Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Santos: People Instinctively Pick Reference Points That Make Them Feel Inadequate

Laurie Santos · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · Jun 14, 2022 · at 8:56

Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos discusses the cognitive biases that undermine human well-being and life satisfaction with Shane Parrish.

0:00 / 0:12exact quote · 12.4s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The comparison point you pick is always somebody that's going to make you feel like crap. And that makes sense. You know, we want to have something to shoot for, but it means we never feel good with what we have. We're always finding reference points that make us feel bad.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Laurie Santos

Insight
Santos: Depriving Kids of Failure Drives Rising College Student Anxiety
“I mean, I think that's right, and I think this is one of the reasons we're seeing so much more anxiety in our college students today, right, is that they've never had a chance to mess up. They've never had a chance to do it on their own, and so when they final…”
Laurie Santos Jun 14, 2022 ▶ 1:07:16 Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness
Insight
Santos: Time Famine Harms Well-Being More Than Lack of Money
“A lot of the unhappiness hit that comes with poverty isn't necessarily a not having money hit, it's a not having time hit. You know, so she argues that time famine comes with, you know, being low income, and it's actually the time famine that's a real hit on w…”
Laurie Santos Jun 14, 2022 ▶ 1:34:42 Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness
Assertion Partly supported
Santos: Over-Intervention by Parents Causes Children to Give Up Faster
“What she finds is that when you give kids a very different puzzle later on, kids who've had that taking over condition, where the parents give the answer, give up much more quickly. And if you find ways to survey them about what they believe, like, they probab…”
Laurie Santos Dec 27, 2022 ▶ 11:30 Best of 2022: Conversations of the Year
Insight
Santos: Altruistic Actions Generate More Happiness Than Self-Care Luxuries
“Happiness is about achieving these accolades. It's not. We often think happiness is about self-care and treating ourselves and giving ourselves these luxuries. It's not. In fact, if anything, it's about doing nice things for others. That gives you more of a ki…”
Laurie Santos Jun 14, 2022 ▶ 14:20 Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness
Assertion Supported
Santos: Religious Happiness Comes From Behaviors, Not Theological Beliefs
“When you really do that work, what you find is that the effect of the correlation between religion and happiness seems to be pretty fully mediated by those religious behaviors. So going to church, doing nice things for other people, you know, taking part in al…”
Laurie Santos Jun 14, 2022 ▶ 31:27 Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness
Assertion Supported
Santos: Feeling Time-Famished Damages Well-Being as Much as Unemployment
“In fact, some work by Ashley Willans shows that if you self-report being time famished, that's as big a hit on your wellbeing as if you self-report being unemployed.”
Laurie Santos Jun 14, 2022 ▶ 1:30:30 Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.