Psychologists and philosophers have debated what makes a good life, traditionally focusing on the search for happiness and meaning. Recently, though, the quest for another sensation has entered the conversation: fulfillment. Shigehiro Oishi, Marshall Field IV Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss his concept of “psychological richness,” where curiosity and spontaneity provide the stimulation we need, and how this outlook can carry us even through the hardest patches of our lives. His book is “Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] I have fond memories of this green curry I had a while back. It somehow managed to balance the sweetness of coconut milk, the sourness of maybe tamarind, the savory, salty of perfectly fried tofu, the mild bitterness of basil, and the spicy sting of chili in every single bite. I would choose this curry over a sugar cube any day. So why is it so easy to assume a sweet life? Happy, easy, predictable. Uncomplicated is always better than a more complex existence. From K-E-R-A in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. My guest calls it a psychologically rich existence. This mixed combination of experiences that can yield deep satisfaction, if not the same buzzy euphoria as that metaphorical spoonful of sugar. He’s noticed that most studies of what makes a good life have focused on happiness or meaning. But he is eager for us to understand those are not the only paths. Shigehiro Oishi is Marshall Field IV Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. His book is called “Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life.” Shigehiro welcome to Think.
Shigehiro Oishi [00:01:13] Thank you.
Krys Boyd [00:01:14] You have thought about this question of how to define a good life, in part because your choices have been so different from your father and your grandfather and all your male ancestors all the way back. Will you tell us a little bit about that?
Shigehiro Oishi [00:01:29] Yeah. You know, I grew up in a rural area in Japan, and my family was always a farmer. And my father, who was the first son in this family. So, you know, he took over his farm and never left. And, you know, he lived his life and other life in that same village and meeting with the same people, doing the same thing, very, very traditional life. And on the other hand, I am also the first son of the family, but just left the farm as quickly as I can, essentially, and never look back and, you know, moved around, moved to Tokyo and then came to the United States. And it just occurred to me like actually until like five, ten years ago, I never thought about this, but wow, how different my dad’s life, my grandparents, you know, grandfather, great grandfather’s life had been compared to me. And I’ve been studying, you know, what’s good life professionally. And that was the first time I thought about, wow, what a different life my dad chose to do. Life of, you know, stability, coziness. And I chose a different life. And I felt like, yes, both way you can. You can you can reach a good life.
Krys Boyd [00:03:00] Yeah. I mean, you in pursuing the life that you wanted, you moved halfway around the world. You had to learn a new language and work in a very competitive field. I mean, some people would look at these. I mean, they’re challenges, but they could also be hardships. How did those challenges play into what for you has been a good life?
Shigehiro Oishi [00:03:19] Yeah, actually, I mean, I was fortunate to have opportunity to get a job and another job offer and so forth. So my first job was in Minnesota, and then I moved to Virginia and I moved to New York, went back to Virginia, and now in Chicago. And actually, what struck me was I studied, you know, the science of happiness. I knew what makes people happy. Yet my own personal choice was completely driven by, you know, the big promotions and things of that sort. And I realized I’m really happy with, you know, what I’m doing. And I realize, my gosh, my dad never moved, never changed, you know, his residence or spouse or anything like that. But he seems to be really happy. And that’s what I thought about the you know, maybe I wasn’t essentially maximizing happiness, although sort of I knew, you know, what I should have been doing, which is like, you know, to live a life of stability and live like my dad.
Krys Boyd [00:04:36] What have been the traditional ways of defining what a good life is?
Shigehiro Oishi [00:04:42] Yeah. So I think traditionally a lot of people thought about the good life as a happy life where the person who lives feels satisfied with their lives and feel happy. So that’s that’s primary sort of the path. And another one is to lead a meaningful life. And whereas, the happy life should be sort of the personal happiness, even at the expense of others happiness, which is sort of what I did probably, I mean, my my children didn’t want to move from Virginia to New York, and I took them so, personal happiness has oftentimes the focus on the self, the maximization of the personal happiness, whereas the meaningful life is all to make other people happy, even at the expense of their own happiness. So personal sacrifice and things of that nature. So traditionally those twos are, you know, the two path. It’s to the good life.
Krys Boyd [00:05:54] So what you’ve chosen is this thing that hasn’t been talked about so much by researchers or by philosophers. What is a psychologically rich life?
