Finding Happiness Through Behavioral Science
SScott Young: Hello, and welcome to another episode of BE Good, brought to you by the BVA Nudge Unit, a global consultancy specializing in the application of behavioral science. Each month, we speak with a leader in the field and get to know more about them and their work. My name is Scott Young of the BVA Nudge Unit UK team broadcasting to you from my basement in West London. And with me is my colleague Ted Utoft.
TTed Utoft: Thanks Scott. I'm really happy to be here and happy to speak with our guest today, Paul Dolan. Paul is a professor and the Head of the Department of Behavioral Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He's the director of the Executive Master's Program in Behavioral Science at the LSE, which began in September, 2014 .
Paul conducts research on the measurement of happiness, its causes and consequences, and the implications for public policy, publishing in both scholarly and popular outlets. He's the author of two popular press books on the subject, Happiness by Design and Happy Ever After. Welcome, Paul.
PPaul Dolan: Hi. Thank you very much for having me on.
T Thanks so much. Paul, let's go back a little bit and let's talk about how you originally come to economics as your field of study? I think it had something to do with health outcomes. Is that right?
P Yes. And you're making me feel very old now because that feels like a long time ago. Actually, it was a long time ago.
We're all very good at being able to construct narratives after the fact that make our lives cohere, but I just kind of randomly stumbled upon doing economics at university. I then did chartered accountancy for a year and after about two weeks of doing that, I realized that wasn't for me, and then went back to school. And I've been in university ever since!
I did a master's at York University and they have a very big center for health economics there and they still do.
So I sort of got sucked into health economics and had my first academic appointment at the University of York.
And I was involved in trying to value health outcomes. So when we're thinking about where to spend scarce healthcare resources, we could try and do it in a way that maximizes benefits. So we were looking at ways in which we value benefits. And I was lucky enough to be at the early days of quality-adjusted life years, QALY, which has now been used quite widely by institutes to evaluate the benefits of healthcare. As I say, we could try and use healthcare resources as wisely as possible.
T Paul, what drove you towards what we're now calling behavioral economics as opposed to more classic economics? Was there any kind of experiment or person that got you thinking about economics in a different way?
P I suppose when I was at York, my mentor was Alan Williams, a professor of health economics. And so we did a lot of that work on evaluation and also some stuff around equity preferences, people's views around fairness in health. But I did a lot of that quality work and basically what we do is we ask people questions about their trade-offs of quality of life over quantity of life. So basically, whether you'd like to live longer in poor health states or have a shorter period of time in better health, and those trade-offs require people to imagine what it's like to be in a whole range of health outcomes, having problems walking, being anxious or depressed and so on.
And it struck me because I wasn't the first person to realize this, that actually people's projections of their future utility or wellbeing are not often accurate guides to those subsequent experiences. And serendipitously-- we're now moving forward quite a few years, I guess we're now in 2002. I went to a conference in Milan. I just won a prize in health economics in the UK and it brought out some teaching time and some money.
So I went to this conference, Happiness in Milan. I went over to that and Daniel Kahneman was there. And I think pretty much that year he won the Nobel prize. And again, luck plays a massive part in a lot of what happens to us in life. I sat next to him on a bus ride or something to the conference dinner, and we were just chatting for 20 minutes or so. And he was interested in this whole life quality stuff.
So he invited me to go to Princeton, which I immediately said of course to, then went to spend some time with him out there. And that got me more interested in the behavioral science aspects, I suppose in a nutshell often, we're not very good at being able to project and predict how future consequences will play out for our experiences. And that led me to rethink how I thought about benefit valuation in health and in public policy more generally.
And then I suppose more broadly than that generated an interest in behavioral science and just how the lessons from essentially the interface of economics and psychology could be drawn into designing better environments, both in the workplace and in public policy, and actually then in our personal lives too.
S Paul, can you speak a little bit about how you see behavioral science specifically contributing to happiness as opposed to other fields such as psychology?
P Yes. I suppose that begs the question of what is behavioral science, doesn't it? It was kind of not a discipline in and of itself. I think it draws on and in different disciplines. Principally, has been economics and psychology, although I think that is changing as other social scientists do behavioral work, but not under the same label. Perhaps we will start collaborating more closely with sociologists and anthropologists. And then also, I guess, data scientists, as people start to get interested in the use of big data and so on.
