In this activity, we're going to focus on kindness, the simple act of doing something nice. Try to do at least one random active kindness a day, it could be something big like donating money or volunteering in your community. As usual, we want you to track what you did, so get out there and do something nice, it'll make you feel better than you expect.

Turns out that the simple act of making a new social connection, talking to a stranger on a train, or even at a coffee shop can significantly increase our positive mood. We just want you to seek out more social connection, strike up a conversation with a friend, or grab lunch with someone you haven't seen in a while, or even strike up a fast conversation with a stranger, and then track that you did it. As we've seen, tracking will help us turn one act of social connection into a habit.

And so, this is going to be a little bit more of a science lecture, but it's going to be awesome, and that it's going to teach you about lots of your biases that lead you astray. But I thought I would give you a nice word to sum up this take home, a kind of definition of this sort of phenomenon of not really thinking the things that are going to make us happy actually do. And just like the case of the other annoying feature, I want you to see them first in the context of our visual system, again, because it's easier to see our biases that way, because they operate kind of all through the mind, from vision to happiness decisions.

Well, it can mean all kinds of different things, but for the purpose of this, we're going to talk in terms of this salient, but often completely irrelevant point against to which we're judging something all the time. And one of my favorite examples of this comes from a cool study by Burleigh and Meegan, where they actually did an experiment in their own classes to see how spiteful students might be about other people's grades. Well, this is a spot that super insidious if you've ever been like me at an airport or at a newsstand looking at all these things, because the world has media that features bodies and perceptions that don't match with what the average is, and at least in my case, they're usually a little bit hotter than me.

Your perceptual systems just in those few seconds, are just assuming like, "Oh, the state of the world is just like I see a reverse flag on the screen and that's just like the way it is." Well, Brickman and colleagues did a very famous study where they looked at lottery winners one year on and they assess their happiness. That seems pretty good, until you realize that controls who haven't won the lottery are at 3.82 statistically no different in that case.

You saw one of these, the intensity part in the context of a study that I'm going to say one more time, because it's so important to remind you guys of, it has to do with grades. Some of you may know that at Harvard, or at least at the time the study was run, you find out which residential college you're in during your freshman year. And that last part about rationalization gets us to the second bias that causes these mispredictions, and that's what Dan Gilbert calls immune neglect.

That we have all these kind of funny features of our mind that deliver to us this swarm of miswanting. The next one is that we are constantly seeing this annoying feature where our minds get used to stuff, where if we have something for a long period of time, it just becomes rote, and we stop getting the pleasure from it over and over again. So, the big question we're going to end with today is, okay, you just told me about all these annoying features in my mind.

So I guess like one way to avoid it is just to put all these filters such as deactivate Facebook or you use less of social media. Like nobody is giving an accurate sense of what their real world is, of what their beliefs are, of how much fun they're having on these tools. And so, in the context of these kind of magazine images, you can shut it off a little bit by realizing these things are Photoshopped.