Shigehiro Oishi [00:06:04] Yeah. So we define psychologically a rich life as a life filled with interesting, diverse, unusual experiences, and that often come with a perspective change. So this is a type of life that is adventurous and doing a lot of different things over time and expanding your horizons. Personal growth is important part of it. So it’s often stressful, challenging, but really trying to make your life as curious, interesting as possible.
Krys Boyd [00:06:39] So to what extent, she said, is any of us able to choose which form of a good life we will actually pursue?
Shigehiro Oishi [00:06:47] Yeah. I mean, you really don’t have to choose just one. However, when you look at the empirical sort of the science of happiness and meaning in life, that the people who say they lead a happy life or meaningful life tend to have this fundamental stability in their lives, financial stability, interpersonal stability and things like that. So for some people who do not have that kind of stability and maybe luxury, you know, happy life and meaningful life may be a little bit difficult to reach. On the other hand, psychological reach life is could be achieved, you know, by by putting yourself in a different situation, new new environments, getting to know new people and things of that nature. So so, you know, some people remarkably do all those. But given the limited time. Right. We all have 24 hours a day. You know, there are some trade off, right. If you if you want to focus on happy life, then we all know what you should do is have a cup of coffee with your best friend, you know, every week, have a romantic dinner with your partner once in a while. So these little things really add up to a happy life. On the other hand, if you. It easily bored with that type of routines and things like that, then maybe you are more, you know, better suited to pursue a psychologically rich life and doing something different.
Krys Boyd [00:08:32] I want to talk through some of the potential pitfalls of choosing a happy life or seeking out life. Right one. One problem is that regardless of our temperament, no matter how sunny we are, there is no way to experience happiness consistently. We’re going to have good days and bad days, good years and bad years. Does that make seeking happiness risky?
Shigehiro Oishi [00:08:52] Yeah, I think you can say so that actually those people who are really happy do not consciously try to maximize their happiness. Right? I mean, Danes and Finns, you know, in the whirlpool, they always rank number one, number two, number three. And they’re the happiest people in the world. But if you ask them, what’s the secret to their happiness, they often say, well, lower your expectations, Right? Be happy with what you have. So the happy people actually Soco satisfies that, that, you know, those people who can say this is good enough for me, Right. On the other hand, if you really saw those people who can honestly say that and be happy with their life, that’s fine. Right? But in this culture, we often equate happiness with personal success. So what that does is that, you know, when you are not feeling happy, then you treat that. You see that as a sign of personal failure. So it if you do that, the life is really, really difficult or, you know, all of sudden the negative emotion, negative events seems very, very alienating. So that’s why I think that the pressure to feel happy or trying to maximize happiness could be potentially dangerous or backfire.
Krys Boyd [00:10:18] You have an interesting perspective on this because you have lived in more than one country. Why do you think American culture puts us at particular risk for this idea that happiness is something everybody ought to be able to have if only we work hard enough at it?
Shigehiro Oishi [00:10:32] Yeah, I mean, this is the long history of protest and work ethics which exist not just United States, but elsewhere in the country, in the world as well. But I think this tendency of seeing a personal fortune so so pursuit of happiness was in, you know, the 1776 the Declaration of Independence. But what’s interesting is that originally Thomas Jefferson didn’t think of this as a personal happiness scholar. I think that he meant more of the pursuit of property, private property, but also more of the, you know, citizenship. So public happiness or collective happiness. But of course, over time, you know, just our culture, of course, changed to equate the happiness with just sort of the okay, something that we can get so fictionally. If you look at the Webster Unabridged Dictionary of 1820, for instance, happiness is defined as good luck and fortune. And that has been that that definition for the longest time. But in 1961, if you look at the same Webster Unabridged Dictionary, there is the denotation saying I take and now the definition became more of the satisfaction with of personal needs and goals and desire. So you know, something happen, of course, in the history of the United States and you know, personal accomplishment became important, fulfillment became important. And so we started to equate happiness as the personal success. And it’s really funny when you ask just for free association, what comes to your mind when you hear the word happy? A lot of American students say things like victory or reward for hard work, and that’s very, very different from, you know, when you ask students in Japan or China or elsewhere.
Krys Boyd [00:12:39] How might people in countries where there isn’t the same pressure to be happy deal better with the occasional negative mood, bad day, bad experience?
