ENDNOTES

Front Unmatters and Front Antimatters

1. 1 D. Hagmann, E. H. Ho, and G. Loewenstein, “Nudging Out Support for a Carbon Tax,” Nature Climate Change, 9, 2019, 484–489.

Chapter 1. Productivity

1. 1 I’m using the word “optimizer” here because “maximizer” is already a term in scientific psychology with a slightly different meaning: one who does an extensive search of options, looking for the best one. Maximizers have goals to have the best options (that is, having high standards) and a way of trying to find them—searching through options. But people who search through alternatives and who have difficulty making decisions are less happy. This is in contrast with people who are satisfied with good-enough alternatives. (See J. Hughes and A. A. Scholer, “When Wanting the Best Goes Right or Wrong: Distinguishing Between Adaptive and Maladaptive Maximization,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 43(4), 2017, 570–583.) But other studies find that maximizers are just as happy as others. (See S. E. Highhouse, D. L. Diab, and M. A. Gillespie, “Are Maximizers Really Unhappy? The Measurement of Maximizing Tendency,” Judgment and Decision Making Journal 3(5), 2008, 364.) I’m using the term “optimizer” to refer to someone who delights in finding better ways to do things, doesn’t mind being told about alternatives, and who is willing to try things out.
2. 2 This is related to the explore-exploit trade-off well-known in computer science. B. Christian and T. Griffiths, Algorithms to Live by: The Computer Science of Human Decisions (New York: Macmillan, 2016), chapter 2.
3. 3 C. Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (New York: Hachette, 2016), 4.
4. 4 S. Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are (New York: HarperCollins, 2017).
5. 5 M. Chui, J. Manyika, J. Bughin, R. Dobbs, C. Roxburgh, H. Sarrazin, and M. Westergren, “The Social Economy: Unlocking Value and Productivity Through Social Technologies,” McKinsey Global Institute 4, 2012, 35–58.
6. 6 S. Kessler, “38% of College Students Can’t Go 10 Minutes Without Tech,” Mashable Tech, 2011, http://mashable.com/2011/05/31/college-tech-device-stats; C. Marci, “A (Biometric) Day in the Life: Engaging Across Media.” Paper presented at Re:Think (March 28, 2012), New York.
7. 7 C. Bailey, The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2016), 79.
8. 8 L. M. Carrier, L. D. Rosen, N. A. Cheever, and A. F. Lim, “Causes, Effects, and Practicalities of Everyday Multitasking,” Developmental Review 35, 2015, 64–78.
9. 9 I’d quote the actual line, which is much more colorful, but getting permission to put verbatim lyrics in a book is an expensive, maddening process. If you want to look it up, it’s the lyric with the word “Billboard” in it.
10. 10 M. R. Dickey, “FREAKY: Your Breathing Patterns Change When You Read Email,” Business Insider, December 5, 2012, retrieved June 18, 2019, from https://www.businessinsider.com/email-apnea-how-email-change-breathing-2012-12; 2012.
11. 11 L. D. Rosen, L. M. Carrier, and N. A. Cheever, “Facebook and Texting Made Me Do It: Media-induced Task-switching While Studying,” Computers in Human Behavior 29(3), 2013, 948–958.
12. 12 W. J. Horrey and C. D. Wickens, “Examining the Impact of Cell Phone Conversations on Driving Using Meta-analytic Techniques,” Human Factors 48(1), 2006, 196–205.
13. 13 D. J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload (New York: Penguin, 2014), 96.
14. 14 Z. Wang, P. David, J. Srivastava, S. Powers, C. Brady, J. D’Angelo, et al., “Behavioral Performance and Visual Attention in Communication Multitasking: A Comparison Between Instant Messaging and Online Voice Chat,” Computers in Human Behavior 28, 2012, 968–975.
15. 15 T. Lesiuk, “The Effect of Music Listening on Work Performance,” Psychology of Music 33(2), 2005, 173–191. People with a lot of musical skill are more likely to find music distracting.
16. 16 J. Andrade, “What Does Doodling Do?” Applied Cognitive Psychology 24, 2010, 100–106. J. Davies and M. Fortney, “The Menton Theory of Engagement and Boredom,” in 1st Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems, Palo Alto, CA. (December 6–8, 2012); http://www.cogsys.org/2012.
17. 17 C. I. Karageorghis and D. L. Priest, “Music in the Exercise Domain: A Review and Synthesis (Part I),” International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology 5(1), 2012, 44–66.
18. 18 A. Gazzaley and L. D. Rosen, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-tech World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 223.
19. 19 S. Reimers and E. A. Maylor, “Task Switching Across the Life Span: Effects of Age on General and Specific Switch Costs,” Developmental Psychology 41(4), 2005, 661–671.
20. 20 M. Richtel, “Lost in E-mail, Tech Firms Face Self-made Beast,” New York Times, June 14, 2008.
21. 21 G. Mark, V. M. Gonzalez, and J. Harris, “No Task Left Behind?: Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work,” Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, ACM, April 2005, 321–330.
22. 22 L. Marulanda-Carter and T. W. Jackson, “Effects of E-mail Addiction and Interruptions on Employees,” Journal of Systems and Information Technology 14, 2012, 82–94.
23. 23 R. Alzahabi, M. W. Becker, and D. Z. Hambrick, “Investigating the Relationship Between Media Multitasking and Processes Involved in Task-switching,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 43(11), 2017, 1872.
24. 24 L. M. Carrier, L. D. Rosen, N. A. Cheever, and A. F. Lim, “Causes, Effects, and Practicalities of Everyday Multitasking,” Developmental Review 35, 2015, 64–78.
25. 25 Gazzaley and Rosen, The Distracted Mind, 196.
26. 26 K. L. Fonner and M. E. Roloff, “Testing the Connectivity Paradox: Linking Teleworkers’ Communication Media Use to Social Presence, Stress from Interruptions, and Organizational Identification,” Communication Monographs 79(2), 2012, 205–231.
27. 27 M. Czerwinski, G. Smith, T. Regan, B. Meyers, G. G. Robertson, and G. K. Starkweather, “Toward Characterizing the Productivity Benefits of Very Large Displays,” Interact 3, August 2003, 9–16; R. Ball and C. North, “Analysis of User Behavior on High-resolution Tiled Displays,” IFIP Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, September 2005, 350–363.
28. 28 S. M. Siha and R. W. Monroe, “Telecommuting’s Past and Future: A Literature Review and Research Agenda,” Business Process Management Journal 12(4), 2006, 455–482. This overview emphasizes that much of the work on telework is poorly done, and better research is needed.
29. 29 W. O’Brien and F. Y. Aliabadi, “Does Telecommuting Save Energy? A Critical Review of Qualitative Studies and Their Research Methods,” Energy and Buildings 225(15), 2020, 110–298.
30. 30 S. Wuchty, B. F. Jones, and B. Uzzi, “The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge,” Science 316(5827), 2007, 1036–1039; K. Lee, J. S. Brownstein, R. G. Mills, and I. S. Kohane, “Does Collocation Inform the Impact of Collaboration?” PloS one 5(12), 2010, e14279.
31. 31 Fonner and Roloff, “Testing the Connectivity Paradox,” 205–231.
32. 32 A. Gazzaley and L. D. Rosen, “Are You a Self-Interrupter?” Nautilus May/June 2017, 16–18.
33. 33 J. Wajcman and E. Rose, “Constant Connectivity: Rethinking Interruptions at Work,” Organizational Studies 32, 2011, 941–961.
34. 34 Gazzaley and Rosen, The Distracted Mind; Ancient Brains in a High-tech World, 11.
35. 35 E. Ophir, C. Nass, and A. D. Wagner, “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106(37), 2009, 15583–15587.
36. 36 Carrier, et al., “Causes, Effects, and Practicalities of Everyday Multitasking,” 64–78; C. Bailey, The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2016), 191.
37. 37 C. Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (New York: Random House, 2012).
38. 38 Gazzaley and Rosen, The Distracted Mind, 12.
39. 39 J. W. Pennebaker, “Writing About Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process,” Psychological Science 8(3), 1997, 162–166. See also K. A. Baikie and K. Wilhelm, “Emotional and Physical Health Benefits of Expressive Writing,” Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 11(5), 2005, 338–346.
40. 40 W. Hofmann, K. D. Vohs, and R. F. Baumeister, “What People Desire, Feel Conflicted About, and Try to Resist in Everyday Life,” in Self-Regulation and Self-Control (London: Routledge, 2018), 256–266.
41. 41 Z. Wang and J. M. Tchernev, “The ‘Myth’ of Media Multitasking: Reciprocal Dynamics of Media Multitasking, Personal Needs, and Gratifications,” Journal of Communication 62(3), 2012, 493–513.
42. 42 This information foraging theory is well-articulated in Gazzaley and Rosen, The Distracted Mind.
43. 43 H. Jahncke, S. Hygge, N. Halin, A. M. Green, and K. Dimberg, “Open-plan Office Noise: Cognitive Performance and Restoration,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 31(4), 2011, 373–382.
44. 44 S. A. Samani, S. Z. Rasid, and S. Sofian, “A Workplace to Support Creativity,” Industrial Engineering & Management Systems 13(4), 2014, 414–420.
45. 45 J. Kim and R. De Dear, “Workspace Satisfaction: The Privacy-Communication Trade-off in Open-plan Offices,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 36, 2013, 18–26.
46. 46 C. Knight and S. A. Haslam, “The Relative Merits of Lean, Enriched, and Empowered Offices: An Experimental Examination of the Impact of Workspace Management Strategies on Well-being and Productivity,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 16(2), 2010, 158.
47. 47 C. Bailey, The Productivity Project.
48. 48 Levitin, The Organized Mind, 199.
49. 49 P. J. Bieling, A. L. Israeli, and M. M. Antony, “Is Perfectionism Good, Bad, or Both? Examining Models of the Perfectionism Construct,” Personality and Individual Differences, 36(6), 2004, 1373–1385.

