Pushkin.
There's a long tradition in audio recording to test someone's microphone, you ask them what.
They had for breakfast. So I put that question to today's guest, William Hanson.
I had two poach tags on some toast.
If that sounds a bit elaborate for a random breakfast at home, you haven't heard the half of it.
I used a forkin knife. I put a place smat down napkin. We did it relatively formally for a Monday.
Place mats napkins. I can't remember the last time I used a cloth napkin for breakfast. I'm not even sure I own any cloth napkins.
Does everybody not have a napkin collection? They should. I can strongly applicate for having one, because you know, as anyone knows in etiquette, we have four different types of napkin size. And I think it's nice to have an array. I think a prop an APCIn is so much better than a sort of a tatty paper one, or a piece of kitchen towel or something like that, which is
not pleasant and coarse on the lips. And when years ago, when I was living in a flat, we had a fire that was in the laundry cupboard and the napkins were right next door to the fire, and this is not what we advised people to do in the case of the fire. But I decided to save the napkins and was very carefully moving them out whilst the flat burned around me.
This season of The Happiness Lab is all about the creative coping strategies real people use to get through their lives as joyfully as possible.
And don't worry, this isn't a show about using napkins. William Hansen is a self confessed happy person.
I think it's better to be happy if you can. It's very easy for me to say that, of course, but for me, I'm quite happy. I'm sort of consistently chip up.
But aside from being a chip or chap, William is a respected expert on etiquette, and he shares the expertise on his podcast Help I Sexit My Boss, and in a great new book called Just Good Manners. I usually associate etiquette with prissy rules about which for it to use first at dinner, rules that make the uninitiated feel stupid and small.
But reading William's book showed me how wrong I was.
Turns out etiquette has more benefits than I realized, because thinking deeply about how to behave in the company of other people, so that you're polite, considerate, and respectful, that can make you feel great too. William's been thinking about etiquette since childhood, and as you'll hear, it's made his passage through life far smoother and far more enjoyable.
This will come as no shock, sheer, Laurie. But I think I was probably quite a precocious child, and my late grandmother gave me a book of etiquette when I was twelve for Christmas, and not because I was feral, but because she thought I might enjoy it. And I did, and it was reluctantly read it because there were more
exciting presents to be playing with. But I started to read it, and as well as it being funny, that particular etitquet book, and I think if it had been written sort of deathly seriously, I don't think I'd be sitting here now. But it opened up this sort of framework, most of which you know are certainly the basics. I knew because my parents brought me a very nicely and we sat at the table for breakfast, lunch, and dinner I had to write thank you letters after birthdays in Christmas,
and we followed this sort of ritual of politets. But there were other rules your average person probably didn't know, probably doesn't need to know. But I found it helped me sort of give structure and confidence that actually in certain situations, some of which age twelve or thirteen. When I was reading this book, I mean ludicrous. Of course I'm not going to be dining with an archbishop tomorrow,
but I was ready should that happen. And of course I get is not just all about dining with archbishops and things like that. But it gave me this foot up in a positive way because I had chosen to learn, and I bought more books because it posed lots of questions, and that's really how my interest started.
Do you think it came to you at a time I'm just thinking of like what I was like at thirteen, and you know, you're kind of going through awkward puberty and things are weird. Do you think it kind of helped your social anxiety? Like was it kind of coping to kind of dig into those etiquette skills?
Yes, I think it probably was helping with that and knowing how to behave at twelve thirteen. For anyone, we're all sort of a little bit all over the sharp our hormones and doing all sorts of things as we grow. For me, there was the gay thing as well. I knew at that age I was gay, but sort of hadn't told anyone. It wasn't long after that that I did come out. Now whether actually etiquette sort of helped me.
In my head, I probably was like, well, it doesn't matter that I'm agay because I actually know how to behave, and I probably know how to behave better than your average person. So I've always got that as a bit of a shield.
And where were you when you decided to come out? If you don't mind shit? Like was it?
I was at home in the summer between we would call it year eleven, so I was sixteen in the summer between year eleven year twelve. We were waiting for my GCSE results, which are the exams that you do at that age. And I was not a natural academic. I wasn't at the class dunce. But you know, I was an average student and I was very tense, as indeed,
I'm sure everybody is tense waiting for exam results. So there was quite a lot of heightened tension as we got closer, and I just sort of finally snapped and just thought, I just tell my parents. I think we were having an argument, which is unusual because I didn't read. I was very apparently I was quite a placid child. But I think we were having a slight argument and I was losing, and I thought, I need something the grenade to throw in to distract from the fact I'm
losing this argument. Oh, I know what I threw in, the gay thing to forget what the argument was about.
