how fans were reacting to it. And there were some times that people would say, oh, good, we get to play that patsy in our stadium. Can't wait for that. But those kinds of comments were very rare. It was much more of, oh my God, we've got to play the Chiefs in Arrowhead Stadium. Yikes, that's going to be really tough. So what jumped off the page of the schedule were the headwinds, not the tailwinds.

I'm imagining in politics, it must be the same. Each side feels the playing field is tilted toward the other.

Yes, exactly. If you ask Democrats and Republicans, what about the elect— we've got this funny thing in the United States, the Electoral College. Who does it favor? Each side thinks it favors the other side more. Interestingly, that's more true the more that people follow politics. The more you're in the political world, the more you're going to get exposed to your side's headwinds, and therefore you're going to believe this even more.

Why do you think this is happening? I mean, at one level, we touched on one of these ideas, which is that our problems feel real to us and visceral to us in a way that other people's problems don't feel real and visceral to us. So we can appreciate that other people go through difficult times. or have challenges or have to climb uphill, but we're not actually doing the climbing. We're doing our climbing. And so part of it is just simply, I think, a question of perspective, right? Whose shoes are you walking in? And depending on whose shoes you're walking in, you're just going to feel what those shoes feel more intensely.

Yeah, that's exactly right, Shankar. There's a way in which this is all part of the familiar story that we're all looking at the world through a small keyhole. And some things, like our headwinds, are teed up for us and are easy to see and acknowledge, whereas other things are in the shadows, outside the field of vision that that keyhole provides, and we tend to ignore them. It's a close cousin to the idea that our successes often psychologically disappear. We don't need to pay attention to them anymore, whereas our failures, they lurk. And that has important considerations and implications when it comes to the political world. So you have a political party that tries to meet certain challenges. You succeed at some and fail at others. The public, they're gonna keep hammering you for the things that you failed at. So, you know, as an early part of the New Deal, I think it was largely Democrats That pushed to electrify the countryside in the United States. Democrats are not getting continued credit for rural electrification or, you know, the creation of Social Security, which basically ended the kind of old-age poverty that existed then, just doesn't exist anymore. And they benefited from that electorally for a while, but, you know, it's just part of the landscape. They don't get credit for it now, whereas other parts of the safety net that don't work so well, the problems with it get stuck to them. And that works for both parties. Successes disappear, failures tend to hang around psychologically.

You've also done some work looking at how many of us see shared burdens as being unusually burdensome for us. Can you talk about this work, Tom?

Yeah. So this is work I did with a former student, Carmen Sanchez, who came to Cornell from working in the financial world. And we were struck by just how often people complain about any changes to tax laws and the regulatory environment. Consistent with the headwinds/tailwinds idea, we thought that, look, this thing that is designed at least to affect everybody the same, we're much more aware of how it's affecting us and we might have some distant feel that it's, oh, it's affecting you too, but it just can't compare to the richness of how it has hurt my life. So if the taxes go up, I think it has hurt me more than it's hurt you. If the tax burden goes down, I think I've benefited from it more than it's benefited you. And this piggybacks on research that was done a number of years earlier by 2 different teams of researchers, one a former student of mine, Justin Krueger and Paula Winchittle, and at the same time, a paper by Don Moore, now at Berkeley, that showed that Any sort of shared burden seems more burdensome to us. You think it has a bigger impact on you than on other people.

Gratitude, like many emotions, involves social comparison. Very often, we are not asking what we have or don't have. We're asking what we have or don't have relative to what others have and don't have. Tom found this in spades when he did a study on elite athletes at the Olympics.

