I think what we have found is that the benefits of connection and the hazards of loneliness and disconnection are so powerful that the reason why we're excited about is we feel like we really want to bring this message to people.
Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today's episode is sponsored by Unlikely Collaborators. Their mission is to untangle the stories that hold us back as individuals, communities, nations, and humanity at large using the perception box lens. They do this through storytelling, experiences, impact investments, and scientific research. Unlikely Collaborators the only way forward is inward. Today we welcome Robert Waldinger to the podcast. Robert is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst,
and zen priest. He is professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where he directs the Harvard Study of Adult Development. His ted X talk on this subject has received nearly forty four million views and is the ninth most watched TED talk of all time. He is the co author of the Good Life with doctor Mark Schultz. In this episode, I talked to Robert
Waldinger about the secret to a happy life. Robert shares with us the recent findings of the Grand Study, which is the longest scientific study of happiness ever conducted. It's been ongoing for more than eighty years now and has had high profile participants like US President John F. Kennedy. In this episode, Robert and I get into the details of how they continue to conduct research and how to
make sense of both the new and old data. Sure enough, what the study has found consistent is the power of connection. We also touch on the topics of psychodynamic therapy, defense mechanisms, attachment, and psychological research and its methodologies. This is a really awesome chat with someone who has led this legendary study. We call this episode the Secret to Happiness, But there's actually a bunch of secrets, and I don't want to spoil it for you. I want some of the secrets
to be a surprise for you. So without further ado, I bring you doctor Robert Waldingter. Hey, thanks for being on the Psychology Podcast today. How you doing well?
I'm doing fun and thanks for having me.
Yeah. I am a great admirer of the work you've done and the research you're continuing to do. Can you kind of start with telling our audience a little bit about how you got into the position you currently have and what your background is.
Sure, I am a psychiatrist. I'm a Jew who grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, and I we knew any psychiatrists growing up, and realized in medical school that psychiatry was the most interesting thing I had found. And so I trained actually as a psychoanalyst, and so my specialty clinically is talk therapy. And then I wanted to learn to do research, and so I retooled in my forties, I went back and took statistics courses and did a bunch of things that got the the wherewithal to do
number crunching kind of research. And at that point, the third director of the study that I now direct, George Valiant, took me out to lunch one day and said, how would you like to inherit this study? So that's how I got here twenty years ago.
I mean, that's incredible that he did. That is George still alive? He is good? Good, because I've been planning on meeting him. I think he's in San Francisco. I've been planning meeting him for lunch.
He's in the LA area.
I just don't want to put that off too much longer. Yeah, Oh, it's he in the LA area. Now, okay, I definitely need to reach out to him. So I'm a I'm a big George Violent fan and v A I L A N T. How do you pronounce his last name?
He pronounces it valiant.
I always noticed that. But there's no extra eye in there. I know that always confuses me. But anyway, okay, anyway, George is such a legend and I'm a big fan of his work on defense mechanisms, and I was, and you know, he's I know you you emphasize connections, but I feel like when he was when he was running that show, he was emphasizing how certain defense mechanisms can really carry us through life and the way that we cope with adversity and the way we cope with things.
So I'm wondering, you know, how much are you interested in in in the stuff that you that George studied.
I'm very interested. So as a psychoanalyst, I'm quite interested in defense mechanisms and how yeah, defense mechanisms really serve us pretty well. What George referred to as the more mature defense mechanism, and some defense mechanisms don't work well at all, and we see that play out in people's lives in our study.
Okay, so let's talk about the study. What a what a whopperduci? This one is? What is the I'm still not so sure on the methodology of it. I'd love to know more about this mysterious methodology that I used to like, what are you measuring? You know, how do you measure it? Do you just de ry on self reports? Basically, this is the Nerdy Psychology podcast, So I want you to feel really comfortable talking about the details with me on this shaw, I'm a fellow psychologist.
Great, do you want me to explain the setup of the study?
Like, yeah, if you could please explain the setup and then you know, what are some of the mean measures that you've been tracking all these years?
Sure? So the study was started in nineteen thirty eight, and it was started with actually as two studies that didn't know about each other. One was a group of two hundred and sixty eight Harvard College sophomores nineteen year old and they were gathered together for a study of
normal young adult development from adolescents to early adulthood. You know, so, of course, you know, if you want to study normal development, you study all white men from Harvard, right, It's like so politically incorrect, but that's what they did at the time. And then the other study was started at Harvard Law School by a law professor named Sheldon Gluk and his
wife Eleanor Gluck, who was a social worker. They were interested in juvenile delinquency and they were particularly interested in how some kids born into really troubled and disadvantaged families managed to stay on good developmental paths. So both groups were studies of thriving but one very privileged, one very underprivileged. And then you know, later on we brought in spouses. Now we've brought in the children, so we have good
gender balance now in the study. But it was originally all boys and young men.
