Video: The Future of Happiness: How Communication Technologies Will Change Our World—Or Not

What impact are information and communication technologies such as the Internet and social media having on our health, politics, and culture? While there is considerable controversy about this topic, informed analysis and empirical evidence to address it are lacking. In this discussion, an interdisciplinary group of experts from across Harvard University will debate the impact of these technologies on health, happiness, and well-being and discuss future implications for policy, practice, and culture. 

Panel Discussion

  • Laura Kubzansky, Lee Kum Kee Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences; Co-Director, Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health 
  • Jukka-Pekka Onnela, Associate Professor of Biostatistics, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health 
  • Kasisomayajula “Vish” Viswanath, Lee Kum Kee Professor of Health Communication; Co-Director, Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health 
  • Jonathan L. Zittrain, George Bemis Professor of International Law, John F. Kennedy School of Government; Professor, Computer Science, John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; Vice Dean, Library and Information Resources, Harvard Law School; Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University 

Presented by Harvard Museum of Natural History and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology in collaboration with the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University

Recorded October 3, 2017

Transcript

[00:00:19.32] It's now my pleasure to introduce tonight's panelists and I'm actually just going to list their names so we can get on and hear from them rather than the long and amazing CVs that they all have, although the names, as you will discover, are quite long in and of them themselves. So, Laura Kubzansky here, the Lee Kum Kee Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences and co-director of the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, JP Onnela, associate professor of biostatistics in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.

[00:01:02.07] And then at the end, Jonathan Zittrain, who's the first person I've ever known attached to four schools here at Harvard-- George Bemis Professor of International Law at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, professor of computer science at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, vice dean of library and information resources at the Harvard Law School, and faculty co-director at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society as part of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

[00:01:31.65] I'm still working on the dental school.

[00:01:33.85] [LAUGHTER]

[00:01:36.12] And last but definitely not least, Vish Viswanath, Lee Kum Kee Professor of Health Communication and co-director of the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, and he will now introduce the topic and moderate our discussion. Vish, thank you.

[00:01:57.84] So thank you, Jane. Thanks for-- let me thank the Harvard Museums and Jane and her team for inviting us to this panel and offering other pebbles of wisdom-- mine will be Pebbles, Laura's will be pearls of wisdom-- to talk about happiness. Happiness is a pretty loaded word and I prefer to have used something else, but we didn't have much of choice, right?

[00:02:26.62] So let me start by introducing the Center and why we are here. And I do have some notes so that you have an illusion that I took the assignment seriously and in order to deserve that big check that Jane's going to send me later. I wanted a check. Laura wanted those rocks, beautiful rocks, you know.

[00:02:47.83] Great crystals out there.

[00:02:49.40] So we'll see how that goes. So the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness is about, roughly, a little more than a year old, funded by the Lee Kum Kee family in Hong Kong whose goal was to really look at how happiness and the movement, social movement for happiness can be spread. And so they came to us and as it always happens with academics, they wanted answers. We had more questions. And if you give away the answers, then what is the purpose of existence for an academic, right?

[00:03:28.73] So we had posed a number of questions for them and they agreed that that is a lot that remains to be done to connect happiness with health and the connection is not very clear. The Center itself has two foci. One is to really advance the signs of health and psychological well-being, a.k.a. happiness, and then to translate that signs to influence policy and practice. So those are the two foci of the center and ever since the center was announced, there has been a lot of pressure on us to be happy.

[00:04:20.02] As soon as the announcement came, I think every person we encountered in the school said, are you happy? I didn't know what I was smoking at the time, but I did have to force myself to look happy about it, but it's really a serious issue, I think, in terms of-- given the social conditions and the conditions that we are facing all around us, including what happened yesterday, it remains a viable question to ask, what are really the social factors and psychological factors that influence well-being and how is this well-being related to health, if at all? Or is it the other way around?

[00:05:05.84] So these are really serious questions that our center aims to address, but, as you will realize from the conversations today, it will go beyond that. I think there are a lot of social factors, what we, in our lingo, call social determinants, as well as a policy and regulatory issues that influence a number of these issues. More critical I think is the development, which is the reason we are here, is the development in information and communication technologies. The sheer ubiquity of these technologies is what has compelled and impelled people to raise some profound questions about, what role do these communication technologies or information technologies play in the way we work, the way we play, the way we converse, the way we engage in relationships with those around us.

