How To Be A Better Human Podcast Footnotes

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“ So I used to have a compost bin. Do you know the brown ones provided by the city, the ones that are rat proof? So then he took them away, the city took them away from cities, bringing them back, and so today I asked for one for my building, big one, there's 13 gallon, 21 gallon.”

More about New York City’s compost program can be found here.

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“I'm in Minnesota, so we're doing a project we're putting out working with this park bird in Minneapolis and creating a new park where we're going to be putting all these placards so people can walk and see the Dakota name of the plant first and then the English name, and then a description of how these plants have been used”

More about this project can be found here.

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“Beyond iNaturalist, Journey North is one for making note of migrations.”

More about Journey North’s projects can be found here.

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“Seek was developed for kids because you don't actually want to use iNaturalist with kids on their own if they're under 14 because they are geolocated.”

Clarification: iNaturalist is available for users 13+. More about the difference between these two platforms can be found here.
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“I talked to a Grandma for Future who is currently fighting in some woods in Germany, defending that from deforestation.”
More about Germany’s Grandmas for Future or “Omas for Future” can be found here.

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“Citizen science can be about anything, and one of the earliest platforms for it was zooniverse. And regular people could actually look at the night sky through their computers, and find galaxies that computer detectors can't see, because the human eye actually detects galaxies better than computers do..”

Clarification: Research suggests the gap between AI and human vision may be closing. For more about Zooniverse’s platform Galaxy Zoo, see here.

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“Community science is something that's been around for a really long time, too, as its own category. And it really reflects small communities or bounded communities, [...] getting together to solve a local problem sometimes is called street science.”

While some use these terms interchangeably, see here for more on this definition of community science and here for more on why some organizations are changing it.

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“In Flint, Michigan, when the water quality was bad. And the local mothers got together and said, this water is poisoning our children. And they connected with a scientist from Virginia, who helped them create a protocol to study that water, and then get data and show it to the city officials.”

More about this project can be found here.

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“Now I walk around and I can just say, like, oh, actually, I know that is a jacaranda. That is a loquat tree.”

Jacaranda trees and loquat trees, though abundant in Southern California, are not endemic to this region. Learn more about them here and here.

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“People may be surprised to hear [the Los Angeles area] is really a fabulous place to be for biodiversity.”

More on this can be found here.
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“iNaturalist is a great learning and discovery tool and it's accessible everywhere. There is an app that the same folks produce called Seek.”
More on the difference between iNaturalist and Seek can be found here.
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“In Southern California, so you're kind of at the moment, but maybe not for long being spared, you know, the swirling smoke from the wildfires that are consuming the West.”

Correction: Smoke may have recently shifted to Southern California. Updates on California fires can be found here.

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Wildfires in the West are here to stay. It's it's a product of climate change and also of fire suppression for several hundred years.

Clarification: For more on the link between wildfires, climate change, and fire suppression see here and here.
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“The the plants that you're seeing some of them won't be adapted to where you are, even within 30 years.”

See here for more on why scientists are concerned about biodiversity loss from wildfires and here for more on projections around species loss in California.

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“You talked about how when we started documenting through citizen science, the monarch butterfly, we not only understood a lot more about their migratory pattern, including this amazing five generations long journey.”

More about monarch butterfly migration can be found here and in Mary Ellen Hannibal’s TED talk.
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“Here in the Bay Area, [...] this Western monarch population is probably gone from here for the moment, maybe we'll be able to come back, maybe not.”
For more on how citizen scientists are tracking the decline of monarch butterflies in California, see here.
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“The solution was not right, right, they should have planted the local, the native milkweed, rather than the tropical one.”See here for more on the milkweed recommended for monarchs and some of the science behind this.
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“This is a very important concept of connectivity, that plants and animals, even plants that seem not to move, need movement corridors, to connect to others of their own kind. And so even if you're a plant, you need to be pollinated by a plant from somewhere else you need to be to come and help you do that, or a butterfly.”

Though not all plants rely on pollinators, see here to learn more about those who do.

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“Sometimes scientists themselves are resistant to the idea of citizen science.”

More on the pros and cons of citizen science can be found here.

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“Now, eBird is a product of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. And I can't even I should look up how many observations of birds that Cornell has collected thanks to regular people who are avid bird watchers for more than 100 years.”

More on the history of the Cornell Ornithology Lab can be found here. Total number of eBird data points can be found here.

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“Based on the birders that I know, I feel like each individual person could contribute thousands alone.”

Correction: Individual data is highly variable, but more on data input into eBird’s Global Big Day can be found here. In 2019, eBird estimated more than 500,000 eBirders collected more than 737 million bird observations.
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“You live in a neighborhood where there aren't that many trees and maybe you are at a disadvantage for your health, your longevity, your emotional well-being compared to someone who lives in a neighborhood with more trees.”
More on the relationship between green space and well-being can be found here.
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“We're looking at Lake Mead, you know, dropping to these historic lows. We're looking at California and the West is just going to be choking on no water, partly because of the way we have diverted water in the past and still do.”

See here for more on the state of Lake Mead and the relationship between water diversion and drought.

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“There's wonderful work being done it with native peoples in Canada, making maps of traditional territories that not only have the place names, they have the stories in them.”

One of these maps can be found here.

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“And there's actually a ton of research showing that people who are self-aware are more fulfilled.”

More on the relationship between fulfillment, self-actualization, and self-understanding can be found here.

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“They have stronger relationships.”

Research on this can be found here.

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“They're more creative.”

Clarification: While there are some mixed results about self-awareness, evaluation, and creativity, some research indicates a relationship between authentic leadership and innovation.

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“They're more confident and better communicators.”

More about this correlation can be found here.

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They perform better at work

More on external self awareness and work performance can be found here.

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“Self-awareness is the will and skill to understand who we are and how other people see us”

While definitions of self-awareness vary, some of the theories supporting this definition can be found here and here.

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“It's not that introspection in and of itself is bad or wrong, it's just that many of us make sort of the wrong choice in how we approach it.”

For more on the relationship between rumination, introspection, and self-reflection, see here.

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“why questions tend to produce the worst outcomes when it comes to self-awareness and happiness, whereas what questions were empowering? They were action oriented.”

Research on this can be found here and here.

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“People who are self aware at home, it unlocks stronger relationships, it builds happier marriages…”

See here for more research on this.

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“... and more mature children.”

Clarification: Some studies indicate perceived parental emotional awareness can support emotional adjustment and maternal emotion socialization can support children’s emotional self awareness.