Shigehiro Oishi [00:12:50] I mean, I’ll give you a Buddhist example because I grew up Buddhist, but in Buddhism we say life is suffering. Imagine that if you expect life to be suffering, then when you encounter suffering, you just accept that as life, right? On the other hand, if you just think that life is unlimited possibilities and it’s all up to you whether you make it or not, it is very, very difficult to accept some of the failures and a lot of bad things happen to the good people. And of course, like L.A. fires, no matter how good you are, how virtuous you are, these bad things happen. So nothing to do with your personal failing. And I think that’s the places where when you think happiness as a good luck and fortune, then unhappiness. Unlucky events can be acceptable. But when you think of, you know, happiness as a personal. Success. And then that’s where it becomes very, very difficult.
Krys Boyd [00:13:55] Shigehiro what irony in all this is that humans turn out to be not all that good at predicting what will cause us lasting happiness or unhappiness.
Shigehiro Oishi [00:14:03] Right. Right. So there’s a really amazing study by Dan Gilbert and Tim Wilson where, you know, they ask assistant professors like, how would you feel if you got tenure? And this is sort of like dumb question, of course. Assistant professor say, of course I be delighted, ecstatic. And then, you know, they ask also, what if you didn’t get tenure? And then they said, my gosh, I’ll be depressed and I’ll be devastated. Right. But the interesting thing is that they went and interviewed those people who actually got tenure and those people who actually didn’t get tenure. And what they found is pretty interesting, good news is that those people who didn’t get tenure were actually pretty happy. And the bad news is that those people who actually got tenure as well, as happy as the assistant professor imagined. So in general, we really overemphasized that. The few big events like promotion, weddings and getting a new car, those are the things that critical for our happiness. Right. But actually, yeah, it is when we get a new car, you know, getting married and so forth, we are happy. But that doesn’t last as long as we think it will. So. So that’s the that’s the part they call affective forecasting error. But it’s really difficult for us to predict what makes us happy.
Krys Boyd [00:15:37] Some philosophers have argued a happy life might not be very interesting, so they have chosen meaning over happiness in broad stroke. In broad strokes, what makes life meaningful?
Shigehiro Oishi [00:15:51] Yeah. The meaningful life is characterized by three things. The first thing is that there is a significance to the person who lives that they feel that their life matters. Their life is making a difference. The second point is that those people who think their lives are meaningful tend to have very, very clear vision, a clear sense of purpose. So they are they know exactly where they are going. The number three factor is a sense of coherence. You know, we you and I, everybody has a lot of different roles, Right? Our professional roles, our, you know, family roles and the neighbors and all kinds of different things we do. And people who think their life is meaningful have a very coherent sense of these different kinds of roles. So everything put together very nicely. On the other hand, those people who are struggling with meaning thinks that their life is very, very fragmented and there is no sort of a sense of coherence. So yeah, that’s the really a huge difference between those people who think their life has a point versus their life is pointless.
Krys Boyd [00:17:11] Is there a meaning trap that we need to be aware of?
Shigehiro Oishi [00:17:15] Yeah. So I think those people who are leading meaningful life are doing great in general. But the science of meaningful life, actually Laura King at the University of Missouri found this recently that shockingly, those people who endorse right wing authoritarianism, these are the people who say we should be really following rules and, you know, follow authorities. They tend to score higher on meaning in life than those people, you know, who do not agree with those kinds of conformity related items. So what we found is that essentially, you know, sometimes you see people drifted into sort of the so-called terrorist organization, and we often wonder how did they end up in that terrorist organization? Oftentimes, these are the people who did not have a sense of direction, a sense of purpose and so forth. And this organization gave them a very, very clear sense of what their actions give rise to that, you know, bigger, you know, good and so forth. So they just embraced that vision of the life and principles and, you know, coherence and so forth. And what’s dangerous there, as you know, is that, of course, they care about their people, but they don’t care about the other people, so they harm other people. So often time meaning comes from often them that sometimes some people find meaning in sort of the antagonism against somebody. Right. Political party is a little bit like that, right? I mean, we we feel the strongest sense of meaning and we’re doing the right thing by criticizing, betraying the other party, for instance.
Krys Boyd [00:19:22] So, yeah, it’s so interesting to think about that. I think we often neglect to consider choosing to pursue meaning in life is not a guarantee that the thing we find meaning in is objectively good for the world.