Chapter 2. Hacking Your Brain, Hacking Your Life

1. 1 T. Schroeder, A. L. Roskies, and S. Nichols, “Moral Motivation,” in J. M. Doris (ed.), The Moral Psychology Handbook (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 72–110.
2. 2 K. A. Amaya and K. S. Smith, “Neurobiology of Habit Formation,” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 20, 2018, 145–152.
3. 3 B. Verplanken and W. Wood, “Interventions to Break and Create Consumer Habits,” Journal of Public Policy & Marketing 25(1), 2006, 90–103.
4. 4 The “central executive” system also involves the cingulate. Levitin, The Organized Mind, 46, 167.
5. 5 I talk about mind-wandering in greater detail in J. Davies, Imagination: The Science of Your Mind’s Greatest Power (New York: Pegasus, 2019). For the trade-off between the cognitive and mind-wandering system activation levels, see Levitin, The Organized Mind, 41.
6. 6 Levitin, The Organized Mind, 43–48.
7. 7 The supplementary motor area has to do with self-initiated actions, which we’re most interested in here, and the premotor cortex has to do with actions guided by the outside world, such as moving in sync with someone else. P. Haggard, “The Neurocognitive Bases of Human Volition,” Annual Review of Psychology 70, 2019, 9–28; T. Schroeder, A. L. Roskies, and S. Nichols, “Moral Motivation,” in J. M. Doris (ed.), The Moral Psychology Handbook (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 72–110.
8. 8 A. L. Duckworth, T. S. Gendler, and J. J. Gross, “Situational Strategies for Self-Control,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 11(1), 2016, 35–55.
9. 9 The existence of a “lizard brain” in the human brain is widely held, but not universally believed. For a counter-opinion, see J. Cesario, D. J. Johnson, and H. L. Eisthen, “Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2020, 255–260.
10. 10 S. M. McClure, D. I. Laibson, G. Loewenstein, and J. D. Cohen, “Separate Neural Systems Value Immediate and Delayed Monetary Rewards,” Science 306(5695), 2014, 503–507; S. M. McClure, K. M. Ericson, D. I. Laibson, G. Loewenstein, and J. D. Cohen, “Time Discounting for Primary Rewards,” Journal of Neuroscience 27(21), 2007, 5796–5804.
11. 11 Duckworth, et al., “Situational Strategies for Self-Control,” 35–55.
12. 12 K. McGonigal, The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It (New York: Penguin, 2012), 12.
13. 13 M. R. Leary, E. B. Tate, C. E. Adams, A. Batts Allen, and J. Hancock, “Self-compassion and Reactions to Unpleasant Self-relevant Events: The Implications of Treating Oneself Kindly,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92(5), 2007, 887.
14. 14 J. A. Brefczynski-Lewis, A. Lutz, H. S. Schaefer, D. B. Levinson, and R. J. Davidson, “Neural Correlates of Attentional Expertise in Long-term Meditation Practitioners.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104(27), 2007, 11483–11488.
15. 15 R. J. Davidson and A. W. Kaszniak, “Conceptual and Methodological Issues in Research on Mindfulness and Meditation,” American Psychologist 70(7), 2015, 581. However, it is very easy to meditate badly. It’s actually hard to meditate well. One could have your control group engage in rumination, or self-analysis. This idea comes from economist Richard Bruns (personal communication).
16. 16 B. Verplanken and W. Wood, “Interventions to Break and Create Consumer Habits,” Journal of Public Policy & Marketing 25(1), 2006, 90–103.
17. 17 Gazzaley and Rosen, The Distracted Mind, 204.
18. 18 J. E. Gillham, A. J. Shatté, K. J. Reivich, and M. E. Seligman, “Optimism, Pessimism, and Explanatory Style,” in E. C. Chang (ed.), Optimism and Pessimism: Implications for Theory, Research, and Practice (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2001), 53–75.
19. 19 L. S. Nes and S. C. Segerstrom, “Dispositional Optimism and Coping: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 10(3), 2006, 235–251; T. D. Wilson, Redirect: Changing the Stories We Live By (London, UK: Hachette, 2011).
20. 20 For a full description of this, and specific exercises you can do, see Wilson, Redirect: Changing the Stories We Live By.
21. 21 R. F. Baumeister, “Suicide As Escape from Self,” Psychological Review 97(1), 1990, 90.
22. 22 Lest you think I’m exaggerating about Buddhist antagonism to ambition, here is a quotation: “We tend to always be going in a certain direction, and having a particular aim in mind. [Zen] Buddhism, on the other hand, has a certain respect for enlightened ‘aimlessness’… Don’t sit to attain a goal… Whatever you are doing, whether it is watering the garden, brushing your teeth, or doing the dishes, see if you can do it in a way that is ‘aimless.’ Sitting in silence can be wonderfully aimless.” T. N. Hanh, Silence: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise (New York: Random House, 2015), 187–188.
23. 23 T. Kasser and R. M. Ryan, “Further Examining the American Dream: Differential Correlates of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Goals,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 22(3), 1996, 280–287.
24. 24 T. A. Judge and J. D. Kammeyer-Mueller, “On the Value of Aiming High: The Causes and Consequences of Ambition,” Journal of Applied Psychology 97(4), 2012, 758–775.
25. 25 Duckworth, et al., “Situational Strategies for Self-control,” 35–55.
26. 26 J. Pencavel, “The Productivity of Working Hours,” The Economic Journal 125(589), 2014, 2052–2076.
27. 27 Levitin, The Organized Mind, 98; K. D. Vohs, R.. F. Baumeister, B. J. Schmeichel, J. M. Twenge, N. M. Nelson, and D. M. Tice, “Making Choices Impairs Subsequent Self-control: A Limited-resource Account of Decision Making, Self-regulation, and Active Initiative,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94(5), 2014, 883–898.
28. 28 M. S. Hagger, et al., “A Multilab Preregistered Replication of the Ego-depletion Effect,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 11(4), 2016, 546–573. But see also R. F. Baumeister, D. M. Tice, and K. D. Vohs, “The Strength Model of Self-regulation: Conclusions from the Second Decade of Willpower Research,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 13(2), 2018, 141–145.
29. 29 M. Friese, J. Frankenbach, V. Job, and D. D. Loschelder, “Does Self-control Training Improve Self-control? A Meta-analysis,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 12(6), 2017, 1077–1099.
30. 30 Duckworth, et al., “Situational Strategies for Self-control,” 35–55.
31. 31 Families who eat at the dining room table weigh less than families who eat in front of the television. B. Wansink and E. van Kleef, “Dinner Rituals that Correlate with Child and Adult BMI,” Obesity 22(5), 2014, E91–E95.
32. 32 J. J. Arch, K. W. Brown, R. J. Goodman, M. D. Della Porta, L. G. Kiken, and S. Tillman, “Enjoying Food Without Caloric Cost: The Impact of Brief Mindfulness on Laboratory Eating Outcomes,” Behaviour Research and Therapy 79, 2016, 23–34.
33. 33 K. A. Amaya and K. S. Smith, “Neurobiology of Habit Formation,” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 20, 2018, 145–152.
34. 34 Duckworth, et al., “Situational Strategies for Self-control,” 35–55.
35. 35 Ibid.
36. 36 B. Wansink and K. Van Ittersum, “Portion Size Me: Downsizing Our Consumption Norms,” Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 107(7), 2007, 1103–1106. This is also known as “unit bias.” A. B. Geier, P. Rozin, and G. Doros, “Unit Bias: A New Heuristic that Helps Explain the Effect of Portion Size on Food Intake,” Psychological Science 17(6), 2006, 521–525.
37. 37 Duckworth, et al., “Situational Strategies for Self-control,” 35–55.
38. 38 P. Rozin, K. Kabnick, E. Pete, C. Fischler, and C. Shields, “The Ecology of Eating: Smaller Portion Sizes in France than in the United States Help Explain the French Paradox,” Psychological Science 14(5), 2003, 450–454.
39. 39 C. Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (New York: Random House, 2012).
40. 40 Amaya and Smith, “Neurobiology of Habit Formation,” 145–152. You can remember using these using the mnemonic CLEAT.
41. 41 B. Verplanken and W. Wood, “Interventions to Break and Create Consumer Habits,” Journal of Public Policy & Marketing 25(1), 2006, 90–103.
42. 42 Amaya and Smith, “Neurobiology of Habit Formation.”
43. 43 Verplanken and Wood, “Interventions to Break and Create Consumer Habits,” 90–103.
44. 44 C. Duhigg, The Power of Habit.
45. 45 H. Aarts, T. Paulussen, and H. Schaalma, “Physical Exercise Habit: On the Conceptualization and Formation of Habitual Health Behaviours,” Health Education Research 12(3), 1997, 363–374.
46. 46 K. A. Finlay, D. Trafimow, and A. Villarreal, “Predicting Exercise and Health Behavioral Intentions: Attitudes, Subjective Norms, and Other Behavioral Determinants 1,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 32(2), 2012, 342–356.
47. 47 This effect is stronger if the change in environment is relevant to the habit in question. Changing jobs but staying in the same building is less likely to help you change your habit of going to the donut shop for a break. Verplanken and Wood, “Interventions to Break and Create Consumer Habits,” 90–103.
48. 48 W. Wood and D. T. Neal, “A New Look at Habits and the Habit-goal Interface,” Psychological Review 114(4), 2007, 843.
49. 49 P. M. Gollwitzer, “Implementation Intentions: Strong Effects of Simple Plans,” American Psychologist 54(7), 1999, 493.
50. 50 Verplanken and Wood, “Interventions to Break and Create Consumer Habits,” 90–103.
51. 51 Ibid.
52. 52 K. C. Berridge, T. E. Robinson, and J. W. Aldridge, “Dissecting Components of Reward: ‘Liking,’ ‘Wanting,’ and ‘Learning’,” Current Opinion in Pharmacology 9(1), 2009, 65–73.
53. 53 K. C. Berridge and M. L. Kringelbach, “Affective Neuroscience of Pleasure: Reward in Humans and Animals,” Psychopharmacology 199(3), 2008, 457–480.
54. 54 Ibid.
55. 55 Ibid.
56. 56 J. Olds, “Pleasure Centers in the Brain,” Scientific American 195(4), 1956, 105–117.
57. 57 Berridge and Kringelbach, “Affective Neuroscience of Pleasure,” 457–480.
58. 58 K. C. Berridge, C. Y. Ho, J. M. Richard, and A. G. DiFeliceantonio, “The Tempted Brain Eats: Pleasure and Desire Circuits in Obesity and Eating Disorders,” Brain Research, 1350, 2010, 43–64, 19.
59. 59 Ibid., 3, 19.
60. 60 Kent Berridge calls the mesolimbic wanting “incentive salience.” The wanting system seems to be associated with the lateral hypothalamus, parts of the nucleus accumbens, the amygdala, the dorsal striatum (especially the ventrolateral portion), and the ventral pallidum (following GABA neuron disinhibition). Berridge and Kringelbach, “Affective Neuroscience of Pleasure,” 457–480; Berridge, et al., “The Tempted Brain Eats,” 43–64.
61. 61 N. Dieker, “Can an Electronic Shock Bracelet Kill Your Bad Habits?” Medium August 2, 2019, retrieved August 18, 2019, from https://forge.medium.com/can-an-electronic-shock-bracelet-kill-your-bad-habits-35681ddb62cc.
62. 62 This study found an effect of unconscious conditioning: A. G. Greenwald and J. De Houwer, “Unconscious Conditioning: Demonstration of Existence and Difference from Conscious Conditioning,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 146(12), 2017, 1705. This study, in contrast, found no effect for non-conscious stimuli: T. Heycke and C. Stahl, “No Evaluative Conditioning Effects with Briefly Presented Stimuli,” Psychological Research, 2018, 1–8.
63. 63 Masochists enjoy pain, but only in some contexts. They might enjoy getting their back turned to hamburger by someone with a whip, but then get a lot of negative feeling when they stub their toe afterward.
64. 64 J. Davis, “The Perfect Human,” Wired, January 1, 2007, retrieved June 13, 2019, from https://www.wired.com/2007/01/ultraman/.
65. 65 K. L. Milkman, J. A. Minson, and K. G. Volpp, “Holding the Hunger Games Hostage at the Gym: An Evaluation of Temptation Bundling,” Management Science 60(2), 2013, 283–299.
66. 66 Duckworth, et al., “Situational Strategies for Self-control,” 35–55.
67. 67 Z. Chance, R. Dhar, M. Hatzis, and M. Bakker, “How Google Optimized Healthy Office Snacks,” Harvard Business Review [online], March 3, 2016, retrieved May 14, 2019, from https://hbr.org/2016/03/how-google-uses-behavioral-economics-to-make-its-employees-healthier.
68. 68 L. S. Levitz, “The Susceptibility of Human Feeding Behavior to External Controls,” in G. Bray (ed.), Obesity in Perspective (vol. NIH: 75–708, 53–60; 1976), Washington, DC: Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
69. 69 S. Achor, The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work (New York: Random House, 2011), 162.
70. 70 Duckworth, et al., “Situational Strategies for Self-control,” 35–55.
71. 71 Ibid.
72. 72 C. Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (New York: Hachette, 2016), 33.
73. 73 Ibid., 70–79.
74. 74 S. Misra, L. Cheng, J. Genevie, and M. Yuan, “The iPhone Effect: The Quality of In-person Social Interactions in the Presence of Mobile Devices,” Environment and Behavior 48(2), 2016, 275–298.
75. 75 Levitin, The Organized Mind, 68.
