Pushkin. I was driving home late at night after spending the night in Seattle, and as I was coming over a bridge back into Tacoma, a little dog run out in front of my car. I did exactly what most people do when this happens, and I now know you shouldn't do, which as I swerved to try to avoid hitting it, and the result of both swerving and then ultimately hitting it anyway, was that my car was sent into a sort of a fishtail and then a spin
across the freeway. This is Abbey Marsh. She was only nineteen years old when the events in this story took place. When the car finally came to a stop, it was in the fast lane of the freeway, just past the crest of this bridge i'd been crossing, which meant that
I was invisible to the oncoming traffic. Unfortunately, they were quite visible to me because my car was now facing backward into the oncoming traffic and the engine on a car sort of sputtered to a halt, and I didn't have a phone, and I had no way of escaping because this bridge didn't have any shoulders on it, so there was nowhere to go even if I were to
get out of the car, and I just panicked. I couldn't get the car to her back on And I was feeling every time one of these trucks or semis past me, the whole car would shutter if they went by, like ushit. Now, what am I gonna do? Like I like, you know, your mind is sort of stuttering through the different options. And do I get out of the car? Do I stay in the car? If I get out
of the car, I was risking car hitting me. But then if I stayed in the car, I was definitely going to get hit eventually, because these cars that were coming over the crest were swerving barely in time. Who avoid me? There? Abby was a teenager, all alone and trapped on the freeway, confronting what seemed like certain death, And it was just the sense of futility and blankness.
It was awful. But what happened next propelled Abby on a totally new journey, a journey that would bring her face to face with the worst and best parts of human nature, and one that has allowed her to unlock a counterintuitive secret to what makes life happier and a bit more worth living. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy.
The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab of doctor Laurie Santos. Abby Marsh was trapped in her disabled sub in the dark, facing the wrong way on the highway. She watched in terror as oncoming traffic swerved by. She needed a miracle.
It's funny because you know, I don't believe in guardian angels, and in fact, it frustrates me when people refer to very alterwistic people as angels, because I feel like it's sort of takes away from how compassionate real live human beings can be. You know, you don't have to be supernatural to help somebody else. But it did have that sense of just he just appeared out of nowhere. Abby looked over to see that a complete stranger was knocking
calmly on her passenger side door. My memory of him is that he was wearing a suit and a lot of gold jewelry and sunglasses. It was the middle of the night, that made no sense, but he said, you looked like you could do some help, and I said, yeah, I think I could. And he ran around the front of my car into the traffic, got into the driver's seat, and then he got the car back started again and got just back across the road and parked us behind
his car. I was shaking, and I'm sure it was gray, and I fell awful, and he said, you don't look so good. Do you need me to follow you to make sure you get home? Okay? I was like, no, no no, no, I'll be fine. I'll be fine. I'm pretty sure. I didn't say thank you. And he's like, okay, you take care of yourself, and he got out of my car, back into his own and disappeared. Abbey has spent a lot of time wondering about the man that rescued her
and the reasons behind his actions. The instant practically he saw in my car. He must have pulled over and then run across five milnes of freeway traffic in the dark to get to me. Why would somebody do that? Why would somebody do that? What was that moment that happened inside this other person's head that I owe my
life too? What's interesting to me is that just knowing that people do it sort of semantically, you know, you read about it in a newspaper, is you can sort of be like, oh, that's interesting, but there's something about it happening to you. Real human being made this choice to save my life, even though he risked being killed himself, to make you want to understand it, and the fact that we don't really have good explanations for why somebody would do something like this. In fact, it defies a
lot of conventional wisdom about human motivation. You know, all humans being fundamentally selfish, that's something many people believe, and so what could be more interesting than a concrete fact that defies a lot of established ideas. But Abbey wasn't content to just sit and wonder why her savior chose to help her. She decided to get to the bottom
of his actions. Scientifically, I'm not sure how often these motivations that drive us are clear in the moment, but in retrospect, it's very clear that my research took a very distinct track since then. Abby is now a professor in the Department of Psychology and the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience at Georgetown she's a world expert and how we
process other people's emotions. I started studying how we respond to other people's fear initially, so why it is that the site of somebody who's frightens elicits caring responses and people who see it. But that's a really difficult question to study in the lab because you know you can't ethically induce extreme fear in people, and it's really hard to measure people's behavior when it comes to things like altruism in the lab in a way that doesn't make them do what you want them to do. So Abby
decided to employ a common psychology research logic. If you want to understand a concept, one of the better ways to do that is to find a population to people who were missing the thing you're interested in and try to understand what makes him different, and hopefully that will help understand where that process you're interested and comes from, which led Abbey to explore the nature of altruistic actions
using a seemingly strange population psychopaths. We had known for a while, and sciences and known for a while that people who are psychopathic don't respond normally to the site of other people's fear, which even the idea of other
people's fear. And one of my favorite examples of this comes from a story of my colleagues of fighting was telling name she was testing a bunch of psychopathic adult inmates on their ability to recognize other people's facial expressions, and one psychopathic inmate she was testing was particularly about it recognizing other people's fear so bad he missed every
single fearful expression she showed him. But he knew he was doing badly because he got to the last fearful expression in the set and he's like, you know, I don't know what that expression is called, but I know that's what people look like right before you stab them. I find that so incredibly profound, because, you know, here's a man who is imprisoned because he does things that cause other people to believe they're going to die, and he's like, oh, yay, I know what they look like.