Shigehiro Oishi [00:19:35] Right. I mean, you know, prison guard, for instance, who abused the prisoners, they were doing this believing that this action is really protecting the American people. So for then, oftentimes they found this incredible sense of meaning. But objectively speaking, maybe that was obvious. Right.
Krys Boyd [00:19:59] So all right. So let’s move on to the potential rewards of a psychologically rich life. When you say a life like this tends to be full of exploration. What forms can that exploration take?
Shigehiro Oishi [00:20:13] Exploration could take a very different forms. For instance, it could be like doing something new today. So we run, you know, two weeks daily diary study and follow college students every day. I ask, you know, did you do anything new today? Yes or no? Did you meet anyone new? Yes or no? Did you eat anything new, yes or no? And we found that essentially the day they did something you or ate something, you met somebody new, they felt that the day was psychologically richer and interesting than those days when they didn’t do anything new. So exploration could be doing something new. It could be. There’s also explorations of meeting somebody new, learning something new for intellectual exploration. So yeah, there are many, many ways you can explore.
Krys Boyd [00:21:11] So it doesn’t have to be selling all our possessions and traveling the world necessarily. Might be for something.
Shigehiro Oishi [00:21:16] No, not at all. I mean, taking a walk, for instance. Think about your commute, right? Probably most of us commute in exactly the same route. But you can change the route a little bit. And you, for instance, you know, from my office to my lecture hall, I always go the same way. But sometimes I change the route and then realize, my gosh, there’s a little this building really pretty. And these are the things that you can do every day, change a little bit, and you notice the change in your environment, although you are right there. So oftentimes we don’t notice these things unless you change and shake it up a little bit.
Krys Boyd [00:21:58] You cite the late Apple founder Steve Jobs as someone who pursued a life of psychological richness. How did he do that?
Shigehiro Oishi [00:22:06] I mean, he’s an interesting guy, right? I mean, he went to college, dropped out after one year, worked in the apple orchard, and then decided that, I want to, you know, find a guru right, in India, but I don’t have any money. So he went back to Bay Area, works at the game company Atari. And then when they when he earned enough money, he just went to India and he was there for like seven months. And of course, he was searching for the guru. He couldn’t find anything. But years later, he talks about this as sort of like my trip to India really opened up my eye, you know, world to the coming back actually to the U.S. was more of the culture shock than going there. And he noticed that in the rural village of India, people just use intuition. They don’t have sort of American educated people’s rationality, but they know how to use intuitions. So when you think about his invention, right, I tune, iPod, I, you know, iPhone, everything. I think he had a great intuitions and he said to himself, thanks to going to India when he was 19 and realizing how important intuition is was the key for him. And he had a wonderful journey. He died relatively young. But he said, you know, in his deathbed, I have no regret. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve seen a lot. I have no regret. And I think he really had unbelievably psychologically rich life.
Krys Boyd [00:23:56] It’s really interesting she get to think about Steve Jobs in this context, because often when his story is told in his travels, in his early sort of career, bouncing around two different things that’s told in service to like how very productive he ultimately was and how much money he made with his inventions. You’re saying that just doing human level, his life seems to have been better because of his choices?
Shigehiro Oishi [00:24:22] Yeah. I mean, he wasn’t driven by money. I don’t think he was driven by curiosity. So I think he was incredibly curious. And, you know, obviously, he wasn’t super happy. Right. I mean, he alienated a lot of people. So social relationship wasn’t his strength. And maybe he wasn’t that happy. He was angry a lot, too. But I think he he’s he’s sort of the mindset of expirations. Right. Keep revolving. You know, that’s really I think, you know, epitomize, you know, for years at least, you know, for me, psychologist.
Krys Boyd [00:25:04] This sounds very intriguing. Is there actual evidence that a psychologically rich day or year or life is good for us?