76. 76 See study 2 of E. J. Masicampo and R. F. Baumeister, “Consider It Done! Plan Making Can Eliminate the Cognitive Effects of Unfulfilled Goals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101(4), 2011, 667–685.
77. 77 Levitin, The Organized Mind. People are good at prioritization: V. Bellotti, B. Dalal, N. Good, P. Flynn, D. G. Bobrow, and N. Ducheneaut, “What a To-do: Studies of Task Management Towards the Design of a Personal Task List Manager,” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (735–742).
78. 78 D. K. Simonton, Greatness: Who Makes History and Why (New York: Guilford Press, 1994), 189.
79. 79 R. Boice, “Contingency Management in Writing and the Appearance of Creative Ideas: Implications for the Treatment of Writing Blocks,” Behaviour Research and Therapy 21(5), 537–543. 1983; R. Boice, “Procrastination, Busyness and Bingeing,” Behaviour Research and Therapy 27(6), 1989, 605–611. For an interesting reinterpretation of the results, and a clear description of the original study, see S. Krashen, “Optimal Levels of Writing Management: A Reanalysis of Boice,” Education 122(3), 2002, 605–608.
80. 80 H. Sword, “ ‘Write Every Day!’: A Mantra Dismantled,” International Journal for Academic Development, 21(4), 2016, 312–322.
81. 81 Now she’s got a master’s degree in legal anthropology from the London School of Economics. #ProudSpouse
82. 82 U. N. Sio and T. C. Ormerod, “Does Incubation Enhance Problem Solving? A Meta-analytic Review,” Psychological Bulletin, 135(1), 2009, 94.
83. 83 Levitin, The Organized Mind, 210.
84. 84 C. K. Hsee, A. X. Yang, and L. Wang, “Idleness Aversion and the Need for Justifiable Busyness,” Psychological Science 21(7), 2010, 926–930; W. C. Wang, C. H. Kao, T. C. Huan, and C. C. Wu, “Free Time Management Contributes to Better Quality of Life: A Study of Undergraduate Students in Taiwan,” Journal of Happiness Studies 12(4), 2011, 561–573.
85. 85 J. McGregor, “What the Most Productive Workers Have in Common,” Washington Post August 5, 2014, retrieved August 18, 2019, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2014/08/05/what-the-most-productive-workers-have-in-common/; C. Newport Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (New York: Hachette, 2016), 70–80.
86. 86 I got the term “strategic quitting” from E. Barker, Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong (New York: HarperOne, 2017), 96.
87. 87 A. V. Whillans, E. W. Dunn, P. Smeets, R. Bekkers, and M. I. Norton, “Buying Time Promotes Happiness,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(32), 2017, 8523–8527.
88. 88 A. G. LeBlanc, J. D. Barnes, T. J. Saunders, M. S. Tremblay, and J. P. Chaput, “Scientific Sinkhole: The Pernicious Price of Formatting,” PloS one 14(9), 2019, e0223116.
89. 89 C. Bailey, The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2016), 140.
90. 90 I should mention that this book also has lots of advice that I think is quite good. B. Tracy, Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time. (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2007), 11.
91. 91 See the Pomodoro Technique Blog for an introduction: https://francescocirillo.com/pages/pomodoro-technique.
92. 92 Alexandra Michel, “Burnout and the Brain,” Association for Psychological Science, January 29, 2016, https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/burnout-and-the-brain.
93. 93 “Job burnout: How to spot it and take action,” Mayo Clinic, November 21, 2018, https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in-depth/art-20046642.
94. 94 B. N. Waber, D. Olguin Olguin, T. Kim, and A. Pentland, “Productivity Through Coffee Breaks: Changing Social Networks by Changing Break Structure,” January 11, 2010. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1586375.
95. 95 D. H. Pink, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing (New York: Penguin, 2019), 54.
96. 96 J. P. Trougakos, D. J. Beal, S. G. Green, and H. M. Weiss, “Making the Break Count: An Episodic Examination of Recovery Activities, Emotional Experiences, and Positive Affective Displays,” Academy of Management Journal 51(1), 2008, 131–146.
97. 97 A. Ariga and A. Lleras, “Brief and Rare Mental ‘Breaks’ Keep You Focused: Deactivation and Reactivation of Task Goals Preempt Vigilance Decrements,” Cognition 118(3), 2011, 439–443; E. M. Hunter and C. Wu, “Give Me a Better Break: Choosing Workday Break Activities to Maximize Resource Recovery,” Journal of Applied Psychology 101(2), 2016, 302; H. Zacher, H. A. Brailsford, and S. L. Parker, “Micro-breaks Matter: A Diary Study on the Effects of Energy Management Strategies on Occupational Well-being,” Journal of Vocational Behavior 85(3), 2014, 287–297.
98. 98 S. Kim, Y. Park, and Q. Niu, “Micro‐break Activities at Work to Recover from Daily Work Demands,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 38(1), 2017, 28–44.
99. 99 M. Sianoja, U. Kinnunen, J. D. Bloom, K. Korpela, and S. A. E. Geurts, “Recovery During Lunch Breaks: Testing Long-term Relations with Energy Levels at Work,” Scandinavian Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology 1(1), 2016, 1–12; J. P. Trougakos, I. Hideg, B. H. Cheng, and D. J. Beal, “Lunch Breaks Unpacked: The Role of Autonomy as a Moderator of Recovery During Lunch,” Academy of Management Journal 57(2), 2014, 405–421.
100. 100 I wrote a whole book about what feels important. J. Davies, Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014).
101. 101 R. Beuhler and C. McFarland, “Intensity Bias in Affective Forecasting: The Role of Temporal Focus,” Psychological Science 16, 2001, 626–630.
102. 102 S. Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018), 4.
103. 103 Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody Lies.
104. 104 I’m talking, of course, about typical news focused on politics and human-interest stories, not science news, which is a little better about this stuff.
105. 105 R. M. Mar, K. Oatley, J. Hirsh, J. de la Paz, and J. B. Peterson, “Bookworms Versus Nerds: Exposure to Fiction Versus Non-fiction, Divergent Associations with Social Ability, and the Stimulation of Fictional Social Worlds,” Journal of Research in Personality 40(5), 2006, 694–712; B. Johnson, “Religion and Philanthropy.” Unpublished manuscript, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2012; P. A. Katz and S. R. Zalk, “Modification of Children’s Racial Attitudes,” Developmental Psychology 14(5), 1978, 447–461.
106. 106 The main issues I have relate to indexing things using keywords different from what I wrote them down as, e.g., kids, children, offspring, etc.
107. 107 I discuss memory palaces more extensively in my previous book: J. Davies, Imagination: The Science of Your Mind’s Greatest Power (New York: Pegasus Books, 2019).
108. 108 This idea comes from my aunt, Mary Berard.
109. 109 Walker, Why We Sleep.
110. 110 L. M. Juliano and R. R. Griffiths, “A Critical Review of Caffeine Withdrawal: Empirical Validation of Symptoms and Signs, Incidence, Severity, and Associated Features,” Psychopharmacology 176(1), 2004, 1–29.
111. 111 S. Stranges, W. Tigbe, F. X. Gómez-Olivé, M. Thorogood, and N. B. Kandala, “Sleep Problems: An Emerging Global Epidemic? Findings from the INDEPTH WHO-SAGE Study Among More than 40,000 Older Adults from 8 Countries Across Africa and Asia,” Sleep 35(8), 2012, 1173–1181; M. Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017), chapter 7.
112. 112 J. J. Iliff, M. Wang, Y. Liao, B. A. Plogg, W. Peng, G. A. Gundersen, and E. A. Nagelhus, “A Paravascular Pathway Facilitates CSF Flow through the Brain Parenchyma and the Clearance of Interstitial Solutes, Including Amyloid β,” Science Translational Medicine 4(147), 2012, 147ra111–147ra111.
113. 113 M. A. Grandner, “Sleep Deprivation: Societal Impact and Long-Term Consequences,” in Sleep Medicine, eds. Sudhansu Chokroverty and Michel Billiard (New York: Springer, 2015), 495–509.
114. 114 M. Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017).
115. 115 Phones often have a function where you can set it to be in a “do not disturb” mode during your normal sleeping hours. If you’re worried about emergency calls, most phones will let a call through if it’s from someone in your contacts and they call twice. Walker, Why We Sleep, appendix.
116. 116 This is due to a variety of factors, including increased sleep fragmentation due to a weakened bladder, and a weakening melatonin and circadian rhythm cycle. Walker, Why We Sleep, 85.
117. 117 Walker, Why We Sleep, 64.
118. 118 D. H. Pink, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing (New York: Penguin, 2019), 63–68.
119. 119 A. Brooks and L. Lack, “A Brief Afternoon Nap Following Nocturnal Sleep Restriction: Which Nap Duration Is Most Recuperative?” Sleep 29(6), 2016, 831–840.
120. 120 Ibid.
121. 121 The effects of orally consumed caffeine peaks at 30 minutes after consumption. Walker, Why We Sleep.
122. 122 L. A. Reyner and J. A. Horne, “Suppression of Sleepiness in Drivers: Combination of Caffeine with a Short Nap,” Psychophysiology 34(6), 1997, 721–725.
123. 123 Levitin, The Organized Mind, 192.
124. 124 A very useful feature I’m shocked is not in phones is the ability to put a phone on airplane mode for a specific length of time. If you’re taking a flight, watching a movie, or napping, you know how long you will need the phone to be in this mode, and it would be nice to not have to remember to take it out of this mode.
125. 125 I. N. Lee, “Nap Pods Making a Return to UBC after Decades of Absence,” The Thunderbird, November 21, 2018, retrieved April 29, 2019, from https://thethunderbird.ca/2018/11/21/nap-pods-making-a-return-to-ubc-after-decades-of-absence/.
126. 126 Much of the findings about what to do when I got from Daniel Pink’s excellent book When.
127. 127 Pink Daniel, H. “When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.” (2018). New York: Riverhead books. 26-31. In medicine, 47–53; Morality, 53.
128. 128 Ibid., 29–45.
129. 129 N. G. Pope, “How the Time of Day Affects Productivity: Evidence from School Schedules,” Review of Economics and Statistics 98(1), 2016, 1–11.
130. 130 Pink, When, 26–31; In medicine, 47–53; Morality, 53.
131. 131 C. Vetter, D. Fischer, J. L. Matera, and T. Roenneberg, “Aligning Work and Circadian Time in Shift Workers Improves Sleep and Reduces Circadian Disruption,” Current Biology 25(7), 2015, 907–911.
132. 132 M. S. Clark and J. Mils, “The Difference Between Communal and Exchange Relationships: What It Is and Is Not,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19(6), 1993, 684–691.
133. 133 A. M. Grant, Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success (New York: Penguin, 2013), 16.
134. 134 This is “pathological altruism.” B. Oakley, A. Knafo, G. Madhavan, and D. S. Wilson (eds.), Pathological Altruism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011); Health problems: V. S. Helgeson, “Relation of Agency and Communion to Well-being: Evidence and Potential Explanations,” Psychological Bulletin 116(3), 1994, 412; Crime victimization: R. J. Homant, “Risky Altruism as a Predictor of Criminal Victimization,” Criminal Justice and Behavior 37(11), 2010, 1195–1216.
135. 135 J. A. Frimer, L. J. Walker, W. L. Dunlop, B. H. Lee, and A. Riches, “The Integration of Agency and Communion in Moral Personality: Evidence of Enlightened Self-interest,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101(1), 2011, 149.
136. 136 M. Feinberg, J. T. Cheng, and R. Willer, “Gossip As an Effective and Low-cost Form of Punishment,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 35(1), 2012, 25.
137. 137 https://www.adamgrant.net/give-and-take-assessment.
138. 138 Clark and Mils, “The Difference Between Communal and Exchange,” 684–691.
139. 139 This book is so good I try to reread it every few years. Grant, Give and Take.
140. 140 P. A. Thoits and L. N. Hewitt, “Volunteer Work and Well-being,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 42(2), 2001, 115–131.
141. 141 N. Weinstein and R. M. Ryan, “When Helping Helps: Autonomous Motivation for Prosocial Behavior and its Influence on Well-being for the Helper and Recipient,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(2), 2010, 222.
142. 142 Thoits and Hewitt, “Volunteer Work,” 115–131.
143. 143 S. L. Brown, R. M. Nesse, A. D. Vinokur, and D. M. Smith, “Providing Social Support May Be More Beneficial than Receiving It: Results from a Prospective Study of Mortality,” Psychological Science 14(4), 2003, 320–327.
144. 144 100 hours: M. C. Luoh and A. R. Herzog, “Individual Consequences of Volunteer and Paid Work in Old Age: Health and Mortality,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 43(4), 2012, 490–509; Chunking volunteering: S. Lyubomirsky, K. M. Sheldon, and D. Schkade, “Pursuing Happiness: The Architecture of Sustainable Change,” Review of General Psychology 9(2), 2005, 111–131.
145. 145 J. H. Fowler and N. A. Christakis, “Cooperative Behavior Cascades in Human Social Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107(12), 2010, 5334–5338.