So one of the things we're sort of thinking about in this episode is this idea that etiquette can be a way to sort of cope when things feel really uncertain. And I feel like the times right now are feeling just incredibly uncertain. I feel like especially in the US right now, but probably all over the world. Do you have this says that etiquette can be used to kind of give structure when things feel out of control.
Yes, absolutely, it's parameters. It's just knowing what is expected of us, what is expected of other people. And I think children supposedly like framework, and they are given a framework at school and at homes to what is expected of them. Not everybody is, but generally most children are. I'm not a child psychologist, but I think child psychologists would agree that most children do thrive with frameworks and guidelines and knowing what is expected of them. And I
think the same is true with adults as well. It's a different framework, it's a different form of expectations, it's more advanced in many ways. But I think actually sort of having a rock to cling on to in uncertain times, I don't think that's a bad thing.
So how do you define etiquette because I think a lot of lay people, people who have not been as well versed in etiquette as you might, kind of misunderstand what it's about.
Oh yes, and look, people misunderstand etiquette on a daily basis. Doesn't help that etiquette as a word is an old French word. It sounds terribly posh and it does go back to the Court of lou the fourteenth in France as a word, but it is just about treating people with respect, tolerance, compassion, civility, charm, grace, whatever similar word you want to put in. And anyone who sort of says that we don't need to do that needs to
be very politely. Just ushered off the planet, really, because it would be a horrible place if we were treating people without any of.
Those I mean, I agree that we want to treat people nicely, but maybe just because I'm an American, I feel like, at least before I read your book, I had this knee jerk reaction against etiquette. It just felt a way that people were being overbearing or kind of holier than now, Like it seems like, Okay, we need to treat people nicely, but do we need to care where the fish fork is and where it goes on
the plate and stuff. Tell me about the history of why etiquette kind of peaked in the aristocracy and kind why it started there, and why maybe those of us who are maybe not so aristocratic need to give it a chance.
I would say that humans back in the days of cave people were forming a social construction as to how you should behave, who got access to the meat first, etc. So in terms of being codified and written down, it was literally the fourteenth and fifteenth as I mentioned in France, who really structured it more or less like we have today are as closest to However, there it was quite exclusive.
It was designed to exclude and if you didn't follow this code, you were demoted down the court life and they would have rules on how many ruffles your sleeves or collars would have depending on your status and what part of the grand levee, which was lewis sort of mourning ritual, which sounds hideous. Baby, all these people watched them get out of bed. I mean, I don't know about you, but I don't want anyone watching and get out of bed. To be fair, it wasn't him actually
getting out of bed. He got out of bed ten minutes before and then got into another bed. But still there was this sort of ritual and if you were in that room you had all the highest statuses in the court. So there it was exclusive. But as life has progressed and we sort of finessed it, I would say now good etiquette and manners, when practiced, are inclusive. They are there to bring people together to help us, so we know what to do and what is expected
of us. France don't have a monarch anymore, British monarchy. It's a very different monarchy from hundreds of years ago. No royal family anywhere in the world is now making up the rules as to how to behave I would say now, etiquet is quite democratic, and we the people are discovering through trial and error often what we like as a group of people and what we don't like as a group of people, and it will always change. Etiquette will evolve and develop as humans walk the earth
and whoever doing your and my jobs. In two hundred years time, we'll be talking about a completely different type of etiquette than what we're talking about today.
If it's okay with you, we're going to take a short break, but we'll return in a moment so William can explain how following a few rules can help your next social gathering.
Go with this wing, the Happiness Lab.
Will be right back.
If you listen to recent episodes of the Happiness Lab, you may have heard that sharing meals is a great way to create stronger bonds with the people around you and to feel happier. But a lot of us find organizing a dinner party or entertaining in our homes to be a bit daunting and get expert. William Hansen says a few simple rules can help, and he should know because his homeland, the United Kingdom, has had quite the history when it comes to table manners.
We are a tiny, tiny, tiny country in comparison to let's say America or China or France, our nearest country, it is at least double the size, and thus we're much closer to the people that we live with. We're all living on top of each other. Thus we have to get on quite nicely. And you know, we're very
fortunate in this country. Our weather is fairly gland. We don't have hurricanes, we don't have tsunamis, we don't have earthquakes, and so we don't have anything else to worry about particularly, and we're very fortunate, again, very fortunate that it's generally a nice country. So yes, we sort of thus have had the time and the headspace to develop this code.