You know, I recognize that phase. But he couldn't link it to the emotion fear. He just he couldn't make sense of that vivid, you know, wide eyed, distressed expression and understand the emotional content behind it. Abby's now done some elegant work exploring why psychopaths have this problem recognizing
others distress. We found that there's a structure in their brain called the amgala that doesn't seem to respond normally to other people's fear, whereas in most people, this particular structure seems to be very active in response to somebody's fear, and that seems to help you interpret that emotion, and people who are psychopathic just show no response at all.
But the biggest idea that came from Abbey's work on the brains of psychopaths was an insight that eventually led her back to the question she first started asking on that highway many years ago. We have understood now for a while that psychopathy is not a sort of cluster of individuals that's qualitatively different from everybody else. It's a spectrum. And so there are people who are highly highly psychopathic and people who are only moderately psychopathic, and then those
traits vary continuously throughout the population. And what it's interesting about that fact is it suggests that there must be such a thing as an anti psychopath. So if most of us are sort of moderately compassionate, and we've got psychopaths on one end who have no compassion, Well, there must be a mirror image of that people who are unusually compassionate, And I got to thinking about what that might look like. What would it look like to be
anti psychopathic? Are they, for example, the kind of people who would run into oncoming traffic to save a complete stranger. Could they be the key to understanding why some people are willing to lose everything to help others. After the break you'll hear more about these so called anti psychopaths and how they are unusual choices, demons straight what you can personally do to become a little bit happier. The
Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. I started out thinking it would be fun too, and you know, edifying to study people who were heroic rescuers, like the man who saved my life. But at the time it wasn't at all clear how I would find them. After exploring the brains of psychopathic killers, researcher Abbey Marsh wanted to understand the minds of the polar opposite side of the psychological spectrum. It's not an easy thing to put like an ad in the newspaper for have you ever
saved a stranger's life? And risk your own. It wasn't aware of any way to recruit them, and so I thought about, well, there are other ways to save lives that involve significant risk and sacrifice, and at the time, a number of articles and a book could come out about altruistic kidney donors. People who give away a kidney to save the life of a stranger and ende renal failure. Patience and end stage renal failure often wait three to five years to get a kidney from a deceased donor.
Living kidney donors, people who are willing to give up one of their two functioning kidneys, can cut down on the weight time for the nearly one hundred thousand people who are on that wait list. The donation procedure is more straightforward than you might think. Most donors return to their usual activities in a few weeks. But like all surgeries, kidney donations come with at least some risk of serious complications,
things like blood clots, infection, or even death. And I thought, you know, if anything is altruistic, it is that it is this very significant decision to give away of an internal organ, invital internal organ, to save the life of somebody that you've never met. And in most cases have been picked off a list for you. So it struck me that if anything could be considered antipsychopathic, gets the decision to give a kidney to a stranger. So Abby harder target group kidney donors, but at the time it
was a pretty exclusive club. There are only a few thousand in the entire country who'd gone through that invasive procedure. Meaningful results in scientific studies require having as many test subjects as possible, and so Abby was a bit worried that she wouldn't be able to find enough donors. In spite of the odds, she put an ad on an organ transplant list Serve, have you ever donated a kidney to a stranger? If so, a researcher at Georgetown is
interested in connecting a study with you. Abby reasonably assumed that she'd never find enough participants from such an absolutely tiny pool of potential recruits. I have this vivid memory of sitting down and being like, oh, I wonder if anybody's responded to my ads for kidney downers, and opening up by laptop and my inbox was just flooded with new messages, many with all caps subject things from altars to kidney downers who were just very excited to be
taking part in my research. You know, I would love to be your guinea pig. Please sign me up. Abby was immediately shocked by this population's generosity. Hundreds of them were ready to fly to her lab at a moment's notice, and once they got there, they were happy to go to great lengths to be helpful. And consider it, working with lots of different populations over the years, it can be a real trick to just get people to come
in and to come in on time. And the first three altruistic kidney donors we brought in and they come in from all over the country, and they were staying in a hotel just a few blocks from the campus where we were going to be scanning them, and they were so worried about not being late to their brain scans that they came three hours early the first camp.