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“There's this idea that if we get in the habit of analyzing everything that happens to us, that's not self-awareness as much as it is neuroticism or rumination right now.”

More on the theory around this can be found here

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“Writing or thinking about a situation from a neutral third party perspective that's used a lot and even relationship or marriage counseling, if it helps us get outside of our own perspective and be more objective about what was happening.”

For more on this, see here.

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“In general, you can't be only focused on the emotions, but you also shouldn't only be focused on sort of the rational what happened. So a good mix between how did I feel and what was happening tends to produce the most insight.”

Clarification: This paper found that when journaling about a stressful or traumatic event, those who focused on cognitions and emotions developed greater awareness of the positive benefits of the stressful event.

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“In a series of four experiments, Krueger and Denning found that most people completely overestimate their talent. What was even scarier, at least to me, was that the least competent people were the worst at recognizing their incompetence.”

More on this 1999 research can be found here.

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“We talk a lot about how to get feedback, but we often sort of make assumptions or we just miss the decision of who are the right people to get feedback from to your point.”

For more ideas on strategies to improve professional feedback, see here.

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“This is a free resource for anybody who wants to take it, a subset of our bigger self awareness assessment that you can basically fill it out in five minutes and you answer 14 questions about those pillars. You send the survey to someone who knows you well.”

Tasha Eurich’s insight quiz can be found here.

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“One of the stories that I tell in the long game is about a woman that I knew years ago, who is this super successful artist.”

More on Dorie Clark’s forthcoming book can be found here.

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“If you're a baseball player, you play in college and then you get drafted and you play in single A ball until they send you to AA. And then you play in, in AAA and then you get your chance at the majors.“

More on progression from the minor to major leagues can be found here.

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“In entrepreneurial you, I tell the story about a guy who in fact is a podcaster named pat Flynn. [...] He had started a blog when he was trying to pass his LEED certification exam, it's this green building exam. [...] So he decided, you know what, I wonder if I package all my blog posts into an e-book, I could sell that ebook. And, you know, he thought, oh, maybe he'll make a little bit of. But it turns out it was so popular, this ebook, that within a couple of months, he was actually earning more from the ebook sales than he was from his day job.”

Pat Flynn’s self-reported income reports can be found here, here and here.
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“I know it does exist for some people, but it really seems like more and more. Insecurity is kind of inherent in work.”
_Clarification: While findings on employment stability over time have been mixed, there has been little change in tenure. For more on this see here, here, and here.--“This goes back 30 plus years, there was a legislation that actually changed it. It's what created the 401k and the whole premise of a 401k is that it essentially shifts the risks of retirement funding from the employer to the employee.”Trends in United States pension plans can be found here. For more on the history of the 401(k) in the United States, see here.

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Robert Waldinger is a scientist whose trying to get to the bottom of these questions. His TEDx talk is one of the most popular of all time, it has more than 40 million views.

Waldinger’s TEDx talk has been viewed more than 40 million times across YouTube and TED.com--Well, some of them that we got from our older people as they look back. And we asked them, what do you most regret about your life? What do you wish you had done differently?Clarification: A similar question was asked in an earlier iteration of the study with former director George Vaillant, but recent versions have asked about life satisfaction using other scales. For more on this, see here and here. --We asked our original guys at one point. Who could you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or scared? Make a list of all those people and some of them could list five, six, seven people that they could call if they were really sick or scared.Correction: When researchers rated the social support of participants, scores were highly variable. See here for more on Waldinger’s findings and here and here for more about the methodology.--What we have seen and we've demonstrated this with a bunch of studies, is that people who feel really connected, like there's somebody in the world who's got my back, that those people stay healthier, longer and they live longer. For more on the correlation between social relationships and mortality risk, see this meta-analysis.--If you are securely attached to at least one other person in the world from the time of early childhood, all the way through the end of life, you are better off both physically and emotionally.Waldinger’s research on this can be found here and here, though the benefits of secure attachment may vary situationally and by age.--
Since 1938, we've tracked the lives of two groups of men. The first group started in the study when they were sophomores at Harvard College. They all finished college during World War II, and then most went off to serve in the war. And the second group that we've followed was a group of boys from Boston's poorest neighborhoods, boys who were chosen for the study specifically because they were from some of the most troubled and disadvantaged families in the Boston of the 1930s. Most lived in tenements, many without hot and cold running water.
Clarification: The Harvard Study of Adult Development is a combination of two studies that began independently. See here for more about the Grant study which began in 1938 studying Harvard sophomores and Glueck study which began in 1939 studying youth ages 10-17 in Boston.
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In terms of gender differences, what we know not just from our study, but from other studies is that marriage conveys an advantage. You live longer if you're married that that we know for both men and women. But men actually get a bigger longevity benefit from marriage than women do.

While there is some variability in these findings around gender (see here and here), studies consistently find that marital satisfaction is strongly associated with happiness. While findings vary with age, this study found never married men had a higher death rate than married men that exceeds the difference between never married women and married women.

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“There have been some decent studies about it that the unequal distribution, what's often called the double burden now.”

More on this can be found here.

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The Dalai Lama. What one thing he said has been really helpful to me, which is he said. My religion is kindness.

The Dalai Lama is attributed with saying "My true religion, my simple faith is in love and compassion" here.

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Incivility is a bug. It's contagious, and we become carriers of it just by being around it.

For more on this, see here.

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It affects our emotions, our motivation, our performance and how we treat others. It even affects our attention and can take some of our brainpower. And this happens not only if we experience incivility or we witness it. It can happen even if we just see or read rude words.

See here for more on the relationship between observing incivility and emotions, performance, and motivation. More on how reading “rude” words can prime behavior, see here.

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I'm the author of Mastering Civility and a new book called Mastering Community How We Move from Surviving to Thriving Together

“Mastering Community” is forthcoming (Grand Central Publishing, 2022).

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We had over 12 percent of people say, you know, based on this one incident where they felt treated rudely or disrespectfully or just insensitively. So most of the time they didn't report this, but 12 percent of them left their job because of this.

Clarification: According to this 2009 paper, in a poll of a large, diverse national sample of managers and employees, 12 percent said they exited the organization as a result of their uncivil treatment. Later work clarifies that harm from incivility is likely to occur from an accumulation of uncivil incidents.

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And we know from subsequent research, it's like the talented are 13 times more likely to leave.

According to this paper, high performers with an above average number of de-energizing ties were 13 times more likely to leave than low and average performers with the equivalent number of de-energizing ties.