[00:06:07.27] I can give you a lot of statistics on this, but I think the point is if you just put a hand in your pocket or your bags and pick it up, everybody has one of these. These are more powerful, as the cliche goes, than the computers that sent man to moon in 1960s. So they're extraordinarily powerful. The power doesn't stem from the fact that it has the bandwidth and the hardware as much as 90% of the American audience or American adults go online. About 80% of them are on social media of one kind or other. A substantial proportion of them spend their time on social media.

[00:06:56.05] So the question, then, people often ask is, with all this ubiquity, with all this engagement, with all this exposure to information or misinformation, what is the impact on one's well-being? So those are the kind of questions that keep coming up. So what we want to do is raise some of these issues, both in terms of where the science is as well as some of the regulatory and legal issues including privacy and other issues that these technologies engender.

[00:07:32.37] So what we want to do is to have Laura Kubzansky, who has pioneered the issue of positive science and health in our school and in the world, to first talk to us, introduce us to this idea of what is positive health or happiness. And then we will follow that by-- again, I am trying to connect this issue of happiness to information and communication technologies.

[00:08:04.26] So let me first open it up and let Dr. Kubzansky talk about what is positive health. And please give us what are the pills we are supposed to take, and how can we be happy, what should we smoke, or whatever. Tell us.

[00:08:20.54] If I had those answers, I'd be a very wealthy woman.

[00:08:25.59] Well, thank you for the wonderful introduction and setting the stage for some of the thinking that we're going to talk about here today. I just want to start with a brief mention of how I got into this work. So a lot of my work in this area stems from this interest in breaking down this idea of mind-body dualism, which is a historical way of thinking in biomedicine that we still have today with this idea that somehow, mind and body are separate, and that mental states can't really influence physical health states.

[00:09:02.15] And well, I say this, and I suspect many of you will be thinking, oh, we know that's not true. We know that stress influences heart disease, and so forth. In fact, this has been a longstanding debate in both public health and biomedicine. And the debate is ongoing. So if you get on to the American Heart Association web site, they actually have a statement that says it has not been demonstrated convincingly that stress is a risk factor for heart disease.

[00:09:31.69] So there's still a lot of discussion about this. And I got into this work thinking I really genuinely believe that mental health has a significant influence on physical health. We should look at it. We should understand it. Because if indeed that is the case, then we are missing a lot of information about how to influence health and how to promote well-being, how to promote better health over the life course.

[00:09:55.59] So a lot of the work we've been doing has been focused on the interplay between mental health and physical health. And this is indeed one of the focuses for the Lee Kum Sheung Center, which is to say how does positive mental health influence physical health. And part of that thinking is also trying to understand how the social and the physical environment influence both mental health states and physical health.

[00:10:21.60] Now, most of the work in this area, up until very recently, has really focused on negative, adverse mental health states. So thinking about stress, Everybody has something to say about stress. If I ever get on an airplane and someone says to me what do you study, and I say, oh, I study stress and health, almost inevitably, the next thing they say is you should study me.

[00:10:44.28] And then I'm always like, just-- I don't need to know. Anyway, so there's a lot of thinking about how negative mental states may influence health-- things like depression and stress and anxiety. And there's a good amount of evidence now gathering to suggest that, in fact, poor mental health is a precursor to poor physical health.

[00:11:08.59] But as part of that work, when I was doing it, I started thinking, I wonder if positive mental health would have an equal influence on physical health. And would it have an effect mostly because it just tells you, well, someone isn't depressed?

[00:11:25.17] Or would it have an effect because actually, there's something over and above not being depressed or not being angry that confers health states? And so we started looking at this issue of whether positive psychological functioning could actually confer health benefits beyond simply telling you that someone is not depressed.

[00:11:46.38] And as part of that work, we have found pretty consistently that indeed, there is a health benefit that seems to be associated with positive psychological functioning over and above just the absence of negative mental health states, and that these seem to travel through both people engaging in healthier behaviors, and there may also be some biological alterations that come along with these positive mental states.