So I think it's a coalition or collaboration of different disciplines. In economics, as you know, we understand that we are essentially very good futurists. We can predict our utility flows very well and precisely. We have very clearly defined preferences and we seek to maximize those subjects or constraints. Of course, we also know that we're not like that.
To some extent, that's the opposite of a kind of scroll map, but we are subject to a range of biases and of course, many of which Daniel Kahneman and others have written about. So I think in understanding how we should live our own lives and prescribe to others how they should live their lives, we draw much more directly on the experiences that people have in their lives moment to moment, rather than trying to base any policy decisions, to some large extent on how people imagine things.
And that takes me back to that health economics valuation stuff. I became disillusioned, I suppose, to some large extent in our abilities to be able to predict how different health states would affect us. In the fullness of time, I think the big issue is not so much our misprediction of how things will impact us in the first few minutes or hours, but it's the days, weeks, months, and years that we are not very good at being able to forecast.
And we're not very good at being able to predict the shift in attention. Some things actually draw more attention to themselves.
So in health evaluation, we find that people will give physical functioning conditions and mental health problems broadly similar weightings. We will get used to the physical health problems to some large extent, but we don't get used to mental health problems. But by its very nature, depression, and anxiety are attention-seeking conditions. They're not any less bad after 365 days than they were after day one.
And so I think if we're thinking about allocating healthcare resources to where they're going to do the most good, we would be shifting resources away from physical functioning conditions and towards mental health problems. And that it’s not what people's imaginations of those conditions suggest.
T And speaking of people's imaginations, Paul, the subtitle of one of your books is 'Escaping The Myth of a Perfect Life'. I want you to explain that for us a little bit. Apart from breaking my dreams, tell me what do you mean by escaping the myth of a perfect life?
P Just to clarify, that's the subtitle of the hardback of 'Happy Ever After'. the subtitle of the paperback, I think is 'A Radical New Approach to Living Well'. You know what these publishers are like (laughs) - no, I'm totally aligned with their interest by the way.
One of the things that I've long been interested in is in how so many people appear to be living their lives in stories about how they ought to be living; to be successful, to be clever, to earn lots of money, maybe to get married, to have children. And it's never been entirely clear to me that that's good for them. I mean, it's probably good for some people some of the time, but not good for all of us all the time; and certainly not to the extent to which people kind of desire those things.
Again, it speaks to this miswanting, that's a term that Gilbert Wilson views as this idea that we often want things that are not good for us and vice versa.
And so I'm interested in how people have been in some instances, almost compelled to be driven by these achievements, attainments, ticking off things on the list, because that's what they ought to do and not necessarily, or even because it's going to make them happier. So I was interested in exploring some of the evidence if there was any out there that would speak to the impact of those narratives on happiness.
But I think beyond that, I've always been interested, and this certainly goes back for a very long time, about how much people care about how other people live; like disproportionately, it seems to me, to the impact that it ought to be having on their own welfare. Why do people care so much about people having alternative lifestyles, for example?
So I just wanted to explore that a bit more fully and explore some of the reasons why we might feel like that.
If you look at any therapy on the individual level, pretty much any form of therapy starts with acceptance. And so it's not just on an individual level, but on a societal level that sometimes, and to some large extent, we might be trapped in these narratives, in these myths of what the perfect life should look like. Not only because it's going to make us happier, but because that's what's expected of us by society, by our parents, by historical accident, by evolution, for whatever reasons. But many of us are living these stories that actually aren't good for us.
So when you look at some of those narratives, if you take, for example, the ones around reaching, as I called them in the books, for the success and the income and education, is not surprising that the evidence so far as we can draw cause and inference from these data, which is often problematic, but so far as we can - is that poverty and low social standing and no education actually does make people miserable, unsurprisingly.
And so to be driven and motivated individually and societally for getting more is actually good for you. It's just that we become addicted. It is like an addiction problem. We just want more and more, way past the point at which it's good for us either individually or societally. So, one of the lessons for the first part of the book is actually just to chill out a little bit.
T I think you've probably seen Daniel Kahneman is oftentimes asked "What is one heuristic or bias that you would choose to do away with that'll serve us all well?" and he's quoted as saying the overconfidence bias. Is there one of these biases Paul, that you think if we could get rid of, would serve us all to the maximum?