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People are three times less likely to be helpful even if they just witness this and turn over the best and the brightest are going to leave.

This study found that people who witnessed rudeness were three times less likely to be helpful than under neutral conditions.

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It's more a lack of self-awareness. So when people find out, you know, the effect that they're having on someone, they have no idea.

Clarification: This survey found that respondents ranked their own civility higher than that of coworkers.
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And then there's a little bit of research that I find like good to kind of remind people of, which is if you preface the feedback you're giving with just 19 words, which is along the lines of I believe in you, you know, and I think that you can have a really positive effect. And so here are some specifics, you know, and so that grounds it.

Clarification: This study found that prefacing feedback with "I’m giving you these comments
because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them” increased motivation in students compared to a control group.

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People tend to kiss up and kick down. So if anything, err on the side of getting feedback from, you know, people that may have less power or status than you.

This study found that employees who fear personal losses from speaking up are less likely to do so.

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You know, people are twice as likely to see you as a leader. You know, they're much more likely to seek and share information. You tend to perform a lot better.

Clarification: This number comes from a study from a biotech firm referenced here. For more research on this, see here.

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I mean, one of the surprises, for example, was just how much thank yous matter and how few times people get it.

More on how de-energizing ties can decrease performance can be found here. Recent research on how gratitude interventions in the workplace can be found here.

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Tom Gardner, who's the co-founder and CEO of Motley Fool. And, you know, I heard him years ago talk at Google about how, you know, culture is so important… And so at the time, he actually challenged his employees.

For more on this see here.

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The way to challenge that is to penetrate that sterility by sort of dissolving the rhythm in the walls of the court and bringing life and humanity and family and community into the courtroom

For more on how language can impact court perceptions of the defense, see here.

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You know, we're talking about millions of human lives and we're talking about an entrenched racist system that was built from slavery.

See here and here for more on this argument and ongoing empirical investigation.

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This district attorney's office [...] that's an elected position.

Clarification: Depending on the system, district attorneys may be appointed or elected. For more on federal district attorneys, see here.

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Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow ... concludes by saying the only thing powerful enough to challenge mass incarceration is a mass movement.

_For more on this, see here.--My friend Alec, a civil rights lawyer who's done incredible work nationally around not only issues like bail and pretrial justice, is the first person I heard talking about it.More on how Alec Karakatsanis describes punishment bureaucracy can be found here and here. --The local public defender's office that, you know, are are doing that work day in, day out and are often not funded or support in the way that those are that are they are given resources to lock people up.

_While this can vary, see here and here for more on why potential discrepancies between prosecutors and defense may persist.--That immediate knee jerk impulse for vengeance and punishment is not a thought out way of addressing larger social ills.For more on how moral outrage and dehumanization can impact offender punishment, see here.

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“When you go into an arranged marriage, you commit to making it work because you know that there's nothing else that's going to carry the relationship you can't rely on.”

In a study of successful arranged marriages, commitment was one of the most frequently reported reasons why love grew in the relationship. For more on this, see here.

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“I'm going to suggest that love is built around two things: the feeling of being accepted by a partner who knows you despite your shortcomings, and secondly, a commitment to personal growth in the other person as well as in yourself.”

For more on the theories behind this, see here and here.

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Now, when I see couples or individuals who come from failed relationships, which goes to the heart of your question, what's happened? Partly that's because in some cases, one of the parties have not allowed themselves to be vulnerable and let their partner get to know them. So they deny themselves the experience of being accepted.

For more on how fear of intimacy may impact relationships and mental health after divorce, see here.

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"Now, before you go out and get all moral on me, remember that Generation X, in the American Public Report, they found that 91 percent of women had had premarital sex by the age of 30."

This 91 percent estimate comes from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth, the findings of which were published in Public Health Reports (2007). For additional information, see here.

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“And one of the big ones that I talk about is influenceability. This comes from Gottman's work.”

While research around the impact of partner influence on divorce remains ongoing, see here for more on the theory behind this.

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“Obviously a physically abusive or emotionally abusive relationship is pretty clear.”

See here for more resources if you or someone you know may be suffering from intimate partner violence.

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In Senegalese Wolof, if you want to say good things take time, you say “Ndànk-ndànk, mooy jàpp golo ci ñaay” which literally means “slowly, slowly one catches the monkey in the forest.”

While there are several different translations to this, a variation is “It is by going slowly that we catch the monkey in the bush.”

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In Sweden, to say someone was born wealthy, instead of saying “he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth” they say “he slid in on a shrimp sandwich.”

For more on how Cuban migration from the 1960s and beyond has influenced Miami, see here.

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Anybody who doesn't speak like that, we kind of push those people and those ways of speaking into the margins. And that creates very real consequences for those communities and those people, you know, access to resources, your own self-esteem, your own livelihood.”

For more on this theory, see here and here.

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I had to devise ways of creating programing around storytelling, that was inviting to other people. So I did drag shows that built in storytelling, you know, video installations that brought in storytelling just to like get people in relationship to language to have a connection with language.

More on the speaker’s prior work on this, see here and here.

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There's something that Lynda Barry, who's an amazing, amazing, amazing cartoonist, she called the word bag. And so if you draw a bag and you're little like notebook and it's like your word bag and, you know, just notice the words that you repeat a lot and start writing them down again, just like, you know, if you're reading the newspaper or somebody says something funny in the TV, just writing in your word bag.

Here, Delgado Lopera expands on Lynda Barry's word bag idea shared in the book What It Is.

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There used to be and there still are a lot of indigenous languages spoken in the U.S.

For more on the state of indigenous languages in the United States, see here.

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My name is Sean Sherman, I am the CEO and founder of my company, The Sioux Chef, and also our nonprofit NATIFS, which is an acronym for North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems.

See here for more about Sherman’s work with The Sioux Chefand NATIFS

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So many kids who grew up in cities are estranged from the land to such an extent that people are surprised their vegetables grow from the ground. It's funny, but it's also like that's a very real thing in our culture right now.

For more on agricultural literacy in the United States, see here.

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And there's just so much more nutrition involved with these indigenous diets.

Clarification: While nutritional value is variable, see here for more research on the nutrient composition of traditional Native American foods.

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If we can have 30 golf courses in a place like Palm Springs in the middle of the desert, what we could do if we did that for good in the purpose of feeding people

The greater Palm Springs area has over 100 golf courses

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All of these things that happened directly to my own family, of having to go through and survive boarding school situations and to deal with a lot of the trauma that was dealt down to them.