[00:12:12.34] And one of the very strong findings has been that having positive states signals more than just the absence of something bad. So the presence of something positive is very different than saying, oh, my friend is not depressed, so they're OK. And one of the things we've been arguing is that most of public health and medicine has focused on the bottom half of functioning-- for good reason.

[00:12:38.63] We look at problems. We're very interested in how to solve problems. And people who seem to be functioning poorly, we really want to help them. But one of the things we've been arguing is that we really focus on the bottom half. So we say someone is either depressed or not depressed. And we don't, as often, look at what happens if you look at better functioning, or even optimal functioning, or you thought about what does it mean to flourish.

[00:13:02.04] And if you never look at the positive half of the spectrum, there may be a lot of information that you can't learn about how to help people function well or how to help people get onto a healthy trajectory so that they can continue to function well over the life course. So I think there's a lot to learn. And certainly, the research bears this out-- that we gain new insights if we look not only at what happens when there's problems, but what happens when people are functioning well.

[00:13:30.60] And we try to understand who functions well and what are the circumstances that enable people to do well. And how come some people seem to recover relatively quickly from very difficult circumstances, and other people seem to be just laid out flat by those circumstances?

[00:13:47.25] And as part of this work, I think one of the factors that we found to be really important is that emotions matter a lot. so both negative emotions and positive emotions, and that well-being is more than simply a state of simple happiness. In fact, there are many facets of well-being that comprise what it means to have positive psychological functioning. And this includes things like a sense of optimism or hope about the future, being engaged in your life, and a sense of satisfaction and purpose, a sense of belongingness.

[00:14:19.56] So when you look at surveys that simply measure happiness, I would say that's interesting, but they're often very limited. For instance, if you ask a group of parents are they happy, and their kids are small and running all over the place, they may say the levels of happiness are not so high. They're running around. They're really tired.

[00:14:37.29] On the other hand, if you ask are they very engaged, do they have a sense of purpose and meaning in their lives, often those answers are much more positive. And so it's a little simplistic in the way that we often think about happiness as a very simple emotional state when actually, positive well-being is comprised of a much more complex and nuanced set of ways of functioning.

[00:15:04.84] So what I wanted to say about all of these issues around positive well-being and how we think about it in terms of how it relates to social media-- I think there are at least three ways in which social media interfaces with health. And in fact, people on the panel may come up with more.

[00:15:25.27] But when I was thinking about it, I was thinking, well, there's the issue of health communications. So how do we inform people and help people to engage in strategies to enhance their health? So if we think that there are circumstances or strategies that would enable people to attain higher levels of well-being, how would we communicate that most effectively to people?

[00:15:45.57] There's also this incredible opportunity right now for data collection using social media. And I think that's an exploding area that, for those of us in research, is incredibly exciting. I know we're going to talk a little bit about that next.

[00:15:59.67] You have more information and more opportunity to see people function in the day-to-day world in ways we've never really had before. And I think that's going to give us a very rich, nuanced understanding of these kinds of questions of circumstances, and how how people function, and so forth.

[00:16:17.94] And then this other question is one that I think many people are very concerned about, which is the effect of social media on mental health. And then we're particularly interested, because our thinking is if it's having an effect on mental health, then down the road, it's also probably having an effect on physical health. And so we should be very concerned about how those things play out.

[00:16:39.40] So there are many, many questions still to think about in terms of the role of social media in how people function. There are some knowns, though, that we can take with us to this research and this thinking. And we know that positive psychological well-being includes a sense of purpose, and a sense of belongingness, and a sense of community. And it does go beyond the simple feeling of pleasure and happiness.

[00:17:06.98] So when we're thinking about how to look at these things, we should be looking at a broader set of measures or a broader set of facets of how people are thinking than just asking people are you happy. And with that, I'm going to leave it there.

[00:17:26.40] Thanks, Laura. I was ready to cut you off. But I had to be careful. I work with her.

[00:17:33.76] So let me-- I think that was a very good introduction to issues of positive health. she Introduced a number of different terms.