P Oh, that's a super question. It must relate to the judgment of others'. I think that is interesting. Why do people care so much? For example, evidence shows that single people, particularly single women who haven't had children, again, we've got no randomized controlled trials, so it's hard to make calls and inference, but they're doing absolutely fine. They're not sad and lonely and miserable, but the narrative says that they ought to be, and they get judged very harshly for being single and not having kids. Who cares? The world is still going to be turning and large numbers of people are going to want to marry and have kids. All that will happen if we're more accepting of those that don't, is that we're more accepting of those that don't.
So I think it's that inability for us to adopt someone else's perspective. I think that is really interesting because that plays into behavioral science in policy as well, by the way, right?
That's really what we think, even though we might not explicitly say that out loud so often, that actually, if only people could become more like us, they'd be better off. Well, actually there's a lot of heterogeneity out there and they might not be, and they're facing different constraints and they have different preferences.
Whilst it took me a little while to get into your question, I think I'm becoming increasingly confident in the answer.
I think it's that judgment piece, it's the perspective issue. And I think that's going to play through into the later part of our conversation as well. I think if we start talking about issues relating to the current situation, for example, which I'm sure we're going to necessarily have to, at some point.
T As I said once to a friend who has quite different political leanings than I do, who said "If they could just pull themselves up by the bootstraps", and I said, "some people don't even have feet". There's this idea like 'why can't you do as I'm doing or work as hard as I'm working?'
Speaking of this idea of judgment and, you know, part of what we do at the BVA Nudge Unit is creating nudges to change people's behaviors; what do you think is a thing or two that we could do to ourselves to nudge ourselves or nudge our family, or nudge our colleagues to release ourselves from that kind of judgment and that presupposing of others that allows us to see the ways in which people, maybe their working styles or their parenting styles or their socializing styles are something that we can adapt to and take on?
P There're a few things: First of all, one of the things I'm particularly interested in given the interest in both in happiness, wellbeing, measurement and impact, is to bring those two worlds together more closely, because obviously different researchers using different research methods, typically; the happiness economists, they're doing regression equations from existing data, trying to make calls of inference from data that haven't been gathered to be causal. Then you've got the behavioral scientists who are doing lots of randomized controlled trials, typically on much smaller samples, and being able to make calls and inference, but not looking at the welfare, the wellbeing impacts, or at least very rarely, of their intervention.
So I think there's a lot to be said, which will free us of the judgment by few adjustments. We'll make the judgment, but make those judgments less biased or personal by actually observing the welfare consequences of our nudges, directly not just on the behaviors that we think people ought to be engaging in, but on the subsequent wellbeing that they experienced from changing their behavior.
And there has been some work looking at the welfare effects of that, if you're familiar with some of that literature, but there needs to be much more of it, the direct inquiry into the welfare consequences of nudging people in particular ways.
I think in the design of the nudges, there needs to be a broader range of perspectives around the table. If you think about the nudges in health. I want to start exploring some of this a bit more fully in my future and then academic work.
And so I'll be interested in exploring that further, and that will help us speak more directly to this judgment piece.
I do think there's a sense in which we want to create-- it's as much about creating environments in our work lives and in our organizations and institutions as it is within ourselves personally, or for ourselves.
Diversity of opinion is what's really critical in organizations. Diversity of characteristics is important and of course, diversity of opinion.
If you take academia, you mentioned earlier about someone you know, saying that people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. I would love to be able to, if it were possible, of course, there are all sorts of ethical reasons why we won't do this, but to get people's political allegiances on their CVs-- [Laughter and Crosstalk]
For academia to have more right-wing academics, more people that you could argue with and debate with because then you could then have a genuine discussion. Other people have written about this. It's an adversarial collaboration they call it in academia, if you bring together people to collaborate on trials and studies that have different views and perspectives. And then I think you can be more confident that the results are scientific in some sense, because we see ourselves as scientists, but we're human beings as well. And so we do bring our own, and again, this speaks to your judgment question; if we bring together people with different judgments and we're very honest and open about the fact that I'm biased in this way, you're biased in that way, we come together and we collaborate in an adversarial way. Then I think we get better, more scientific outcomes, than by us all having the same beliefs or underlying values and biases and pretending that we're all pure scientists and going into the research question.
S Paul, one of our areas of focus at BVA Nudge Unit is the idea of bringing behavioral science to the private sector. And tied to this, I was really curious to hear your perceptions of the executive program at LSE in particular, what kinds of questions and issues and challenges are the students bringing to you perhaps after they leave the program and then go into both private and public sector work?
