Findings from several surveys show that happiness is one of our
most important goals.
One survey found that happiness was rated the highest among 12 possible goals,
including goals like success, knowledge and material wealth.
In a survey that I conducted with my coauthors,
we two found very similar results.
We gave the respondents a list of 16 important life goals,
like being rich spiritual group, finding a purpose in life,
being happy, et cetera and we asked them to rank these codes.
We found that happiness was the second most important goal after fulfilling
relationships.
The difference between happiness and
fulfilling relationships was actually statistically non-significant.
Meaning that for all practical purposes, happiness emerged
as the joint top goal along with fulfilling relationships.
Given how important happiness is you would think that people would not
sacrifice it for other goals, but as we are soon going to see, they routinely do.
I got my first hint that people sacrificed happiness for
other groups to something that I call the genie question,
which many of you answered in the precourse survey that we sent out to you.
The genie question goes like this.
Imagine that a genie similar to the one in Aladdin's story appears in
front of you and offers you three wishes.
What wishes would you make?
If happiness is a very important goal, people should be asking the genie for
happiness.
But as it turns out, they often don't.
In fact, very few people, only about 6% ask for happiness.
As it turns out, the top three items on people's genie wish
list are money, fame and success and relationships.
The items on the genie wish list hinted the kinds of things for
which people routinely sacrificed happiness.
Notice that the top two items are extrinsic things money and status.
This suggests that people routinely sacrifice happiness for
the sake of money and status.
We are now at Bajaj Hall,
one of the many dining areas of the Indian School of Business and I've brought you
here to show you how we often sacrifice happiness for the sake of value for money.
[SOUND] Imagine that you are salad bar similar to this one here and you could
load your plate with whatever you wanted to eat and pay by the pound out there.
So for example, you could load your plate with.
>> Cucumber, carrot, beet, turnip, cabbage, radish and capsicum.
>> Yummy.
Makes me want to stop the lecture and start eating immediately.
So as you can see, I've loaded my plate with some items and
now I'm going to pay by the pound.
How much is it ma'am?
>> 1 million rupees!
[SOUND] >> [LAUGH]
>> Now imagine,
as I said a little while back that you're at a salad bar similar to this one,
behind me.
The salad bar has multiple items, including chickpeas and grilled chicken.
Imagine that you love chickpeas, which, by the way,
we call Chana in India a And that you don't like grilled chicken.
But at the same time, you recognize that pound for
pound, the grilled chicken costs much more than chickpeas.
What would you do?
Would you pick option A, which is load your plate with chickpeas and
avoid the grilled chicken, because that's what you enjoy more.
Or would you pick option B, which is take at least a little bit of grilled chicken,
even though you don't like it, just so that you can get some value for money.