And yes, our food was historically, I mean it has dramatically changed in the last forty years, but historically our food was fairly plain, and so you can see why you might want to develop a series of rules to slow down how to eat it because it was wasn't the most delicious, and maybe.
Make it more festive, to hence the exciting napkin collection.
I guess right, well, exactly, yes, And you know, and again there's a logic, particularly with dining, there is for most things, there is a logic behind them. The knife goes on the right hand side because that was your sword carrying hand. Historically, that's why most people were right handed, and certain religions would say that anything held in the left hand it was the hand of the devil. So thus fawks for many years were considered very suspicious of
you using a fork. You used your hand and a knife. And then when various religions realized that actually, if you used a fork, there was actually nothing wrong with you, and actually thought was quite helpful. And so you know, the napkin of whatever size is there to protect your clothing and to take any sort of residue off your lips. So most things have been developed with a logic, and it's normally those that don't understand the logic whose default
reaction is, well, it doesn't matter. Well it does, it's just that it hasn't been explained to you correctly, or you've had some negative experience where someone else has used etiquette for bad not for good.
Okay, can I talk to you about some of the things I learned in your book that I want to share with my listeners because it was like mind blown, like I had no idea where these things come from.
Right, Yes, I love it.
So one of my favorites which comes up for me in my own dining as a kid was the no elbows on a table. Well, I just thought this was a completely arbitrary thing that you know, parents and nana's come up with to like yell at the kids at like the Thanksgiving table. But it turns out no elbows on the table very functional.
Why yes, So that goes back to the sort of medieval dining in the Middle Ages and the sort of fifteen hundreds where you would have trestle tables with sheets of wood, and they were created for the meals that they had, and they only ate twice a day back then, so they weren't having three meals a day. These tables were cleared away and then basically these multi purpose rooms
then became bedrooms and you'd sleep on the floor. And so the food again we ate not like now, it's almost sort of a big buffet style that the food was laid down the center of the table carefully balanced so the table did not tip, so all the heavy stuff was down the very middle of the table. So if you put your elbows on the table and put particular weight, particularly if you were an adult, the table would probably tip. And so it became the etiquette to
not put your elbows on the table. And yes, so many people think, oh gosh, I can hear my mother, my father, my grandparents saying that to me. I would also say, it's actually terribly difficult to eat with your elbows on the table. If you're using a knife and fork,
the angles don't align. Having your elbows on the table at the end of a meal, perhaps if I've come around to your house, Storry, and we finished eating, we're having a cup of coffee at the end, or a cocktail or whatever, if you've got your elbows on the table. As a host, I would say, as a guest, that's fair enough, I can put my elbows on the table, But actually during a formal meal, no, And I.
Have to say, like, even in grad school, I had some tables that might not have been like medieval, but they were cheap things that could.
Fall part exact.
So I love this one. Another thing that I learned from your book book makes sense at least the right time was seating charts This is another thing I never knew. As a Yelle professor, I sometimes have to go to these formal dinners where everybody has to sit in this specific spot, and I was kind of like, who cares?
Then I learned that this too came from important times back in the day, because as you mentioned before, of the swords, so explain why the guest of honor is often sitting in a very specific spot at the right hand side of the table and kind of where that came from.
Yes, so it's always the host's immediate right is where you put the guest of honor And actually, if you look at the White House, as you said, have the photographs of those two armchairs that are in front of the fire and the oval office, the President is always on camera right and to his right is always the
visiting head of state. However it is, and that was because your sword was on your left hip, and so if someone was sort of going to attack you, you would draw your sword and protect them, so it would be across your guest of honor or whether you were protecting. And that's also why I mean Britain gets a bad rap for driving on the left, whereas everyone other other countries drive on the right. Should just say that all countries drove on the left historically, and it wasn't driving,
it was horse and cart. And you did that because again for necessity, because if someone was a highwayman was going to attack you, you would take out the sword. And it was Napoleon and the French who thought they hated us, so we'll just switch sides to annoy them. And lots of other countries shocked, didn't like the British either, so they copied suit as well. Everyone else changed it, not else.
Okay, So I didn't know it was driving that was about swords, but I love that it was. Formal dinners were about swords, but there was.
So much of etique. Is it about sort? It's quite violent?