P Teaching all students is actually genuinely a privilege, but teaching these executive students is exceptional in the sense that they come from a wide range of backgrounds; in business, in the public sector. And so they're able to go out and impact policy and practice directly and immediately. That was actually the motivation for me setting up that program by the way. So I was quite patient. I've always been quite patient.
So they come from a whole range of backgrounds.
So they'll be sitting in class next to somebody who works in an NGO, with someone who works in an investment bank. They would otherwise never meet one another. But they're sitting next to one another in class and they're bringing their own interests and experiences to the program.
I think it enables them-- again, that comes from the perspective piece.
That seems to be a theme that seems to be naturally emerging in this conversation, is having different opinions around the table, and all of those opinions being voiced and aired and everyone having the environment in which it's safe to speak up, and to have that diversity of thought. I think that's what our program's benefit is and then as a cohort, to incorporate different perspectives.
The one thing that they all come with is enthusiasm and interest in behavioral science. And even though they've been very successful; they realize that they don't know it all. And I think that is what behavioral science teaches us - humility - that we are actually all in our own way affected by a whole range of heuristics and biases all the time.
And to speak to that overconfidence point, to believe that you're not and to believe that a bit of training or a Masters degree or a successful career can also be a bias.
S Is it sometimes easier for the people making those decisions in government to imply that the decisions are purely scientific as opposed to what they really are, which is almost inevitably value judgments on some level?
P Again, a very good question. There's a natural tension between academics and practitioners in the fact that we want all this evidence to be causal and done under randomized controlled conditions. And of course, that's just not always possible. It's rarely possible in an organization. So they just want to do some of this anyway, but what does good evidence look like when it's not possible to gather the gold standard evidence? And can they actually draw any good conclusions from data that might be a bit dirty and messy?
I guess that's a lesson for us as well, by the way. As academics, we're fishing our way through working out what we can take as being good evidence or not and leaving on one side the whole replication crisis in psychology, which of course is a massive problem. But just whether you can find something that seems to work in an organization and whether that's generalizable to another business unit or another part of the company or somewhere else- I think that's an important question. I don't have an answer to it. I just think that's what we're grappling with. Does that resonate with you?
S Earlier, you mentioned the issue of reaching and there're obviously direct implications for individuals as they think about their careers and being happy in their careers. But I was also curious to look at it from the managerial side and ask what might organizations or managers do to promote happiness in their organization. Do you feel that your work has application from that managerial or organizational perspective?
P It's interesting. The main thing is that we're now taking, I think collectively companies are taking wellbeing and happiness more seriously. Not just because it's been shown to be causally related to all the things that companies would care about, like productivity and less absenteeism, and a healthier workforce, but also because it's an important consequence in itself. I do think there is some genuine desire on the part of organizations to improve worker wellbeing because they care about worker wellbeing.
And so from a manager's perspective, it's not just about the productivity of the work improving, it's about a relationship that they have with the employee that is a good one because the employee's feeling good.
And there are simple things that organizations could do. Feedback is absolutely critical. Timely feedback is paramount. We're not very good at doing that in organizations. If someone's been working on a project for a few weeks or something, and then that project gets cancelled, that's the time to step in and say to that employee, look, I appreciate that this work hasn't led to where we thought it might be going, but the work is still valuable. We'll be able to draw on it some other time. That intervention, just that simply very authentic 'thank you' at that point will have huge impact on that employee.
In the early work, using the day reconstruction method, they showed that time spent with your boss was one of the least pleasurable activities that people could be in. That's a pretty sad indictment of management, isn't it? People are happy basically when they don't have to see the boss, and we should be thinking about what it is in that interaction that makes that so stressful for the employee?
But in terms of the reaching narratives, I've got an older PhD student who was a senior partner in one of the consultancies and he's left to do a PhD and he's looking at the dark triad, which is psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism.
You see quite a lot of that in the world generally but it's maybe concentrated more in the senior management in some firms. Looking at what impact that has on the progression of people that aren't playing the game, is interesting.
Not everybody wants to be a partner. And you can have some very good employees who will be very good at their job at a particular level, and they don't need to be reaching for more. We shouldn't be expecting them to. It's not good for the organization if we expect everybody to either get promoted or leave. You can have people that are very good employees in a particular position for a very long time.
So I think breaking that narrative amongst the managers would actually lead to a happier workforce, to answer to your question
S One issue that we're looking at right now of course is the reopening of society. And a question I have for you is, as people start returning to offices and businesses start opening in one form or another, what's our role as a behavioral science community in terms of promoting positive behaviors or perhaps reassuring people? Is there a constructive role that we can play as this process starts to unfold?