[00:17:42.90] Let me just connect that to a little bit to my area of work in the information and communication technologies just to introduce a couple of points and then punt the question over to JP. So here is the reaction of people who look at a particular type of media and said there is massive, irrefutable evidence that exposure to this media lead to juvenile delinquency-- massive, irrefutable evidence that exposure to this media lead to juvenile delinquency. They were talking about movies in the 1930s, the so-called nickelodeons where people can put in a nickel and then go in and watch these movies. .

[00:18:29.04] And of course, as it so happens, Herbert Blumer-- some of you may know that name. You may not know that name-- the very famous sociologist-- actually goes out and does research, looks at the empirical evidence, and says, well, it's a bit more complicated than that.

[00:18:46.29] There's really no evidence that everybody who's watching these movies, especially the children, the kids, are becoming juvenile delinquents. So that was one in the 1930s.

[00:18:59.40] In the 1950s, people were concerned about comics and comic books. So a fellow called Frederick Wharton, who had an MD by his name, started making a big noise about how exposure and reading of comics and comic books could potentially lead children astray. And they wrote a book called The Seduction of the Innocent with the title, with the framing, with an M.D. by his name. And of course, it caused a big human cry. And the government was even ready-- in fact there, was a proposal by a group of people to form something called Comics Code Authority. Just think about it.

[00:19:46.02] So again, a new medium, a new technology-- people are concerned. People are ready to intervene. And of course, when television was introduced in the country in the 1950s and '60s, again, there were a series of committees in the Congress-- The Senate Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, the hostile-- what they were saying is the very exposure to television, the very use of television could potentially lead children to imitate acts of aggression. Because they have seen kids go out and beat the heck out of the Bobo dolls in these small experiments.

[00:20:27.22] And now there were a series of proposals in the country to really control the exposure of children to TV. And we know how that worked out. As I said, after the television entered the bedrooms of children, all the battle was Lost. But of course, none of us have become delinquents. At least not publicly we would admit to it. We all grew up with television. Except me, actually. Television was not in India for a long time.

[00:20:55.63] But the point is every time we have introduced a new technology, a new communications technology, this question always comes up. What is the impact it is having on people, number one? Number two, then there is a great deal of anxiety to regulate this technology. And then over time, people become really adept at how to use these technologies and manage it.

[00:21:23.22] So I think we should remember that as we get very anxious about these information communications technologies, including social media. The question I have today-- for which I have an answer, but I will let others answer, too-- is, is there something fundamentally different about these technologies, the information and communication technologies of today as opposed to the communication technologies of yesterday?

[00:21:50.64] And if that is the case, then there is a reason for us to become anxious or celebrate, either way, and take appropriate action. So that is the fundamental question that is-- if you look at the evidence-- and I've been looking at this evidence very closely-- at least in terms of happiness, psychological well-being, depression, mental health, the evidence is all over the board.

[00:22:19.73] You can download any article you want. Some articles will tell you that social media are leading to depression. Some articles will tell you, actually, social media are connecting people to other people, thereby influencing psychological well-being in a very positive way.

[00:22:39.70] So we do have a lot of questions to answer. Bart people don't have the patience or time. They can't afford to wait for these answers. The question, then, is what do we do given this. Those are some of the questions that will come up as we discuss this.

[00:22:55.81] But Laura said there are some advantages that these technologies allow us to test and provide evidence much more adeptly than has been the case in the past. So Dr. JP Onnela, who is a faculty member in the Department of Biostatistics at Harvard and Harvard Chan, has been doing some very interesting work on social networking science, but more importantly, a line of work on what he calls digital phenotyping, how smartphones can be used to collect data on psychological health. So JP will talk about that.

[00:23:31.81] Well, thank you so much for having me, and thank you for that bridge. For a moment, I wasn't sure if I was in the right panel, but I think I am.

[00:23:39.32] So my background is-- I have a somewhat different background from some of the other panel members. I was trained in physics and network science, and I'm currently faculty in biostatistics, as Vish said.

[00:23:53.77] And I wanted to give you-- I wanted to take a step back and give you the focus of our work. So as a natural scientist, as somebody who thinks about data and measurement very deeply, I'd like to argue that progress in science has always been driven by the availability of data.