Actually, it actually makes so much sense. Okay. The other fancy dress thing that I loved you explaining, which has to do again with formal seating, is why so many of the formal dinners I go to, including weddings, are sat boy girl boy girl, which felt very gender and very weird. Why do we have to do that?
Yes, so sort of at the start of the Georgian period of history in Britain, so George the first it was all men down one side, all women down the other side of the table, and you didn't have the concept of dating we have now and courtship, and so as life began to progress, they thought, well, actually, let's sort of alternate the genders. Obviously it was George in England, and they assumed that there were just two genders, which we can unpick that another time, but just we're going
with what they believed. So it was this boy girl, boy girl, which I think is probably preferable to all men down one side, all women down another. And the etiquette was that if you were married, you were actually seated apart from each other, not drastically far apart, just a little bit. So you can talk to other people because you do live with them, so you might want a bit of a change. As much as we love
our spouses, if you were engaged. If we look at Elizabeth and mister Darcy in Pride and Bridges, you know they won't going off to the cinema and sitting in an olive god and having a nice get to know you dinner. There was none of that. Really. They just saw each other at balls and might have had tea with the family, and then suddenly they were going to
spend the rest of their life together. So hostesses would put these couples next to each other at dinner so at least they could have some sort of private conversation. Say now, you don't need to do such gendered stric seating. I would just say, just balance it, try not to have clusters of any particular genda all in one bit
to the detriment of another space on the table. I love my husband's pieces, but I don't actually want to sit next to me to dinner because I want to be able to in the car on the way home go guess what I learned tonight and be able to share on swap stories. But equally, if I was going to a dinner where I knew nobody else other than my husband and the host, actually, then I do want
to sit next to my husband. Probably probably not always, So we can take a lot from where we have come from in order to work out what we like from back then what we don't like, and also create our owner to get as well.
Can I ask it different? I think you mentioned in the book that another reason for the boy girl boy girl thing with that women's dresses were just enormous and that they couldn't fit.
So you know, again sort of Georgian and and Elizabethan, sort of like Victorian era. Your early Victorian era women's dresses were so voluminous, often with hoops, and they could actually physically get to the table, so you would have to have somebody not wearing such a luminous outfit I men, to assist you getting in and out of the chair. Yeah, the pulling out of the chair was not because the
women were the weaker sex or anything like that. It which is out of absolute necessity because women couldn't physically do it. And then obviously when dresses became a lot more practical, you sort of still did that as a bit of a nod to where we had come from. Today, some people like it, some people hate it. I would say, just pull out a chair for anyone you're sitting next to,
however they identify. And actually I saw the other day a woman pulled out the chair for her husband and who was a man, and I thought, gosh, that's lovely. There's nothing wrong with it. Again, we're still sort of tipping the hat to where we've come from, So yeah, do it for any fellow human being.
And the huge dress thing gets to something we've already talked about, which is the importance of napkins of different sizes. Another thing I didn't realize with the different size napkins also actually had a function too.
Yes, so you had the largest dinner size napkins, which were between twenty four and twenty six centimeters. I think you work in inches so colleges, but they were the largest, and so they would sort of be completely over the ball gown because you were wearing this huge ball gown and so you would need a larger napkin to cover it.
Now, if I look through your book in all the domains where we see these etiquette rules popping up, they happen in all parts of life, but they seem to crop up especially at these moments of rights of passage, right weddings, funerals, these big scary state dinners, And that seems like exactly the time psychologically where you might want
more of the structure to reduce uncertainty. Is that your sense of kind of how these rituals developed is that they were kind of during these moments of uncertainty.
Yes, I think so, And I think probably the hatched matched and dispatched points of our lives are probably when you know, we have large groups of people that come together, particularly for the wedding one, and you've got lots of different personalities, lots of different family dynamics, and always have done as far as sort of matrimony has been the thing, And so that's why these rules have popped up in particular, and you know, everyone's got an opinion, particularly on weddings.
I also think you see this just in times where they are these subtle things about the psychoology that are hard to understand, but if you just stick a rule in, you can sort of protect people. One of my favorite examples that my colleague Dave Disteno, the psychologist who studies rituals, talks a lot about is in moments of death and
certain rituals that come up during grieving. He talks about a case in Shiva and the Jewish tradition where during the period of mourning you're supposed to cover up all the mirrors in the house, which kind of seem like a very strange etiquette rule or ritual, but it turns out that seeing yourself being sad or seeing yourself being anxious in a mirror amplifies that sense of being sad or being anxious, And so the Shiva tradition of covering up the mirrors makes all the grievers not kind of
compound their grief just by seeing how messed up you look and how sad you look all the time. Any other examples kind of like this that come up in more traditional etiquette moments where it seems like it's about kind of protecting people psychologically in ways that we might not expect.