Chapter 3. Happiness

1. 1 P. Van Cappellen, M. Toth-Gauthier, V. Saroglou, and B. L. Fredrickson, “Religion and Well-being: The Mediating Role of Positive Emotions,” Journal of Happiness Studies 17(2), 2016, 485–505.
2. 2 Happiness makes you work harder: S. G. Barsade and D. E. Gibson, “Why Does Affect Matter in Organizations?” Academy of Management Perspectives 21(1), 2007, 36–59; Happiness improves your health: M. Olfson, C. Blanco, and S. C. Marcus, “Treatment of Adult Depression in the United States,” JAMA Internal Medicine 176(10), 2016, 1482–1491.
3. 3 S. Kagan, How to Count Animals, More or Less (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019).
4. 4 G. MacKerron, “Happiness Economics from 35,000 Feet,” Journal of Economic Surveys 26(4), 2012, 705–735.
5. 5 S. Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018), 266; MacKerron, “Happiness Economics,” 705–735.
6. 6 J. Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York; Basic Books, 2006), 220.
7. 7 M. Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008), 158; M. Csikszentmihalyi and J. LeFevre, “Optimal Experience in Work and Leisure,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 56(5), 1989, 815; C. K. Hsee, A. X. Yang, and L. Wang, “Idleness Aversion and the Need for Justifiable Busyness,” Psychological Science 21(7), 2010, 926–930; Flow states activate the left prefrontal cortex, especially areas 44, 45, and the basal ganglia. The self-critical part of the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala are deactivated; Levitin, The Organized Mind, 203.
8. 8 A. E. Clark, S. Flèche, R. Layard, N. Powdthavee, and G. Ward, The Origins of Happiness: The Science of Well-Being Over the Life Course (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018), 74.
9. 9 Work ranks close to last (commuting to and from work is even worse) whether you look at reflections on the day, or ask people’s emotional states at random times during the day (experience sampling method). A. B. Krueger, D. Kahneman, D. Schkade, N. Schwarz, and A. A. Stone, “National Time Accounting: The Currency of Life,” in Measuring the Subjective Well-being of Nations: National Accounts of Time Use and Well-being, ed. Alan B. Krueger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 9–86; Unemployment is worse: Clark, et al., The Origins of Happiness, 61.
10. 10 J. F. Helliwell and S. Wang, “Weekends and Subjective Well-being,” Social Indicators Research 116(2), 389–407.
11. 11 S. Steiner, “Top Five Regrets of the Dying,” Guardian, February 1, 2012.
12. 12 L. Golden and B. Wiens-Tuers, “To Your Happiness? Extra Hours of Labor Supply and Worker Well-being,” The Journal of Socio-Economics 35(2), 2006, 382–397.
13. 13 R. M. Ryan, J. H. Bernstein, and K. W. Brown, “Weekends, Work, and Well-being: Psychological Need Satisfactions and Day of the Week Effects on Mood, Vitality, and Physical Symptoms,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 29(1), 2010, 95–122.
14. 14 I. Granic, A. Lobel, and R. C. Engels, “The Benefits of Playing Video Games,” American Psychologist 69(1), 2014, 66.
15. 15 N. Ravaja, T. Saari, J. Laarni, K. Kallinen, M. Salminen, and J. Holopainen, “The Psychophysiology of Video Gaming: Phasic Emotional Responses to Game,” in DiGRA 2005 conference changing views-worlds in play 2005, 1–13.
16. 16 This study found that they use the game as a break, for recovery after strain. L. Reinecke, “Games at Work: The Recreational Use of Computer Games During Working Hours,” CyberPsychology & Behavior 12(4), 2009, 461–465.
17. 17 J. E. Kim and P. Moen, “Retirement Transitions, Gender, and Psychological Well-being: A Life-course, Ecological Model,” The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 57(3), 2002, P212–P222.
18. 18 R. F. Baumeister and K. D. Vohs, “The Pursuit of Meaningfulness in Life,” Handbook of Positive Psychology 1, 2002, 608–618.
19. 19 Pinker, Enlightenment Now, 267.
20. 20 J. McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (New York: Penguin, 2011), 29–30.
21. 21 I. Granic, A. Lobel, and R. C. Engels, “The Benefits of Playing Video Games,” American Psychologist 69(1), 2014, 66.
22. 22 Ibid., 74.
23. 23 L. A. Jackson, E. A. Witt, A. I. Games, H. E. Fitzgerald, A. Von Eye, and Y. Zhao, “Information Technology Use and Creativity: Findings from the Children and Technology Project,” Computers in Human Behavior 28(2), 2012, 370–376.
24. 24 Granic, et al., “The Benefits of Playing Video Games,” 66; L. Denworth, “Brain-changing Games,” Scientific American Mind 23(6), 2013, 28–35; R. Stephens and C. Allsop, “Effect of Manipulated State Aggression on Pain Tolerance,” Psychological Reports: Disability and Trauma 111(1), 2012, 311–321; M. Konnikova, “Why Gamers Can’t Stop Playing First-person Shooters,” The New Yorker, November 25, 2013, retrieved April 18, 2019, from https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/why-gamers-cant-stop-playing-first-person-shooters.
25. 25 Granic, et al., 73.
26. 26 McGonigal, Reality Is Broken, 67.
27. 27 Ibid., 4.
28. 28 Jane McGonigal says, “Good games are productive. They’re producing a higher quality of life.” Though, to her credit, she talks about how to use wisdom from game design to increase actual productivity later in her book. McGonigal, Reality Is Broken, 51.
29. 29 R. Hunicke, M. LeBlanc, and R. Zubek, “MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research,” in Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Challenges in Game AI (Vol. 4, No. 1, 2004) 1722.
30. 30 For a readable account, with links to studies, see W. Boot, “Evidence Behind ‘Brain Training’ Games Remains Lacking,” Undark, June 11, 2019, retrieved June 18, 2019, from https://undark.org/2019/06/11/brain-training-lacks-evidence/.
31. 31 V. J. Shute, M. Ventura, and F. Ke, “The Power of Play: The Effects of Portal 2 and Lumosity on Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills,” Computers & Education 80, 2015, 58–67.
32. 32 K. Bainbridge and R. E. Mayer, “Shining the Light of Research on Lumosity,” Journal of Cognitive Enhancement 2(1), 2018, 43–62.
33. 33 Granic, et al., “The Benefits of Playing Video Games,” 66.
34. 34 This is the “peak end rule.” V. Tiberius and A. Plakias, “Well-being,” in J. M. Doris (ed.), The Moral Psychology Handbook (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 402–432, 405.
35. 35 Note that this is because people perceive that the disabled are less happy, which might not be true. Tiberius and Plakias, “Well-being,” e402–432, 418.
36. 36 J. M. Zelenski (in press), Positive Psychology: The Science of Well-Being, chapter 2.
37. 37 S. Oishi, “The Experiencing and Remembering of Well-being: A Cross-cultural Analysis,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28(10), 2002, 1398–1406.
38. 38 Tiberius and Plakias, “Well-being,” 402–432, 412.
39. 39 B. S. Frey, C. Benesch, and A. Stutzer, “Does Watching TV Make Us Happy?” Journal of Economic Psychology 28(3), 2007, 283–313.
40. 40 Levitin, The Organized Mind.
41. 41 Zelenski, Positive Psychology, chapter 3. People differ a lot in how much they suffer after the loss of a spouse. G. A. Bonanno, C. B. Wortman, D. R. Lehman, R. G. Tweed, M. Haring, J. Sonnega, and R. M. Nesse, “Resilience to Loss and Chronic Grief: A Prospective Study from Preloss to 18-months Postloss,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83(5), 2002, 1150.
42. 42 A. E. Clark, E. Diener, Y. Georgellis, and R. E. Lucas, “Lags and Leads in Life Satisfaction: A Test of the Baseline Hypothesis,” The Economic Journal 118, 2008, 222–243.
43. 43 S. Lyubomirsky, “Hedonic Adaptation to Positive and Negative Experiences,” in S. Folkman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Stress, Health, and Coping (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 200–224, 203.
44. 44 Lyubomirsky, The Oxford Handbook of Stress, Health, and Coping, 200–224. I explored adaptation about confusing things that you can’t make sense of in my previous book Riveted.
45. 45 Zelenski, Positive Psychology, chapter 3.
46. 46 Pinker, Enlightenment Now, 268.
47. 47 Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, 89.
48. 48 Zelenski, Positive Psychology, chapter 3.
49. 49 Ibid.
50. 50 D. G. Blanchflower and A. J. Oswald, “Is Well-being U-shaped Over the Life Cycle?” Social Science & Medicine 66(8), 2008, 1733–1749.
51. 51 A. T. Jebb, L. Tay, E. Diener, and S. Oishi, “Happiness, Income Satiation and Turning Points Around the World,” Nature Human Behaviour 2(1), 2018, 33. You can see a chart at https://qz.com/1211957/how-much-money-do-people-need-to-be-happy/.
52. 52 T. Kasser and R. M. Ryan, “Further Examining the American Dream: Differential Correlates of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Goals,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 22(3), 1996, 280–287.
53. 53 Levitin, The Organized Mind, 78.
54. 54 Lyubomirsky, “Hedonic Adaptation,” 200–224.
55. 55 Ibid.
56. 56 Ibid.; A. R. Hariri, S. Y. Bookheimer, and J. C. Mazziotta, “Modulating Emotional Responses: Effects of a Neocortical Network on the Limbic System,” Neuroreport 11(1), 2000, 43–48.
57. 57 T. D. Wilson, D. J. Lisle, J. W. Schooler, S. D. Hodges, K. J. Klaaren, and S. J. LaFleur, “Introspecting About Reasons Can Reduce Post-choice Satisfaction,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19(3), 1993, 331–339.
58. 58 T. D. Wilson, D. B. Centerbar, D. A. Kermer, and D. T. Gilbert, “The Pleasures of Uncertainty: Prolonging Positive Moods in Ways People Do Not Anticipate,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 88(1), 2005, 5.
59. 59 N. Paumgarten, “There and Back Again,” The New Yorker, April 16, 2007; Clark, et al., The Origins of Happiness, 63, 70.
60. 60 A. Stutzer and B. S. Frey, “Stress That Doesn’t Pay: The Commuting Paradox,” Scandinavian Journal of Economics 110(2), 2008, 339–366.
61. 61 Exercise makes people happy: K. Weir, “The Exercise Effect,” American Psychological Association website cover story, 42(11), 2011, 48, retrieved October 24, 2019, from https://www.apa.org/monitor/2011/12/exercise; People are happier walking outside: E. K. Nisbet and J. M. Zelenski, “Underestimating Nearby Nature: Affective Forecasting Errors Obscure the Happy Path to Sustainability,” Psychological Science 22(9), 2011, 1101–1106.
62. 62 J. Jachimowicz, J. J. Lee, B. R. Staats, J. Menges, and F. Gino, “Between Home and Work: Commuting as an Opportunity for Role Transitions,” Harvard Business School NOM Unit Working Paper (16–077), 2018, 16–17.
63. 63 Paumgarten, “There and Back Again,” 16.
64. 64 Of course, it’s species-specific, too. Mice would probably think we spend an inordinate amount of time in the daylight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_consumption_per_capita
65. 65 Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, 83.
66. 66 Lyubomirsky, “Hedonic Adaptation,” 200–224.
67. 67 Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, 88.
68. 68 The original meaning of the word “happy” favored the “cortical lottery” theory of happiness: it meant “favored by fortune” or “lucky.” The “hap” being the same one as in “happenstance” or “haphazard.”
69. 69 Zelenski, Positive Psychology, chapter 3.
70. 70 Lyubomirsky, “Hedonic Adaptation,” 200–224.
71. 71 “Prozac” is Haidt’s shorthand for whatever SSRI works for you—there are many on the market. Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, 35.
72. 72 M. E. Seligman, “The Effectiveness of Psychotherapy: The Consumer Reports Study,” American Psychologist 50(12), 1995, 965.
73. 73 Paul Reps (trans.), Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1958), 22–23.
74. 74 There is some evidence that meditation can help you focus. H. A. Slagter, A. Lutz, L. L. Greischar, A. D. Francis, S. Nieuwenhuis, J. M. Davis, and R. J. Davidson, “Mental Training Affects Distribution of Limited Brain Resources,” PLoS Biology 5(6), 2007, e138; Y. Y. Tang and M. I. Posner, “Attention Training and Attention State Training,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13(5), 2009, 222–227.
75. 75 Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, Kindle location about 115.
76. 76 Ibid., 26.
77. 77 M. A. Killingsworth and D. Gilbert, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind,” Science 330, 2010, 932.
78. 78 Pink, When, 191; F. B. Bryant, C. M. Smart, and S. P. King, “Using the Past to Enhance the Present: Boosting Happiness through Positive Reminiscence,” Journal of Happiness Studies 6(3), 2005, 227–260.
79. 79 M. Baldwin, M. Biernat, and M. J. Landau, “Remembering the Real Me: Nostalgia Offers a Window to the Intrinsic Self,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 108(1), 2015, 128.
80. 80 J. Nawijn, M. A. Marchand, R. Veenhoven, and A. J. Vingerhoets, “Vacationers Happier, but Most not Happier after a Holiday,” Applied Research in Quality of Life 5(1), 2010, 35–47. I discuss more extensively about how imagination can make you happier or more miserable in my previous book Imagination.
81. 81 Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, 95.
82. 82 Zelenski, Positive Psychology, chapter 3.
83. 83 D. C. Glass and J. E. Singer, Urban Stress: Experiments on Noise and Social Stressors (New York: Academic Press, 1972).
84. 84 Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, 94.
85. 85 R. M. Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-related Diseases, and Coping—Now Revised and Updated (New York: Holt, 2004).
86. 86 “Manage stress: Strengthen your support network,” American Psychology Organization, lc, retrieved October 25, 2019, from https://www.apa.org/helpcenter/manage-stress.
87. 87 2015 Stress in America Snapshot. www.apa.org.
88. 88 J. A. Updegraff and S. E. Taylor, “From Vulnerability to Growth: Positive and Negative Effects of Stressful Life Events,” Loss and Trauma: General and Close Relationship Perspectives 25, 2000, 3–28.
89. 89 R. A. Emmons, “Personal Goals, Life Meaning, and Virtue: Wellsprings of a Positive Life,” in C. L. M. Keyes and J. Haidt (eds.), Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-lived, American Psychological Association, 2003, 105–128; For a review of this “adversity hypothesis,” see Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, 143–154.
90. 90 J. Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating our Species, and Making Us Smarter (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017), 209.
91. 91 D. T. Cox, D. F. Shanahan, H. L. Hudson, K. E. Plummer, G. M. Siriwardena, R. A. Fuller, and K. J. Gaston, “Doses of Neighborhood Nature: The Benefits for Mental Health of Living with Nature,” BioScience, 67(2), 2017, 147–155.
92. 92 Zelenski, Positive Psychology, chapter 7.
93. 93 D. Peters, “What Drives Quality of Life in Iowa Small Towns?” Extension and Outreach Publications 297, 2017.
94. 94 M. Beck, “City vs. Country: Who is Healthier?” Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2011, retrieved June 9, 2020, from https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304793504576434442652581806.
95. 95 J. P. Suraci, M. Clinchy, L. Y. Zanette, and C. C. Wilmers, “Fear of Humans as Apex Predators Has Landscape‐scale Impacts from Mountain Lions to Mice,” Ecology Letters, 2019, doi: 10.1111/ele.13344.
96. 96 S. Arbesman, The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date (New York: Penguin, 2012), 135.
97. 97 M. Kremer, “Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million BC to 1990,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 108(3), 1993, 681–716; L. M. Bettencourt, J. Lobo, D. Helbing, C. Kühnert, and G. B. West, “Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104(17), 2007, 7301–7306; Arbesman, The Half-life of Facts, 60.
98. 98 Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody Lies.
99. 99 R. A. Emmons and R. Stern, “Gratitude as a Psychotherapeutic Intervention,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 69(8), 2013, 846–855.
100. 100 The statistics are a little different depending on whether you count safety by distance, by hour, or by trip. That is, if you look at a per mile chance of and severity of injury, cars are a bit safer. But if you look at it by the trip, or by the hour, they are the same. I think it’s more rational to look at it by the trip, because the fact is you take shorter trips if you’re on a bike. You might drive forty minutes to a restaurant, but you’d be unlikely to bike that same distance. Using a bike means you choose different destinations.
101. 101 “Bicycling: the SAFEST Form of Transportation,” Mr. Money Mustache (blog), June 13, 2013, http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/06/13/bicycling-the-safest-form-of-transportation/.
102. 102 This data is from 1993, compiled by the Failure Analysis Associates, Inc. I cannot find the original reference, but I got it from https://www.helmets.org/stats.htm.
103. 103 “The Health Benefits of Cycling,” Bicycle Helmet Research Foundation, https://www.cyclehelmets.org/1015.html; for an overview.
104. 104 Zelenski, Positive Psychology, chapter 9; M. Koo, S. B. Algoe, T. D. Wilson, and D. T. Gilbert, “It’s a Wonderful Life: Mentally Subtracting Positive Events Improves People’s Affective States, Contrary to their Affective Forecasts,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95(5), 2008, 1217–1224.
105. 105 Koo, et al., “It’s a Wonderful Life,” 1217–1224.
106. 106 For a good review of the literature on the benefits of sleep and exercise, see G. Wells, The Ripple Effect (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2017), chapters 2 and 3.
107. 107 World Health Organization, Physical Activity. Fact sheet 385. June 2016.
108. 108 G. Cooney, D. T. Gilbert, and T. D. Wilson, “The Unforeseen Costs of Extraordinary Experience,” Psychological Science 25(12), 2014, 2259–2265.
109. 109 S. J. Heintzelman, J. Trent, and L. A. King, “Encounters With Objective Coherence and the Experience of Meaning in Life,” Psychological Science 24(6), 2013, 991–998.
110. 110 S. A. Turner and P. J. Silvia, “Must Interesting Things Be Pleasant? A Test of Competing Appraisal Structures,” Emotion 6(4), 2006, 670–674.
111. 111 Zelenski, Positive Psychology, chapter 3.
112. 112 Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, 88.
113. 113 P. Van Cappellen, M. Toth-Gauthier, V. Saroglou, and B. L. Fredrickson, “Religion and Well-being: The Mediating Role of Positive Emotions,” Journal of Happiness Studies 17(2), 2016, 485–505; Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, 199.
114. 114 S. Folkman, “Positive Psychological States and Coping with Severe Stress,” Social Science & Medicine, 45(8), 1997, 1207–1221; Zelenski, Positive Psychology, chapter 3.
115. 115 M. Joshanloo, “Cultural Religiosity as the Moderator of the Relationship Between Affective Experience and Life Satisfaction: A Study in 147 Countries,” Emotion 19(4), 2019, 629–638.
116. 116 Pinker, Enlightenment Now, 438.
117. 117 Ibid., 438–439.
118. 118 S. Crabtree, “Religiosity Highest in World’s Poorest Nations,” Gallup.com, August 31, 2010, retrieved September 5, 2019, from https://news.gallup.com/poll/142727/religiosity-highest-world-poorest-nations.aspx.
119. 119 Clark, et al., The Origins of Happiness, 125.
120. 120 “People Who Take All Their Vacation Get Better Performance Reviews,” The Huffington Post, August 27, 2014, retrieved August 15, 2019, from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/vacation-days-performance-review_n_5723548.
121. 121 Interestingly, it also appears that anticipation of the trip boosts happiness. People look forward to their trips, and this seems to make them mildly happier before they go (this effect is very small: on a five-point scale, vacationers rated an average happiness of 2.25, and everybody else rated 2.07).; Nawijn, et. al., “Vacationers Happier, but Most not Happier after a Holiday,” 35–47.
122. 122 J. De Bloom, S. A. Geurts, and M. A. Kompier, “Vacation (After-) Effects on Employee Health and Well-being, and the Role of Vacation Activities, Experiences and Sleep,” Journal of Happiness Studies 14(2), 2013, 613–633.
123. 123 J. T. Cacioppo, J. H. Fowler, and N. A. Christakis, “Alone in the Crowd: The Structure and Spread of Loneliness in a Large Social Network,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 97(6), 2009, 977.
124. 124 Levitin, The Organized Mind, 12.
125. 125 Zelenski, Positive Psychology,. Chapter 3.
126. 126 R. H. Frank, Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001).
127. 127 This amount is in 2007 dollars. N. Powdthavee, “Putting a Price Tag on Friends, Relatives, and Neighbours: Using Surveys of Life Satisfaction to Value Social Relationships,” The Journal of Socio-Economics 37(4), 2008, 1459–1480.
128. 128 A meta-analysis showed that extraverts tend to act moderately extraverted 5–10 percent more than introverts. W. Fleeson and P. Gallagher, “The Implications of Big Five Standing for the Distribution of Trait Manifestation in Behavior: Fifteen Experience-sampling Studies and a Meta-analysis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 97(6), 2009, 1097.
129. 129 S. Pinker, The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Happier and Healthier (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2014); The best personality predictors of happiness are being extraverted and having a low neuroticism. Agreeable and more conscientious people are also a bit happier. Zelenski, Positive Psychology, chapter 3.
130. 130 W. Fleeson, A. B. Malanos, and N. M. Achille, “An Intraindividual Process Approach to the Relationship between Extraversion and Positive Affect: Is Acting Extraverted as ‘Good’ as Being Extraverted?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83(6), 2002, 1409.
131. 131 L. Henderson, P. Zimbardo, and B. Carducci, “Shyness,” The Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2010), 1–3.
132. 132 W. Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008).
133. 133 J. Hambrick, “Mozart Minute: Wolfgang’s Labor, Constanze’s Birth Pangs,” WOSU Radio, 2015, retrieved May 10, 2019, from https://radio.wosu.org/post/mozart-minute-wolfgangs-labor-constanzes-birth-pangs#stream/0.
134. 134 D. H. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us (New York: Penguin, 2001), 143.
135. 135 Pinker, The Village Effect, 30.
136. 136 Ibid., 179.
137. 137 J. Davies, “Why Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing,” Nautilus (blog), June 1, 2015, retrieved October 28, 2019, from http://nautil.us/blog/why-facebook-is-the-junk-food-of-socializing.
138. 138 S. Turkle, Alone Together (New York: Basic Books, 2011).
139. 139 Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, 132.
140. 140 G. Miller, “Why Loneliness Is Hazardous to Your Health,” Science 331, 2011, 138–140.
141. 141 A. C. Zimmermann and R. A. Easterlin, “Happily Ever After? Cohabitation, Marriage, Divorce, and Happiness in Germany,” Population and Development Review 32(3), 2006, 511–528.
142. 142 R. E. Lucas and A. E. Clark, “Do People Really Adapt to Marriage?” Journal of Happiness Studies 7(4), 405–426.
143. 143 Pinker, The Village Effect, 221.
144. 144 C. C. Mann, “The Coming Death Shortage,” Atlantic Monthly 295(4), 2005, 92–102.
145. 145 Clark, et al., The Origins of Happiness, 27.
146. 146 Information from Statistics Canada, retrieved April 25, 2019, from https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/89-503-x/2010001/article/11546-eng.htm#a8.
147. 147 Zimmermann and Easterlin, “Happily Ever After?” 511–528.
148. 148 Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody Lies.
149. 149 B. Tomasik, “The Cost of Kids,” August 4, 2012, retrieved July 5, 2019, from https://reducing-suffering.org/the-cost-of-kids/.
150. 150 Clark, et al., The Origins of Happiness, 83–84.
151. 151 See the graph on page 8; G. L. Brase and S. L. Brase, “Emotional Regulation of Fertility Decision Making: What Is the Nature and Structure of ‘Baby Fever?’ ” Emotion 12(5), 2012, 1141.
152. 152 Tomasik, “The Cost of Kids.”
153. 153 Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, 124.
154. 154 Romantic love is a cross-cultural phenomenon, and not a new, historically recent thing, as some would have you believe. W. R. Jankowiak, and E. F. Fischer, “A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Romantic Love,” Ethnology 31(2), 1992, 149–155.
155. 155 G. Sinha, “You Dirty Vole,” in O. Sacks (ed.), The Best American Science Writing 2003 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 132–137. There’s a great podcast that explains all of this, called, “This Is Your Brain On Love” from the excellent series “Radiolab.” I highly recommend it. Very entertaining and interesting. http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2007/08/28.
156. 156 A. Cloutier and J. Peetz, “Relationships’ Best Friend: Links Between Pet Ownership, Empathy, and Romantic Relationship Outcomes,” Anthrozoös 29(3), 2016, 395–408.
157. 157 S. Kanazawa, “Why Productivity Fades with Age: The Crime–Genius Connection,” Journal of Research in Personality 37(4), 2003, 257–272.
158. 158 V. J. Knox, “Cognitive Strategies for Coping with Pain: Ignoring vs. Acknowledging,” unpublished doctoral dissertation (Waterloo, Ontario: University of Waterloo, 1972).
159. 159 R. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia vol. 5038 (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
160. 160 I’m not suggesting that computer programs cannot have subjective experience, just that, in this example, this one doesn’t.
161. 161 F. Hindriks and I. Douven, “Nozick’s Experience Machine: An Empirical Study,” Philosophical Psychology 31(2), 2018, 278–298.
162. 162 F. De Brigard, “If You Like It, Does It Matter if It’s Real?” Philosophical Psychology 23(1), 2010, 43–57.
163. 163 T. Hurka, M. D. Adler, and M. Fleurbay, “Objective Goods,” The Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy 2014, 379–402.
164. 164 S. Lyubomirsky, K. M. Sheldon, and D. Schkade, “Pursuing Happiness: The Architecture of Sustainable Change,” Review of General Psychology 9(2), 2005, 111–131.
165. 165 A. M. Isen and P. F. Levin, “Effect of Feeling Good on Helping: Cookies and Kindness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21(3), 1972, 384.
166. 166 Clark, et al., The Origins of Happiness, 222.
167. 167 Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, 101.

