Fan Yang is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago, the principal investigator of the Human Nature & Potentials Lab, and the lead investigator of the Moral Transcendence project at the Center for Practical Wisdom.
Life is marked by challenges and hardships, an undeniable reality of human existence that leads some thinkers to ponder the preference of never being born. While substantial research efforts have focused on making life more tolerable, Yang's research investigates ways to enhance our living experiences, making them truly enjoyable and worthwhile.
In this interview. we discuss the difference between happiness and meaning in life, the ways one might reach their greatest human potential through awe and flow, and how those concepts tie to wisdom.
My favorite takeaway from this conversation “Maslow actually thinks self-actualization and self-transcendence, they are kind of the highest level of human development and they typically come only at the very end of life and only for very small percentage of people. So I think I'm just turning that view upside down. I actually think we all have seeds for these things, and I think it's not just the 1%. I think it's actually 100%. We all have this potential”
Conversation transcipt:
Fan Yang: For us to really fully realize our emotional potential, we also have to realize our moral potentials. These are two major directions in my lab right now. We both study what gives people optimal experiences in life such as happiness, meaning, & awe. And we also study what are our tendencies and potential to go beyond our self-interest and contribute to entities and interest beyond ourself.
My name is Fan Yang. I'm a Research Assistant Professor here at the Department of Psychology at UChicago and I direct the Human Nature and Potentials lab.
So when I was about age 15, I started to have questions about 'Why do I live? What is life's meaning?' So I was looking around desperately for answers. So I searched in books and I just couldn't find satisfying answers anywhere. My lab right now actually studies what gives people a sense of living a happy and meaningful life. So I believe the questions do not just relate to myself but it is a question of interest for a lot of people as well and it is also these questions have also been studied by social psychologist for decades.
Unlike most psychologists who study happiness & meaning, I do not view living a happy and meaningful life is all about figuring out how to...how they function as emotional states. We found, you know, even children as young as ages four or five and also adults, they actually think bad people are not happy.
We told young children “There's this bad person who actually can get everything he wants. He has lots of good feelings every day, so do you think he's happy or not?" Children and adults, they just don't think bad bad persons are very happy.
Compared to happiness meaning is a concept that even focuses more on other people's interest and when ask people to judge like 'What is a meaningful life? What is a meaningful job?" people really care about how much the job and the life actually brings benefits to people beyond the self. When people think about happiness they tend to think about happiness as like a self-enhancement.
So basically, as long as you do not harm others, as long as you are not a bad person, then you can be happy by satisfying your desires and enhance yourself. But when it comes to meaning, people are really much more focusing on self-transcendence, so they care about how much we go beyond our self-interest and contribute to societies
Jean Matelski Boulware: Is there a difference between self-transcendence and pro- sociality?
Yang: I tend to think of pro-sociality is as we normally talk about it, is actually one way of transcending ourselves. For example, if we are talking about pro-sociality to help another person or to contribute to societies, that definitely means we are transcending the interest of ourselves. But I also think self-transcendence is broader than that. So for example, morally speaking, it also goes beyond these traditional ways of being prosocial to another person. So for example identifying with all humanity and have this mindset of promoting humanity's interest as a whole. So normally we do not think these are our moral obligations or like prosocial things that we are expected to do in everyday life, but actually it is part of greatly transcending the interest of the self. So in terms of emotions, for example, I think pro-sociality is more about the moral side of self-transcendence but we can also have self-transcendent emotions. So basically, for example, emotions like awe, like compassion, like flow- these are called self-transcendent emotions. When we have these emotions, we tend to lose our sense of self & feel like we are one with things greater than ourselves. So this also goes beyond pro-sociality.
Boulware: You've recently published a couple of papers on awe and self-transcendence and then wisdom. Can you explain a little bit more about your findings and how they tie to wisdom in general?
Yang: Yeah, exactly so I always think wisdom is this super desirable thing and very mysterious -like everybody wants to have it and nobody knows how to how exactly we can get there. So I think in the field there have been theoretical views and also findings showing negative experiences in life such as some even very traumatic experiences can actually surprisingly help people to gain wisdom -if people learn from these negative events. So what I have been thinking is whether we could also gain wisdom from less painful ways and by also having good experiences and learn from the good experiences.
So that's why in one of our recent papers, with Yena Kim, who is a brilliant PhD student at Booth at UChicago right now and in collaboration with Dr Howard Nusbaum, the Director for the Center for Practical Wisdom, we studied how self-transcendent experience can help promote wisdom.
In our initial study, we found that people who have dispositional self-transcendent experiences- for example, who are more likely to have awe experiences, flow experiences in life -we found that they are more likely to report beliefs and cognitive reasoning reflected as wise reasoning and also epistemic humility.