Yes, and that fundamentally I mean and also said, a lot of our more traditional has come from religion, whichever religion that is, and I would say most religions do share the same core principles. But yes, it is just a consideration for other people before ourselves. And the idea is that I'm pushing you first and you're pushing me first, and it's this nice homogeneous unit that is the idea.
And actually the Shiver thing reminds me of For many years, I was really reticent to post videos of myself on social media doing etiquette tips, which is something that's very commonplace now for lots of people in whatever industry. But I was really reluctant because I don't think it is healthy to constantly look at yourself, whether you've got an ego or you're insecure or not. I think it can be quite harmful, and so I take away mirrors generally to be honest, whether we're grieving or not.
So sometimes etiquette comes up in these big, scary times, the what did you say, hatched catched hatch, Yes, so ednikie comes up in these hatched, matched and dispatched times. But there are lots of times that are a little bit anxiety provoking what we're engaging in social connection, And a big one is the dinner. Talk about some strategies that can reduce uncertainty during moments of dinner. I'm thinking about well set tables, that kind of thing.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think when you arrive to eat, whether it's in a restaurant, your friend's house, anywhere, how the ground it is. If you know, if the table and the room look inviting and it's sort of there's been a little bit of consideration into the table setting, you're probably a little bit more relaxed than if actually all the cutlery is in a pot in the middle of the table, some of it's a bit grubby, there's a few scraps of something unattractive kitchen towel on the table,
You think, God, do they even want me here? Have they really prepared? Am I being a burden on them? And I think hospitality is, whether you're doing it professionally or you're doing it sort of socially, is about making others feel welcome and relaxed, and thus putting in a bit of effort. If you're going to have friends over is key. If you don't want to have friends over,
that's fine. Don't have friends over, go out to a restaurant or do it another And then yes, if you're eating food and you don't know what to do with it and you're presented with something new, don't be afraid to ask ask your host, gosh, this sort of delicious? How best do you suggest I eat it? Or just sort of slightly hang back and just see what everyone else is doing. May not be correct, but if they're doing it, they going to think it's correct. Yeah.
I'm a big believer in the hangback. As someone who hasn't studied a lot of etiquette in this American but finds myself in lots of these formal moments, I'm a big hangbacker and watch what everybody else does, especially for the like positioning of the thing. Somehow the bread like little dish. I always I never know what's going on.
Okay, Well with your breadplate, yes, exactly what you need to remember is you need to remember BMW motor cars. So as you look at your place setting B for bread, it's on the left, M for meal it's in the middle, and W for wine it's on the right. So as you sort of sit down, you know that your breadplate is on the left. If you start taking bread from the right hand side, that someone else's breadplate that's stealing. That's very bad matters. So your breadplated.
As happened recently, it was giving a talk and we're at a restaurant and they, you know, have the bread plates set up, and I was like, which side should I be taking it from? Which side should I be taking it from? And I realized they just set the wrong number of bread plates, so there's one in too few, and so I was like, I did the math, and I was like, wait a minute, okay, this is not me.
This is yes, this is something that I have more and more frequently as I write about these rules, whether it's in just cod manners or doing a video on Instagram or whatever teaching, and it's all very while we going, well, this is this is how glasses are arranged, or this is how cutler is arranged. But if the restaurant or your friends has not done it properly, you might actually what I have told you to do might be complete rubbish.
Like bmw B You're like, wait, MWB, I don't know what's going on. It's not very confusing.
Yeah, exactly, Yes, So I would always you know, And I think that's why it's good to sort of know what the etiquette should be, and then you can either choose to apply it or you go, do you know what wrong setting here? Tear it up and do something else.
I love this idea of just kind of, you know, making the table so beautiful and having all the napkins
and so on. But one of the things we've talked about in this sh show is this idea of sort of scruffy hospitality, that social connection is so important and the loneliness is so prevalent that you shouldn't let kind of worries about cleanliness and worries about having the perfect table setting come up any advice there of how you can kind of be minimum about the etiquette stuff and like the table settings and the fanciness, but still kind of get the social connection in and still get the
hospitality into.
Well. One of the things that I see a lot of, particularly if people haven't hosted an awful lot, and good on them for trying. And we've all had our first dinner party and for most of us it probably went horrifically. But like anything, the more you do it, the better you get. But don't run before you can walk. If you're dining table seats for it a push, don't invite five.
