You and I Are Going to Work on Happiness

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Happiness is something i really care about in my work, but i would not have imagined that a social psychologist thinks about when they are choosing research areas. It's so interesting to hear you that one of the motivating factors for studying this was that your other work wasn't very funny. By experiences, make it a treat, by time a pay now, consume later. And i should know these and invest in others. These are like five. I'm sure there are more. But we never meant to say, this is the holy set of five things and there's nothing else. We're going to study it, and we're going to find ways to make people happier.

Can money really buy happiness? Michael Norton is a social science researcher who studies how we feel about our spending decisions. His work explores questions like: What’s the best way to spend your cash? How much should you donate to charity? Do credit cards make us unhappy? In this episode, Michael shares the sometimes-surprising findings that can help you use our money to improve your life. Michael is a professor of business administration in the marketing unit at the Harvard Business School. Prior to joining HBS, Michael was a Fellow at the MIT Media Lab and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. His work has been published in a number of leading academic journals and has been covered in media outlets such as the Economist, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. To learn more about "How to Be a Better Human," host Chris Duffy, or find footnotes and additional resources, please visit: go.ted.com/betterhuman