Shigehiro Oishi [00:25:13] Yeah, I mean it’s it’s, it’s a little bit hard to really quantify. But we have experiment, for instance, you know, randomly assigned participants to think about why happiness is important versus why meaning is important versus why psychologically rich life may be important. And then we do sort of the curiosity tasks. For instance, this is like a trivia game. So I ask, you know, participants who was the only US president who had the patent and then the choices. We either you wait or you skip to the next question. But then if you choose to wait, you have to wait somewhere between ten to 30s. And what we find so curious, people tend to wait, right? Because they want to know the answer. Right? Whereas I’m curious, people say, I don’t care. Let’s go on to the next question. So we have 15 questions like, look, what we found was that when we make people think about the value of psychological richness, people tend to become curious and they wait for the answer. So I think that the psychological richness, when you have that mindset, people are much more become curious, are interested in some trivial matters. Whereas if they’re focusing on meaning or happiness, they may not be as curious. They may not be interested in intellectual exploration as much.
Krys Boyd [00:26:47] One of the reasons I love my job interviewing different people is that I get to learn a lot of different things day after day and year after year. But, you know, I have classmates whose careers in law or medicine or some other specialty field are now experts in those fields in a way that I will never be. Why can specialization turn out to be a hindrance, at least for the pursuit of psychological richness?
Shigehiro Oishi [00:27:11] Yeah, I mean, in terms of productivity, you need a specialization. Well, you know, in order to be specialized, you really have to focus on the few know a few things. So I think that when you want to be a specialist, you really have to make a decision what is the relevant information and what is irrelevant information. And you just have to focus on the relevant information. On the other hand, if you’re not the specialist but the generalist, then you don’t have to have that type of focus. What we find is that those people who are specialized or thinking about being specialized, they really cannot afford to pay attention to the random factor. And in life, we find a lot of unexpected richness in unexpected area, right? So by chance, you go to the, you know, use bookstore and find some copy of You always want it before. And I think when you focus and when you are so specialized, you forget that the the richness resides in this randomness and serendipity and generalist mindset tend to make it easier to accept a lot of irrelevant activities. So the specialist may say, that’s a waste of time, but then the generalist might say, that could be interesting. So, you know, you’re opening up yourself for unexpected adventures and potential learning. If you’re a generalist.
Krys Boyd [00:28:56] Have you identified any sort of psychological richness trap in the same way that there’s a happiness trap and a meaning trap?
Shigehiro Oishi [00:29:04] Yeah. I think if you’re trying too hard to do the different things every day, for instance, I think it’s just too exhausting. And in the end, you know, our brain cannot process everything that well, right? So in the end, what do you remember after you did so many different things? This is like going to Metropolitan Museum and just trying to cover all kinds of galleries. Right? You’re just overwhelmed and you cannot absorb much. The better approach probably is just a choose a few gallery, spend as much of your time as possible and try to absorb. So potentially, I think the psychological richness trap is trying too hard to do a different things and diverse things. Instead, I think there’s optimal level of richness in environment that we can process. Remember, in the end, you have to remember psychological richness is just like a material richness, you know, the material rich people have a lot of aset in their portfolio. Psychologically rich people, we have a lot of stories and experiences in our psychological portfolio. If you do too much, you don’t remember and you’re not actually accumulating those experiences. So I think that’s the potential trap.
Krys Boyd [00:30:31] Shigehiro, there was a time, of course, when people did a little bit of everything just to survive, right? They might have used their own food and made their own clothes and built their own houses. In modern life, everything is pretty specialized. This work gets outsourced. You share this story of how rewarding it was for you and your wife to build a brick patio together rather than hiring somebody to do it. Tell us about that. Right.
Shigehiro Oishi [00:30:56] Yeah. So we had this house in Charlottesville and the side, you know, garden was just a mess. So one day we said, wouldn’t it be nice to have the, you know, drink patio? So my wife. I agree. Yeah. So we, you know, like the ordinary house owner, we we asked around and we got three quotes and then the quotes were outrageous. I don’t remember. Not like 10,000, 20,000, something like that. So we said, Joe, do you think we can do it? And what’s the material cost? And then we figured material costs like a 4000 or 5000. So, my gosh, if we do this, we can save a lot. So stupidly, we decided to do it ourselves. And we looked at the YouTube say it looked like easy. So we started doing that. My gosh. It was just so much pain. It took so much longer. Of course, like 1 or 2 months we dug and dug and, you know, some days just it was so painful I couldn’t get out of bed. And then we, you know, blame each other, like, why do we didn’t we hire somebody? We didn’t have to be so cheap. So we had to find and things like that. But in the end, we, you know, we, we, we we finished. And it wasn’t as beautiful as, of course, the professional work. But we have so many stories to tell now. So the point is, if you’re going for efficiency, of course you hire some professional. They’ll get it done in three days or four days. It’s beautiful. All you have to do is just pay a little bit more. Sure. Rationally speaking, that sounds like a great choice. Why? We suffer for like two, three months. But psychologically speaking, if you hire somebody, this is like 3 or 4 years ago. So would you be still talking about it? No way. Right? Because we did it. We suffer together and we fought and so forth. We still remember fondly. And we discover something new that I am really terrible at these kinds of things. But the engine somehow I was able to do it fairly decently. So. So I feel like, I discover something new about myself as well.