_This study examines potential impacts of historical trauma on indigenous American communities.--So we make this dish called wojape. And it was just a traditional chokecherry dish. But it reminds me of foraging for chokecherries on Pine Ridge Reservation when I was growing up. Sean Sherman’s wojape recipe can be found here--

So hopefully you could find an indigenous restaurant in Manhattan or in Chicago or in Seattle, and they would all be different, you know, so we look forward to that future someday.

_Clarification: While there is a food truck in Seattle serving Native American cuisine, there are very few restaurants in the United States.

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“In addition to her work as a lawyer and educator, wrote a beautiful book about a former student of her’s, Patrick, who was involved in a tragic crime and ended up incarcerated.”

See here for more about Michelle’s book and other work.

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“When we experience stories and we experience art, we feel a sense of of dignity and a sense of what is possible. And that makes us want to that opens us up to the whole world and to what other people also deserve to feel.”

For more on how reading may influence empathy and understanding of others, see here and here.

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“There's the, you know, social psychology concept of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Right. That we have to get our basic needs taken care of first, like food, water, shelter, before we can do these higher level things. But in a lot of ways, it's not as simple as that. Like, that's why people who are hungry or unhoused still can appreciate and need beauty as well”

Several theories have proposed that humans can experience happiness while simultaneously working on a number of needs. For more on this, see here and here.

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“There's something very funny to me about the idea that ethics is an elective course that students choose to take.”

While some universities require students to take ethics courses, requirements often vary by university and program.

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“And so one of the issues that has arisen over the course of the past year has been this conversation around what is it reasonable to ask people to do in terms of curtailing their liberties for the sake of public health. So here we have two things that we really value public health and individual liberty. And it turns out that we can't have as much public health as we want and as much individual liberty as we want.”

For more on this debate in the context of COVID-19, see here and here.

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“So philosophers, at least trained in the kind of thinking that I've done, talked for many years about these trolley problems and this shows up in television as well.”

_See here for a TED-Ed lesson on the trolley problem.--“And then folks like Google started designing cars that are going to drive themselves and Tesla. And pretty soon a lot of ethicists are being hired by these companies to be like, all right, well, what is the answer?”Clarification: While independent research from the MIT Moral Machine investigated this kind of moral reasoning, little is known about how or if these are being taken into consideration by the industry.--And here are two stories, which I don't think that writers sat around and said, like, let's let's write a story about polarization. But I also don't think it's entirely accidental that two of the tentpole movies around the same time were about our heroes fighting each other.See here to read more about the stories and politics behind Batman vs Superman and Captain America: Civil War.--“I think that the reason the Marvel movies took off around 2000, 2001. So this was 2001. Obviously a very, very heavy time for us Americans of the movie that came out directly after that was Spider-Man, the first Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie.”Clarification: The first Spider-Man movie directed by Sam Raimi was released in May 2002, shortly after the September 11 attacks in 2001.--“Superman's earliest adventures was fighting against domestic violence. I mean, Wonder Woman is wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, Captain America's conception of Captain America #1 has him punching Hitler in the face and on and on.”See here for more on the earliest editions of Superman (also here) and Captain America.--Superman takes on the KKK. He wins, of course, because he's Superman. Black Panther did as well.“Clan of the Fiery Cross” was broadcast on the The Adventures of Superman radio series in the 1940s and later inspired a 2019 graphic novel. More on Black Panther’s storyline can be found here.--“I wanted to put students into situations where we got to see well what would you actually do in some of these things without really putting them into a situation where there's high-stakes ethics in play.”See here and here for more on Robichaud’s work on using simulations to teach ethics.--“As much as I love reason and argumentation from a philosophical standpoint, that's not always or even most of the time the way that we navigate the world. We navigate it through metaphor, through analogy, through allegory, through fiction. And, you know, there's a reason why we learn so many moral lessons from stories.”For more on this theory, see here and here. --“I am an old school believer in the democratic liberal project. I'm not using in a conservative versus liberal. I'm talking about the use of reason and conversation and discussion as a means of coming together as a community to face the challenges that we all face together, even if we are not going to see eye to eye on it.”Clarification: For more on the philosophical principles of liberal democracy see here and here.--“With police violence, we can see how because of cameras and video being everywhere now, the actual effects of police violence are no longer just anecdotal. There's video, there's photos. There's the stories that are, you know, shown.”For more on how cell phones and video evidence have reshaped policing practices, see here.

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“People who spent money on others got happier; people who spent it on themselves, nothing happened. It didn't make them less happy, it just didn't do much for them. The other thing we saw is the amount of money doesn't matter much. People thought 20 dollars would be way better than five. In fact, it doesn't matter how much money you spent. What really matters is that you spent it on somebody else rather than on yourself.”

This research by Norton and Dunn can be found here.

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“In your book which you and Liz Dunn co-wrote. You have these five principles that guide how to spend money in a way that actually does increase happiness.”

For more on this work see, Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending by Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton.

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“We're really bad at waiting for anything and everything now is structured to come to us right away”

See here for more research on why some individuals struggle with waiting and here for more on cultural influences on immediate gratification.

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“I'm old enough that when I was a kid, a movie would come out and then it would be out of the theater and you could never see it again. That was the end of the movie forever.”

Clarification: The rise of VCRs and video stores in the late 1970s and 1980s expanded movie viewing at home and allowed viewers to watch movies after release in theaters. See here for more on the rise of VCR, DVDs, and streaming platforms.

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“There's cool research. So if people are waiting for a product to arrive like a TV or something, the emotion they experience primarily is frustration. I'm like, where's the thing? I want my thing? Why isn't the thing here yet? Where's the box with my thing? When people are waiting for an experience, the number one emotion they report is anticipation.”

Clarification: This study found people were more likely to experience impatience around material purchases and more likely to derive happiness when anticipating an experience.

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“Looking forward to things it turns out is great in general for our psychology.”

For more on the potential benefits of anticipating positive events, see here.

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“One thing that we were sure to study … with our collaborator Lara Aknin as well, who's at Simon Fraser University was when does it make you feel the best to give, you know, what are the conditions under which it really is awesome versus it's just OK.

For more on this see: Aknin, L. B., Dunn, E. W., Sandstrom, G. M., & Norton, M. I. (2013). Does social connection turn good deeds into good feelings? On the value of putting the “social” into prosocial spending. International Journal of Happiness and Development, 1, 155–171.