The Olympic Games has this kind of unique structure where there are 3 medals given out. There's the gold medal winner, and then the second-place finisher gets a silver, and third place gets bronze. And then after that, no more medals. Everybody wants the gold. The gold gets you on the Wheaties box. You become famous if you win that. And you might think that, okay, the gold medal winner is going to be happiest, the silver medal winner will be Next happiest because they finished second. And the bronze medal winner will be the third happiest. But if you look at it from the perspective of what are the thoughts likely to be going through the heads of these athletes, the silver medalist is going to be thinking, I almost won the coveted gold. If I'd just gotten out a little faster, if I'd made a stronger push just at the end, I'd be up there on the gold medal stand rather than that person. The bronze medalist could be, and many of them certainly are, saying the same things. Oh, if I had just pushed out a little earlier, I'd have the gold medal. But that's harder for them. They've got to make up 2 different slots to get to the gold medal. And much closer is not being on the medal stand at all. And so we looked at the Olympic Games in 1992 from Barcelona, Spain. And A lot of footage of athletes on the medal stands, lots of footage of athletes right at the moment they just touched the edge of the pool, look up and see that they finished in 2nd or 3rd place. And then we had people rate those facial expressions. And it turns out that in both venues, on the medal stand or in the immediate aftermath of the end of the performance, silver medalists just look less happy than the bronze medalists.

President Theodore Roosevelt wrote, comparison is the thief of joy. I can't feel thankful for what I have if I think you have more than I do.

It is woven into our psychological experience. Again, it's often not the thing itself, but how the thing compares to something else. What was it like earlier, or what is it like compared to something that someone else does? And this, of course, is the familiar keeping up with the Joneses idea that, you know, you get a new car. If your neighbor gets a new car on the very same day that you did, and it's a better car than yours, that can rain on your parade and make it harder to enjoy that.

So these are some of the enemies of gratitude. We adapt to the good things in our life and quickly forget our blessings. We focus intensely on the headwinds that slow us down, but take the tailwinds that propel us forward for granted. We mistakenly believe the burdens shared by many are burdens that we bear alone. What all of these have in common is that we have a self-centered view of life. Even worse, we don't realize that we are seeing the world through a narrow keyhole of self-interest. In order to feel gratitude, we need to take a wider, more expansive view. For a few lucky people, this expansive worldview comes easily. This allows them to bathe in the good feelings of gratitude and enjoy its many psychological benefits. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls this winning the cortical lottery. Tom says that while this might be true, it may be useful to think about the ability to take on an expansive worldview as a skill, something that can be learned with practice.

One of my academic advisors, Lee Ross, said that, you know, there's a lot of very good work on happiness. It's very informative, and it's guided by the idea that some people have more of a trait of happiness. And it wasn't that he was saying that that was wrong, but he was saying that if we think of it not so much as a trait, but a talent, we might gain some additional purchase on this. And this goes back to the idea of whether you've won the cortical lottery or not. That makes you more talented at thinking about the world in a way that's pleasing to you, and you come out being happier.

The barriers to gratitude in our lives are plentiful. Some arise from within us, others we learn from those around us. Collectively, they can keep us from noticing what is good in our lives and reaping the benefits of gratitude. When we come back, breaking through these barriers. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen Accounts automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

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Imagine that, you know, she saves X people today. Is it likely to be the case that next week, if she only saves that many people, she's going to say, oh, this isn't enough. I need to save more and more? Is she on sort of a benevolent hedonic treadmill? And that just doesn't seem right. If you're doing good for others, you're in a sort of a different world, a different psychological world where adaptation is going to be less of a problem. And I mentioned that example in my introductory social psychology course a number of years ago, and I probably sloppily said, and so go out and purchase experiences that adaptation isn't as powerful As many of us are wont to do when we're speaking off the cuff, Tom made a mental leap.

His hypothesis was that the happiness we get from doing good deeds would be resistant to the hedonic treadmill. He extrapolated from that with a new idea: that all experiences might produce more enduring happiness than the pleasure we get from stuff. And so I started to think about, After Tom finished his lecture, his teaching assistant approached him with a question.