It's like unheard of, and they ended up getting lost in the bowels of the university hospital and almost ended up breaking through a fire door to get to the camp center and setting off alarms all over the hospital because again they were so incredibly concerned about not being late. Abby also found that her kidney donors were unusually humble. They didn't like her hypothesis that they were in any way special or at the extreme end of some goodness spectrum.
A number of them very kindly told me that they were happy to participate in the study. They were happy to help out, but they were pretty sure that I was barking at the wrong tree. The idea that there was anything different about them at all was just wrong. They're not unusually altruistic, they're not unusually compassionate. They're just like anybody else. They happen to be in the right place at the right time, which is not how anybody
else talks about people who give kidneys to strangers. But their real sense of humility has been really striking, just an unwillingness to think of themselves as better than anybody else. Of course, Abbey's results showed that kidney donors were wrong. They were different, at least when it came to their brains.
Abbey used neuroimaging techniques to measure the size of the donors amygdalas, that same brain structure involved in processing fear, the very same part that was significantly smaller than average in psychopaths. It turns out that her kidney donors also had peculiar amygdala's, but they were eight percent larger than those of average people. Now, it could be that her donors were just born that way, but it was also possible that performing acts of kindness over time had caused
the enlargement, like a muscle responding to exercise. Whatever the reason, these extreme ultruists had ambigdalas that indeed looked like the polar opposite of what she'd seen in her malicious criminals. Abby had finally identified a population of anti psychopaths, which was a pretty cool result for a budding neuroscientist. But the most important thing about studying this new population for Abby wasn't just that she had discovered a completely new,
nearly atypical population. The ultruistic kidney donors finally gave Abbey the opportunity to pose the question that had puzzled her for decades, The question she wanted to ask her highway savior. Why would somebody do that? Why did her rescuer choose to save her? Abby conducted interview after interview, asking what was going through your head when you decided to help someone in such an extreme way. The most common answer I get to the question is it just hit me
like a bolt of lightning. I've found out that there are people who were dying from kidney failure. There's one hundred thousand of them on the waiting lists, and most of us can of a kidney away and be none the worse for wear for it. And I thought, I'll do that. I mean, there is no decision process I think is the interesting thing. Like, it's not a hemming and hawing process for really almost anybody I've talked to, it's just so, well, you can do this. Somebody's life
is gonna be saved. I'll do it. At first glance, this sort of answer fits with Abby's initial hypothesis that there had to be something fundamentally different about people who would risk their lives for strangers without a moment's thought. But if that were the case, her results wouldn't be as relevant for all of you, and so I wouldn't be talking about them here on the Happiness lab. As Abby probe more deeply, she realized that this couldn't be
the whole story. As she heard more about her participants' lives, she realized that many of them got to this act of kidney donation through lots of smaller acts of generosity. Nobody goes from sort of ground zero to donate a kidney almost always. The people we've worked with are long time blood donors, platelet donors, some have been marrow donors. Many of them work in tier positions, rescue animals, foster children. They've all done things in the past that involved giving
of themselves to help other people. Abbey realized that many of her kidney donors wound up getting to what seemed like an extreme altruistic choice through lots of baby steps, smaller nice actions, the kinds of things that lots of us do or could easily do. Over time, the donors recognize that performing these smaller acts of kindness felt well,
kind of nice. The sense that I get is that they have had the wonderful opportunity to discover how rewarding that is, what a sense of joy and happiness it gives you to help other people. And it's just like any other reinforcement process. You sort of work your way up. You're like, well, that was so rewarding. What else could I do? If donating blood is good, I guess donating marrows even better. If donating kidney is good. I guess
donating a piece of my liver is even better. And I now have several kidney donors I've worked with who've also donated a portion of their liver. As she heard from more interviewees, Abbey's Big Savior on the Highway puzzle started to become Clearerultists did what they did because they had learned a simple yet counterintuitive principle of human motivation. Doing nice things for other people feels really good, even in cases where it's a bit costly. Helping others can
provide a big spike to our well being. Altruistic kidney donors just take the usual wellbeing spite we all experience to an extreme. It's therefore no surprise that they tend to be a really happy group on average. It's a universal response I get from them. They are so glad that they made the decision to donate. They do it one hundred more times. If they could do one hundred
more times. It's one of the best things that they ever did, and it gives them this sense of joy that sticks with them as far as I can tell forever. Some of the people I've worked with donated close to twenty years ago. Now, and it doesn't ever seem to go away, that sense of vicarious joy of having been
able to do this thing for somebody else. I've had many interviews and in tears as people are describing the after effects of their nation and hearing that the child who would receive their kidney like days after donnation, he was making plans to go to the beach and camping for like the first time. He'd never been able to do these things. And like the kidney donors sabbing relating this,