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“We see a little bit the same with money as well, that for sure, different cultures have different spending practices. The amount you spend on family, for example, varies dramatically from culture to culture, what you're expected to contribute to the family. At the same time, when we look across cultures, we tend to find everywhere we look that giving makes you happier than spending on yourself.”

See here for more on differences and similarities in giving across cultures.
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“The pessimistic version is there's a curse of being human, which is that the more we have of things, the less we like them. Hmm. It can be like hedonic treadmill, habituation. There's all kinds of words for that.”

Though some research has indicated their repeated experiences may be more enjoyable than people think, see here to learn more about hedonic adaptation.

--

“But we do know that on average, if you take any kind of a break, even in TV, if you take a commercial break, just the commercial break when you come back, you like the show more than if you just kept watching the show the entire time.”

Research on this can be found here.

--

“One of the another curse of modern life is credit cards … they allow us to pay for things and it doesn't feel like we're paying for things … we're constantly not feeling the pain of paying.”

For more on how credit cards may impact the pain of paying, see here.

--

“And what Tami finds is that when people engage in that kind of transaction, we see the other person as petty.”

More on Tami Kim’s research on this can be found here.

--

“And at the same time, 100 companies are causing 71 percent of emissions.”

Clarification: This comes from a report estimating greenhouse gas emissions from human activity between 1988 and 2015. This number includes the emissions released when the fossil fuels sold were used by customers and excludes some sources like agricultural methane.

--

“There is no government in the world, or at least very, very few governments in the world that have a reasonable plan to fight for one point five degrees, like to limit global warming to 1.5.”

For more on this, see here.

--

"The current pandemic is also a result of a very, very mixed up, awkward, unhealthy relationship between nature and human. So the real cause, why there is a pandemic and why it's so much more likely that we have more pandemics coming up in the next decades and centuries."

Correction: The relationship between climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic is still undergoing investigation, but for more information on how environmental change can influence infectious disease, see here and here.

--

"The more engaged alternative towards that is possiblism, which Swedish philanthropist Jakob von Uexküll came up with and possiblists see what is possible."

Clarification: While several others have proposed similar ideas, see here for more on Jakob von Uexküll's philosophy on possibilism.

--

"People see the flames in California and the floods and Louisiana and so on. So that just and it's interesting how people, you know, experience those extremes. And then don't organize in a way I would expect them to organize."

For more on climate activism in the United States, see here.

--

“That is how Fridays for Future happened.”

For more on the Fridays for Future movement, see here.

--

"Stress can certainly interfere with our ability to get good quality sleep. Our daily lives and social rhythms, including our biological rhythms, have also been profoundly disrupted by the pandemic and stay at home orders. The fact that we're working from home. ... And we're also spending a ton of time with our families and with our partners, and that can also create relationship conflict."

While research around sleep and the COVID-19 pandemic is ongoing, see here for studies on how it has influenced stress, social routines, and relationships.

--

"We have lots of evidence to show that married or partnered people live longer, happier and healthier lives than their unmarried or unpartnered counterparts. And it's also true that the quality of relationships matters for our health, but we don't quite know how that transpires."

See here for more on the association between relationship quality, physical health, and longevity.

--

"And yet at the time that I started studying sleep over 15 years ago, very few people were studying sleep in the social context in which it occurs, which is with the bed partner."

For more on Wendy Troxel's research, see here.

--

"The interesting thing is that when we measure sleep objectively, for instance, using motion sensing devices, when couples share the same bed, they actually show some objective sort of costs to their sleep, to their sleep is disturbed in some ways, but if you ask those same people subjectively, do you sleep better with your partner or alone? Most people will say they sleep better with their partner."

This study can be found here.

--

"We've shown that there's really this kind of reciprocal influence that particularly for men on nights when men sleep poorly the next day, they report poor relationship functioning or satisfaction for women. The opposite was true on days when women were more satisfied in their relationship. That night, both she and her partner slept better."

This study can be found here. More research around social relationships and sleep can be found here.

--

"There's also research showing that under sleep deprived conditions, people are less empathic. That is, they're less able to read their partners emotions, their communication skills suffer, their problem solving skills suffer, and they're more prone to conflict."

See here for more on how sleep deprivation can impact empathic accuracy and conflict as well as communication and problem solving.

--

"We see that individuals at the with low income households have higher rates of sleep disruptions and certain sleep disorders."

Clarification: While many factors can influence sleep disorders, more on the relationship between socioeconomic status and occupation and sleep disturbances can be found here and here.

--

"What we see is poor sleep quality in low income, predominantly African-American neighborhoods, for instance, that is a study that we have."

This study can be found here.

--

"And if you're scrolling through social media kind of doomsday scrolling, you're looking at content that often is distressing, even if not distressing. It's kind of emotionally activating. That's exactly opposite of where you want your headspace to be as you approach sleep."

While the relationship between sleep and technology remains ongoing, for more on how mobile phone use may impact sleep see here, here, and here.

--

“We want our bedrooms to be cooler at night than you would during … daytime activities, generally somewhere around sixty seven. Sixty eight degrees is a comfortable bedroom temperature for sleep because the lowering of your body temperature is one of the signals that happens to facilitate sleep onset.

Clarification: While the optimal nighttime temperature varies individually, see here for more on the National Sleep Foundation's recommendations.

--

"Sleep science as a field is a relatively young science, kind of 60 or so years. And it's really only been in the past couple of decades where we saw this major emergence of study after study showing the many, many consequences of sleep loss and sleep disruption ranging from increased risks of heart attacks, diabetes, stroke, now even dementia and other indicators of cognitive decline. We also know that sleep loss is strongly linked with our mental health and well-being."

Clarification: See here for more on how sleep medicine has evolved in the last 30 years since early studies on REM sleep from 1953. See here for more research linking sleep loss and disruption to dementia and cognitive decline as well as other mental health issues.

--

"The general strategy with naps is shorter, is better, and earlier in the day is better"

More research on napping can be found here.

--

"One of your famous quotes is great sleep is the new great sex. Is that something that you truly believe? Do you stand by that?"

Correction: The quote "Sleep is the new sex." is attributed to journalist Margaret Carlson

--

"And when you think about sleep from an evolutionary perspective, it's a vulnerable state to be in. And that's in part why some of us do benefit from sleeping with a partner, because a partner can help to make one feel psychologically safe and secure."

For more on this theory and why it may be applicable to certain attachment styles, see here.