That is so interesting and seemingly very disparate life experiences, you know, seemingly I guess it's possible that there were Harvard students who grew up in poverty and maybe were there any were there any like overlap, Well, you know, there.
Was a little not so much poverty, but some of these guys were on scholarship. Half of the young men had to work to pay at least part of their way through college. So they weren't all rich kids. Harvard was by then trying to bring in people who were not wealthy, but you know, most of them were much more advantage than the inner city so there wasn't that
much overlap. And the inner city sample was not just poor kids, but kids from families that were known on average to five social service agencies for things like domestic violence, severe parental mental illness, physical illness, you know, very extreme poverty, those kinds of things. And then you had asked, so, what's the methodology, what did we study? And we really have studied the big domains of life, so they are mental health, physical health, work life including work satisfaction and
who gets promoted, who gets fired, and relationships. And then for the world. For the Harvard men, they were all of the age to go to World War Two and almost all served in the war. The inner city men were on average nine years younger, so they were not old enough to go to the war, but we studied World War two experiences as well.
Still alive, Yeah, wow, they must be old.
They're really old. They're all in there either late nineties or early one hundreds, and only about forty out of seven hundred and twenty four.
Totally still amazing that forty still exist, that's still amazing. I mean, yeah, I mean this is the biggest power well of your study that I am aware of is one that I talk about a lot, which is Epaul
Torrance's Creativity Study. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but if you're not, I'd love to teach you everything about it because they he initiated that in the fifties and they have been still following up and they still released the reports on what were the biggest predictors of creativity. So you're focusing on happiness, so you're focusing on well being, you know e. Paul Torrance asked a very similar question, which is what who naturally grows up to be the
most creative? Were there any metrics of creative productivity in your in your study?
You know there were? I mean, so we have, of course, metrics of income. We know how much everybody made, you know, at regular intervals, we know about job promotions, we know about professions, but we really never studied that question of you know, who's more creative who's less creative?
Yeah, well, you know, I'd love to teach you all about the Appaul Torne study and what they found. But you know, obviously we're shining a spotlight in your amazing study today. So in terms of happiness, I mean, as you acknowledge in the book which I love, happiness is messy. It is it's not just how feeling good. So when you look at I assume that you attack this issue from multiple different things that you triangulate to try to figure out, you know, if they're happy someday in life.
What are some of the main things that you try to triangulate Because you say in your book quote the good life is a complicated life. You said that, you.
Said that I stand by it is.
Well, I stand by it too. I stand by your right right.
So you know what we did. I mean, we're kind of a text book case in the history of science. So we've studied the same things for eighty five years, but we bring in different methods as different methods come online. So we started out with regular questionnaires, surveys, and we did you know, the original founders of the study did interviews and detailed physical exams, and then every few years we'd send them a questionnaire every two years actually, and
we got their medical records from their doctors. But then we began to audio tape them, and then we began to videotape them. And now we draw blood for DNA and messenger RNA, and we put people into the MRI scanner and scan their brains. I mean, we deliberately bring them into our lab and stress them out and then watch they recover from stress.
Don't stress these one hundred year olds out too much, my friend.
Well, we we were. We actually brought in the kids and stressed. Oh okay, I gotchas. So what we do is we bring in these different methods to try to look at well being through different lenses.
That's amazing. Yeah, you know, the originators of the study would never in a million years have imagined A that the study was still going on, and b that you'd be that such methods would even exist. Imagine going to nineteen thirty eight and showing them an fMRI machine.
Exactly, we're working in your brain or DNA, you know.
Yeah, or DNA. Well, you know, you think about how much science it's a whole other topic. But I'm fascinated with the history of science and and even just the past seventy years. You know, what we've gone from the kind of a pre scientific world to a ultra scientific world. Anyway, that's it's so fascinating. Well, what a what a wonderful data set to inherit, so to speak. You know what that that that you can play around with that nerds
like us can just jump in that. And and so you're looking at well you're looking at lots of correlations. It seems like in terms of causa causative claims you're a little bit more limited there. But what can you still say? I mean, it is a longitudinal study, So that's beautiful, you know that is that does make it possible to make some but you don't have a good control group. That's my concern.