P Yes, interesting. Of course it's interesting and it's impossible to have this conversation without discussing COVID-19.
Picking up this theme of perspectives, I think differences of opinion and perspective in the decision-making process are vital at any time for any particular decision, but my God, especially now. And so it concerns me a little bit that we're talking a lot about that what we do is going to be guided by science. We hear that a lot. And what that means really is the science of infection control. It's the science of virus transmission. It's epidemiological science. And even if the epidemiological science evidence were clear, which of course it's not actually, there's a huge amount of uncertainty around the virus generally. The science of virus transmission is very uncertain. But even if it was certain, the science of virus transmission is only one very small part of the decisions that are being made by policymakers to restrict freedom of movement, to physical distancing, to closing schools. And then of course now, what we might do is open some of those things and what we do next, then scientific judgments to some large degree are questions of value.
It concerns me that it doesn't appear to be the case. What is the evidence of the impact of schools being closed for the welfare of children? Not just on their educational attainment, but inequalities in outcomes, on children that are in very dysfunctional, problematic households where school is the only safe place that they go to, the place they get attention, that the school would identify if there's any problems at home, they are scientific. They're questions of science, but they're also questions of value.
And so, I would like to be more confident that the decisions that are being made are incorporating a whole range of scientific perspectives and then weighting those to form a value judgment about who gains and who loses from the particular policy decisions that can't ever be determined only by epidemiological data.
S Yes, that definitely resonates with us. A very consistent theme in working with organizations is this pole between rigor and expediency.
As behavioral scientists, we're always looking for depth and rigor. We'd love to run randomized control trials and isolate variables and really understand and document what's working and what isn't. But from the company's perspective, they're often just looking for a sense of whether anything is working, and at least some idea of what's driving it. So we're always looking to find the right balance between those two in different situations.
P So a couple of things, first of all, more of an observational level, I suppose is the fear, if you think of that as not just an emotion, but really significant predictor of subsequent behavior, is that post COVID-19 has to be alert to fear, and the heterogeneity in the population potentially. We've had a policy in the UK of lockdown, which the messaging is really to get people to stay at home because of course, you need to be scared of this virus, not only for yourself but for the transmissions of others. And as we start to release particular population groups or sectors of the economy, we're going to have to start changing some of that message into actually ‘don't be quite so afraid’. And that's a difficult thing to do once you've initiated a particular reaction.
I imagine what will happen, is that we'll get segmentation. There'll be people who continue to be afraid and very afraid, and then there'll be others who are much less so. Interesting questions are dealing with the heterogeneity in responses.
Even in terms of the lockdown, think about the happiness effects of the lockdown; the lockdown is one thing, how it's experienced is very different for different people. I guess ironically, but paradoxically we're in a world where you should be phoning up your extrovert friends to make sure that they're okay, because this is an introvert's dream. You've probably seen that in your own experiences of yourself and others, the extroverts are really struggling, and the introverts are loving it.
So there's no such thing as a lockdown that's experienced by everybody in the same way. And I think that when we come out of COVID-19, we're going to have heterogeneous reactions. So dealing with that is going to be interesting and important.
I do think that as a behavioral scientist, one of the things that we say a lot, is that past behaviors speak to future ones more directly than intentions, for example.
It's a bit like when people are sick and they say, Oh, when I'm well again, I'm going to remember how good it is to feel healthier. Of course, they're healthy again, and they completely forget that they were ill. And that's pretty much what's going to be collective, how we're going to experience this, is that most things will go back to exactly how they were, even though in the moment of crisis we think things are going to be so different.
Some things will be changed. The fact that we're now speaking to one another on this conference call online, will stick to some large degree. The face to face meetings are going to be much less than they were, even when physical distance measures have been reduced or removed. Companies will realize that they don't need people to go in to work every day for the same hours every day. For those of us that can work from home, some of those changes will be permanent. But most things won't change unless we design environments now, and have conversations like this about what we want to stick to. That is one of the good things that have come out of this, beyond the resolution of the crisis, because otherwise, we're almost certainly going to look back on this in five years time, and not even remember it in a sense of how we have changed society in any meaningful way.
