Matt Killingsworth

Mm-hmm

... um, it was updated, and the study, it was a joint study, um, by Kahneman, uh, Matthew Killingsworth, and Barbara Fredrickson.

I apologize if I said that wrong.

But they reexamined the issue with a large US sample and found that the pattern depends on whether you're generally happy or unhappy beforehand.

And you've probably heard that number quoted in just about every TED Talk and every conference since then.

But then 11 years later, Matthew Killingsworth at Wharton ran the whole thing again in a different way.

And what he found is there's no plateau at all.

So you've got two respected researchers flatly contradicting each other.

And it's called anticipatory savoring.

In 2014, a researcher named Amit Kumar, along with Matthew Killingsworth and Thomas Gilovich, ran a study that didn't wait for people to come into a lab and report their feelings after the fact, nor before.

They pinged people throughout actual days of their actual lives, random points, and asked, right then, how are you feeling and what's on your mind? Some of those check-ins caught people mid-thought about something they'd booked that they hadn't have happened yet.

A trip, a concert, versus a material purchase that they were waiting on.

It shifted dramatically in 2021.

And that is thanks to a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania named Matthew Killingsworth.

Okay.

He completely challenged Conham's conclusions because he fundamentally changed the methodology.

[laughs]

[laughs] So we talked to Dr. Matthew Killingsworth from University of Pennsylvania.

Uh, he's a world-renowned expert on happiness, and components of the happiness journey involve that having a goal, having great relationships, you know, making that kind of regular progress against it.

And so I think money is like one of those things in life that is great to form a, a goal around.

A huge one.

Matthew Killingsworth, a senior fellow at Wharton, published a new study that just completely upended Kahneman and Deaton.

He did.

And what I find so fascinating about Killingsworth's study is his methodology, because it fixes a fundamental flaw in how we usually measure emotion.

So let's dig into that data because it is robust.

The researchers surveyed over six thousand respondents.

A massive sample size.

Huge.

Cleaning the house, cooking, running errands, mowing the lawn, the mundane stuff.

If you pay someone to do that, you are happier.

And the researchers actually explain the underlying psychology of this using something called the buffering hypothesis.

Okay, break that down for me because I know that term originally comes from social support literature, right?

So let's start with the Killingsworth and Gilbert study because it's the foundational piece of evidence and we want to do it justice with the method included.

So Matthew Killingsworth,

and Daniel Gilbert at Harvard published a paper in Science in 2010 with a title that itself is almost a complete summary of their findings.

It says, a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.

So let's go over what the research says about how often this happens, because once you understand the scale of the problem, you'll understand why I'm taking a whole week to talk about it here.

2010, Killingsworth, Matthew Killingsworth and Dan Gilbert at Harvard, they were using an iPhone app that pinged 2250 people, random moments throughout the day, and found that the human mind is wandering around and not present to what it's doing approximately 47% of the time.

That's almost half of your heartbeats, folks.

Nearly half of our waking hours.