So no, it's really it's a really good concern. It's an important question. You know what do we so unless you do a tightly controlled experiment, Yeah, you can improve causation right right, And we can't tightly control it and say, okay, we're going to traumatize these children and we're gonna not traumatize these children and then we're going to see how their lives play up. That's unethical, right, It's unethical to
do most kinds of experiments on human beings. So what we do, as you're mentioning, is we follow people along and we don't prove causation. But what we can get closer to is that kind of chicken and egg question which comes first, and that's very helpful. So I'll give you an example. Quite a number of people in our study had the combination of depression and alcoholism. And when you ask people who have those problems which came first, the alcohol or the depression, they will always tell you, oh,
I got depressed and then I started to drink. But when you actually look and we followed them, the drinking comes first and then depression. So it's that kind of question that we can shed some light on by following people year after year over a lot of time.
That's true, that's true, but a lot of things came before their depression as well. Just to play devil's advocate, not just you could have you could have said, you can't make the same inference of value. Oh they got divorced before the depression, you know exactly.
So what we do, and this is where you know to your point, we make sure that other studies have found the same things or are pointing in the same direction. So we never claim our study alone has found it and so you have to believe it. Yeah, because of this problem that there needs to be replication of scientific findings for us to have confidence that those findings are not just by chance.
I got you. That's a good scientist in you. Today's podcast is sponsored by Unlikely Collaborators. Their mission is to untangle the stories that hold us back as individuals, communities, nations, and humanity at large using the perception box lens. They do this through storytelling, experiences, impact investments, and scientific research. Today's conversation with Robert really illustrates the importance of expanding
the walls of our perception box. The perception box is the invisible mental box that we all live inside, and it can seriously hinder our ability to understand one another and to understand ourselves. In this episode, Robert reveals the main lessons he has learned from the longest ever study on human happiness. One of the major lessons is the importance of cultivating human connections for being able to weather the storms of life and to live a full, happy existence.
This lesson is very much tied to our perception box. When our perception box walls are contracted, we see the world in a very narrow way thanks to our own stories and self judgments. These stories and self judgments limit our potential to form deep connections with others. This is especially the case when we perceive someone as being very different from us, or we don't immediately feel a connection
with a person. Consciously and deliberately make the effort to see outside ourselves and our stories, at least temporarily, the walls of our perception box expand, and we're able to encounter another human being with curiosity and openness. This can help us cultivate the most unlikely connections and can lead to some of the happiest moments in our lives. To find out more about unlikely collaborators and the perception box, go to Unlikely Collaborators dot com. You said you're a
psychoanalysts by training. That is so interesting because I don't feel like psychoanalysts get a lot of get much love these days, especially in psychology. You know, Phil in the psychology feel we love We've like moved on where CBT where you know act where? Well, they're all all the acronyms, all the things. Do you think do you feel like Freud is overrated or underrated?
I think Freud is both some people over rate him, very few actually, but many people underrate him. So yeah, he in psychology. Now Freud has thought of as like old school you know, almost witchcraft, because he had some ideas that were really wrong right, but he had so many fundamental ideas that were so right that now we forget they were largely made popular by Freud. So CBT was founded by a psychoanalyst. Aaron Beck was an analyst. Yeah, you know that. There are many and there's a great talk.
I can't remember his name. He's a psychology professor at Yale, but he gives a talk to his undergraduate students saying you're going to hear that Freud is, you know, is totally outdated, not useful at all, but let me just walk you through all these concepts that we couldn't live without in psychology because of Freud. So I would say mostly he's underrated because we forget that a lot of what everything is based on had to do with Freud.
Absolutely, I think you're referring to Paul Bloom by the way, I don't remember.
I loved his talk, whoever he was.
I think I think don't quote me on that. But it sounds like something Paul would say. But well, first of all, so that's that's cool, But also, let's give some love to Anna Freud. Anna Freud, I mean that's talking about defense mechanisms. I think Anna did more than than then What's sign did. Yeah, and so let's give some love there. And also I am such a big Anyone who knows me knows I'm such a big fan
of Karen Horney. Oh yeah, And I have been trying to resurrect Karen Horney and show some love to the amazing work that she's done on well, the neurotic trends. I don't know if you're feel that that idea of hers, it's beautiful. And yeah, So as a as a psychoanalyst, you know, do you do you think there's still a place in the modern day world for psychoanalysis? Is we don't need to move completely on from that?