Krys Boyd [00:33:22] Are there good ways of figuring out which challenging tasks to take on ourselves for the psychological richness and which ones to, you know, hire a plumber for whoever?
Shigehiro Oishi [00:33:33] Yeah. Yeah. So as effective for guessing the error, I think this is kind of difficult to predict. So that’s my prediction. But at the same time, the simple question is, okay, if I did it ourself myself, would I rather. Interesting story to tell. Right. So think about cleaning. Think about cleaning toilet, for instance. Would I have an interesting story to tell if I did it myself versus hire somebody? Well, we don’t hire, but, you know, hypothetically. And I feel like some task too simple that even if you do it yourself, you might not be bringing psychological richness, but relatively simple, you know, do it yourself type of task. I feel like there are lots of opportunities for psychological richness.
Krys Boyd [00:34:26] Are there particular personality traits that prime individuals to seek a good life on any of these particular dimensions, whether it’s happiness or meaning or psychological richness?
Shigehiro Oishi [00:34:37] Yeah. So there is a I mean, really huge research on personality and wellbeing. And the basic finding is that a lot of people who are happy and lead a meaningful life, they tend to be extroverted. They are not so neurotic about everything and they’re conscientious and agreeable, which sort of makes sense. And in the personality, Big five personality, it consists of those four extroversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness. A good. Bonus. And the other dimension is the openness to experience. And somehow openness to experience is not really strongly correlated with happiness or meaning. What is interesting is that when it comes to psychological richness, it is a openness to experiences that that is the strongest predictor of personality predictor. So, you know, open people open to experiences are that that the people explorer essentially so they tend to lead cyclists every slide compared to the closed people.
Krys Boyd [00:35:51] So many artists might be classified as leading psychologically rich lives based on what you tell us?
Shigehiro Oishi [00:35:57] That’s right. I just got the email from artist who read my Guardian article and say, I have always thought, you know, I was going for happiness and meaning and couldn’t quite figure it out. And I got it. I was leading a psychological rich life. And that’s exactly right.
Krys Boyd [00:36:17] How would you say that a pursuit of psychological richness can help us put losses and sorrows and struggles in context, in a way that maybe a pursuit of happiness or meaning cannot?
Shigehiro Oishi [00:36:30] Yeah. So we follow earthquake survivors. So I’m from Japan, so I’m acutely aware of, you know. Many, many people who suffered from earthquake. So in Kobe, exactly about 30 years ago, there was a huge earthquake. About 7000 people died. And I spent my sabbatical in 2000, 13, 14 in a 12 and 13 in Kobe. And what was shocking is that landscape wise is just perfectly recovered. I mean, nobody imagined that the, you know, huge earthquake happened in the city. But when you look at the survey data, even 16 years afterward, those people who lost their house in 1995 earthquake were less happy. They were reporting more physical symptoms and illness than those Kobe residents who didn’t lose their house. But what’s most interesting was that so many people who experienced earthquake reported the change in value orientation. All of a sudden they think that being the news, social workers and teachers, other wonderful job. And indeed, when we looked at the job application in the Kobe area after 1995, there was a surge in application for the pro-social jobs. So we think that there is a silver lining of the the terrible natural disasters and the losses as well. If you just measure happiness or meaning, you know, you don’t you don’t see any anything positive from it. But when you look at the psychological richness, I think we see that they can you know, they can they can think of the experience as something of the springboard for their own growth and the change for better.
Krys Boyd [00:38:40] You extoll for people who want psychological richness, the virtues of spontaneity. And I know this sounds like a funny question Shigehiro, but can we be intentional about pursuing spontaneity?