Chapter 4. What We Think Is Right and Wrong

1. 1 This is by income, not wealth. See www.globalrichlist.com. This information was retrieved April 2, 2019.
2. 2 W. MacAskill, Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference (New York: Gotham Books, 2015).
3. 3 J. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (New York: Penguin, 2013), 126.
4. 4 F. Harinck, C. K. De Dreu, and A. E. Van Vianen, “The Impact of Conflict Issues on Fixed-Pie Perceptions, Problem Solving, and Integrative Outcomes in Negotiation,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 81(2), 2000, 329–358.
5. 5 I. Pyysiäinen and M. Hauser, “The Origins of Religion: Evolved Adaptation or By-Product?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14(3), 2010, 104–109.
6. 6 People today tend to read the Bible with the moral background of humanism. Pinker, Enlightenment Now, 429.
7. 7 M. Godoy, “Lust, Lies, and Empire: The Fishy Tale Behind Eating Fish On Friday,” NPR, April 6, 2012, retrieved August 18, 2019, from https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/04/05/150061991/lust-lies-and-empire-the-fishy-tale-behind-eating-fish-on-friday.
8. 8 N. Epley, B. A. Converse, A. Delbosc, G. A. Monteleone, and J. T. Cacioppo, “Believers’ Estimates of God’s Beliefs Are More Egocentric than Estimates of Other People’s Beliefs,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106(51), 2009, 21533–21538; J. Davies, “Religion Does Not Determine Your Morality,” The Conversation, published online July 24, 2018.
9. 9 Greene, Moral Tribes, 83.
10. 10 K. A. Wade-Benzoni, A. E. Tenbrunsel, and M. H. Bazerman, “Egocentric Interpretations of Fairness in Asymmetric, Environmental Social Dilemmas: Explaining Harvesting Behavior and the Role of Communication,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 67(2): 1996, 111–126.
11. 11 Greene, Moral Tribes, 99.
12. 12 D. B. Krupp, L. A. Sewall, M. L. Lalumière, C. Sheriff, and G. T. Harris, “Nepotistic Patterns of Violent Psychopathy: Evidence for Adaptation?” Frontiers in Psychology 3, 2012, 305.
13. 13 This is excluding the 90 percent of what we assume to be “junk” DNA that’s just along for the ride and doesn’t code for useful proteins. “Why Mouse Matters,” National Human Genome Research Institute, July 23, 2010, https://www.genome.gov/10001345/importance-of-mouse-genome.
14. 14 Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, 48.
15. 15 P. Singer, The Expanding Circle (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1981); M. Shermer, The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom (New York: Macmillan, 2015).
16. 16 M. Xue and J. B. Silk, “The Role of Tracking and Tolerance in Relationship Among Friends,” Evolution and Human Behavior 33, 2012, 17–25.
17. 17 J. J. Massen and S. E. Koski, “Chimps of a Feather Sit Together: Chimpanzee Friendships Are Based on Homophily in Personality,” Evolution and Human Behavior 35(1), 2014, 1–8; J. Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017), 206.
18. 18 Greene, Moral Tribes, 35.
19. 19 This is assuming that the proportion of close relatives was similar to that of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 154.
20. 20 Greene, Moral Tribes, 23.
21. 21 J. Urist, “Which Deaths Matter?” The Atlantic September 29, 2004, retrieved July 22, 2019, from https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/which-deaths-matter-media-statistics/380898/.
22. 22 This in-group bias is also called tribalism, intergroup bias, or parochial altruism. Greene, Moral Tribes, 49.
23. 23 Davies, Riveted.
24. 24 C. K. Lai, et al. “Reducing Implicit Racial Preferences: I. A Comparative Investigation of 17 Interventions,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143(4), 2014, 1765.
25. 25 B. L. Hughes, N. Ambady, and J. Zaki, “Trusting Outgroup, but Not Ingroup Members, Requires Control: Neural and Behavioral Evidence,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 12(3), 2017, 372–381; J. A. Everett, Z. Ingbretsen, F. Cushman, and M. Cikara, “Deliberation Erodes Cooperative Behavior—Even Toward Competitive Out-groups, Even When Using a Control Condition, and Even When Eliminating Selection Bias,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 73, 2017, 76–81.
26. 26 Y. N. Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (New York: Random House, 2016).
27. 27 J. Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012), 164.
28. 28 Levitin, The Organized Mind, 28.
29. 29 G. Fiorito and P. Scotto, “Observational Learning in Octopus Vulgaris,” Science 256(5056), 1992, 545–547.
30. 30 D. R. Boyd, The Rights of Nature: A Legal Revolution that Could Save the World (Toronto: ECW Press, 2017), 34.
31. 31 E. Brooke-Hitching, Fox Tossing, Octopus Wrestling and Other Forgotten Sports (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015).
32. 32 J. Reese, “Survey of US Attitudes Towards Animal Farming and Animal-Free Food October 2017,” Sentience Institute, November 2017, retrieved February 12, 2020, from https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/animal-farming-attitudes-survey-2017.
33. 33 A. Shriver, “Knocking Out Pain in Livestock: Can Technology Succeed Where Morality Has Stalled?” Neuroethics 2(3), 2009, 115–124.
34. 34 Boyd, The Rights of Nature, 48.
35. 35 Ibid., 56.
36. 36 Ibid., 119.
37. 37 Ibid., 131–134.
38. 38 Ibid., 220.
39. 39 J. J. Prinz, and S. Nichols, “Moral Emotions,” in J. M. Doris (ed.), The Moral Psychology Handbook (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 111–146.
40. 40 J. Greene, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Moral Judgment,” in M. Gazzaniga (ed.), The Cognitive Neurosciences 4th ed., (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009) 987–1002.
41. 41 Prinz and Nichols, “Moral Emotions,” 111–146.
42. 42 Ibid., 111–146.
43. 43 Ibid.
44. 44 Ibid.
45. 45 M. W. Merritt, J. M. Doris, G. Harman, “Character,” in J. M. Doris (ed.), The Moral Psychology Handbook (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 355–401.
46. 46 D. Lieberman, “Objection! The Evolution of Pathogen, Sexual, and Moral Disgust,” talk at Disgust, Morality, and Society. A Conference Addressing the Emotion of Disgust. Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, April 6–7, 2017.
47. 47 A. R. Andrews, T. Crone, C. B. Cholka, T. V. Cooper, and A. J. Bridges, “Correlational and Experimental Analyses of the Relation Between Disgust and Sexual Arousal,” Motivation and Emotion 39(5), 2015, 766–779.
48. 48 Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 171. For an opposing view, that disgust does not spill over, see J. F. Landy and G. P. Goodwin, “Does Incidental Disgust Amplify Moral Judgment? A Meta-analytic Review of Experimental Evidence,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 10(4), 2015, 518–536.
49. 49 Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, 186.
50. 50 Lieberman, “Objection!”
51. 51 W. Sinnot-Armstrong, L. Young, and F. Cuchman, “Moral Intuitions,” in J. M. Doris (ed.), The Moral Psychology Handbook (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 246–272.
52. 52 J. M. Tybur, Y. Inbar, L. Aarøe, P. Barclay, F. K. Barlow, M. De Barra, and N. S. Consedine, “Parasite Stress and Pathogen Avoidance Relate to Distinct Dimensions of Political Ideology Across 30 Nations,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(44), 2016, 12408–12413.
53. 53 E. J. Masicampo, M. Barth, and N. Ambady, “Group-based Discrimination in Judgments of Moral Purity-related Behaviors: Experimental and Archival Evidence,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143(6), 2014, 2135.
54. 54 F. Cushman, L. Young, and J. D. Greene, “Multi-system Moral Psychology,” in J. M. Doris (ed.), The Moral Psychology Handbook (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 47–71.
55. 55 Ibid.
56. 56 Ibid.
57. 57 Ibid., 47–71, 265.
58. 58 Sinnot-Armstrong, et al., “Moral Intuitions,” 246–272.
59. 59 That’s a real thing, as I learned when I studied for my Canadian citizenship exam. It’s not from Tolkien, as I suggested when I first learned about it.
60. 60 E. Machery and R. Mallon, “Evolution of Morality,” in J. M. Doris (ed.), The Moral Psychology Handbook (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3–46.
61. 61 For an interesting discussion of how complicated this is, see https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-review/.
62. 62 Sinnot-Armstrong, et al., “Moral Intuitions,” 246–272.
63. 63 T. Hayden, “Bug Splat,” Council on Foreign Relations, Rep. Keith Ellison Call for Drone Reform, The Nation, January 18, 2013, retrieved July 3, 2019, from https://www.thenation.com/article/bug-splat-council-foreign-relations-rep-keith-ellison-call-drone-reform/.
64. 64 Sinnot-Armstrong, et al., “Moral Intuitions,” 246–272.
65. 65 Greene, Moral Tribes, 113.
66. 66 E. W. Dunn and C. Ashton-James, “On Emotional Innumeracy: Predicted and Actual Affective Responses to Grand-scale Tragedies,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44, 2008, 692–698.
67. 67 Described in Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, 62.
68. 68 S. Sachdeva, R. Iliev, and D. L. Medin, “Sinning Saints and Saintly Sinners: The Paradox of Moral Self-regulation,” Psychological Science 20(4), 2009, 523–528; P. M. Gollwitzer, P. Sheeran, V. Michalski, and A. E. Seifert, “When Intentions Go Public: Does Social Reality Widen the Intention-Behavior Gap?” Psychological Science 20(5), 2009, 612–618.
69. 69 P. Singer, The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 51.
70. 70 Some argue that his contribution to defeating Germany in World War II counts for something, but this is also debated. See the chapter “A Statue for Stalin?” in P. Singer, Ethics in the Real World: 87 Brief Essays on Things that Matter (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017), 239.
71. 71 Singer, The Most Good You Can Do, 57.
72. 72 Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, 29.
73. 73 A. Tversky and D. Kahneman, “Loss Aversion in Riskless Choice: A Reference-Dependent Model,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 106(4), 1991, 1039–1061.
74. 74 P. Rozin and E. B. Royzman, “Negativity Bias, Negativity Dominance, and Contagion,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 5(4), 2001, 296–320.
75. 75 J. Gottman, J. M. Gottman, and N. Silver, “Why Marriages Succeed or Fail: And How You Can Make Yours Last (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).
76. 76 Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, 31.
77. 77 R. Dawkins, The Universe Is Queerer than We Can Suppose, TED talk, 2005.
78. 78 The idea that our natural morality is reflective of what is actually right and wrong is presented as “preservationism” and torn down very persuasively in P. K. Unger, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996), 10.
79. 79 All moral theories rely on appealing to our moral intuitions in some way, and when ethicists criticize different moral theories, they often do it by showing that the theory leads to some conclusion that doesn’t match with our moral intuitions. Sinnot-Armstrong, et al., “Moral Intuitions,” 246–272.
80. 80 For example, the moral rules that deontologists endorse are often considered to be reasonable heuristics to a utilitarian, in that the utilitarian thinks that the rule, if followed, will often lead to doing the most good. So a utilitarian might think that murder is wrong because it often leads to bad outcomes, where the deontologist might think that murder’s wrongness does not need to be justified by anything more fundamental. Kagan, How to Count Animals, More or Less, 173.
81. 81 Greene, Moral Tribes, 26.
82. 82 For philosophers: as a total hedonic utilitarian, I’ve had to accept that utility monsters and tiling the universe with hedonium are good things, as foreign as those ideas feel to me.
83. 83 For one thing, if people thought that hospitals were places where they might be killed, they would be very loath to go to them. Hospitals need to protect the people that go there, even if a short-term cost-benefit analysis says they should not. This is one of the justifications for “rule utilitarianism,” which says that we should follow some rules for utilitarian reasons. It might be good in the moment to sacrifice one person to save five, but the longer-term societal effects might be bad enough to mean you shouldn’t do it. D. Schmidtz, “A Place for Cost-Benefit Analysis,” in H. LaFollette (ed.), Ethics in Practice: An Anthology (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 602–610.
84. 84 Merritt, et al., “Character,” 355–401.
85. 85 Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, 64.
86. 86 Y. N. Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (New York: Random House, 2016), 239.
87. 87 Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, 160–166.
88. 88 This argument is summarized in Greene, Moral Tribes, 178.

Chapter 5. What’s Actually Right and Wrong

1. 1 “Where keeping a promise will harm someone, for example, what we ought to do will depend on how serious the promise is, to whom it was made, the size of the potential harm, and so on. To weigh all these factors requires discernment and judgment.” This is a description of David Ross’s deontology theory, even though deontology normally tries to avoid numerical thinking. D. McNaughton and P. Rawling, “Deontology,” in H. LaFollette (ed.), Ethics in Practice: An Anthology (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 37–48.
2. 2 Doctors tend to have a more deontological moral outlook, but public health professionals are more utilitarian, and it’s easy to see why. Greene, Moral Tribes, 128.
3. 3 Thank you to my friend and skeptical podcaster Darren McKee for this example.
4. 4 People will disagree on what helping and hurting entails, and who counts as people, and other details, but in general the idea that hurting people is bad is universal. Haidt, The Righteous Mind.
5. 5 In philosophy, we would say that hitting people is bad because it harms another. This means that hitting people is “instrumentally” bad, meaning that it’s bad because of something else that is bad. If something needs no justification, it is self-evident. If something is good or bad by itself, without needing to appeal to some more fundamental moral, it is “inherently” good or bad.
6. 6 In philosophy, the biggest debate in ethics is between utilitarianism and deontology, which have differing answers to this question, among others. The third major competing philosophy is “virtue ethics.” But this theory is more about developing one’s moral character, not providing a calculus for determining the moral value of particular actions. In the time I took to research this book, I didn’t find enough virtue ethics theory that was relevant to the questions I wanted to answer in this book, so I’m leaving it out.
7. 7 E. Roedder and G. Harman, “Linguistics and Moral Theory,” in J. M. Doris (ed.), The Moral Psychology Handbook (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 273–296.
8. 8 McNaughton and Rawling, “Deontology,” 42.
9. 9 Pinker, Enlightenment Now, 417.
10. 10 Greene, Moral Tribes.
11. 11 I can’t do justice to the hundreds of years of ethical theorizing, but we might look to a respected source for a reasonable summary: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In its article on deontological ethics, it lists the generally accepted advantages. One is that it “leaves space for agents to give special concern to their families, friends, and projects. At least that is so if the deontological morality contains no strong duty of general beneficence, or, if it does, it places a cap on that duty’s demands.” I read this as saying that an advantage to this theory is that it allows me to benefit me, my kin, the people I care about, and my preferred social group more than other people, and to value my own projects over those of others. That sounds a lot like selfishness to me.
12. 12 Greene, Moral Tribes, 125–127.

Chapter 6. A Work in Progress

1. 1 Each field’s facts have a different half-life, in years.

   Physics:	13.07
   Economics:	9.38
   Math:	9.17
   Psychology:	7.15
   History:	7.13
   Religion:	8.76
   S. Arbesman, The Half-Life of Facts.

2. 2 9,441 is the estimate, but the optimistic estimate is 562 metric tons, and the pessimistic estimate is 12,730 metric tons. This paper also has data estimated for other countries, which don’t consume as much per capita carbon as the U.S. (page 18, table 2). P. A. Murtaugh and M. G. Schlax, “Reproduction and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals,” Global Environmental Change 19(1), 2009, 14–20.
3. 3 D. Notz and J. Stroeve, “Observed Arctic Sea-ice Loss Directly Follows Anthropogenic CO2 Emission,” Science 354(6313), 2016, 747–750.
4. 4 Murtaugh and Schlax, “Reproduction and the Ccarbon Legacies of Individuals,” 14–20.
5. 5 D. Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008).
6. 6 P. Singer, Ethics in the Real World, 31.
7. 7 D. Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1984).
8. 8 M. A. Kline and R. Boyd, “Population Size Predicts Technological Complexity in Oceania,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 277(1693), 2010, 2559–2564.
9. 9 J. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1999), chapter 10.
10. 10 Parents send children to work out of desperation, not greed. Pinker, Enlightenment Now, 93, 232; N. D. Kristof, “Where Sweatshops Are a Dream,” New York Times, January 14, 2009, retrieved August 29, 2019, from https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/opinion/15kristof.html.
11. 11 MacAskill, Doing Good Better, chapter 8.
12. 12 C. Bellamy, The State of the World’s Children 1998: Summary, UNICEF, 1997.
13. 13 MacAskill, Doing Good Better, chapter 8.
14. 14 C. Cramer, D. Johnston, B. Mueller, C. Oya, and J. Sender, “Fairtrade and Labour Markets in Ethiopia and Uganda,” The Journal of Development Studies 53(6), 2017, 841–856.
15. 15 Harari, Homo Deus, chapters 6 and 7.
16. 16 War has been disappearing, too, possibly because wealth today is less about material resources and more about knowledge and skill, which can’t be stolen. There’s more money to be made with cooperation. Harari, Homo Deus, 17.
17. 17 It was defined as $1.90 as measured in 2011 dollars. You can use online calculators to find out what that means at the time of your reading. See the Wikipedia page on “extreme poverty” for updated information.
18. 18 United States poverty guidelines: https://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty-guidelines.
19. 19 P. Singer, Practical Ethics, third edition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 191.
20. 20 MacAskill, Doing Good Better.