[00:24:13.36] But something very dramatic has happened in the last few years. If we even think about the last five or 10 years, it's not only that we have more data available today about human behavior than we've ever had before, but we have completely different types of data available now, the kinds of data that we couldn't maybe even dream about a few years ago.

[00:24:36.65] And the fundamental reason for this is probably what's called Moore's law-- the idea that the number of transistors we can pack into a small chip approximately doubles every 18 months. So I won't go into excruciating detail about that, but why should that be relevant for what we're talking about today?

[00:24:56.46] And I think there are two reasons. One is what that implies is that we can make sensors that are cheap to make, that are small, and they can be put almost everywhere. So that's the data collection piece.

[00:25:09.01] But equally important, if not more important, is the data analysis piece. So now we have the combination capacity-- we can take sophisticated models, whether it's more standard statistical models, machine learning, AI models, whatever you like, and try to make sense of these data.

[00:25:26.14] So my argument would be that while collecting research to create data is still very difficult, I think the main intellectual challenge is moving away from data collection towards data analysis. So in our work in this area, we've-- you already introduced the term "digital phenotyping." So we've tried to address what some people call the phenotyping challenge.

[00:25:49.15] So a phenotype is a collection of all different kinds of traits of organisms-- so for example, transcriptomics and imaging and so on. And if we think about these different classes of phenotypes, behavior has traditionally been a very difficult phenotype to handle.

[00:26:06.91] And the main reason behind that is that it's highly context-dependent and it's highly time-dependent. So our solution to this problem has been what we call smartphone-based digital phenotyping.

[00:26:20.95] So we've defined digital phenotyping as the moment-by-moment quantification of individual-level human phenotype in situ, in the wild, using data from personal digital devices-- in particular, smartphones. And when we started this line of work several years ago, when I would talk about this stuff, the common objection would be, but nobody has smartphones.

[00:26:44.44] And how many of you have a smartphone today? Thank you for validating our work. So now, as it turns out, 95% of Americans have some kind of a phone, and almost 80% have a smartphone.

[00:27:00.50] And I think what this enables us to do is to measure social and behavioral markers at scale at a level of precision that we simply never had before. If we think about how do we-- again, I know nothing about happiness, but I'm surrounded by happiness experts, which makes me happy. We typically would do surveys to learn about people's emotions and how happy they are, and so on.

[00:27:24.80] But if you think about what are the limitations of survey instruments-- well, one thing is it's difficult to remember things. I just got back from Europe on Sunday. I'm completely jet lagged. So I can't even remember what I had for dinner or a week ago.

[00:27:38.26] But typically, what we do, especially when we study patient populations, we're asking patients who really have trouble remembering the past few days-- we're asking them questions about how happy have you been in the last two months, or have you been good about x, y, or z. So the idea is that we try to move away from using survey instruments to really trying to objectively measure behaviors in the wild.

[00:28:05.17] And when we do this, we can think about two different kinds of data. So one data type that we call active data refers to data that's only collected if the participant actively participates in our study. So this would imply things like taking, for example, a survey on smartphone screen or giving an audio sample, which can be diagnostic for example, for depression.

[00:28:32.47] The other category is passive data. And these are data that are collected continuously in the background. So this would be things like GPS data, communication logs, accelerometer data, screen on/off data, and do on. And what these enable us to do is to learn about mobility, movement, social networks, communication habits, and so on over time.

[00:28:54.55] And so this obviously has privacy implications, which I think we will hear a lot about in a couple of moments. But it's important to realize that in this type of work, we always consent our participants. So we started this work-- this was a crazy idea which we had a few years ago. And we started with a single study at MGH in a bipolar cohort.

[00:29:17.26] Today we are running about 15 different studies. We have studies in depressed subjects, subjects with bipolar disorder, schizophrenics. We also do stroke. We have brain tumor, we have spine tumor, and we have a breast cancer cohort, and so on. So what started as a simple idea, which is try to capture the lived experiences of people using devices that we already carry, most of us carry on us. The idea then spread and seems to encompass a broad range of different medical cohorts.

[00:29:52.19] So if we try to think about-- to come back to the idea of health and well-being and happiness, I think the opportunity here with these new communication technologies is to provide better measurement of social and behavioral markers in the wild. And then if we have the methods to take those data and try to make sense of those data, I think then we'll be in a better position to try to understand some of these relationships.