and I'm sabbing relating this, it's incredibly profound. As Abby heard more of these stories and saw the incredible joy that her subjects experienced, she started to think that her extreme subjects might be onto something important, something that the rest of us could learn from. Two. If you want to make a good decision about bringing joy and meaning in a sense of connectedness into your own life, helping
people is clearly the way to do it. Abby started to realize that all of us can benefit from doing nice things for others, even if we're not yet ready to give up a body part to a stranger. We all have our own ways that we can make the lives of other people better. You know, donating kidney is one way, but it's certainly not the only way. But as Abby right, I mean, it's clear that her donors
get a huge happiness boost from their generous act. But can the average person really become happier by making a small sacrifice to aid a stranger? Can shifting your focus to helping other people really be a strategy for improving well being? And if there is a path to becoming a happy altruist, is there a step along that path that you could take today? The Happiness Lab will be right back. When we think of small, everyday things we can do to boost our mood, we often think of
the idea of pampering ourselves. And whenever I think of personal pampering, I'm reminded of one of my favorite seams from the TV show Parks and Recreation. Once a year, Donna and I spend a day treating ourselves. What do we treat ourselves to? Clothes, treat yourself, treat yourself, massage, treat yourself, mimosa, treat yourself, fine leather goods. Treat yourself. It's the best day of the year, the best day
of the year when we want to be happier. We think it's time to spoil ourselves, or, in the popular parlance of parks wreck, I've got three words for you, Yo sill. On the show Tom and Donna observed treat yourself day every October thirteenth. It's now become a cultural phenomenon, so much so that Rheta, the actress who plays Donna, can't post a photo of a cocktail or a purse on Instagram without some fan telling her to go ahead
and treat yourself. But it's a strategy, right. Should we be treating ourselves to feel happier or are we missing other more powerful opportunities to boost our moods? You know, I don't think treating ourselves is a terrible idea, like spending money on ourselves can be good. This is Liz Done, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia an author of the book Happy Money, The Science of Happier Spending.
It's just that this idea of that spending money on somebody else could actually be helpful, I think is especially easy to overlook because I think we do just get focused on ourselves. Liz studies the cases where our so called treat yourself. Intuitions can lead us astray, especially when it comes to spending our disposable income. I first got interested in this idea, like, not because I was especially interested in generosity, but because I was interested in money.
So I managed to make it through my twenties without ever holding a real job. At twenty seven, I got my first real job and they actually started paying me, and I was like, oh wow, Like, what do I do with all of this money? Like this is more money than I need to survive, you know, and what do I do with it? I was surprised at the time by how little research there was on this topic. Liz Comb the literature to figure out the best way to spend our money to feel happier, and all the
existing studies seem to point in the same direction. The science shows that treating ourselves doesn't make us as happy as treating other people, and that result is not just true for extremely altruistic people like Abby's kidney donors, even when we look in pretty diverse regions of the world. In fact, in all seven major regions of the world, we find this relationship whereby people who donate money to
charity are happier than those who don't. So I thought, well, okay, would we actually get more of kind of happiness being for our buck by spending on others than by spending on ourselves. Listen, our colleagues decided to test this in a rather simple experiment. They walked up to people on the street and handed them twenty dollars. We asked them to spend it by the end of the day, but
with a catch. So we told half the people they had to spend it on themselves, and we told half the people they had to spend it to benefit others. Imagine for a second that you're a subject in this study. You just got twenty bucks out of the blue, and you're asked to spend it. What would feel better spending that money on a nice free meal or a shiny manicure for yourself, or using that same amount of money to help someone else. If you're like Liz's subjects, you
probably think the treat yourself condition would feel better. In fact, Liz asked over a hundred people to predict which condition they would prefer, and about two thirds of them went with the treat yourself option. But what did Liz find when people really spent that cash windfall. People were in a better mood at the end of the day when they'd been asked to spend this money on other people
rather than on themselves. The simple act of spending twenty dollars on another person was enough to significantly raise people's well being levels. But Liz has found that the same effect holds for smaller amounts of money too. Her team tested a different group of subjects. They were given only five dollars to spend on themselves or someone else. This second group showed exactly the same effect as those who
were given more cash. You don't necessarily have to be spending crazy amounts of money on others, even like say five dollars, or even just two dollars, and shifting it towards using that money to benefit other people does seem to provide this detectable benefit for moods. Listener colleagues have now replicated the same effect in people all over the world, in Canada, India, Uganda, and even remote villages on the island of Vanawatu. The results are always the same for
rich and for poor people. One study of South African subjects found that people who are happier spending money on others even when they report not having enough money to buy food for their families in the last year. But what's most impressive is that Liz has shown that generosity doesn't just feel good in adulthood. We started to wonder, like, you know, is this a fundamental part of human nature?