Chapter 7. The Numerical Value of Human Life

1. 1 C. M. Farmer, “The Effects of Higher Speed Limits on Traffic Fatalities in the United States, 1993–2017,” August 2019, retrieved August 30, 2019, from https://trid.trb.org/view/1607583.
2. 2 A. Van Benthem, “What Is the Optimal Speed Limit on Freeways?” Journal of Public Economics 124, 2015, 44–62.
3. 3 You can divide by about 30 to see what one year of life is worth to people. Updated numbers can be found on the Wikipedia page for “Value of Life.” Also Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, 2016. Guidelines for Regulatory Impact Analysis. US Department of Health and Human Services. Retrieved November 2, 2020, https://aspe.hhs.gov/system/files/pdf/242926/HHS_RIAGuidance.pdf; For a readable account see S. Ben -Achour, “How to Value a Life, Statistically Speaking,” Marketplace, March 20, 2019, retrieved February 12, 2020, from https://www.marketplace.org/2019/03/20/how-value-life/.
4. 4 These numbers are in 2003 dollars. J. F. Morrall III, “Saving Lives: A Review of the Record” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 27(3), 2003, 221–237; Roy Gamse, “How Much Are We Willing to Spend to Save a Life?” The Life You Can Save (blog), June 30, 2014, https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/blog/id/93/how-much-are-we-willing-to-spend-to-save-a-life.
5. 5 Unfortunately, there is no data on the world’s most effective theater charities.
6. 6 Philosophically minded readers might note that not everybody is utilitarian. Fair enough. Many deontologists believe that we have special obligations to people close to us. But they are often vague on how strong this obligation is. Maybe you have an obligation to be nice to your brother, so you might justify spending $78 on a meal to cheer him up. This is the cost of extending an African person’s life for one year with the most effective charities. So the obligation would have to be very strong for the meal to be the better action than donating the same money to the Against Malaria Foundation.
7. 7 A. D. Lopez, C. D. Mathers, M. Ezzati, D. T. Jamison, and C. J. Murray (eds.), Global Burden of Disease and Risk Factors, The World Bank, 2006, 402.
8. 8 Some economists try to put everything in terms of dollars, but this has some serious problems: it makes changes in happiness less valuable to poor people, and asking people about their willingness to pay to not get this or that disease ends up with nonsensical data. Clark, et al., The Origins of Happiness, 203.
9. 9 A. D. Lopez, et al., Global Burden.
10. 10 “Disability-adjusted life year,” Wikipedia, retrieved November 28, 2019, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability-adjusted_life_year.
11. 11 C. Hjorthøj, A. E. Stürup, J. J. McGrath, et al., “Years of Potential Life Lost and Life Expectancy in Schizophrenia: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,” Lancet Psychiatry, 4(4), 2017, 295–301.
12. 12 There are several ways to estimate these weightings, and scholars are not in agreement over which one makes the most sense. Although there are significant differences between the results of these different methods, in one study of twelve diseases, all of the different methods actually used agreed, at least, on the rank ordering of how bad the diseases were. B. Robberstad, “QALYs vs DALYs vs LYs Gained: What Are the Differences, and What Difference Do They Make for Health Care Priority Setting?” Norsk Epidemiologi 15(2), 2005, 183–191.
13. 13 MacAskill, Doing Good Better.
14. 14 See the chapter on imagining the future in J. Davies, Imagination: The Science of Your Mind’s Greatest Power (New York: Pegasus Books, 2019).
15. 15 G. L Albrecht and P. J. Devlieger, “The Disability Paradox: High Quality of Life Against All Odds,” Social Science & Medicine 48(8), 1999, 977–988.
16. 16 Clark, et al., The Origins of Happiness, 96–97.
17. 17 “Disability and Health Care Rationing,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, January 29, 2016, retrieved December 1, 2019, from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/disability-care-rationing/.
18. 18 Robberstad, “QALYs vs DALYs,” 183–191.
19. 19 Roedder, “Linguistics and Moral Theory,” 273–296. The debate on age weighting is reviewed here: Robberstad, B. “QALYs vs DALYs,” 2005, 183–191.
20. 20 L. Green, J. Myerson, and E. McFadden, “Rate of Temporal Discounting Decreases with Amount of Reward,” Memory & Cognition 25(5), 1997, 715–723.
21. 21 Technically, a lower marginal utility of income. Clark, et al., The Origins of Happiness, 204.
22. 22 Although discounting future money is not controversial, discounting health benefits is. Robberstad, “QALYs vs DALYs,” 183–191; W. K. Viscusi, “Discounting Health Effects for Medical Decisions,” Valuing Health Care 7(828), 1995, 125–47.
23. 23 The Against Malaria Foundation is consistently ranked as one of the world’s most effective charities. Scholars estimate that the AMF avoids a DALY for approximately $78 USD through giving people mosquito bed nets. M. Capriati and H. Hillebrandt, Against Malaria Foundation, 2018, retrieved July 18, 2019, from https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/report/against-malaria-foundation/.
24. 24 C. F. Bowen and V. Skirbekk, “Old Age Expectations Are Related to How Long People Want to Live,” Ageing & Society 37(9), 2017, 1898–1923.
25. 25 Harari, Homo Deus, 33, 48.

Chapter 8. Choosing a Career

1. 1 R. J. Vallerand, et al., “Les Passions de l’ame: On Obsessive and Harmonious Passion,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85(4), 2003, 756.
2. 2 Wayne Gretzky biography from the Encyclopedia of World Biography, retrieved July 5, 2019, from https://www.notablebiographies.com/Gi-He/Gretzky-Wayne.html.
3. 3 Y. Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: Random House, 2014).
4. 4 T. A. Judge and R. Klinger, “Promote Job Satisfaction through Mental Challenge,” in E. Locke (ed.), Handbook of Principles of Organizational Behavior (Chichester, UK: John Wiley, 2000), 75–89.
5. 5 R. N. Bellah, R. Madsen, W. M. Sullivan, A. Swidler, and S. M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007).
6. 6 A. Wrzesniewski, J. E. Dutton, and G. Debebe, “Interpersonal Sensemaking and the Meaning of Work,” Research in Organizational Behavior 25, 2003, 93–135.
7. 7 J. Nakamura and M. Csikszentmihalyi, “The Construction of Meaning Through Vital Engagement,” in C. L. Keyes and J. E. Haidt (eds.), Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-lived (Worcester, MA: American Psychological Association, 2003), 83–104.
8. 8 Except for environmental protection, this list includes the main categories on a major effective altruism website. Their list is “global health and development,” “animal welfare,” “long-term future,” and “effective altruism meta.” Retrieved June 20, 2019, from https://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds.
9. 9 D. Matthews and B. Pinkerton, “How to Pick a Career that Counts,” Vox, November 28, 2018, retrieved June 20, 2019, from https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/11/28/18114601/future-perfect-podcast-career-choice.
10. 10 Matthews and Pinkerton, “How to Pick a Career that Counts.”
11. 11 MacAskill, Doing Good Better.
12. 12 This concept originated independently in several places. A notable one is William MacAskill in a 2011 talk called “Want an ethical career? Become a banker.” For a published analysis, see W. MacAskill, “Replaceability, Career Choice, and Making a Difference,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17(2), 2014, 269–283. The term “earning to give” appears to have been invented by Brian Tomasik. B. Tomasik, “Why Activists Should Consider Making Lots of Money,” 2006, retrieved July 4, 2019, from https://reducing-suffering.org/why-activists-should-consider-making-lots-of-money/.
13. 13 MacAskill, “Replaceability, Career Choice, and Making a Difference,” 269–283.
14. 14 This is a bit of a simplification. For an in-depth analysis, see Tomasik, “Why Activists Should Consider Making Lots of Money.”
15. 15 MacAskill, Doing Good Better, chapter nine.
16. 16 Of course, Schindler also deliberately sabotaged some of the manufacturing so the munitions wouldn’t work. Likewise, someone in a morally problematic career might take action to mitigate harm more than their replacement would. But I’m not focusing on this aspect of it because I don’t think this possibility is necessary to justify such a career when donations are high enough—it can be ethically justifiable even if the worker causes more harm than their replacement would because of higher competence. You can see Schindler’s story in Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. MacAskill, “Replaceability, Career Choice, and Making a Difference,” 269–283.
17. 17 “List of Serial Killers by Number of Victims,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_serial_killers_by_number_of_victims.
18. 18 B. Tomasik, “Employers with Huge Matching-Donation Limits,” 2017, retrieved July 4, 2019, from https://reducing-suffering.org/employers-with-huge-matching-donations-limits/.
19. 19 H. Rolston III, “Feeding People versus Saving Nature,” in H. LaFollette (ed.), Ethics in Practice: An Anthology (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 583–591.
20. 20 S. Mukherjee, Fighting Chance, in O. Sacks (ed.), The Best American Science Writing 2003 (New York: HarperCollins, 2002).

Chapter 9. Measuring Good Done

1. 1 MacAskill, Doing Good Better.
2. 2 Ibid.
3. 3 S. N. Zane, B. C. Welsh, and G. M. Zimmerman, “Examining the Iatrogenic Effects of the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study: Existing Explanations and New Appraisals,” British Journal of Criminology 56(1), 2016, 141–160.
4. 4 MacAskill, Doing Good Better.
5. 5 Zane, et al., “Examining the Iatrogenic Effects of the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study,” 141–160.
6. 6 MacAskill, Doing Good Better.
7. 7 This charity, “Deworm the World,” is ranked as very effective and you can donate to them.
8. 8 MacAskill, Doing Good Better.

Chapter 10. Animals

1. 1 S. T. Weathers, L. Caviola, L. Scherer, S. Pfister, B. Fischer, J. B. Bump, and L. M. Jaacks, “Quantifying the Valuation of Animal Welfare Among Americans,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 33, 2020, 1–22.
2. 2 Although most agree that consciousness of pleasant and unpleasant states is sufficient, people disagree on whether or not it is necessary. Some think that trees or ecosystems, and sometimes even mountains, should have moral standing on their own—that is, independently of how harming them harms other conscious beings, such as humans who can appreciate them. Kagan, How to Count Animals, 12–15.
3. 3 Some disagree with this, and hold that preference violation without consciousness is morally relevant. Kagan, How to Count Animals.
4. 4 P. Singer, “All Animals Are Equal,” in H. LaFollette (ed.), Ethics in Practice: An Anthology (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 172–180.
5. 5 This analogy is from neuroscientist Susan Greenfield.
6. 6 What I’m calling the muted animal theory has been called the “decreased suffering approach,” and what I am calling the “Tinker Bell theory” has been called the “increased suffering” approach by S. S. Rakover, “Animals Suffer Too—A Response to Akhtar’s ‘Animal Pain and Welfare: Can Pain Sometimes Be Worse for Them than for Us?’ ” The Journal of Mind and Behavior 40(3/4), 2019, 195–204.
7. 7 P. Harrison, “Do Animals Feel Pain?” Philosophy 66(255), 1991, 25–40.
8. 8 This view is endorsed by Judith Jarvis Thompson: J. J. Thomson, The Realm of Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 292.
9. 9 S. Akhtar, “Animal Pain and Welfare: Can Pain Sometimes be Worse for Them than for Us,” The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 495–518.
10. 10 Many thinkers hold that it is an animal’s lack of self-awareness, particularly in terms of being able to think of itself as a being that has a past and future, that makes a big difference—in fact, that it defines “personhood.” The idea is that only with a conception of yourself in the future can you have frustrated goals. Singer, Practical Ethics, 52, 65–75.
11. 11 D. Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses (New York: Scientific American, 2012). When this excellent book was published, there was no evidence yet that plants had any sense of hearing.
12. 12 M. Gagliano, M. Grimonprez, M. Depczynski, and M. Renton, “Tuned In: Plant Roots Use Sound to Locate Water,” Oecologia 184(1), 2017, 151–160; H. M. Appel and R. B. Cocroft, “Plants Respond to Leaf Vibrations Caused by Insect Herbivore Chewing,” Oecologia 175(4), 2014, 1257–1266.
13. 13 C. R. Jain, “The Practical Dharma of The Practical Path,” (Allahabad: The Indian Press Ltd., 1929), 49, 55.
14. 14 B. Tomasik, Is Brain Size Morally Relevant? June 19, 2013, retrieved July 2, 2019, from https://reducing-suffering.org/is-brain-size-morally-relevant/#Small_brains_matter_more_per_neuron.
15. 15 A. Shriver, “Knocking Out Pain in Livestock: Can Technology Succeed Where Morality Has Stalled?” Neuroethics 2(3), 2009, 115–124.
16. 16 A. Lutz, D. R. McFarlin, D. M. Perlman, T. V. Salomons, and R. J. Davidson, “Altered Anterior Insula Activation During Anticipation and Experience of Painful Stimuli in Expert Meditators,” Neuroimage 64, 2013, 538–546. Interestingly, another study had people study meditation for only a few months and found a similar reduction in the suffering associated with pain. F. Zeidan, K. T. Martucci, R. A. Kraft, N. S. Gordon, J. G. McHaffie, and R. C. Coghill, “Brain Mechanisms Supporting the Modulation of Pain by Mindfulness Meditation,” Journal of Neuroscience 31(14), 2011, 5540–5548.
17. 17 R. A. Band, R. A. Salhi, D. N. Holena, E. Powell, C. C. Branas, and B. G. Carr, “Severity-adjusted Mortality in Trauma Patients Transported by Police,” Annals of Emergency Medicine 63(5), 2014, 608–614.
18. 18 Of course, giving a human with no money $1,000 gives more pleasure than giving a mouse with no money $1,000 (if it were cash, the mouse might be able to use it to make a nest). So we’ll restrict our discussion to things that have similar effects, though the effects might vary in intensity.
19. 19 Shelly Kagan believes that if two beings have toothaches, and the felt pain is equal for both beings, and you only have resources to relieve one of them, and one of the beings is a mouse and the other is a human, then you have a moral obligation to help the mouse rather than the human. Because I think mice have muted pain (relative to humans), for this thought experiment to be plausible the toothache would have to be much more severe, medically speaking, for the experienced pain to be actually the same. Given that, I disagree with Kagan, and believe that it would be equally morally virtuous to help either the mouse or the human in this situation. Kagan, How to Count Animals, More or Less, 125.
20. 20 Boström admits to speciesism with respect to artificial intelligence pleasure and pain. N. Boström, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014).
21. 21 P. Carruthers, “Animal Mentality: Its Character, Extent, and Moral Significance,” in T. L. Beauchamp and R. G. Frey (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011).
22. 22 D. DeGrazia, “Moral Status as a Matter of Degree?” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 46(2), 2008, 181–198. Shelly Kagan calls the “Equal Consideration” view the “unitarian” view, and the “Unequal Consideration” view the “hierarchical” view: Kagan, How to Count Animals, More or Less.
23. 23 Scientists disagree on how strongly brain volume in humans correlates with intelligence; estimates range from around 0.2 to 0.4. But all of these correlations are pretty big. G. E. Gignac and T. C. Bates, “Brain Volume and Intelligence: The Moderating Role of Intelligence Measurement Quality,” Intelligence 64, 2017, 18–29.
24. 24 K. Hays-Gilpin and D. S.Whitley (eds.), Reader in Gender Archaeology (Hove, UK: Psychology Press, 1998).
25. 25 The theory that babies are more conscious than adults comes from one of the world’s most respected developmental psychologists, Alison Gopnik. A. Gopnik, “Why Babies Are More Conscious than We Are,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30(5–6), 2007, 503–504.
26. 26 Another version of the brain-body ratio is called the “encephalization quotient.” Another way is to look at the raw number of neurons in a brain. Some have argued that our brains are mostly scaled-up primate brains. S. Herculano-Houzel, “The Human Brain in Numbers: A Linearly Scaled-up Primate Brain,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 3, 2009, 31.
27. 27 “List of Animals by Number of Neurons,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons.
28. 28 For example, this paper argues for different brain functions implementing consciousness in ray-finned fish: M. L. Woodruff, “Consciousness in Teleosts: There Is Something It Feels Like to Be a Fish,” Animal Sentience: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Animal Feeling 2(13), 2017, 1–21.
29. 29 R. I. Dunbar and S. Shultz, “Evolution in the Social Brain,” Science 317(5843), 2007, 1344–1347.
30. 30 R. V. Kail and J. C. Cavanaugh, Human Development: A Life-span View (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2018), 130.
31. 31 L. Chittka and J. Niven, “Are Bigger Brains Better?” Current Biology 19(21), 2009, R995–R1008.
32. 32 Singer, Practical Ethics, 85.
33. 33 C. McFarland and D. T. Miller, “Judgments of Self-Other Similarity: Just Like Other People, Only More So,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 16(3), 1990, 475–484.
34. 34 Peter Singer says no: “We are not, of course, going to attempt to assign numerical values to the lives of different beings, or even to produce an ordered list.” And I’m like, “Of course?” Singer, Practical Ethics, 90.
35. 35 Levitin, The Organized Mind, 45.
36. 36 C. Koch, “How to Make A Consciousness Meter,” Scientific American, November 2017, 28–33.
37. 37 Some disagree. For example, in reference to being able to feel pain, philosopher Shelly Kagan claims that “there is no obvious reason to assume that this capacity is one that humans have to a higher degree than animals have.” Kagan, How to Count Animals, More or Less, 163.
38. 38 To get this number, you divide the species-typical number of cortical (or equivalent) neurons by the number of human cortical neurons (16 billion). L. Scherer, B. Tomasik, O. Rueda, and S. Pfister, “Framework for Integrating Animal Welfare into Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment.” The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment 23(7), 2018, 1476–1490.
39. 39 It is important that we use multiplication rather than division, because with division the numbers go screwy when the level is negative. If a human and a chicken both endure a -10 event, the human’s adjusted happiness would be (-10/1) = -10, but the chicken’s would be (-10/0.0038) = -2631. This is the opposite of the intention, which is to mute the consciousness of simpler beings. A better way is multiplication. I’m citing Kagan here, though Kagan is discussing these points as a way to differentiate the moral value of different animals’ pains, not the differences in the felt pains themselves. Kagan, How to Count Animals, More or Less, 89, 138.
40. 40 For a thorough discussion, see Tomasik, “Is Brain Size Morally Relevant?”
41. 41 Invertebrate Sentience Table, retrieved August 18, 2019, from https://www.rethinkpriorities.org/invertebrate-sentience-table.
42. 42 Shelly Kagan believes that even if the suffering is exactly the same, we should still favor more complex animals over simpler ones. Kagan, How to Count Animals, More or Less.
43. 43 S. Segal Glick, “I Made My Kids Eat Crickets,” Today’s Parent, January 22, 2018, retrieved July 7, 2019, from https://www.todaysparent.com/family/parenting/i-made-my-kids-eat-crickets/.
44. 44 Scherer, et al., “Framework for Integrating Animal Welfare,” 1476–1490.
45. 45 T. M. Khuong, et al., “Nerve Injury Drives a Heightened State of Vigilance and Neuropathic Sensitization in Drosophila,” Science Advances 5(7), 2019, eaaw4099.
46. 46 D. Crummett, “The Problem of Evil and the Suffering of Creeping Things,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 82(1), 2017, 71–88.
47. 47 R. Bruns and J. Davies (under review), Modeling Uncertainty in Animal Welfare and Ethics.
48. 48 The Muted Animal Theory was further broken down into what measure of brain complexity was used (these percentages sum to 62): Raw Brain Mass: 2 percent, Brain-Body Ratio: 5 percent, Encephalization Quotient: 20 percent, Neuron Count: 15 percent, Cortical Neuron Count: 20 percent.
49. 49 For the spreadsheets that I created with economist Richard Bruns regarding animal welfare and climate change, see http://www.jimdavies.org/science-of-better/.
50. 50 “Numbers of Insects (Species and Individuals),” retrieved July 30, 2019, from https://www.si.edu/spotlight/buginfo/bugnos.
51. 51 Ethnobiologists created a category of “bug” to explain the predominance of the bug category in so many languages. Levitin, The Organized Mind, 28.
52. 52 Scherer, et al., “Framework for Integrating Animal Welfare,” 1476–1490.
53. 53 Human (2,100,000,000 seconds) (Wolframalpha.com)