I mean, it is extraordinary how many it's happening less now as I'm getting older, but how many friends dinner parties we've gone to and they've tried to cram it in because we want five. Well, we're not comfortable wherever we are eating. We want to be comfortable eating, particularly as we get older. We want chairs that sort of support us and we want to not think, thank God, I can go home so comfortable environment. The food does
not have to be cooked yourself. You can buy it in, you can have cooked and the food can be just passible. It doesn't need to be delicious, So food that's nice but doesn't need to be phenomenal, and you can have bought it in a clean table, clean cutlery, clean glassware, not glassware where I can see your thumb prints and your fingerprints as you've placed it down on the table. That's not very appetizing or hygienic. A nice napkin if you're going to do paper, because you can't be bothered
to wash napkins. There are some really good sort of three or four ply thicker proper paper napkins you can get. Most supermarkets or stores that sell napkins will have them, so you can just still throw them out and they can be recycled. And if you're going to have music on in the background, a lot of people get triggered by really loud music, and actually the best soundtrack to any sort of party is just people chatting and laughing.
And actually, so don't spend two days curating the perfect dinner party playlist, because we really shouldn't be listening to it. We might hear it at the start when there are a few of us there, but as the party gets into the swing of it, we shouldn't be hearing the music so have it there in the background, but really on very.
Low Social gatherings when they go smoothly, can be a great source of happiness, and observing a set of agreed upon rules without being a jerk about it can help ensure that these.
Interactions go well.
But that's not the only benefit of taking etiquette more seriously, which we'll hear more about after the break. William Hansen's new book Just Good Manners taught me that etiquette has a lot of unexpected benefits, and one of my favorite benefits is that etiquette often acts like a break, which can be a good thing when it comes to our happiness.
Our lives often pass at lightning speed, but if you organize a dinner party following William's tips, considering the seeding plan, or giving thought to the napkins, you have the time needed to anticipate just how fun it'll be. Research shows that humans get a happiness boost from this sort of anticipation. We also enjoy events way more when we have a chance to savor them rather than rushing through everything all
the time. So does William agree that etiquette can help us find room for pause in our hectic lives.
Yes, and I think it's about just slowing down life. And I think, as life is so fast paced now compared to how it was in sort of etiquette's heyday, I think it's good just to sort of just pause and take time. And you know, let's look at communications or written communication. We can communicate instantly with people and get a response, and that's fantastic and gosh, so many ways.
But if we had to do it like they did in Jane Austen time, where you write a letter and then you would wait for it to be collected, which might have been the day or the day after that, and then it would go of our horse and can't to even somewhere within your city, but it could be two cities away, and then you know, you might not get a response for a month. So you had time.
They had the luxury. It wasn't considered at the time, but they had the luxury of time of considering how are we going to respond, what's the best thing to do.
I need to be concise as well, because I've got paper as expensive as well, and we're not going to try and keep it as short as possible, whereas now we are expected to sort of have the answers immediately upon sending a message, and we have to speak and hope or write and hope that what we say is in some ways comprehensible, not offensive, clear, and it's not always going to be possible.
It also seems like this act of kind of being more present can come from the things that I sometimes again as my you know, etiquette first American background brought me up to be things like dress codes, right, whereas I often think of the dress code as something that's like overbearing, that's like constraining by freedom and so on. But you've argued that it's a way again of kind of being a little bit more present, maybe even of honoring the people that are kind of throwing whatever event
this is. Can explain what you mean.
Again, if you have been invited to a party, someone has spent money presumably or time and effort on looking after you and taking interest in you and wanting you to have a nice time, and so by doing things correctly and honoring it and following what is expected of you, you are honoring them and the friendship rather than this sort of well, actually I don't want to do that. I'm just going to ignore that and thinking somehow that someone is above the rules.
So it seems like one of the ways that etiquette can really help us is doing this sort of honoring, is this kind of other oriented take on how you should behave in these kinds of settings.
And I would say also treating people with respect is a constant. How we treat people with respect might have changed over time from the time of George the Third to now, and it will always change. Etiquette as a shape shifter. And it would be ridiculous for me to say what's published in Just Good Manners in one hundred years time, every single sentence I write is going to be exactly the same. I think the core principles hopefully
will be the same, but it will change. Yes, I think just I think it is important, particularly when the world around us, our social, political, diplom life might be incredibly uncertain. It is the easy thing to do would be to sync to that level. Life is not easy. We know that, and actually what we need to do is raise people to a slightly higher standard, particularly those
in higher office. And I can see why some people whichever country, in so many countries have you know, it's not peachy for everybody, But I can see why a lot of people think well, why should I be nice? You can be a bit of a brute, or you can be a bit of a bully or say the wrong thing, and you can get to the highest office in the hand. It applies to many, many heads of stake, and.