Oh my gosh, I mean it's really I run the psychodynamic Teaching program at the residency at my hospital at Massachusetts General Hospital and McLain Hospital, and it is a teaching program that basically teaches people to talk and listen rather than pulling out a manual. It teaches them. Okay, how do you listen between the lines? How do you listen to what someone's not able to tell you but
you can get hints of it. How do you listen to their train of thought and from that draw some inferences about what's most worrying them or what's most upsetting them, And then how can you reflect it back to them so that they feel heard, they feel understood. And it's very different from taking out a manual and say today we're gonna work on these four dysfunctional beliefs. CBT has a lot of usefulness, don't get me wrong, But this kind of more open ended, exploratory model of psychotherapy I
find just incredibly powerful. And the research is the research says it's just as powerful as CBT. They CBT says it's the only evidence based practice, but that's not true.
Oh yeah, you like those are fighting words.
They are fighting words. But the studies show that psychodynamic work is as effective and in some way in some studies, longer lasting than the results of CBT for depression, for anxiety, for a whole variety of well.
I know some CBT people where that would be fighting words what you just said, but uh yeah, yeah, yeah, because they do kind of have this attitude that there's no evidence space, there's no evidence space, and that's so not true.
I know, I know the evidence based well actually because I've I've had to look into it in a man a lot of the papers about it.
Well, do you feel like the close cousin of depth psychology, which is of a psychoanalytic therapy, which I think is depth therapy. Do you think that's underrated because I think depth therapy that you know, Carl Jung's ideas about about what therapy looked like, his vision for therapy. I think that's really underrated too these days. Do you agree to do too?
I do too. I think he had you know, Freud, Freud wasn't an easy guy, right, and he had terrible rivalries with Young.
And honest, let's be honest. Yeah, yeah, so you know.
So a lot of Freudians and Youngians kind of don't talk to each other, which is of course silly. But Freud had some I mean, Young had some very important ideas and really expanded on what Freud did in important ways.
I think so as well. And then you know, humanistic psychology doesn't get as much love as it should. In my open an existential humanist psychology. Yeah, Carl Rogers and yeah, yeah, yeah, he's been on my podcast. He's been on my podcast he has, yes, yes, recently, recently. Yeah, I'll send you the episode. He's a legend. He's a legend.
Stuff, I really do.
Have you met him?
I only I was at a conference where he spoke, but I've never met him.
He's such a he's such a great guy. His work has influenced me a lot. Okay, so I know we've strayed a little bit away from the details of your study, but I just wanted to go into this realm of what sort of therapies do you think are the you know, underrated, underrated in this day and age. Let's tie it back to your study. So do you view some of the major findings through a lens of psychodynamics? I'm just curious. And then obviously tell us some of the biggest findings.
I know you've you've spoken this on many podcasts, but for our audience who maybe are not as aware of some of the most significant findings, please tell with them and then how to interpret them through what lens.
Yeah, sure, I would say that the interpretation that really what we do is we think of questions to ask that are informed in part by psychodynamics psychoanalytic theory. So we've studied security of attachment in our older adults and their partners. So we studied late life marriage and security of attachment in late life marriage and its links with brain functioning, all kinds of things. So my interest in psychodynamics informs the kinds of things I study and measure
in the longitudinal study. And then there was another part.
You asked me, uh, well, yeah, well, you know, go through some of the most significant bindings.
So probably the biggest takeaway and the biggest surprise from this study was that the people who had the warmest connections with other people weren't just happier, but they stayed healthier. Right, that was the surprise, Like how could relationships get into your body? And how could warm relationships make it less likely that you'd get coronary artery disease or type two diabetes? Right? Like,
how could that be a thing? And then a lot of other studies began to find the same thing, and we came to understand that this is a robust finding. So we've been studying the mechanisms.
What do you think are Okay, in terms of the measures you're referring to give me a specific dependent measure from the psychological perspective, what sort of.
Tests do you use, tests of.
Whatever, whatever you're measuring psychologically. I just I don't even I don't have a list of all the all the sort of tests that you've administered, because it's like, because I'm trying to wrap my head around how this is something I'm trying to wrap my head around, and please explain to me nineteen thirty eight when initiated, it's not like you had very well psychometric validated tests that you
have today. So how are you able to look at continuity over these different time periods when a lot of these tests are recently developed. So that's one thing I'm trying to understand.
That's a great question. So you're right, So we you know, my predecessors asked about the same things, but they asked different questions. The wording of the questions was different. So then how do you compare the data you get in response to one question from the data you get fifty years later in.
Response to my question questions.