    Cattle (18 months), pig (5.5 months), chicken (6 weeks) lifespans are from Aussie Abbatoirs, https://www.aussieabattoirs.com/facts/age-slaughtered.

    Salmon Slaughtered at 2 years of age:

    https://www.avma.org/KB/Resources/FAQs/Pages/A-Primer-on-Salmon.aspx.

    Shrimp eaten at 5 months:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocaridina_davidi.

    Crickets eaten at 2 months:

    https://modernfarmer.com/2018/08/how-to-raise-crickets-for-food/.

    Mealworms eaten at 1 month (“anywhere from a week to a couple of months”):

    https://www.wikihow.com/Raise-Mealworms.

54. 54 In animals, smallness of the body and population density are correlated. C. N. Johnson, “Relationships Between Body Size and Population Density of Animals: The Problem of the Scaling of Study Area in Relation to Body Size,” Oikos 85(3), 1999, 565–569.
55. 55 For wild animals, there are probably between 1,011 and 1,014 vertebrate land animals, at least 1,013 vertebrate sea creatures. But terrestrial and marine arthropods (bugs) are vastly more, numbering at about 1,018. There are probably 5*1,030 bacteria. B. Tomasic, “How Many Wild Animals Are There?” 2018, retrieved July 9, 2019, from https://reducing-suffering.org/how-many-wild-animals-are-there/.
56. 56 Ten quintillion insects (a 1 with 19 zeroes) times the cricket sentience discount = 29,000,000,000,000, which is 29 trillion. Divide that by the number of humans and you get 3,851.26. 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 insects * 0.0000029 / 7.53 billion people = 3,851.26
57. 57 Z. Groff and Y. K. Ng, “Does Suffering Dominate Enjoyment in the Animal Kingdom? An Update to Welfare Biology,” Biology & Philosophy 34(4), 2019, 40.
58. 58 B. Key, “Fish Do Not Feel Pain and Its Implications for Understanding Phenomenal Consciousness,” Biology & Philosophy 30(2), 2015, 149–165.
59. 59 “Predatory Behaviour,” ALERT, January 8, 2020, retrieved January 10, 2020, from http://lionalert.org/page/predatory-behaviour.
60. 60 Zoos vary enormously in the welfare the animals in them enjoy. There certainly are animals in zoos who have it worse than their wild counterparts, particularly in zoos of the past, where efforts for behavioral enrichment and large enclosures was not as much of a priority. Designers and workers at contemporary zoos in rich countries are very concerned with the welfare of the animals.
61. 61 C. Wilcox, “Bambi or Bessie: Are Wild Animals Happier?” Scientific American Blogs, April 12, 2011, retrieved July 9, 2019, from https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/bambi-or-bessie-are-wild-animals-happier/.
62. 62 This is actually a bit controversial. It could be that consciousness, which is what makes valanced mental states possible, was not directly selected for, but is rather a by-product of other adaptations. Aversion and attraction are more certainly adaptive.
63. 63 Harari, Sapiens.
64. 64 B. Tomasik, “Medicine vs Deep Ecology,” October 30, 2012, retrieved July 10, 2019, from https://reducing-suffering.org/medicine-vs-deep-ecology/.
65. 65 J. McMahan, “The Meat Eaters,” New York Times, September 19, 2010, retrieved July 8, 2019, from https://canvas.harvard.edu/files/4295822/download?download_frd=1.
66. 66 Singer, Ethics in the Real World, 44–45.
67. 67 Singer, Practical Ethics, 54.
68. 68 Pinker, Enlightenment Now, 19.
69. 69 “Baby Death Parents Spared Jail,” BBC News, September 14, 2001, retrieved June 4, 2019, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1542293.stm.
70. 70 B. Tomasik, “Does Vegetarianism Make a Difference?” 2006, retrieved July 7, 2019, from https://reducing-suffering.org/does-vegetarianism-make-a-difference/.
71. 71 Singer, Ethics in the Real World, 50–51.
72. 72 Singer, The Most Good You Can Do, 138.
73. 73 “The Effects of Diet Choices,” Animal Charity Evaluators, March 2016, https://animalcharityevaluators.org/research/dietary-impacts/effects-of-diet-choices/.
74. 74 Harish, “The Fish We Kill to Feed the Fish We Eat,” Counting Animals (blog), July 10, 2011, http://www.countinganimals.com/the-fish-we-kill-to-feed-the-fish-we-eat/.
75. 75 “The Efffects of Diet Choices,” Animal Charity Evaluators.
76. 76 Singer, Ethics in the Real World, 44.
77. 77 Considering 6-ounce portions, mussels have 40.4 grams of protein, and a T-bone steak has 48; mussels have 8 grams of fat, steak has 12. “Mussel Nutrition & Health Benefits,” retrieved August 22, 2019, from http://canadiancove.com/recipes/nutrition_and_health.html.
78. 78 D. Fleischman, “The Ethical Case for Eating Oysters and Mussels,” 2013, retrieved July 7, 2019, from https://sentientist.org/2013/05/20/the-ethical-case-for-eating-oysters-and-mussels/; Some think that mussels and other bivalves might feel a bit of pain, but agree that eating mussels be morally superior to eating just about any other kind of meat. B. Tomasik, “Can Bivalves Suffer?” February 6, 2017, retrieved July 10, 2019, from https://reducing-suffering.org/can-bivalves-suffer/.
79. 79 This spreadsheet has the most complete recording of harms of eating all foods that I’ve seen. You can download it yourself. M. B. Budolfson, “Harm Footprint of Food,” 2015, retrieved August 22, 2019, from http://www.budolfson.com/footprints.
80. 80 It’s a little more complicated than that. A reduction in demand at the store causes a reduction in prices, which increases sales. So reducing chicken consumption from, say, 10 birds to 0 causes a demand reduction of less than 10. How much less is called the cumulative elasticity factor. Estimates for this vary widely for meat, especially fish, but for chickens it’s about 0.3. This means that eating 10 fewer chickens can be expected to result in 3 fewer chickens being farmed. Going vegetarian (compared to a typical American diet) would prevent between 2 and 21 land animals from being raised every year, and 232 fish and shellfish being caught and farmed. https://animalcharityevaluators.org/research/dietary-impacts/effects-of-diet-choices/; That said, chicken farming is a low-margin, competitive business. Some would say that in the long run, producers exit the market, creeping price back up, and eliminating this elasticity. On this view, eating one chicken causes one chicken to suffer. For more explanation of this, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ31XUGj34.
81. 81 N. Rott, “Decline in Hunters Threatens How U.S. Pays for Conservation,” NPR, March 20, 2018, retrieved December 13, 2019, from https://www.npr.org/2018/03/20/593001800/decline-in-hunters-threatens-how-u-s-pays-for-conservation.
82. 82 Singer, Ethics in the Real World, 44.
83. 83 B. Key, “Fish Do Not Feel Pain and Its Implications for Understanding Phenomenal Consciousness,” Biology & Philosophy 30(2), 2015, 149–165. Woodruff, “Consciousness in Teleosts,” 1.
84. 84 B. Fischer and A. Lamey, “Field Deaths in Plant Agriculture,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 31(4), 2018, 409–428.
85. 85 Ibid.
86. 86 This study was conducted in 2017. K. Greig, “Ace Highlight: When Will There be Cost-Competitive Cultured Animal Products,” May 18, 2017, retrieved July 1, 2019, from https://animalcharityevaluators.org/blog/ace-highlight-when-will-there-be-cost-competitive-cultured-animal-products/.
87. 87 “The Humane League,” December 2019, retrieved July 1, 2019, from https://animalcharityevaluators.org/charity-review/the-humane-league/.
88. 88 3.5 chickens saved per dollar * 365 days = 1,277.5 chickens saved per year; 1,277.5 chickens saved – 365 chickens eaten = 912.5 chickens saved.
89. 89 Harish, “The Fish We Kill to Feed the Fish We Eat.”
90. 90 One recent study recommends eating meat. B. C. Johnston, D. Zeraatkar, M. A. Han, R. W. Vernooij, C. Valli, R. El Dib, and F. Bhatia, “Unprocessed Red Meat and Processed Meat Consumption: Dietary Guideline Recommendations from the Nutritional Recommendations (NutriRECS) Consortium,” Annals of Internal Medicine, 171, 2019, 756–64.
91. 91 C. Radnitz, J. Ni, D. Dennis, and B. Cerrito, “Health Benefits of a Vegan Diet: Current Insights,” Nutrition and Dietary Supplements 12, 2020, 57.
92. 92 The reason these studies are so hard to do is because diet is often confounded with other factors relevant to health and longevity (exercise and social interaction, for example), and because you can’t control what people eat, long term, in order to study them in a more experimental setup. But some American Adventists go to churches with dietary restrictions and others do not, making a given Adventist’s diet randomly assigned, while holding culture and genes more or less constant (or equally variable). These studies suggest the 3.6 years of life gained from a vegetarian diet. David G and Froolow [2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest], “Is Eating Meat a Net Harm?” Slate Star Codex, December 11, 2019, retrieved March 2, 2020, from https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-net-harm/.
93. 93 David G and & Froolow [2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest], “Is Eating Meat a Net Harm?”
94. 94 Ibid.
95. 95 Ibid.

Chapter 11. Comparing Human to Animal Suffering

1. 1 Technically, they estimate that $1,000 saves between -6,000 and 13,000 animals. That is, it might be that the Humane League is doing more harm than good. I took the middle of this range, 7,000 animal lives saved. “Animal Charity Evaluators,” The Humane League, 2018, retrieved August 12, 2019, from https://animalcharityevaluators.org/charity-review/the-humane-league/.
2. 2 The most effective charities save lives for thousands of dollars. I’ve seen numbers ranging from $2,000 to $7,500 per life saved. R. Wiblin, “Most People Report Believing It’s Incredibly Cheap to Save Lives in the Developing World,” 80,000 Hours Blog, May 9, 2017, retrieved July 2, 2019, from https://80000hours.org/2017/05/most-people-report-believing-its-incredibly-cheap-to-save-lives-in-the-developing-world/.
3. 3 M. Capriati and H. Hillebrandt, “Against Malaria Foundation,” Giving What We Can, April 25, 2018, retrieved July 18, 2019, from https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/report/against-malaria-foundation/.
4. 4 “Aussie Abattoirs,” Age of Animals Slaughtered, retrieved August 12, 2019, from https://www.aussieabattoirs.com/facts/age-slaughtered.
5. 5 If Americans eat 98.6 kg per year, and that is an expected 30 animals, and Nigerians eat 5.91 kg per year, then (5.91*30)/98.6 = 1.798 animals eaten yearly by the average Nigerian. 1.798 animals * 20 years = 35.96, which I rounded to 36, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_consumption_per_capita.
6. 6 This is ignoring the environmental impact of a saved Nigerian life (which, again, would be far less than an American life saved).

