Good News: The pandemic didn’t make us meaner

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Jordan Heath-Rawlings Be honest, tell me what you think the pandemic has done to our behaviour, or at least tell me what it appears to have done. Think of everything that you’ve seen and heard in person on social media or otherwise. Think about the belligerent anti maskers abusing poor service workers. Think about the jerks throwing tantrums on airplanes. Think about the occupiers and the capitol stormers, the online pylons, the hate, the vitriol, the polarization and the general unkindness. It can feel like something broken us during those months of lockdown and fear that we’ve splintered from one another, that the idea of being a good Samaritan or a friendly neighbour just vanished in a cloud of divisive politics and conspiracy theories. Now would it help here at the end of a pretty bleak year if I told you that that is absolutely not true. I’m not doubting your impression based on the stories and the incidents and the videos and the anecdotes that you’ve seen and heard. I feel that way too. But anyway, it’s not true. We are still for the most part kind people who help one another and when the chips were down, we did more of that helping than ever and we have the data to prove it. Does that help you? Because it helps me. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings and this is Good News Week on The Big Story where we hopefully send you out for the holidays and into 2024 with the feeling that things are not as bad as they seem. They really aren’t. Here to help with that today is Dr. John Helliwell, a professor emeritus at the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia, and importantly a founding editor of the World Happiness Report. Hello John.

John Helliwell: Hi Jordan.

Jordan: Before we get into recent findings, what is the World Happiness Report and what does it do exactly?

John Helliwell: Well, the first one, which was produced to support a high level meeting at the UN pursuant to the Bhutanese resolution of 2011, that countries should emphasize the improvement of happiness and wellbeing as a focus of their policy attention. In a meeting later in 2011, it was agreed by Prime Minister Thinley and Jeffrey Sacks and others that we should have a report showing the science of wellbeing as part of the background for that report. The first report was very well received, so much so that we decided to subsequently produce another the first at 18 months after that, the second, another 18 months after that. And then when World Happiness Day or the International Day of World Happiness was created, it was proposed that we should produce a report annually coming out on World Happiness Day and that’s the way it has been ever since and that a number of readers we get is growing up to the many millions now. So we think there’s an appetite for the kind of information that is included, essentially providing an antidote or an alternative or a supplement to the conventional economic and social news that people hear.

Jordan: That’s what I wanted to discuss with you as part of this week and mostly focusing on the most recent report because it’s got some data that was gathered during the pandemic and I think there is a widespread perception that the pandemic made most of us worse, more short-tempered, quick to outburst, more selfish. What does the actual research say about that? Is that true?

John Helliwell: No, it isn’t true and we ended up thinking of reasons why it should be true, but all over the world people dramatically increased relative to pre pandemic levels, they frequency which they had helped strangers. We have a lot of other evidence that when people see something bad happening and other people needing help, they don’t turn a blind eye. They rush into help and essentially that’s what’s been happening as people have been shut into their neighborhoods, they’ve been reaching out to meet and help their neighbors. So it’s about a 25% to one third increase and it’s in every region of the world. So it’s not related to any specific calls to help your neighbors, it’s just the way people are.

Jordan: Why do you think we have that false understanding then that the pandemic broke a lot of us made us mean and quick to lash out?

John Helliwell: Well, because the stories you hear typically are the stories of things going wrong rather than the things that are going right. One of the classic pieces of information which late on in the World Happiness Report, we managed to get into a special edition of the Gallup World poll, what we call the wallet questions, asking people all over the world, how likely is your wallet to be returned if you lost it and it was found by a stranger or alternatively a police officer, and we were able to see the value of those to people. In other words, how much happier were they feeling? Their wallet would be returned and the answer was hugely more happy. So it’s very important to feel that sense of trust. Well, there were also experiments done actually dropping wallets, so it’s easy enough to find whether people are too pessimistic or not optimistic enough about other people in their communities in particular. We also had these wallet questions in the Canadian General Social Survey, and this is especially important for your Canadian listeners and the Toronto Star not realizing they were contributing to science. So importantly had another experiment they ran of dropping 20 wallets all over downtown Toronto. The survey said from the Toronto respondents to this survey that the likelihood people felt that their wallet would be returned was a quarter, and that’s a very big sample of people, wasn’t a huge sample of wallets, but 80% of the wallets were returned. And so it’s a small sample, but the difference is so extreme. There’s one chance in 7 billion that people are being optimistic enough about their neighbors and since your happiness depends not on the actual number of wallets because presumably you don’t know it or you wouldn’t, wouldn’t give those answers to the survey, what people expect about the likelihood of their wallet being returned. So one of the very best things we could do in the report and as media is to tell people that in fact the world they live in is a lot friendlier and more helpful than they think it is, and that’s a cheap and easy way of making them happier. And of course it’ll change their behavior so they’ll be less likely to protect their children, they’ll be more likely to open the doors between the old and the young and so on.