--

Brene Brown talks about how vital belonging is to our sense of selves, to our ability to thrive.

See here for more of Brene Brown’s writing on belonging

--

Since 2011, growth and gentrification have unfolded in San Francisco at a furious pace, my neighborhood used to be part of the Western addition, with all of the ensuing change, it is now NoPa.”

For more on trends in housing prices and needs in San Francisco, see here and here.

--

As we hit the Tenderloin, which is a neighborhood in San Francisco at the highest concentration of homelessness

Clarification: The Tenderloin neighborhood falls within District 6, which is estimated to have the highest number of unsheltered and sheltered homeless persons as of 2019. See here for more information.

--

We are hardwired for connection, right, and the Idea of othering doesn't go away until you expose yourself to proximity, right? This idea that you really need to get out there and perhaps you don't get a chance to really walk in someone's shoes, but you meet them, right? You connect with them in some way. And that's what changes you.

For more on social connections and volunteering see here, here, and here.

--

“It's something that the sociologist Charles Derber described as conversational narcissism. This ability that we have to turn the focus back to ourselves in a conversation”

For more on Charles Derber's definition of conversational narcissism, see here.

--

“It's like Terry Gross is the host of an NPR show called Fresh Air, and she says the only icebreaker you'll ever need is tell me about yourself.”

Jolie Kerr, How to Talk to People, According to Terry Gross, The New York Times

--

“Do Nothing is about taking some of the attention economy away and actually being present. And then this book about great conversations.”

Celeste's books can be found here.

--

“In Buddhism, when you are working on compassion, it's hammered in over and over again”

For more about the Buddhist principle of karuna (compassion), see here.

--

“I explain that in journalism, the rule is that if you put in a complicated question, you're going to get a simple answer out and you don't want the simple answer.”

_While individual approaches may vary, see here for more on Celeste's approach to asking questions.--“I just finished writing a book or in editing. Now, my new book that comes out this fall is called Speaking of Race, which is about how to have conversations about race.”For more on Celeste's forthcoming book, see here.--“You are not going to change anyone's mind, period paragraph. It's not going to happen.”See here for more of Celeste's thoughts on why to not go in to a conversation with the intent of changing someone's mind.--“The more you condemn someone, the more you other-ize them.”For more on how social rejection and condemnation can lead to isolation, see here.

--

“You can try to be this perfect specimen of humanity and set the bar really high for your kids. But it's only going to make them feel like if they failed, they did something wrong.”

To learn more about the social learning theory of perfectionism, see here and here.

--

“After George Floyd was murdered. We had a conversation about like what might be an issue being Black in America. And we had that conversation early, you know, six and seven our children were. And it was very uncomfortable”

For more on how Glen Henry and his wife talked to their sons about being Black in America, see here.

--

“We're kinder to the people we respect, we're kind to the people we love. We're kinder to people who are more attractive, like that's just what we do as human nature.”

See here for more on the halo effect and here on ingroup kindness.

--

“We're relatively private as a species, sexually speaking.”

For more theories on why humans conceal mating, see here.

--

"And then people watch porn as a way to learn about sex."

Clarification: Findings have been mixed (see here and here) around how pornography contributes to how individuals learn about sex.

--

“The mechanism in your brain that controls sexual response is called the dual control model, the dual control model. … "And if I tell you that the first part is the sexual accelerator or the gas pedal, that means the second part has to be the brake."

To learn more the dual control model theory discussed in this episode, see here.

--

“They say sex drive when they mean sexual incentive, motivation system.”

For more of Nagoski's thoughts on the term "sex drive", see here.

--

"But if you are in the middle of an enormous conflict in your relationship, if you are hugely stressed out in your life, if you've got young children in your household, if you live in a world where you don't feel safe a whole lot of the time, those are contexts that are going to hit the brakes."

Clarification: Sexual excitation and inhibition factors can vary by individual and gender. Further research is needed to understand the relationship between having young children in the household and sexual inhibition (see here and here).

--

“I have a whole workbook in addition to Come As You Are.”

Worksheets can be found here.

--

“[Alcohol] makes it actually not legally possible, technically speaking.”

To learn more about consent laws in the United States, see here.

--

"Alcohol has what's called a biphasic effect."

While further research is needed to understand how alcohol impacts the dual control model, see here to learn more about the biphasic effect.

--

"So the first thing that happens is you turn off the off’s, you turn off all the the chatter, the noise, the anxiety, and then you start turning off the ons. Because alcohol is a central nervous system depressant doesn't mean it depresses you mood wise. It means it turns things off in your central nervous system."

See here for more on how alcohol impacts sexual response and the central nervous system.

--

"It makes your ability to make decisions worse."

For more on how alcohol may increase sexual risk behavior, see here.

--

Furthermore, those of us with more minority identities have even more treacherous path because there are extra messages of unworthiness lofted upon you based on stereotype, microaggression, discrimination, prejudice and outright hate.

See here for more on how stereotypes, discrimination, and microaggressions can influence self-worth and self esteem.

--

The literature from self compassion, gratitude, would likely advocate for a separation of comparing to acquire new skills and increase performance and comparing that is harmful for your sense of self.

For literature on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and self compassion, see here and here.

--

Being innovative with what the best science tells us and what I've been pulling from is the literature on self compassion, my first strategy for students is telling both parents, students, everyone is telling them this is not your fault.

While literature around self-compassion and pandemics is ongoing, see here for more on self-compassion and self-blame in other health contexts.

--

The language we use actually primes us in certain directions.

While further research is needed to investigate language priming for the word “should”, some theoretical framework can be found here and here.

--

The first thing I would say is to kind of get clear on developmentally where your child or kid is at and start looking at some of the best practices that the CDC and others have.

The CDC’s resources on talking to children about COVID-19 can be found here.

--

“One thing that I like to talk about that conditions of worth do to us is what I call the three C's. It makes us compare, and comparison, we know from the psychological literature, is the thief of joy. It really brings us down. We compare, we consume [...] and then we compete.”

While many factors can influence contingent self-worth, see here for more for the relationship between self-worth and social comparison, consumption, and competition. More information on a popular model of contingent self-worth can be found here.

--

There's a lovely book called The Power of Habits and what that what a habit essentially does. It takes away your decisional fatigue.

Dr. O’Reilly references The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. See here for more on theories behind habits and decision making.

--

“Another one is getting active. What that does is it kick starts are positive, natural, positive brain chemistry, a little norepinephrine.”

