A User's Guide to Our Emotional Thermostat (with Adam Mastroianni)

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🗓️ 1 April 2024

⏱️ 63 minutes

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Summary

Can you be too happy? Psychologist Adam Mastroianni talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about our emotional control systems, which seem to work at bringing both sadness and happiness back to a steady baseline. Too much happiness is--perhaps surprisingly--not necessarily a good thing. They also explore whether our general level of happiness is really related to events in our lives or connected to something much larger than ourselves.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:08.0	I'm your host Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to Econ Talk. in to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done
0:24.5	going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econ talk.org we'd love to hear from you. Today is March 6, 2024. My guest is psychologist Adam Ostriani.
0:42.6	His sub-stack is experimental history.
0:46.4	This is Adam's fourth appearance on Econ Talk last year in October of 2023
0:51.9	talking about learning and forgetting.
0:54.0	Adam, welcome back to Econ Talk.
0:56.0	Hey, it's great to be back.
0:58.0	Thanks for having me.
0:59.0	Our topic for today is your recent essay,
1:02.0	you can't be too happy, literally.
1:06.7	That kind of blew my mind a little bit.
1:09.9	You start with the fact that in surveys of people's happiness in America,
1:16.8	over time,
1:18.7	recessions, depressions, wars, all kinds of things going on, it's pretty flat.
1:24.4	Semmarize that, go a little deeper than that, but it's pretty flat.
1:29.2	Yeah, Gallup has been asking people, you know, a pretty broad question about happiness from 1948 and every
1:38.5	year about the same answers back. And I know a lot of people get. you get
1:43.7	upset about the same answers back and I know a lot of people get you know upset about
1:45.9	surveys of happiness like how could you possibly measure something like
1:49.3	happiness and you're one of us yeah Yeah I am, but that's okay. So I mean for what it's worth if you
1:56.8	ask the question in different ways obviously the level of the answers changes
	...

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