Jordan: The wallet is obviously a great example of it, but just in general as we think about people caring for others, the report qualifies it. I guess as a pro-social act, what does that cover? How broad is that term? Give us some examples that we might not recognize as them.

John Helliwell: Take your pick. It’s essentially anything that is designed or not necessarily designed has the effect of helping other people and ideally intentionally. So some of the classic things that were measured in the Gallup world poll include donations, voluntary work, and the one I mentioned before, the helping of strangers. Generally all kinds of cooperative work where you actually do things that are not in your own interest directly because it will help others, and there’s a whole range of those kind of activities. It includes when you’re dealing with who’s going to do what to produce something, not caring about what share you’re getting and what share of the work you’re doing just together moving ahead, supporting each other and cooperating and of course that makes people happier.

Jordan: You mentioned that we saw this increase across the entire world. Were there any places where we saw it more or less?

John Helliwell: It was very similar so that none of the differences we found I think were statistically significant across regions, so that’s one of the things that made it so dramatic.

Jordan: Do we know what’s to blame for the rise in Pro-social acts during the pandemic? I know as it began, there was certainly a lot of messaging from everyone, from government leaders to brands even in commercials about like, we’re all in this together. Was it that messaging? Is it just the way humans respond to this kind of stress? Is it in our nature? Could we determine where it came from?

John Helliwell: Well, let’s not call it blame, let’s call it who gets the credit, because unequivocally it was a good thing and it was good for the world and it was good for the people on both sides of that exchange. I don’t think it was the messaging because the messaging happened only in some countries and this behavior happened everywhere. So I think we’re talking about something that’s much more hardwired into the human structure than people give it credit for being. There’s quite a wave or a field of evolutionary psychology that argues that the social groups, which will then be initially tribes and families, but end up being societies that have a capacity to survive in an uncertain and sometimes dangerous world are the ones for whom cooperation comes naturally. Obviously, when pro-social acts arise out of just who you are, then that means you rush in right away to help other people and that increases the chances that together you’re going to survive and thrive.

Jordan: What do we know about the impacts of these acts? Not on the people that we are helping obviously, but on ourselves. I know a lot of people listening right now, our parents probably told us that doing good deeds is just as much for yourself. It makes you feel better, I’m hoping. And I guess assuming that the research bears that out and do we know why?

John Helliwell: Well, it is for the reasons we’ve been discussing. It’s built right into us to do things for others. And whenever you do the right thing, and Aristotle got onto this a couple of millennia ago when he said, living the good life, doing what’s good for others and the society as a whole indeed makes you more inclined When asked, and this is the happiness question we use, how do you evaluate your life as a whole these days? People who’ve done good things for others give a higher writing to their quality of their life, and it’s a natural thing for them to do.

Jordan: I’ll ask you a question, I guess on behalf of most media, but also mostly just for myself and those of us at this show, and that’s how do we balance the idea that people have this perception that the world is getting meaner and nastier and sadder because that’s in the news with the responsibility that we obviously have to report what’s going on? I mean, there’s no question that on this show, when we cover one topic a day, we try to make room for good news where we can, but the news is usually not great and we have a responsibility to convey that. How do we do that in such a way that still conveys to our audience that the world is better than this one story? Perhaps