My TA at the time, Leif van Boven, now a very successful professor of social psychology at the University of Colorado, came up to me and said, oh, that was really interesting. Can you tell me the paper that shows that? And I kind of went, oh, I guess I got over my skis there. There was no research on that. So he and I set about examining Do you adapt less for the experiences you have? Is it the case that, you know, if you go to a gratifying musical concert, is it the next one that's that good? Is that going to be as gratifying? Well, yeah, probably. Does it have to be better the next time? We're not always seeking greater and greater concert experiences. And so we put it to the test by asking people, think about the best experiential thing you purchased in the last, let's say, 5 years, or other people think about the best material thing you've purchased, let's say, in the last 5 years. And then we ask them, how much do you enjoy it now? How much do you consider that money well spent, et cetera? And what you find is that people say they get more enduring satisfaction from their experiential purchases than from their material purchases.

Hmm. And why do you think this is happening?

Well, that's the interesting part. Why is that? And it turns out that there's at least 3 things that are big drivers of why we get more enduring satisfaction from our experiences. One of them is that experiences connect us to other people more. So, you know, imagine that you and I just discovered that, oh, we're wearing the same tennis shoes. We'd feel a little closer to each other because we share this material thing. That's true. But it's nowhere near as true as, oh, you and I just saw the same concert. When you share those kinds of experiences with someone, you feel much more connected to them, and you are enriched in that way. So that's one thing. Experiences also, they build up who we are. We are in some sense the sum total of our experiences. You know, we identify with our stuff, but however much we care, they are separate from you. And you're not building the same personal capital as you are when you're experiencing things. You become a different person through the different things that you've done. And therefore, if we're building up that self, we're building up something very substantial. And then finally, the third thing is the very thing that you mentioned earlier, which is the comparisons that we make, the kind of invidious comparisons. Oh my God, I just got this new pair of sneakers and your sneakers are better. I got this new car, your car is better. that kind of keeping up with the Joneses. It applies to experiences. It can be a little deflating to see that someone else got to, you know, spend 2 weeks on vacation, you only got to spend 1. But we've shown in study after study that it's just much less pronounced.

One of the things that you recommend when it comes to the headwinds-tailwinds asymmetry is aversion of asking ourselves the question, what am I missing? What information do I need to seek out? Can you talk about this as one of the ways to defend against this enemy of gratitude is to actually go out and solicit the information that helps us understand that, in fact, other people are walking uphill as much as we are. Other people are paying their fair share of taxes, and it's a burden on them as much as it's a burden on us. That just sort of seeking out the information itself can be an antidote to this enemy of gratitude.

Yeah.

Yeah. If it's an informational problem, then the problem can be solved by seeking out different kinds of information. It turns out that's a key to good judgment and decision-making generally. It can be hard to do. Decision-making researchers often talk about this as consider the opposite. The mind automatically thinks of all the reasons for the thing that you're entertaining. Things that run against it, it's just the mind isn't prepared to as energetically look for it. The mind is already going to look at the kinds of— it's already going to seize upon the kinds of things that can make you feel envious, entitled, and resentful. And finding those relatively invisible tailwinds, that takes more effort. And so that is a habit that has to be cultivated.

We've talked a lot in this conversation about noticing things to be grateful for. But it's also— you and others have found it's really important to try and find ways to express these things that we're grateful for. Can you talk a little bit about the work that's been done that talks about the importance of expressions of gratitude, like open and explicit expressions of gratitude, as an engine for feeling thanks?

Yeah. A couple of people you've had on your show before, 2 former students, Nick Epley and Amit Kumar, have done this great work on that, that people often are reluctant to reach out and express gratitude to other people even though they deeply feel it. And it seems like one of the barriers there is you feel like, oh, I got to say this just right, otherwise, you know, Who knows how it'll be received? And I'm not so sure I'm very good at writing, expressing my gratitude exactly right. And what they've shown is the gratitude recipient doesn't really care about the quality of it. They just care about the fact that you took the time to do it. You can botch your gratitude letter and still, oh, this person feels that way. It's enormously gratifying for them. And this highlights a saying that's generally attributed to Maya Angelou, that I think is one of the wisest statements about human behavior that anyone's ever said, which is, people will not remember what you did, they won't remember what you said, but they'll remember how you made them feel. So whether you can write a kind of gratitude letter that Ian McEwan would write, that doesn't matter. Just The fact that you took the time will register. It'll make the other person feel good, and that's what's important. And it will make you feel good as well.