Clarification: While research around human exercise endocrinology is ongoing, see here and here for more on the relationship between plasma norepinephrine and exercise.

--

One low hanging fruit way would be just a block off, maybe an hour, maybe more of just open ended time.

See here for more on how mind wandering may contribute to creativity.

--

“I said, ‘Why are we telling this 246-year-old story?’”

Correction: The musical Hamilton premiered on Broadway in 2015 based on this biography of Alexander Hamilton, highlighting events from the 1770s to the early 1800s.
--

Shakespeare said it: "All the world's a stage." He nailed that part. What he screwed up royally was that part where he said, "And we are merely players."

The quote "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players" comes from Act II of William Shakespeare's As You Like It.

--

“I want to wear a different kind of clothes that will in fact have a deep emotional resonance, the response to both how you feel, but how others feel about you.”

Research on clothing and emotion remains ongoing, but some findings suggest clothing may influence performance and perception.

--

“If I want to make you feel uncomfortable and I design a room with lots of weird asymmetrical corners and things that are going to bump into, then it's successful because I did what I achieved, what I was trying to achieve.”

See here for more on responses and preferences to different geometric spaces.

--

“Lighter airier colors are going to have a more spacious feeling.”

For more on how bright colors and illumination can be used to influence feelings of spaciousness, see here.

--

“How we designed Hamilton in 2015 was one snapshot of who I was, who Lin was, who Tommy was, the director and the writer, who we were in that moment.”

For full details on the cast and crew of Hamilton see here.

--

“So if you show up to work and you're always kind of dressed down, that has an effect subconsciously on you, but subconsciously on the people who you're playing with.”

See here for more on how formal clothing may influence behavior and cognition.

--

“I'm an emergency physician and the author of a book called When Doctors Don't Listen that's about patient advocacy.”

Leana Wen, and Joshua M. Kosowsky. When Doctors Don't Listen: How to Avoid Misdiagnoses and Unnecessary Tests. New York: Thomas Dunne, St. Martin's Griffin, 2014.

--

“But for whatever reason, there are so many systemic barriers in the way. Doctors, for example, are really limited when it comes to time. There's all this focus on testing and on these bureaucratic things that have to take place in medical care.”

See here for more on doctor perceptions of structural problems in medical care.

--

“And that system problem specifically is the lack of time that doctors have with patients.”

While more studies are needed to understand the impact of extending consultation time on health outcomes, some studies have indicated an association between time pressure and physician burnout.

--

“And then patients are ushered through the system where they don't feel like their doctor has really listened to them and understood them. So they don't feel that connection. They don't then have the trust in what the recommendations are that the doctor is giving.”

See here for additional information on patient priorities and here for more on building strong doctor-patient relationships.

--

“Sometimes it helps to have, actually, it's not just sometimes, but it always helps to have someone with you.”

Correction: Findings on the impact of a companion or family member on communication dynamics in medical consultations are variable. While some studies show potential positive results (here and here), others indicate potential negative effects.
--

“That initial conversation would make a really big difference for fostering trust and actually for getting to the diagnosis much faster.”

Correction: More studies are needed to investigate the relationship between doctor-patient trust and diagnostic speed. See here for how building trust and listening can help improve care and perception around diagnosis.

--

“It's one of the steps that's a concrete step that is necessary to be a good ally and that is mitigating your own biases, both the kinds that are conscious and the kinds that are unconscious.”

For more on the role of mitigating bias in equity work, see here and here.
--

“There's some people that are sort of at that awake stage. They're just beginning to understand what we're talking about here early on in determining what allyship looks like for them. And then you've got a woke group that knows how to be an ally … And then there are people that are just working. They are actively doing equity work and they're not in those other two categories at all. They're operationalizing the things that we're talking about.”

A wide variety of models have been proposed around the development of ally identity. See here for more on the role of awareness in allyship.

--

“We're very accustomed to saying that doesn't really have anything to do with me or I don't have the power to do anything about that. So it keeps us in the bystander position.”

See here for more about barriers to bystander intervention on college campuses and in emergency situations.

--

“A lot of a lot of the ways in which people kind of engage with these issues right now or a lot of the most contentious places where they're engaging with them are on social media.”

For more on the role of social media in activism and social movements, see here.

--

“I actually call it fake-quity, fake equity."

Others have proposed a similar idea of fake equity, which can be found here.

--

“I'm an organizational psychologist and author of four and a half books about people, teams and really how to make the experience of work a little bit better.”

Correction: David Burkus’s fifth book was published in January 2021. A full list of the speaker's books can be found here.

--

"Invite your coworkers into what some companies call fika, which is the Swedish word for it to have coffee."

The Swedish word "fika"typically refers to a social coffee break.

--

"When you look at the engagement data of employee engagement surveys from places like Gallup, the three-two week, that's actually the one that engages people the most, even B.C. even before COVID."

Clarification: A Gallup State of the American Workplace report found that employees were most productive when spending three to four days of a five day work week off-site or remotely.

--

“When we all went virtual, you probably lost 50 or more percent of the interactions you had with your direct supervisor because they were accidental, organic or serendipitous."

Further research is needed to fully understand how many spontaneous interactions decrease with remote working. More on the impact of remote work during COVID-19 on team dynamics can be found here.

--

"Zoom Fatigue is a real thing."

Research on the possible cognitive effects of virtual interactions can be found here.

--

"I do think, you know, five or 10 years from now, there'll be technologies that make the magic of a brainstorming or an ideation session a little bit easier virtual."

Early research indicates some benefits of online brainstorming compared to face-to-face brainstorming.

--

“We started to gain new insight into how to change hearts and minds ... with a relatively simple intervention a 10-minute one-on-one conversation that we call deep canvassing”

Deep-canvassing to reduce antitransgender prejudice was investigated by Broockman and Kalla here.

--

“We find in our research that if you're communicating with a conservative, you would likely be more persuasive if you could somehow articulate your issue position in terms of values that resonate more with conservatives like religious values or patriotism or respect for tradition and so on.”

Matthew Feinberg and Robb Willer. From Gulf to Bridge: When Moral Arguments Facilitate Political Influence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2016.

--

“According to Jon Krosnick and colleagues here at Stanford, it isn't so much that conservatives and Republicans don't believe in climate change. Majorities now do. It's just that it isn't a really high ranking issue of significant concern. And they also don't perceive it as as worth economic tradeoffs that they perceive as inevitable for taking action.”