Chapter 12. Environmental Morality

1. 1 Singer, Practical Ethics, 216.
2. 2 T. Carleton, M. Delgado, M. Greenstone, T. Houser, S. Hsiang, A. Hultgren, et al., “Valuing the Global Mortality Consequences of Climate Change Accounting for Adaptation Costs and Benefits,” Working Paper of the Becker Friedman Institute, 2018, retrieved August 20, 2019, from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3224365.
3. 3 An earlier version of the following paper estimated that 72 percent of regions would be adversely affected by rising temperatures, and the rest will benefit. Carleton, et al., “Valuing the Global Mortality Consequences of Climate Change.”
4. 4 Ibid., 37.
5. 5 Ibid.; (Table H.3, EPA Valuation, Panel A, RCP 4.5, lowest discount rate, full uncertainty, divided by $80k value of statistical life year per Broome.) R. D. Bressler, The Mortality Cost of Carbon, CEEP, Working paper number 11, 2020, retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://ceep.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/papers/n11.pdf; Broome, “How Much Harm Does Each of Us Do?” in M. Budolfson, et al., Philosophy and Climate Change.
6. 6 For the spreadsheets that I created with economist Richard Bruns regarding animal welfare and climate change, see http://www.jimdavies.org/science-of-better/.
7. 7 J. Glover and M. J. Scott-Taggart, “It Makes No Difference Whether or Not I Do It,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society supplementary volumes, 49, 1975, 171–209.
8. 8 Singer, Practical Ethics, 217.
9. 9 The ranges presented are 90 percent confidence intervals. These ranges are more instructive than point estimates, due to the great uncertainty, but sometimes a point estimate is required, so here they are: the mean effect of eating a serving of beef is adding the equivalent of 0.053 days of human life, and the mean effect of eating chicken is losing 0.68 days of human life. It’s tough to justify going to eat chicken at a restaurant if it means you’re causing someone’s life to be cut half a day shorter. These calculations take into account animal suffering now, and human life lost in the next 100 years. It does not take into account animal suffering and life lost over the next 100 years, as there are no estimates of this. Calculations are available at http://www.jimdavies.org/science-of-better/.
10. 10 Even those trying to “de-extinct” species know very well that they are only approximating what the species was. B. Wray, Rise of the Necrofauna: The Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-extinction (Vancouver: Greystone Books, Ltd., 2017).
11. 11 D. Bourn and J. Prescott, “A Comparison of the Nutritional Value, Sensory Qualities, and Food Safety of Organically and Conventionally Produced Foods,” Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition 42(1), 2002, 1–34.
12. 12 R. Blair, Organic Production and Food Quality: A Down to Earth Analysis (Chichester UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2012).
13. 13 V. Seufert, N. Ramankutty, and J. A. Foley, “Comparing the Yields of Organic and Conventional Agriculture,” Nature 485(7397), 2012, 229.
14. 14 M. B. Budolfson, “Consumer Ethics, Harm Footprints, and the Empirical Dimensions of Food Choices,” in Philosophy Comes to Dinner, A. Chignell, T. Cuneo, and M. C. Halteman (eds.) (London: Routledge, 2015), 163–191.
15. 15 H. L. Tuomisto, I. D. Hodge, P. Riordan, and D. W Macdonald, “Does Organic Farming Reduce Environmental Impacts?—A Meta-Analysis of European Research,” Journal of Environmental Management 112, 2012, 309–320; G. van Huylenbroek, K. Mondelaers, J. Aertsens, and K. Mondelaers, “A Meta‐Analysis of the Differences in Environmental Impacts Between Organic and Conventional Farming,” British Food Journal 111(10), 2009, 1098–1119.
16. 16 Budolfson, “Consumer Ethics, Harm Footprints,” 163–191; W. Wakeland, S. Cholette, and K. Venkat, “Food Transportation Issues and Reducing Carbon Footprint,” in Green Technologies in Food Production and Processing (Boston: Springer, 2012), 211–236; P. Desrochers and H. Shimizu, The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile Diet (New York: Public Affairs, 2012).
17. 17 D. R. Boyd, The Rights of Nature: A Legal Revolution that Could Save the World (Toronto: ECW Press, 2017), 165.
18. 18 To put some numbers to that, we can look at how many people die as a result of pollution created. For each kilowatt-hour, coal kills 387 times as many people as nuclear. Pinker, Enlightenment Now, 147.
19. 19 You can find GiveWell’s top recommended charities at https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities.

Chapter 13. Choosing Charities

1. 1 Numbers adapted from Toby Ord’s essay, as described in Singer, The Most Good You Can Do, 111, 119, footnote 7.
2. 2 Singer, The Most Good You Can Do, 111.
3. 3 D. Matthews, “Join Wall Street. Save the World,” Washington Post, May 31, 2013, retrieved June 21, 2019, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/31/join-wall-street-save-the-world/?utm_term=.d917e0e3ed88.
4. 4 This is brilliantly illustrated in an xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/871/.
5. 5 This financial planning structure was inspired by this excellent book: E. Warren and A. W. Tyagi, All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005). I added the charity part.
6. 6 Effective altruist Ian Ross expressed this view, as reported in: Singer, The Most Good You Can Do, 45.
7. 7 Buying your cousin’s peanut butter helps your cousin, too, of course, but buying peanut butter from anybody helps somebody, and by a utilitarian value system your cousin isn’t any more valuable than anybody else. So helping your cousin over someone else is only good to the extent that it makes you feel good, because other than that the good to the world is, we’ll assume, the same. If buying the grocery store peanut butter helps really poor people, though, then the economic help done would be greater for the grocery store case.
8. 8 Cost to prevent blindness: Singer, The Most Good You Can Do, 111.
9. 9 What I mean is the production will cost $10,000 after ticket sales. Most theater productions do not recoup their expenses with ticket sales, and rely on grants and donations to keep going.
10. 10 Singer, The Most Good You Can Do, 120.
11. 11 T. Syme, “Charity vs. Revolution: Effective Altruism and the Systemic Change Objection,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22(93), 2019, 1–28.
12. 12 Work stating that capitalism causes poverty: Syme, “Charity vs. Revolution,” 1–28. Work stating that capitalism is curing poverty: Pinker, Enlightenment Now, 107–109.
13. 13 J. Somé, S. Pasali, and M. Kaboine, “Exploring the Impact of Healthcare on Economic Growth in Africa,” Applied Economics and Finance 6(3), 2019, 45–57.
14. 14 Pinker, Enlightenment Now, 74.
15. 15 Gross National Product (GDP) correlates with just about every measure of human flourishing, including peace, longevity, freedom, health, human rights, and nutrition. Pinker, Enlightenment Now, 96.
16. 16 Singer, Practical Ethics, 208.
17. 17 Singer, The Most Good You Can Do, 28.
18. 18 K. Kushlev, D. M. Drummond, S. J. Heintzelman, and E. Diener, “Do Happy People Care About Society’s Problems?” The Journal of Positive Psychology, 2019, DOI: 10.1080/17439760.2019.1639797.
19. 19 Singer, Practical Ethics, 213.
20. 20 For a more in-depth and nuanced discussion of fighting climate change vs. global health, see https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GEM7iJnLeMkTMRAaf/climate-change-interventions-are-generally-more-effective.
21. 21 As mentioned earlier, it costs the average American regulatory agency about eight million dollars to save one life. If we estimate that saving one life is saving about thirty years, that comes out to about $266,666 to save one year of life. S. Ben-Achour, “How to Value a Life, Statistically Speaking,” Marketplace, 2019, retrieved February 12, 2020, from https://www.marketplace.org/2019/03/20/how-value-life/.

Chapter 14. How to Motivate People to Be Good

1. 1 T. Nordhaus and M. Shellenberger, “Global Warming Scare Tactics,” New York Times, April 8, 2014, retrieved September 4, 2019, from https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/opinion/global-warming-scare-tactics.html.
2. 2 B. Ottenhoff and G. Ulrich, “More Money For More Good,” 2012, retrieved July 2, 2019, from https://www.guidestar.org/ViewCmsFile.aspx?ContentID=4718.
3. 3 Even $37,500 is quite expensive to save a life. The best charities are much more efficient.
4. 4 Singer, The Most Good You Can Do, 90.
5. 5 R. B. Cialdini, L. J. Demaine, B. J. Sagarin, D. W. Barrett, K. Rhoads, and P. L. Winter, “Managing Social Norms for Persuasive Impact,” Social Influence 1(1), 2006, 3–15.
6. 6 T. Rogers, N. J. Goldstein, and C. R. Fox, “Social mobilization,” Annual Review of Psychology 69, 2018, 357–381.
7. 7 Ibid., 357–381.
8. 8 Ibid.
9. 9 D. Krech and R. S. Crutchfield, “The Field and Problems of Social Psychology,” 1948.
10. 10 T. Hamm, “Buying Foods Based on Cost Per Calorie,” The Simple Dollar, January 25, 2017, retrieved May 19, 2020, from https://www.thesimpledollar.com/buying-foods-based-on-cost-per-calorie/.
11. 11 C. Finney, “To Eat or Not to Eat: 10 of the World’s Most Controversial Foods,” Guardian, November 20, 2019, retrieved May 20, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/20/to-eat-or-not-to-eat-10-of-the-worlds-most-controversial-foods.
12. 12 E. H. Haddad and J. S. Tanzman, “What Do Vegetarians in the United States Eat?” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 78(3), 2003, 626S–632S.
13. 13 “Diet Change and Demographic Characteristics of Vegans, Vegetarians, Semi-Vegetarians, and Omnivores,” Humane League Labs Technical Report, retrieved June 28, 2019, from http://www.humaneleaguelabs.org/blog/2014-04-07-large-scale-survey-vegans-vegetarians-and-meat-reducers/.
14. 14 http://www.humaneleaguelabs.org/blog/2015-01-24-which-vegan-meals-do-omnivores-find-most-appetizing-and-accessible/.
15. 15 Between 3.4 and 7.4 years, according to https://animalcharityevaluators.org/research/dietary-impacts/effects-of-diet-choices/.
16. 16 “Length of Adherence to Vegetarianism,” Animal Charity Evaluators, November 2017, https://animalcharityevaluators.org/research/dietary-impacts/vegetarian-recidivism/.
17. 17 “Our Use of Cost-Effectiveness Estimates,” Animal Charity Evaluators, April 2018, https://animalcharityevaluators.org/research/methodology/our-use-of-cost-effectiveness-estimates/#6.
18. 18 “Leafleting,” Animal Charity Evaluators, November 2017, retrieved July 1, 2019 from https://animalcharityevaluators.org/advocacy-interventions/interventions/leafleting/#report.
19. 19 “Protests,” Animal Charity Evaluators, March 2018, retrieved July 1, 2019 from https://animalcharityevaluators.org/advocacy-interventions/interventions/protests/#3.
20. 20 Brian Tomasik’s estimate is actually $11, but he believes the true number is closer to $100, for reasons he explains in this online article. B. Tomasik, “Donating Toward Efficient Online Veg Ads,” January 28, 2012, retrieved August 29, 2019, from https://reducing-suffering.org/donating-toward-efficient-online-veg-ads/; William MacAskill also suggests the that $100 is the cost of making someone vegetarian for one year. MacAskill, Doing Good Better.
21. 21 “Diet Change and Demographic Characteristics.”
22. 22 Also, people respond pretty well to documentaries and books, so marketing material should promote them. Brochures, booklets, and magazines seem to be less effective. But this effect was quite small. “Diet Change and Demographic Characteristics.”
23. 23 J. Hallam, R. G. Boswell, E. E. DeVito, and H. Kober, “Gender-related Differences in Food Craving and Obesity,” Yale Journal of Biological Medicine 89(2), 2016, 161–173.
24. 24 MacAskill doesn’t believe that you can do meat offsets like you can do carbon offsets. I don’t really understand his argument, though. MacAskill, Doing Good Better.

Chapter 15. When Giving Gives Back

1. 1 E. W. Dunn, L. B. Aknin, and M. I. Norton, “Prosocial Spending and Happiness: Using Money to Benefit Others Pays Off,” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23(1), 2014, 41–47.
2. 2 Ibid.
3. 3 Ibid.
4. 4 There was a significant relationship between giving and happiness in most of these countries. Dunn, et al., “Prosocial Spending and Happiness: Using Money to Benefit Others Pays Off.”
5. 5 Dunn, et al., “Prosocial Spending and Happiness: Using Money to Benefit Others Pays Off,” 41–47.
6. 6 J. H. Fowler and N. A. Christakis, “Cooperative Behavior Cascades in Human Social Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(12), 2010, 5334–5338.
7. 7 For a compelling argument about why being good is incredibly costly, I recommend the book P. K. Unger, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996).
8. 8 Tomasik, “Why Activists Should Consider Making Lots of Money.”
9. 9 V. S. Helgeson, “Relation of Agency and Communion to Well-being: Evidence and Potential Explanations,” Psychological Bulletin 116(3), 1994, 412.
10. 10 Oakley, et al., Pathological Altruism.
11. 11 A. M. Grant, Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success (New York: Penguin, 2013), 159.
12. 12 R. Schulz, et al., “Patient Suffering and Caregiver Compassion: New Opportunities for Research, Practice, and Policy,” The Gerontologist 47(1), 2007, 4–13.
13. 13 J. Crocker, A. Canevello, and A. A. Brown, “Social Motivation: Costs and Benefits of Selfishness and Otherishness,” Annual Review of Psychology 68, 2017, 299–325.
14. 14 Singer, Ethics in the Real World, 111.
15. 15 Matthews and Pinkerton, “How to Pick a Career that Counts.”
16. 16 You can see recent figures at https://www.jefftk.com/donations.
17. 17 For those interested, it’s the point of marginal utility: where giving away hurts you as much as the recipients would gain. As far as I know, nobody has lived up to this standard, including Peter Singer, the world’s unofficial spokesperson for utilitarianism. Singer, The Most Good You Can Do, 15. Peter Unger puts it well. Perfect morality would be “By sending funds to the most efficient loss-lessening programs, you must incur financial losses up to the point where going further will be unproductive, overall, in lessening serious losses.” Unger, Living High and Letting Die, 145.
18. 18 Syme, “Charity vs. Revolution,” 1–28.
19. 19 J. L. Bühler, R. Weidmann, J. Nikitin, and A. Grob, “A Closer Look at Life Goals Across Adulthood: Applying a Developmental Perspective to Content, Dynamics, and Outcomes of Goal Importance and Goal Attainability,” European Journal of Personality 33, 2019, 359–384.
20. 20 S. K. Nelson, K. Layous, S. W. Cole, and S. Lyubomirsky, “Do Unto Others or Treat Yourself? The Effects of Prosocial and Self-focused Behavior on Psychological Flourishing,” Emotion 16(6), 2016, 850–861.
21. 21 Ibid.
22. 22 R. B. Cialdini and D. A. Schroeder, “Increasing Compliance by Legitimizing Paltry Contributions: When Even a Penny Helps,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 34(4), 1976, 599.
23. 23 L. B. Aknin, M. I. Norton, and E. W. Dunn, “From Wealth to Well-being? Money Matters, but Less than People Think,” The Journal of Positive Psychology 4(6), 2009, 523–527; D. Kahneman, A. B. Krueger, D. Schkade, N. Schwarz, and A. A. Stone, “Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion,” Science 312(5782), 2006, 1908–1910.
24. 24 D. Saxbe and R. L. Repetti, “For Better or Worse? Coregulation of Couples’ Cortisol Levels and Mood States,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 98(1), 2010, 92; D. E. Saxbe and R. Repetti, “No Place Like Home: Home Tours Correlate with Daily Patterns of Mood and Cortisol,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 36(1), 2010, 71–81.
25. 25 For a recent review of this literature, see W. Zhang, M. Chen, Y. Xie, and Z. Zhao, “Prosocial Spending and Subjective Well-being: The Recipient Perspective,” Journal of Happiness Studies 19(8), 2018, 2267–2281.
26. 26 Aknin, et al., “Prosocial Spending,” 635.
27. 27 Singer, The Most Good You Can Do, 100.
28. 28 Aknin, et al., “Prosocial Spending,” 635.
29. 29 Zhang, et al., “Prosocial Spending,” 2267–2281.
30. 30 J. Haidt, “Elevation and the Positive Psychology of Morality,” Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-lived 275, 2003, 289.
31. 31 A. C. Brooks, “Does Giving Make Us Prosperous?” Journal of Economics and Finance 31(3), 2007, 403–411.
32. 32 J. Andreoni, W. T. Harbaugh, and L. Vesterlund, “Altruism in Experiments,” The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics: Volume 1–8, 2008, 134–138; W. T. Harbaugh, U. Mayr, and D. R. Burghart, “Neural Responses to Taxation and Voluntary Giving Reveal Motives for Charitable Donations,” Science 316(5831), 2007, 1622–1625.
33. 33 Thoits and Hewitt, “Volunteer Work and Well-being,” 115–131.
34. 34 S. Lyubomirsky, L. King, and E. Diener, “The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success?” Psychological Bulletin 131(6), 205, 803.
35. 35 Grant, Give and Take, 182.
36. 36 Lyubomirsky, “Hedonic Adaptation,” 200–224.