And then in the experimental study, we also tried to promote the self-transcendent emotional states. So for example, in order to promote awe experiences, we showed people videos involving vast nature scenes from BBC documentary. And then to promote flow, Yena came up with a very creative idea- so she found this music making tool online so that people could actually do these kind of flow activities and compose music. And we found in inducing these emotional states compared to inducing for example neutral states or pure happy states by watching amusement video, people are more likely to show wise reasoning skills. For example they are more likely to resolve interpersonal conflicts and they are more likely to report their significant gaps in their epistemic understanding- as well as their willing is to improve these aspects and to improve their general moral character as well.
So flow basically makes you zoom in and really focus on your task at hand. It just makes you feel you're absorbed in the activity. Whereas awe makes you want to zoom out- like you really open your, your eyes and open your mind to realize there are things are much much larger than yourself. So even though they sound completely different, I think they both involve this self-transcendent component and they both promote wise reasoning. So it just seems to me these kind of self-transcendent experiences can be very very useful and valuable in promoting wise reasoning and wisdom in general.
Boulware: I guess, if you're focusing on self-transcendent experiences, how would you what would you recommend for someone to do, to be able to tap into that…without participating in one of your studies but to just experience it to maybe better themselves in some way?
Yang: Yeah I think one of the major take-home message from our studies is that so, so if we think about wisdom and wise reasoning involve the type of abilities to balance different viewpoints and to take more perspectives outside ourselves and to be more prosocial in general, it seems these ways to transcend ourselves emotionally actually can promote those ways to transcend ourselves cognitively and morally. So I think awe is a very easy way to actually make us more more likely to experience this on a daily basis.
When you ask people to spontaneous report how much awe they have, it’s pretty rare. There has been some efforts to help people to find awe in more everyday activities, it doesn't...it more takes your appreciation than how impressive the stimuli are to have a sense of awe.
I think maybe we even lose our ability to find awe in our life...because children they seem to view everything with such open eyes, with such curiosity, everything seems to be interesting and to be new to them. So I mean this is an empirical question we have…we have to test of course…but at least we show even from a very young, we are able to find awe and appreciate awe. So that means this could be a very effective way for us to gain it from everyday life and across different age groups.
And also I mean flow activities also so these like... so basically the hypothesis is I think by constantly having these more self-transcendent emotional states perhaps we could be more likely to be able to cognitively to go beyond our own perspectives and also morally to go beyond our self-interest as well.
Boulware: So here's the toughest question: You've been thinking about happiness and the meaning of life since you were a teenager, and you've been studying it now...do you find yourself -in your work- happy and meaningful?
Yang: I think I have been changed a lot by my research and that's also one of the motivations for why I want to keep doing it, because I feel I have benefited so much from it. So for example, children’s views about happiness really have greatly shaped my own view about happiness.
I really just thought about happiness just as you know as feeling good, but we know Aristotle has this deeper view about happiness is also being good. And I couldn't believe it when I heard you know, I tested my first participants -they were all four years old -they just said you know that that mean person was not happy even though we said you know "The person could get everything he wanted" I really couldn't believe it. I had to ask them to repeat, but after three children then I totally believed it. I- it just seems to me such a deeply rooted idea happiness is somehow is just intertwined with our sense of Morality in our mind. So I guess like it's even very hard for people to imagine, you know, an evil person being truly happy.
When we think about happy persons, we tend to think of them as smiling. We tend to think of maybe a very nice one. So I mean it's just- it totally I know we didn't directly test it -but the implication for me is I really feel you know perhaps I shouldn't just think about directly pursuing happiness but I should think more about 'Am I being a good person? Am I living a good life?' So that shifted my energy and my goals in my life -to be more about things like 'What I should value you know? Are these, are these good?’ -not just about ‘Are these desirable? Or are these going make me feel good?
I just hope my work can help you know change, on one hand, our conceptions about -our thinking about children. So they are not as simple as we think- they have more fundamental needs even these higher level kind of emotional needs. But also on the other side, I feel like studying these questions among children and finding these, these results also can change us, also can change our understanding about these topics themselves. So basically these are not you know really high level things or luxury things in life, but actually they are just available to everybody. They are needed by everyone even from a very early in life. So I feel these just start to fundamentally can change our views about how the nature and Origins about these things.
For example, Maslow actually thinks self-actualization and self-transcendence, they are kind of the highest level of human development and they typically come only at the very end of life and only for very small percentage of people. So I think I'm just turning that view upside down. I actually think we all have seeds for these things, and I think it's not just the 1%. I think it's actually 100%.
We all have this potential to have these and I hope my work- by studying children's view about these- I hope we can we can just show and also find ways to help bring the best within us to help everybody to realize their potential. So I hope long-term speaking I really hope, the field can be more collaborative in studying these questions and I hope my work is just one small step for that giant leap in the field.
Boulware: I'm Jean Matelski Boulware and this has been a Conversation on Wisdom with Fan Yang.