About marriage, for example, you know, or happiness whatever. So one of the things that you can do is to look at what are called latent constructs. So let's say we ask about marriage in five different ways over forty years, right, But you can and see, Okay, what's the latent construct, the underlying thing we're trying to measure each time we
ask the question. And then there are statistical methods for converting the data you get in response to each different question into something that's comparable, where you kind of put them on a level playing field. And so what you do is you identify a latent construct and you then harmonize different measures so that then you've got it's not exactly repeated measures, but it's measures of roughly the same
thing over time. So that's what we do, and there are some very well developed techniques for doing that.
Now, absolutely no, that makes complete sense to me. I didn't even know you did that, so it's yeah, so yeah, there. I mean, you can swim in the sea of lead and variable analysis and and and and even you could test some of the older items from the thirties now and see how it loads on the factor of the new factors. And I get it, and I get it now. I mean I had so many of these unanswered questions I don't get from your other interviews because there with
like people who don't know anything about psychology. So I'm left with the more detail oriented questions. So, Okay, now I get it. That's that's really cool.
And then you get to talk to you about this because nobody else.
Asked that's what we do here on this show. That's what we do here. Okay, that's cool. And so do find that some of the kinds of questions they asked that maybe like are outdated in terms of like, you know, maybe not even put a correct like maybe a focused on the male gender, right, you know, because and stuff. Do you find it still loads on on some some some more global factors when you include other kinds of items that are more modern day.
Yeah, yeah, you can you can see that. Oh actually, this this loads really well. This this coheres really well with some of the other measures, some of the other questions we asked. Sometimes it's surprising how well they cohere and surprising how all the predict things. So actually, George Valiant measured defense mechanisms, and he did it in this really creative way. He identified vignette stories people told about a challenging time, a relationship, or a job challenge or something.
He'd take those stories and have people code them and say, Okay, what defense mechanisms were being used here? And then we have so we have a kind of measure of what is someone's primary motive defending themselves against challenge, against anxiety? What are their top two defense mechanisms. And then what we find is that the maturity of their defenses, how mature they are, is so predictive of so many things
later on. And so this kind of rough and ready measure that we created by coding text, by coding stories, turns out to be hugely predictive of health, of well being, of work functioning. Right, So it's pretty cool.
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defense mechanisms. It's been a hobby of mine. I want to send you a paper where we try to do a big factor analysis of all different kind of defense mechanism items from different scales to kind of see what the essential features are. I'm actually I'm just trying to google Google my paper right now, because I'll tell you some of the major factors, and then I want to know how it maps onto which factors you found are
most important? For you said two, there's two biggies, so I want to like, keep keep the drum roll going for a second.
Mean for defenses or for did you.
Say you found top two defense mechanisms. Did I understand that correctly?
Oh? No, no, I was giving an example, like what of this person? But we did find what My co author Mark Schultz and I reorganized George's defense mechanism ratings into two big categories, which were defenses that engaged the world and defenses that avoided the world avoided reality. So it was Waydon's versus engagement. And what we found was that people who were higher on the engagement dimension were much more successful in their lives than the people who were higher on the avoidance dimension.
That's huge. That's a huge finding, huge finding.
They are called facing the music or burying our heads in the sand. That's the title of the paper.
Oh my god, I'm gonna I got a chill because I've been I love that finding. I've been really fascinated with the research in the act approach on experiential avoidance and how that underlies so many forms of psychopathology, and so that I want to find that paper that is really in wine with a lot of other research. So you found those two counters, engagement and avoidance. So we found four facts. We found four factors, and we just
read the factors to you. We did like a We administured so many of these defense items, and these are the four factors. One was maladapted of action patterns is what we labeled this obviously with the subjective what you
able a factor, but we abled it. And they were the kind of items like they included suppression I'm unable to keep a problem out of my mind until i have a time to deal with it, rationalization like I'm unable to find good reasons for everything I do, or I'm unable to keep a problem out of my mind. I'm reverse coding it on the spot. I'm often told I don't show my feelings, so so that actually seems to have to do with avoidance. Yeah, I think that
maladaptive action patterns. I actually, as I'm reading these items, I'm like, that seems to be avoidance suppression. The second one we found was an image distortion factor, which tended to have to do with changing oneself. I am like I'm the greatest. That was very narcissistic sort of, you know, ways of dealing. I ignore danger as if I were Superman. Sometimes i think I'm an angel and other times I think I'm a devil. Something to do with distortion of one's self image.
Yeah.
Third we found were adaptive, very adaptive ones like like using humor or using creativity, anticipation. And then the fourth one was was more altruism. So I feel good when I know someone when I when I know, I always feel that someone I know is like a guardian angel. If I were in a crisis, I would seek out another person who had the same problem. So ways of dealing and coping through altruism. Anyway, that was our four factors.
