Michael Norton

God is our provider.

Hey, there's two psychologists, Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton.

They spent years studying where happiness from money actually comes from.

In one of their most cited studies, they gave people a small amount of money, five bucks, 10 bucks, 20 bucks, like small amounts of money.

I talked about this in the book.

A Harvard professor named Michael Norton did a couple of professors and a couple of experiments.

And what he did was he went to a college and basically gave students a couple of different envelopes.

And he basically said, okay, it's 10 o'clock now.

And there's something else here worth knowing.

A study by Michael Norton and Francesca Gino, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in 2014, found that small rituals like this give people a sense of control during loss.

Not control over what happened.

Control over this one minute, this one threshold, this one sentence.

Once you have money, does the way you spend it actually change how happy you are? Turns out, yes, just probably not in the way you'd expect.

Michael Norton is a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and co-author of Happy Money, The Science of Happier Spending.

His research shows that spending on other people freely by choice, not out of obligation, tends to make us happier than spending on ourselves.

It's a finding that holds across countries and income levels with amounts as small as $5.

So it's a very small change.

It's just like an extra second in each purchase, but it can change your behavior in meaningful ways.

That's Michael Norton, professor at Harvard Business School and co-author of Happy Money.

So what do you think? Did that shift how you see your own spending? Because my biggest takeaway is this.

The basic finding, which wasn't a surprise to me, is that we value things more when we've had to work for them.

There's a famous later study called the IKEA Effect by Michael Norton at Harvard Business School, which found that people place significantly higher value on flat-pack furniture they'd built themselves, even when it was objectively worse than the preassembled version, just because they'd put the effort in.

Basically, it found that we are literally wired to find meaning in things that cost us something, particularly when that cost was an effort that we can't necessarily put a price to, which means that when everything is instant and effortless, our brains don't actually register it as valuable because that key signal of worth is missing.

But the piece of science I really want to spend time on because I think it's the most useful for actually doing something about this is the research on flow state.

You're listening to a reading of articles and features from the Jamestown Post-Journal on the Niagara Frontier Radio Reading Service, where you can always listen to our live stream on our website, nfradioreading.org. Next up, the Article Mental Health Association welcomes the St. Susan Center Director.

At the Mental Health Association in Chautauqua County's August Recovery Luncheon, Michael Norton, Executive Director, welcomed the return of volunteer and certified personal trainer Brian Mayo.

All are welcome to Mayo's Boot Camp Fitness, classes that meets on Thursdays from 5 to 6 p.m. at the Jamestown Recovery Center.

Norton also introduced Sherry Rowland, Executive Director of the St. Susan Center, that serves 4,900 meals last month.

The most recent book is called Leave the Lights On: How Joyful Decisions Can Save Our Species.

And the previous book, which you co-authored with Michael Norton, another guest on Unsiloed, is called Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending.

Welcome, Liz.

Oh, thanks so much for having me.

But how did researchers actually prove this? I mean, it sounds like common sense.

Well, in 2011, Michael Norton, Daniel Moshan, and Dan Ariely ran a series of experiments.

In one, they had participants fold origami, and then they asked them to bid on their own creations.

Another group of participants bid on the same origami creations without having folded them themselves.

It's called the IKEA effect.

Researchers Michael Norton, Daniel Molkin, and Dan Ariely found that people place a much higher value on something that they helped create than on the exact same thing that someone else built for them.

That's why when you spend four hours putting together an IKEA bookshelf, and you step back and you look at that one shelf that's upside down, and you still say, in kind of a pride voice, "Yep, that's a custom bookshelf." Your spouse, Mandy in my case, walks in, stares at it for about three seconds, and asks, "Is this supposed to lean like that?" You and me, we immediately get defensive because that crooked bookshelf isn't just furniture anymore.

It's our crooked bookshelf.