T You put it almost like squandering an opportunity. I used to live in Singapore and they're referring to the lockdown instead as a circuit breaker, which I think is really interesting semantics, because, with a circuit breaker, it almost seems like there is also opportunity in it, in that it resets something. And I think as behavioral scientists, obviously we have to use the tools in our toolkit to mitigate issues and try to get economies and families back up and running in normal ways. At the same time, I feel we would be squandering an opportunity if we didn't also look at the ways in which it might be potential for really creating new behaviors because of this kind of circuit breaking moment.
P I completely agree. But those new behaviors need to be embedded when the circuit has been broken. I think we're agreeing on that and not waiting until the circuit has repaired itself, and then wondering why it's repaired itself --
S When we all fall back into putting our hands all over the rails on the tube.
P Well, yes, exactly. Is there anything specifically that's interesting because there're so many different things in the current crisis that we could talk about? But is there anything that's particularly interesting or challenging to you, and as you think about that, I suppose in the corporate sector, as well as in policy?
S I think the whole issue of reassurance is a really interesting one. It cuts across just about everything. And as you alluded to before, we've been telling people essentially to be afraid and to stay inside, and now we're going to be telling them to be selectively afraid, or at least to use judgment about what they do and what they don't do. So the question is how do we reassure people in a way that doesn't inadvertently scare them more, but really actually helps them make good decisions and also helps them feel comfortable when that's appropriate, whether it's going on public transport or booking a hotel room?
P We're going to be in a world to some degree of shielding. The mortality risks of COVID are very clearly associated with age and underlying health problems. So, the very blunt conclusion is shield vulnerable and old people, and everybody else go about their business normally. How you implement that and present that information to people in a way that makes them comfortable is a really difficult challenge.
It's interesting. People often talk about how we don't understand numbers and we're not very good with numeracy and stuff. Or how standardized mortality rates for populations are going to be. How would it possible for people to really understand fully? But I think our numeracy is not as bad as some people make out. You see a weather forecast where it says 20% chance of rain or whatever, and people get that. They get that the weather is not certain, and the 20% chance of rain means that it could rain, but it probably won't.
And so, I'm a bit more confident that some people might understand, for example, when the default is that the mortality risk of COVID-19 is very low-- I guess the optimist in me, but the one thing that Daniel Kahneman has mentioned is one thing that we don't understand is exponential growth. That's the problem.
Our minds can't cope with the fact that if you have one person get a virus now, in a week's time, that's many hundreds. That's a really difficult thing for us to grapple with. But I do think there are other numbers that are more manageable for us. And I think mortality rates by age group might be one of those things that we can get people to understand better.
S Paul, I know we're up against time now. So first off, I really wanted to thank you so much for spending your time and sharing your thoughts with us and our listeners. And as we wrap up, I also wanted to see if there's anything else that you'd like to share; Any topics that we didn't have a chance to speak about.
P I suppose one of the things is thinking about the reaching narrative again, and the status that's afforded to people currently, the situation is that by and large, they're very low paid workers. And it's hard to imagine in a new world order where those jobs are going to be significantly more remunerated than they are currently, in spite of whatever optimism we might have about that. But they can be afforded the respect that they deserve, which is largely costless from a financial perspective.
And I'd like to think of ways in which we might try to embed the memory. The people that have been very important right now and respected the status of their professions post-COVID-19. And it speaks to this reaching narrative, you can't just be a cleaner. That's not good enough. Well, actually it's fucking good enough. It's really good enough. It's really what we need right now, and yes, it would be good if we could pay them a bit more money. That would also be good too, because poverty makes people miserable, but affording people respect and status. I think that's also important. We know that that motivates the human condition. And so I think if we can think of ways beyond this crisis, that we do that, I think that would be a good outcome.
S Yes. That could be one of the positive outcomes that you were alluding to before, if this crisis really drives us to rethink the issue of status and what's really important, and maybe rethink respect.
P Exactly. Returning to that judgment piece, to the perspectives, to different values that different people in different populations will hold. I think behavioral science needs to be respectful of that, perhaps a little more than it might have been historically.
T Thanks so much again, Paul, for joining us today and talking about your work. Is there anything you'd like to leave our listeners with, perhaps where they could find out more about you or your work?
P Oh yes. Good. Thank you. That gives me the opportunity to self-publicize. I like that. https://pauldolan.co.uk/ , that's my website. And of course, everybody should have bought both books by now anyway, but if they haven't, they should buy Happiness by Design, and Happy Ever After. I don't care whether they read them, just buy them. It'd be really nice if they read them. My Twitter. Thank you very much.