I'm just, I'm just my My nerdy question is do you do you see any of those four playing a role in what you found?
Well, we do. It's a it's a different way to your buckets, but it's the same coping mechanisms, right, and so like it's just it. And as you know, there's like there's no standard list of defense mechanisms, right because there's label it so many ways. And so what you're trying to get at is four dimensions. We had divided things into two dimensions, but we're all looking at the same I know, styles of coping and so I'd love to see what you did that would be great.
We correlated it with narcissism and and okay, well this is this is wonderful. And how does that how do those findings avoidance approach, how does it link to the off cited finding about the importance of human connection? How do how do you can you relate those things to each other at all? Like do people who have more avoidance do they avoid relationships that would be beneficial for them that sort of thing? Right, Yeah, and.
They often avoid dealing with problems in relationships.
Oh right, yeah, there you go attachment style.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. So, uh so we find that avoidance doesn't work well interpersonally. Right. It also doesn't work well in other things too, like dealing with a health crisis. Right, Yeah, but certainly interpersonally not a good not a good thing.
Why do you emphasize connections so much? In uh, when you talk about this, I mean, you're you're awesome ted talk emphasized connection, You're the book does a lot. Is that like the thing you're most excited about finding consistently or.
Because the findings are so powerful?
Right, that's the most powerful finding.
Yeah, I mean also taking care of your health, which matters hugely so. But but I think what we have found is that that the the benefits of connection and the hazards of loneliness and disconnection are so powerful that the reason why we're excited about it is we feel like we really want to bring this message to people. Yeah that in some ways, you know, it's not rocket science.
In some ways, it's stating something that we all deep down know, but it's just bringing it out front and center and saying, look, there's all this science behind it.
It's so important and there is so much science behind it for everyone. You know that almost every study you find you identifind willeliness is predicts a lot of negative, maladaptive of things in life. Again, I just want to come back to the control question, the control group question. What would that even in this kind of study, what would that even look like like? You know, obviously the two groups, the Harvard group and the juvenile group are
very different from each other. Do you compare them to each other? Ever? Do you? Okay, so you can do cross sample comparisons? Okay, absolutely, yes, that's great. What are some findings, what are some findings from looking at the benefits, because there's got to be benefits of being going to Harvard and having that social support system, having people believe in you versus going through and having people kind of expect, you know, negative outcomes.
Yeah. And actually, the most powerful finding we have on that regard comparing them is that the Harvard guys live on average ten years longer than the inner city guys. Wow, so privilege matters a lot. But twenty five of the inner city guys, twenty five out of four hundred and fifty six went to college and graduated from college, and those twenty five lived just as long on average as the Harvard guys. So what we find is, and we
don't think it's because of their college diplomas. But we think that the support they got first of all to get to college and to stay in college that was huge and probably had other effects on their lives and
their longevity. And then also the education, the value of the education, because you know, the big public health messages about the dangers of smoking, the dangers of addiction, the alcoholism, all that really began to emerge in the sixties, seventies, eighties come into the public health consciousness, and we think that the Harvard guys, because of their education and reading more widely, probably got those messages sooner and were able
to implement them sooner than the inner city guys. So we think that education probably had something to do with this longevity benefit.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. A lot of the Obviously most of the participants are it's anonymous. We don't know who they are, but it was leaked. You know that JFK was one of the study participants, and so you have, like you know, in some closet somewhere, you have a lot of information about JFK and and and and things we probably don't even know you know about him that you know and in his life is I'm not going to ask you to tell me any secrets, but tell me some secrets.
Well, of course, and you know I couldn't.
I couldn't tell you, I know, but tell me.
We don't have the information about JFK. So when he was running for Senate from the state of Massachusetts, his advisors thought it was best that he withdraw from the study. I had remove his records because they felt that having a bunch of private personal information in a in an office somewhere, even though it was locked up, probably wasn't a good idea. So those records are now in the Kennedy Library. Oh, I see, okay, at the University of Massachusetts.
Okay, I see that's open to the public. Yeah, I see. I didn't know that. I didn't know that. That's cool. Well, so they're obviously there are a lot of successful individuals in the Harvard thing. What about the inner city guys. I like how you refer to them as the inner city guys, So I'm going to refer to them. Is that as well? Anyone there you don't think give me names, obviously, but anyone who became wildly successful from that cohort.