What we know from the science is that this is very effective in terms of boosting people's happiness. I think we assume, with so much in the world right now talking about self care and treating yourself, that kind of being as selfish as possible when it comes to food or whatever, it would make us feel good. But study after study shows that doing nice things for others, whether it's spending money on other people, doing kind of like charity acts for other individuals, that makes us feel better
than doing for ourselves. So another thing that you talk a lot about in terms of being a good guest that really resonates with the science is the importance of expressing gratitude. And you are a big fan I know of the thank you letter? Why or thank you letters so important? So powerful?
I think they're more powerful now in an era where so little is handwritten by hand most things aren't emails. I think actually to have something, I think it shows more effort I mean, that's id rather someone emailed me a thank you than literally avoid of silence, but for someone to actually put pen to paper and to pay for a stamp, which I'm sure in your country but's definitely ours. Stamps cost rise and rise and rise almost
every every six months. But actually to sort of have taken a moment to put in a little bit of effort to say thank you, especially if the effort has
been quite considerable on my part. Just as to scriggle a few lines, I think is so nice and I think it carries more clout and base if it gets you brownie points more than if you just said send a quick sort of DM to go, yeah, thanks so much for dinner, see you soon, kiss, which you've probably written lying in bed, picking your nose, thinking about what you're going to have for breakfast in the morning. It's not quite the same.
You've seen the benefit of these brownie points kind of, I guess secondhand with your friend Daphne. Tell me the story of Daphne and why her thank you notes were so powerful.
Daphne is a gorgeous, gorgeous person. She's now in her nineties, and when I first stayed with Japhanne in her early agies. I was not living in London at the time, but I was working in London a lot, and so if i'd have an early start, I would stay with Daphne. And Daphne told me the following story, and I should say Daphne's house beautiful, Mary Poppins esque, Chelsea townhouse gorgeous.
And Daphne and her twin sister grew up outside of London, in the north of England, and every Christmas was sent a one pound note. No, we don't have one pound notes anymore, but back then, ninety five years ago, a one pound note was a lot of money, particularly for two girls to be getting. They would each get it and they would sort of once they got to four or five, they would start squiggling a little thank you letter to say thank you to this great aunt who
was sending them the money. And sort of, as they got older, they'd begun to understand that this great aunt was persona and on grata with the family. There was some family feud. You just did not talk about this great aunt. And as Daphne and her sister were now in their twenties, they were living in London, they thought, well, look, we'll put in our thank you letters that we don't care what this argument was, We don't know. Can we take you up for lunch please to say thank you properly.
Never did they get a response, and then one year Daphne's sister said, look, I'm going to stop writing because I sort of it's embarrassing. It's not worth as much as it was. We're earning money. She never had no other contact with her. I sort of want her to save her money and give it to someone else. So she stopped writing. Daphne continued and still for about five or six more years, they were both sent their one pound note, and shortly after one Christmas they received nothing.
And then after Christmas, Definitely received a phone call to Sam, so sorry to tell you that your great aunt has died and in her will she has left you her Chelsea townhouse. It's because you always wrote a thank you letter. The sister was not left anything. Yeah, exactly, And so I always write to Definitely when I stay with her, because you never know.
That's awesome. I mean, I think you know, that's a case of getting brownie points, you know, like literal brownie points from the person you send a thank you letter to But psychologically, there's lots of evidence that we get these kind of happiness boosting Brownie points just because the act of writing a thank you letter to someone else, especially in researchers looked at this, a byhand thank you letter that you put some detail into it wounds up
not just making the person who receives a letter happy, it makes you happy too. In fact, a study by Marty Seligman and colleagues fines that the boost in happiness you get small but significant boost and happiness you get last for somewhere between one to three months, which is sort of incredible, right, It's like this really long standing little boost and happiness that we get from a handwritten thank you letter.