John Helliwell: That’s always been a challenge because there is this, even in psychology, they say it isn’t just the media themselves focusing on the negative just because that’s the way they feel when given a choice. People often go to the alarming and the special to look at first, one way of dealing with it, of course, is to make sure that the good news is made as interesting as the bad news. So it means not only having a special session where you concentrate on it, but doing it in a way that not only makes it obviously true, but invites people to create a little more of that themselves because it’s the social norms that govern how people treat each other, and those are the things that get shattered when people start thinking that other people are out there to take advantage of them. And of course there are things in our daily lives that threaten our sense of the goodness of others. Those scamming emails and telephone calls that people get in maybe even increasing quantities then make them shy about believing that other people really are good. It doesn’t need very many people doing bad things to create an image of living in a bad society. The goodness doesn’t shine out as dramatically, and that’s why of course it needs recording and measuring and talking about. So people are not just thinking they’re being stupidly optimistic when they relax in front of others and reach out to them, but saying in fact, the surrounding community is in fact more helpful and supportive than they thought it was. And so once they really changed their mind about that and are convinced, and that’s why the wallet experiments are so good, because it’s quite precise. We know that people underestimate the goodness of others, but that question allows us to combine the experimental evidence we now have from 50 countries, which shows a lot of generosity with the converse, and so we have to shout about some of the good news in order to, but it has to be quality shouting, if you know what I mean. You can’t just say, be hopeful everyone, regardless of what’s going on around you, you say Actually what’s going on around you justifies you being much more friendly, much more open, and to reach out and help others because it will help you as well as it helps them. There’s one final point on that question that you raised earlier about what should you tell people about it? I don’t concentrate so much on doing good things for other because it’ll make you feel better because there’s quite a lot of evidence that people are doing it because it’s the right thing to do. And if you tell ’em or even accuse them of doing it just because it’ll make them feel better, then it won’t. So it’s a philosophical question. You want it to be something that happens naturally and the happiness is not the purpose of doing it. Happiness is the consequence of doing it. So the general advice is seek the happiness of others, and if you do it in the right sorts of ways, you’ll probably end up happier, but don’t focus on that. Don’t do it because you think it’ll make you happier, because if you focus on that motive of getting happiness for yourself, then it won’t work as well for others and it won’t work as well for you.

Jordan: What can people do to counteract, and you can argue with me on this if you think I’m wrong, but it feels like in recent years it has become a even more effective political strategy for politicians to convince people that the country is broken or crime is rampant or people are coming to steal your jobs. And that fear that you were just talking about that drives people towards the negative has become an even more effective tactic. What can people do themselves to counteract that messaging inside their own head when they see it or hear it?

John Helliwell: One of the reasons people have given for the fact that people are generally more satisfied with their lives as they get older is that one of life’s skills is to learn from good things and bad things, but after you’ve learned from the bad things, you put them away in a drawer and you don’t dwell on them while the good things you burnish and you show and you look at in order to convince you that that is the case and it lightens your spirit. And it’s just a question of emphasis. And that capacity is within all of us to change what we look at and how we look at it, how we store our past, so we create a hopeful future rather than a despairing future. The purpose of the world Happiness Reports is to provide people with the evidence that that’s just not being a silly Pollyanna. That in fact it actually represents the state of the world as being one that is worth their investing in these pro-social ways, and it already has more people in it than they think it had.

Jordan: The last thing I want to ask you then is what can we learn from the last decade plus of happiness research that we can apply during really difficult times? I know this research was taken during the extreme lockdowns of the pandemic and perhaps the early days of the war in Ukraine. Look, we all know that we’re going to have a climate reckoning coming somewhere down the line. What have we learned in the last dozen years or so from this report that can be applied when we start thinking about that or when we start factually experiencing it?

John Helliwell: Well, one thing to remind ourselves, and we haven’t talked about it yet in this conversation, is that if people talk for example now about an epidemic of loneliness. In fact, in 2022, which was still a pandemic year, there was a major survey done in many countries that we have had access to and used in the report that shows that feeling of being socially supported were twice as prevalent as feelings of loneliness. And not only that, they were more important for your feeling of wellbeing than the presence of loneliness was detrimental to it. And we also find and continue to find in the Gallup World Report, people talk about some increases in some of the negative emotions, but in fact, the positive emotions remain twice as prevalent as the negative ones. And that was true in both good times and bad times. And so to remember that helps you to put the bad things in context.

Jordan: John, thank you so much for this. It’s a delight to have conversations like these, and I really hope this chat and this week helps put it in some context for people who may be feeling down around this time of year.

John Helliwell: Well, good for you for making the effort to burnish the good and get it out there, especially as holiday times are coming.

Jordan: Dr. John Helliwell of the University of British Columbia and a founding editor of The Happiness Report, that was the first of five episodes of this Good News Week. I hope it made you feel better. We’ve got some more fun things coming, I promise. Nothing bad, nothing terrifying. You can put that out of your mind a little bit. Trust me. We’ll be back on The Big Story first thing in 2024, and there will be bad news. There always is, but not this week dammit. If you want to talk to us, you can always find us on Twitter at The Big Story fpn. You can always email us. That address is hello at The Big Story podcast.ca. You can call us up and tell us if this made you feel a little happier. The phone number is six nine three five five nine three five. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings, and I will be happy to talk to you tomorrow.