So my student lair Acting and I teamed up with Kylie Hamlin, who's a developmental psychologist, and we brought toddlers just under the age of two into the lab. Now, of course, toddlers don't really care about money, so we worked with like the closest thing to toddler gold which of course is goldfish crackers, And so we gave these little kids windfall of goldfish for themselves, as well as a chance to give some of those goldfish away to
a puppet named Monkey. The researchers watched how many goldfish crackers kids gave away, and then they coded their facial expressions to see how happy toddlers seemed afterwards. What we see in the study is that even children under the age of two seem to exhibit pleasure from giving their resources away. Counterintuitively, the kids smiled more and see much
happier after losing a bunch of their goldfish crackers. It's kind of just reassuring, Like as many problems as we have in the world right now, it's like the tiny humans are starting out with this proclivity to derive joy from giving their stuff away. That to me, I don't know, it makes me optimistic again about the world. What's less optimistic, though, is that we adults don't realize that doing nice things for others feel so good that it can have such
a positive impact on our mood. I mean, I definitely want to be happier, but I haven't given away a really significant chuck of my income, let alone a kidney. I bet you haven't either. Our lying minds keep saying treat yourself, which means we tend not to even take baby steps towards kindness nearly as much as we could.
It's so interesting because I think on a broad level, people totally recognize that this is the case, and I get postcards and emails and stuff from people saying why did you, as a scientist, need to waste your time showing this Where people are just saying like, oh, we already knew this from like the Bible or from like, you know, what our parents taught us. And I think you know, on a broad level, people recognize that generosity
feels good. I think what they miss is that, you know, when they're looking at how to spend the twenty dollars in their pocket, that's where they make the error. So it's like, in this moment, with this like piece of extra money in my hand, it doesn't maybe occur to me to spend it on something else, or you know, it feels much more tempting to use it to benefit
myself rather than to spend it on others. And again, I think we forget that, like, oh, I could buy a slightly less expensive car and then have a lot of money left over to use to help other people in my life or donate to charity or whatever. And I think you know, that's where the error creeps in, is that we've kind of get that we would actually benefit from using the money less on ourselves and more
on other people. So if you really want to treat yourself to a happier day, give up something to benefit another person. You can start with money, just give up a dollar or two, But if you're strapped for cash, you can also give up time, like letting someone cut in front of you in line at the grocery store. It could even be a small service like helping a neighbor clear off the snow, or maybe taking the time
to rate and review your favorite podcast. And doing nice things for others doesn't just boost your mood, it also makes the person who received your kind actions a little happier too. And that's a kind of tip I most love sharing on this podcast, one that lets my listeners selfishly bump up their own happiness in a way that also helps to make the world a better, more empathic place. And who knows, maybe you won't be satisfied with the small act of donating two dollars here or five bucks there.
Maybe you'll also graduate from those baby steps to the kind of selfless acts that lead to a huge, huge, long standing boost and well being, ones that really really help people. Maybe you'll even save the life of another person, A person like Abby stuck on the highway alone, embraced for what could have been certain death, a moment that has stayed with her for decades. It just stuck with me, the fact that I owe my life to the stranger who is willing to risk his to save me. I'm
hoping that your altruistic Savior is out there somewhere. If he's listening right now, what would you say. That's a big one. But you know, if he's out there listening today, and I just want to say how profoundly grateful I am for the beautiful thing that you did and the opportunities you've given me, and I hope to do your tremendous act of bravery justice. The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley with the help of Pete Naton. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver,
with additional scoring, mixing and mastering by Evan Viola. The show was edited by Sophie mckibbon and fact checked by Joseph Fridman. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Carlie mcgliorre Heather Fame, Julia Barton, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanik, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and by me, Doctor Laurie Santos