Shigehiro Oishi [00:38:52] I think so. I think so. I mean, you know, the funny stories in graduate school, you know, we had all the free time. So whenever we wanted to have a cup of coffee, I would just knock on the door and say, hey, Rich, you know, let’s go grab coffee. And when I got the job at the University of Minnesota, I thought, you know, the things would be similar. So I just knock on the door, Hey, Bob, let’s have a cup of coffee. And I still remember this is to the year 2000. He pulled out the PDA, the old fashioned personal digital assistant, and looked at his schedule and said, I’m busy today. Maybe in two weeks. Right. So most of us in professional jobs, we are so casual, highly scheduled, so we don’t have this spontaneous outing opportunities. But I think you can you can intentionally start bothering other people essentially like, hey, do you want to grab a coffee? Do you want to grab tea? Do you want to take a walk? And probably 80, 90% of the time they say no, but but sometimes they may say yes. And I think those spontaneous moments are the really precious one because you’re not expecting anything. And then you often find something new when we are not scheduled. Right. When we are scheduled in the scheduled meeting, we are so on the task. We don’t talk about anything other than the task. But when we have this spontaneous meeting, we talk about something we never talked about and discover new things about each other. So I think we could be intentionally spontaneous.
Krys Boyd [00:40:37] So it helps to let go of this persistent idea that everything we do ought to be productive in some measurable.
Shigehiro Oishi [00:40:43] Exactly. I think this is the productivity trap and productivity and it’s discontent, you know, in our lives just we are just so focused on getting things done. Be, you know, productive and efficient. And, of course, that’s that’s just sort of the measure or index of professional success. But at the same time, if you’re thinking about your life and how to enrich your life, then I think we should think carefully about how much do we really have to care about productivity per say. Sometimes we have to. We want to. We should be more playful. So Erick Erickson, the famous psychiatrist, said this like, you know, playfulness and playful is something that for adults taking vacation from this social or economic. Responsibilities and living in somewhere in between reality and fantasy. And, you know, five years old children all do that. And your dog, when they’re chasing tennis ball, they do that. And adult like us. We should do that once in a while. You know, be spontaneous and be playful.
Krys Boyd [00:42:02] What about this? Is psychological richness easier to choose when we are young than it might be when we’re older and have more obligations and more commitments?
Shigehiro Oishi [00:42:14] Definitely. I mean, if you’re a college student in a residential setting, right. Anybody live in a dorm type of situation, you can be totally spontaneous because, you know, everybody’s there and be playful. Once you get out of that context and then you have family obligations and the neighbor obligations, neighborhood of obligations and all kinds of obligations, then it is very, very difficult to have psychologically rich life. So we have to be intentional about it.
Krys Boyd [00:42:48] So what can we do to push back on what’s called the mere exposure effect by which something that’s just familiar is somehow, it seems to us as being more valuable than something that might be new and undiscovered.
Shigehiro Oishi [00:43:04] In many ways, I think we are really, really biased toward the film the others. Bob Zion’s famous social psychologist had brilliant experiments showing the use show the same Chinese character three times. Six times. Nine times than when you. Those people who saw nine times like that Chinese character are better than those people who saw only three times. The face is the same thing. If you see the same face nine times, you like it better than when you have never seen before. So we have this inherent familiarity bias or media exposure effect. So that’s what make it difficult for us to, you know, lead the psychological rich life, which inevitably you have to go against this. Tell me the reality bias.
Krys Boyd [00:43:56] If someone listening to this conversation wanted to experiment with adding psychological richness to their lives would be some suggestions.
Shigehiro Oishi [00:44:06] So I think we often have this question of like, when you have time this weekend, what should I do? Should I do the same thing that I always like to do, or should I do something new? This is sort of the famous clash, you know, Should I stay or should I go? Question And this familiarity bias often answer that question saying, okay, we should just do what we liked, always like to do right instead, once in awhile you should say to yourself, should I do something new? Then immediately you have to say, Yes, I should do that once in a while. So I think essentially the simple answer is just do it whenever the thought occurs to you, Well, should I do this? Just do it. Just do it once in a while.
Krys Boyd [00:45:02] Shigehiro Oishi is Marshall Field IV Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. His new book is called “Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life.” Shigehiro, this has been so interesting. Thank you for sharing your time with us.
Shigehiro Oishi [00:45:18] Thank you so much.
Krys Boyd [00:45:19] Think is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram and anywhere you get podcasts. The website is think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.