You know, one of the things that we've been doing on Hidden Brain for a few years is to list an unsung hero at the end of each of our episodes. And a couple of years ago, we started a spinoff show called My Unsung Hero, where people recount a moment in their lives when someone came to their assistance. in a moment of need. These are short stories, 2 minutes long, 3 minutes long, 4 minutes long, so they're not very long stories, but they capture a snippet of something that happened in someone's life many, many years ago. What's been striking, I think, is that, one, people remember these moments decades and decades into the future. They can be very small moments, and in fact, the person who has done them the kind deed probably has not even been aware that they did a kind deed or they've long forgotten But the person remembers it far into the future. The second thing that's been very interesting, Tom, is that when I listen to stories about person A thanking person B, and I don't know person A and I don't know person B, but there's something about listening to that act of gratitude, that expression of gratitude, that makes me feel good. It makes me feel like maybe I want to do something that helps someone else as well. Can you talk about the psychology that's happening here? There's something very interesting. Because I don't know either of these people, but seeing gratitude expressed in the world somehow makes us feel like being better people.

Yeah, that's really interesting. And it relates to some work we're doing now, Shai Davidai and I, about what are those tailwinds that we do appreciate. They tend to be ignored. They're less salient than headwinds. But sometimes we do note them. And what are the kinds that are noted? And overwhelmingly, the boosts you get from other people, if it's that kind of headwind, you're just much more likely to notice it. And so, you know, at the Academy Awards, people express thanks. All the thanks are directed at other people. It's not things that, oh, I grew up in a rich family and so I was able to take singing lessons at an early age. People don't say that. I was just born with the kind of genes that I'm incredibly handsome, and that's why I got these roles. No one says that, of course, but they do talk about other people. So some kinds of tailwinds are more salient than others, and those are more social. We are moved by all of those things that bring us together. So when you see person A expressing gratitude to person B, even if you don't know A or B. It's just very moving. Just the other day, we discovered this note that our daughter, the very daughter I talked about before, wrote to my wife when she was 6 years old. I find it very moving, but she wrote, you've been in my family for 6 years, and in all that time, you've been loving me and in such a kind way. Thank you for being this nice to me. This picture— she drew a little picture of irises— is yours to cherish when you are old and frail and your garden does not bloom. Keep it for the time— keep it for— get this— keep it for the time when you're going to have the longest nap of your life. I think she's already anticipating my wife shedding this mortal coil. I think that's what she's referring to. But anyway, I saw that and just found it very charming.

Yeah. What do you think is happening in you when you're hearing that story? I mean, it's obviously these are people whom you know. These are not strangers. But what do you think is happening? Why is it moving to you, Tom, to hear this?

It's just good to see another person's loving heart. Even if it's strangers and you see one person reaching out To another. It's one best self expressing itself to another, and that's just really heartening.

Tom Gilovich is a psychologist at Cornell University. He's the author of The Wisest One in the Room: How You Can Benefit from Social Psychology's Most Powerful Insights. Tom, Thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Oh, absolutely.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. As Tom and I were talking about unsung heroes during our interview, Tom asked me if he could mention one of his own. So here is today's unsung hero from Tom Gilovich.

Well, since I'm here in the recording studio at Cornell University, the person who makes it all happen, Bert, he's just amazing. Everything goes super smoothly. I owe him a lot, as so many of us do. He makes me sound better than I am. And, you know—

Now you're sounding just like you are. You sound great. Well, since Bert's on the line, let me thank Bert as well. And I'll just note that, you know, to build anything actually requires so many people who are unsung heroes. And Bert, thank you for helping make this interview so successful.

Well, thank you. It's been a total pleasure.

I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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