Yale professor Dr. Laurie Santos discusses common misconceptions regarding human well-being with Shane Parrish on The Knowledge Project.
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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.”
Assertion Supported
Santos: Genetics Accounts for Only 30% to 40% of Happiness Variance
“You know, even the heritability of happiness is, is lower than you might expect. You know, estimates kind of vary, but it's probably around, you know, 40%, 30%. Like, it's not that all the variants and the happy people that you see out there in the world is li…”