And so I love love, I love That's that's great to know. And actually so strongly do I believe in
the thank you letter thing. When we were doing the book for America because it came out in Britain last year, I said to Gallery Simon and Schuster, the publishers, and said, look, can I do an appendix which I should have done for the UK book, but I didn't think of it at the time of sample thank you letters because sometimes people say to me Oh, yeah, well I don't know what to say, which I don't think is much of
an excuse. I mean, whisper it quietly. I mean, you can get AI to help you write a thank you letter if you really really are struggling, you know, and AI help thank you letters better than nothing. So yes, I've done this sort of additional appendix of all different scenarios and just things just to help inspire people so they know sort of how long they should be writing and what sort of tone it should take.
It's funny that we have such trouble with thank you letters, because I think we don't have that much trouble with the opposite, which is like writing complaint letters or complaint reviews on Yelp or something like that. It seems like the negative part of it comes really easily to us. But you have a little etiquette suggestion here as well. You know that we should try to limit our complaints generally, or at least try to balance our complaints with the positives.
I think it should be a two to one ratio at minimum.
So we've talked so much about these kinds of traditions that have come, you know, from back in the day, from our time of swords and aristocracy and so on. You've noticed that etiquette is changing and probably will change. If we add this podcast in two hundred years, none
of what we said might be the same. Where are the domains where you think it's changing, especially in some of these spots where we might be dealing with kind of new moments of uncertainty or new sort of social times that feel potentially fraud.
I think attitudes and more enlightened approaches generally to gender I think is changing etiquette certainly. You know, I've taught etiquette for nearly twenty years, and twenty years ago, I would have said, socially, in terms of the introduction, precedence, deciding who is more important than others in the introduction, you've got to save somebody's name first. Obviously in a business gender is irrelevant to age. But socially, twenty years ago you would have looked at age and gender. So
Granny being eighty is lifted beyond Annie, who's eighteen. So you would say, Granny man, produce Annie. It's Granny is old. But if you had Anie and you had Matthew, you would have gone historically, Annie man introduced Matthew, and you would have risen any and not Matthew. I think that I think age is still socially is still looked at, and that's fair enough. I say it's fair enough. Come back to me in twenty years I might have had
an epiphany and'd say it's not. But the gender one we are completely as we are more accepting and more aware of different genders. We are just revising that and the weight that we give that. And sometimes it will be correct in the introduction to do it that way, but not always. And actually it's probably moving towards a more business orientated structure. Of it goes on rank or position. Socially,
we don't of course have ranks. I mean we do in Britain because we have the aristocracy, but they are infant to some in comparison to the general population.
Do you think that we're going to be developing new etiquette rules for new technologies? The folks that open ai sort of issued this plea asking, hey, when you talk to chat GPT, can you not tell them please and thank you because just like those words take up so much space in a it's like so much computing power for open ai to kind of deal with the thank you, so that just people just deleted them. It would be faster and would save you know, whole rainforest of computing
power and stuff. And I just found, oh my gosh, it's so hard for us to shut off these etiquette rules even when we're talking to an AI and I hope we don't. I hope we keep our please and thank you when we're talking to Claude and chat GPT and so on.
Exactly. Yes, ignore what open a I say. Please keep saying please and thank you to your smart speaker. I mean I still will ask whatever my smart speaker is called, I won't say it. Now you do this please wich, I think. Is it's nice, It's we need to sort of keep the reflex and keep the politeness muscle honed.
Hopefully we can write her a thank you letter too, because she does so much for us.
A smart speaker, gratefully, gratefully receive it.
And this as a last question, lightning around top three etiquette tips that you wish everyone knows.
Well, Yeah, you don't need to have read just good man as, gone to an etiquette class or gone, you know, watched an etique video on Instagram to know you should be making eye contact with people when you talk to them, especially when you greet them, but also when you talk to them. Have a good handshake. Now, culturally what is a good handshake changes, but in the West it's basically two pumps, locking the fingers and the thumb again, making
eye contact firm, but not too firm. And try to use people's names as much as possible because we respond better. Happiness valve is released in US when we hear our own name and when it's used and we actually the opposite valve. The valve gets turned off when someone gets our name wrong. And if I'm allowed a fourth you cannot say please or thank you enough.
And to honor that spirit of politeness, I'd like to offer my deepest thanks to William Hansen for such an enlightening interview. After chatting with him, I'm going to try to embrace the rules of etiquette a bit more because a little formality does seem to be a great way to show love and respect to the people you care about. You know, I might even go out and find some
cloth napkins. In our next episode on creative coping strategies, we'll be moving from the gentility of dining rooms to the wilds of mother nature, because I'll be talking with someone who finds her comfort in birds.
That's all.
Next time on the Happiness Lab with me, Doctor Laurie Santos