A recent Climate Insights report by Jon Krosnick and work by the Pew Research Center find that while majorities of Americans believe in climate change, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to hold climate change as a higher issue of concern. See here for more on political opinion around the economy and climate change in the United States.

--

“We also find that liberals are more likely than conservatives to, you know, morally judge somebody who's actively not recycling [...] we found that making a new sort of environmental protection argument in terms of purity and sanctity, like protecting the sacredness of nature, tended to resonate more with conservatives than one that was just about protection and caring for the environment, which is a mode of rhetoric that we find resonates more with liberals.”

Matthew Feinberg and Robb Willer. The Moral Roots of Environmental Attitudes. Psychological Science, 2012.

--

“One example was that we looked at whether arguments for high levels of military spending and a classically conservative political position would resonate more with liberals if they were articulated in terms of the values of equality, of opportunity and social justice and fairness.”

The methodology used in Feinberg and Willer 2012 can be found here.

--

“It's just so critical to have trusted sources be the people you're hearing that message from. And so this was one of the big takeaways from the W.H.O. and the Obama administration's activities in West Africa in the Ebola response was you need to define trusted sources.”

Clarification: This was specifically a takeaway of the World Health Organization’s activities during the West African Ebola crisis. For more on the Obama administration’s Ebola response, see here.

Further research in the context of COVID-19:

Bavel, J.J.V., Baicker, K., Boggio, P.S. et al. Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response. Nature Human Behavior, (2020).

--

“A lot of men think of wearing a mask as a position of ... sort of weakness, lack of liberty, lack of individual lack, you know, not asserting your individuality.”

Research around gender and mask wearing in COVID-19 can be found here and here.

--

“That is true that some people have a greater inbuilt capacity to cope with whatever seems to happen to them, not quite whatever happens to them, because there is research that shows that if you’re continually bombarded with adverse events, then of course, that is more likely to erode your capacity to, you know, get back”

More on the link between resilience and adverse childhood experiences can be found here.

--

“And what that is about this is, Bob Neimeyers work about meaning making through loss.”

For more on Robert Neimeyer’s work around meaning-making, see here.

--

“One of the other great advancements in bereavement research is that when someone dies, you don't have to sever your connection with the dead.”

More on the continuing bonds paradigm can be found here.

--

“So the fact that when our daughter was killed, we were told that we were prime candidates for divorce, mental illness and family estrangement. [...] I was pretty furious because and I've subsequently discovered that that is not true”

Clarification: While there is some evidence that bereaved parents are at risk for mental health complications, further research is needed to understand the impact of parental bereavement on divorce rates.

--

“Most of us just do get through somehow and we actually get back to pretty normal functioning surprisingly quickly”

Clarification: Research suggests that many people commonly return to ongoing life after about 12 months of bereavement, while a minority suffer from prolonged or complicated grief. Parents who have lost a child may be at increased risk, but research remains ongoing.

--

“There’s really great research around the importance of rituals of [...] unofficial ways of remembering and memorializing those that have died.”

For more on the role of individual rituals in coping with grief, see this study.
--

“The research suggests that it's really important to be pragmatic and really ruthlessly realistic about what we're up against and that the people who have kind of runaway optimism.”

For more on realistic optimism, see here.

--

“When we decide, as the industry had for years, that female driven action movies don't work commercially.”

For more on this, see this study from the Sundance Institute and Women In Film Los Angeles Women Filmmakers Initiative.

--

“When people assume, oh, well, you can't sell black actors abroad outside of the U.S., the consequences of that are apocalyptic in terms of the actual valuing of black lives in America and around the world. Because we make fewer black movies, we don't market those movies abroad, you know, and it's just fundamentally not true.”

More on the international distribution of films featuring Black leads and majority-minority casts can be found in the 2019 UCLA Hollywood Diversity report.

--

“Stacy Smith, a professor at USC, ran the numbers and found that basically when you support movies with diversity at the same level, that you support movies that don't have that diversity, guess what? They make the same amount of money.”

To read more on this, see the following report from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative here.

--

“Last year the Harvard Business School did a study on the economics of the blacklist and found that movies on The Blacklist, when controlling for every other factor, movies made from scripts on The Blacklist made 90 percent more in revenue than movies made from scripts, not on The Blacklist.”

Clarification: This is attributed to a working paper from Harvard Business School updated in September 2019. For more on the controls and data used, see here.

--

“Increasing diversity is good for the bottom line”

For more on this, see the 2019 UCLA Hollywood Diversity report.

--

“Last year the Academy issued some new rules for films to be considered for an Oscar. The rules had minimum requirements for diversity and inclusion”

Clarification: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced new representation and inclusion standards in September 2020. For more on these standards see here.

--

“I think Netflix just put out that they had 78 million people watched Gina Prince-Bythewood movie, The Old Guard.”

Netflix has shared this information in their 2020 Q3 Shareholder Letter. As of 2019, Netflix measures viewership based on the first two minutes of the film.

--

“Loneliness does not carry a diagnosis. Neither does the experience of failure or guilt or rejection or lots of other kinds of things that impact our emotional health and even our physical health. Loneliness certainly impacts our physical health. So they have those impacts, but they are not considered in the mental health category because they're not diagnosable”

For more on how social isolation and loneliness influence health, see here. See the following for more on the psychological effects of failure, guilt, and rejection.

--

“loneliness has a huge impact on our physical health. It contributes to an early death and is considered to be the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day in terms of the damage that does to our health and longevity.”

This statistic is widely attributed to the following source and is cited by co-author Julianne Holt-Lunstad here.

--

“There are certain practices that we can do on a daily basis that are proven to be extraordinarily useful psychologically and in every possible way. So one of them, for example, is gratitude exercises.”

Clarification: While gratitude interventions have demonstrated some benefits for emotional well-being, findings around their applications vary. One study found gratitude exercises more effective when practiced once a week than three times a week. A recent meta-analysis does not recommend gratitude exercises as a treatment for symptoms of anxiety and depression.

--

“But we find now that the loneliest group of people are actually the youngest. They come out as significantly lonelier than do all the elderly and middle aged groups”

Clarification: Findings around the association between age and loneliness are variable. Some studies have found higher rates of loneliness in younger age groups, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, while others find u-shaped associations between age and loneliness.

--

“What our emotional response to that loneliness is can be very different in certain, like in collectivist societies, it's going to have a different response. Somebody's feeling lonely will have a different response than somebody who doesn't. Individualistic societies, for example.”

For more on loneliness in collectivist and individualist societies, see here.