Yes, there were there were people who became you know, business owners, quite successful, maybe millionaires at a time when a million dollars was a huge amount of money, that kind of thing. So some of them, I think one had a shop that made the first toll house chocolate
chip cookies, you know, and so very cool. Now I will tell you are are the opposite of the success story which I only found out when it was published in the Boston Globe that in the delinquent sample, which we did not follow the delinquent boys from that study, one of them was the Boston Strangler.
Wow. We we're allowed to know that.
We're allowed to know that because it was published in the in the Boston Globe. Long.
Wow, Well, well, I don't know what lessons to learn from about happiness from him? Was he? Because like what if you found out that he was the Boston Strangler but he was happy? You know, Like, what lesson do we learn from that?
No?
Lesson?
So well, we didn't we didn't follow him.
Follow it up? You didn't follow that up? Yeah, no, I know. That's like, I know that got dark really quick. But I'm just my point here is that the point I'm trying to make is that I often feel like when we talk about happiness. I always try to emphasize to people, you know, it's it's how you acquire that
happiness that matters, sometimes even more. You know. Eric from has this wonderful book called The Sane Society, which is one of my favorite books, and I think it's so important to recognize that being sane in it insane society is actually a marker of insanity. You know, being happy if everyone else around you is dying or suffering. You know, do we just want to reward and say, look, let's
do whatever this person's doing because they're happy. No, you know, so just zooming out to a broader context and not just looking at the factors that predict happiness, but look to see that those factors are increasingly net positive on the world I think is important too.
Do you agree, yes, absolutely, absolutely.
The Boston Stranger is just an example that I was like because it's like that'd be cheeky, not cheeky, but like, you know, you find well terms of the Boston Strangers scores with the happiest of them all. Well, it's not like we then want to like do whatever he did.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, we know that sociopaths are often impervious to write to what other people think of them, whatever you know, and so they seem untouchable in terms of their happiness.
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dot Org. I look forward to welcoming you in December. In terms of like relationship the power, because I'm right there with you in the power of relationships, and I love that you're bringing that so foremost to the culture. Your work has done a lot to bring that to the foremost. I love that there's just there's obviously a lot of nuance there, like being single. Like in terms of romantic relationships, do you find I feel like a good marriage is like one of the best, if not
the best, predictors of happiness. But but a bad marriage is one of the best predictors of depression. So it's not just like get married, it's like, no, no, get married to the right person, you know.
And yeah, and figure out how to work on relationships to make them better. Now, not every relationship is workable, and so you know, as we know, many people split up, and some couples really should split up, some friendships should split up. But I think one of the things we try to emphasize in the book is that it's really important to see what's possible in a relationship to see if it's possible to work through difficulties, because often it
makes a relationship stronger. And once you've invested in a relationship, whether it's a romantic relationship or a friendship, there's huge cost to blowing it off, to jettising it, jettison it. So we want to be sure that we've done what we can to see if differences can be worked out.
Oh, I completely agree with that. I'm bringing down some of this stuff because I feel like you're giving me good quotes for my next book. I think you're saying, yeah, you're absolutely yeah, And of course I'm going to ask your remission before I include it in my book. Yeah, Early, you're giving you, you're giving, You're giving me good You're saying such good things that I really agree with. Uh, just getting back to the needy, gray details of what
you're looking at. Do you have measures of meaning? Do you have measures you know, because like modern day well being scales exist right that incorporate lots of different things. Purpose. Do you feel like you sai? It's a purpose, a sense of meaning in your life. Do you feel like you matter? Do you feel like you're not just connection, but other things. I'm wondering, are using any of these modern day scales, And yeah, we do.
Like we use Ed Deaner's Satisfaction with Life scale, we use some more expanded satisfaction with life scales, and they include questions like, you know, do you feel like you have meaning and purpose? Or what gets you up? And do you know what gets you up in the morning and that kind of thing. So we do, and we use those scales because they are tested, they are tried and true. Yeah, George Valiant and his predecessors made up a lot of their own questions and they were great
at it. It's just that they didn't do psychometric testing on them. And so now what we've done is to bring in measures that have been tested, and that way it allows us to compare our data to other studies that are using the same measures.
Absolutely, because do you ever find that some things that predict happiness maybe don't predict meaning and vice versa. You know, something like when I say happiness, I mean just life satisfaction scale one to ten. How satisfied with you are your life? How what's the ratio of your positive to your negative emotions? That's really just how the life satisfaction
questionnaire is. But do you find there maybe there's some things that over the years have predicted a greater sense of meaning and purpose but may show lower happiness scores. Do you look at that differentiation at all?
We don't, But I think you probably know of Carol Riff's work, where she differently you know, hetonic while being from eudaemonic being well for work. You know, there are people who prioritize meaning and purpose and they'll defer gratification in order to get that. And there are other people who say, no, I really want to party now and
I want to have a good time right now. And so we know that people differ a lot in the extent to which they prioritize the being happy now versus the deferred gratification kind of happiness.
Yeah. Yeah, I'm just curious if you looked at that different differentiation at all. And then, of course the creativity question is so interesting to me. Success have you looked at like the role of self esteem or the role of feeling like you are competent in your life and how much that matters you. Have you looked at that at all?
Well? We have, you know, we haven't I would say, we have not done really rigorous measurement of self esteem. I wish we had, because it's something that I feel is so vital. We haven't done that, but we know people would men things that reflected high or low self esteem a lot in their responses to us. But you know, have we done a particular defined study of self esteem? No?
Fair enough. I mean, you can't measure everything in the world.
You know, when people like you ask really good questions with oh, I wish we'd answer we had asked that.
Well, look, I mean it's it's still one of the best, most unique studies in the history of psychology. Don't feel you know, apologetic at all that you didn't didn't you We didn't include every measure possible measure in the world. The original architects of the study, did they ever plan for this to be a longitudinal study or it just turned out to be that way?
Well? No, I think they planned to follow people maybe five to ten years, okay, okay, but nobody, nobody ever dreamed it would go on this long.
It's a really remarkable achievement and that you're part of a you're part of a remarkable lineage.
You know, really lucky, really lucky.
Yeah, well you're worthy, You're worthy. But yeah, yeah, that's the psychologist me.
Yeah, exactly.
So with the connection thing, what are some of the tell me some more of the benefits of connection that you found. You know, people who were able to have more connectionised we're also able to what in their lives, like what tell me more of the correlations associations you see there.
Well, they weathered hard times better, right, because relationships help us get through the hard times. They were often more successful at work and you know we know this from lots of work. Now that says, you know, emotional intelligence, people's skills. Being good with people often matters more than IQ for how well you do at work. So there are a lot of things we found about connection. They just it has a lot of positive benefits and a lot of benefits in terms of weathering the storms of life.
And remind me how you measured the presence of high quality connections, you know, that's that's a phrase you know in the psychologic culture, high quality connections, which is different than like the need for belonging. You know, you can have you can feel a sense of belonging, but not feel like there's a mutual intimate back and forth. So I'm just curious, how do you measure the presence of lots of high quality connections in one's life?
Well, so in different ways. I mean, we'd ask people about friends, how often do you see friends? What do you do with your friends? I see, I saw that kind of thing. And we would also talk about being satisfied. How satisfied are you with friends? How satisfied are you with your spouse? Uh? How good is your sex life? I mean, there were a lot of things we asked that tried to get at quality.
It's great, it's pretty comprehensive.
Yeah.
Well, I feel like I've don't worry. I think I've exhausted my questions for today. I look at you every time I started to ask question, I think you feel like you're in the hot seat or something like, you know, and where were Roberger? Where were you? One June second, nineteen seventy two. But I really honor and treasure this opportunity to be able to ask you those questions. I've wondered them for a while. And I hope our listeners really, you know, get the main points of this of the study.
They don't get lost in the factor analysis discussion, but they understand the main points here. Any any other sort of mean, you know, sort of points you want to make about what you've gleaned from this enormous data set.
Well, I think that you know, we talk about what we've called social fitness, and it's really just an analogy with physical fitness. The idea that the people in our study who were best at this were the people who were active, you know, who would make sure they stayed in touch with friends, who would make plans with friends, who who were proactive, who didn't just wait for relationships
to take care of themselves. Because they didn't always take care of themselves, some really good relationships would just wither away and die. And so I think that's an important message that's worth getting out there.
Yeah, that's a beautiful place to maybe end. As I get older, I feel like I hold on, you know, more tightly to my most meaningful relationships, you know, trying to make its investment. You make investments easy, you know, calling mom, you know, you know, staying in touch more regularly, calling your friend if who's on another coast or whatever. And these investments and your research shows in a lot of ways that these individuals who made these investments as
young as possible. It lived longer and you know, and lots of really great things, Doctor Waldinger, Such an honor to have you on my podcast day, and I wish you all the best with the continuing studies of it great.
This was a pleasure I really enjoyed by talking with you.
Thanks a lot, Thank you, thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thusycology podcast dot com. We're on our YouTube page, The Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out.
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