[00:30:21.32] So for example, if you want to think about bidirectional relationships-- does happiness cause something or does something cause happiness-- you really need to have data that's what's sometimes said temporally dense. So we have not just one or two ways of observations, but potentially hundreds or thousands of measurements per individual.

[00:30:41.77] So I'm so jet lagged I have no sense of time. This feels like five minutes to me. Is that all right more or less?

[00:30:50.03] That's fine. I'll not let you go. I have some questions. I'll come back and ask you those questions. So thank you. That was very good.

[00:30:58.61] The next will be Professor Jonathan Zittrain. If you haven't had a chance to look at his website at Berkman Klein Center, I urge you to look at. It is very provocative. I have heard him speak about 15 years ago, actually, at a conference. And then it so happens now that we are both at Harvard and that I have-- it's very fortunate that we have him here.

[00:31:25.54] He has written a number of books around the issues of internet and privacy, cyber security, a whole range of issues, including a book I would recommend. He's not paying me for this yet.

[00:31:39.39] It's a very provocative book-- The Future of Internet and How to Stop It. And it's a very-- one of the most thoughtful people in this area. And Jonathan, why are you causing trouble?

[00:31:53.74] Thank you. For a minute, I saw the title of the panel is "The Future of Happiness and How to Stop It." Maybe that turns out to be the right perspective.

[00:32:07.27] Already what's been so fascinating to me is thinking about, consistently through the panel, the idea of the study of happiness as a scientific and rigorous endeavor like any other. And to hear the excitement JP's description of all the data points he can at last gather, this totalizing panopticon of happiness-- I, too, feel myself excited about what might be discovered.

[00:32:42.22] I don't know how many people use FitBits or other quantified self-mechanisms. And of course, as those develop, we can not only study individuals but groups. We can ask is Boston happy tonight and get an answer. And we have to be careful that sometimes-- don't ask the question unless you want to know the answer and to get near instant feedback.

[00:33:09.63] As you think about, say, the presidential debates, if you watch it on some channels, they have the little line with people with dials, sentence by sentence. If you see them as you're the person speaking, you can see the thing going down and just change the end of the sentence to try to get it back up again. It does make you wonder.

[00:33:29.24] And Vish mentioned a number of books. We're in an era now where data is able to be gathered through your Kindles, say, of how your reading is going. And again, you could get group data out of that to have a sense for here's the paragraph of chapter 2 where everybody stops reading your book. And wouldn't that make it tempting to issue an update to your book, pushed out to the Kindle with just a picture of a happy cat where that paragraph was? And now we bring you back to your book without that hump.

[00:34:04.56] And it shows that there could be such a thing as pursuing. It's why Vish had mentioned it's so careful to quantify what is it we're wanting to measure and possibly optimize for. You could optimize for it and then find the only books we produce are ones that appear to make us happy or bring us to finish them, but they might not be the books that we would want to be reading.

[00:34:30.03] Now, Laura had mentioned that when you start studying something like this, you might start looking for-- in a correlation, say, between mind and body, how unhappiness leads to unhealth rather than how happiness leads to health. And it's true that the stories we tell tend to start-- or have as the middle-- a snake in the garden and a problem.

[00:34:52.74] And I think of it more generally as the things we tend to worry about, including if we're telling a story about privacy, classically are Orwellian-- invasions of privacy in the service of another, maybe a government, like Big Brother, that use the data that they find to further advance the cause of misery.

[00:35:14.13] As I recall, in 1984, when it's revealed the aim of this government-- why does it exist-- I think they just say it's a boot forever stamping on the face of the human soul. OK. Well, you're maximizing for that.

[00:35:28.14] But there's actually another worry that is the complement to the classic Orwellian vision. And that's Aldous Huxley's vision that what we should fear most is not what harms us, but what we fear most is what makes us happy. That could put us into a state.

[00:35:49.65] And that, of course, is maybe not a bad introduction to thinking about the impact of technology upon us. And it calls to mind-- it's a computer scientist named Luis von Ahn, Carnegie Mellon. He is very interested in a phenomenon now called gamification and the ways in which you can get people to do stuff by turning it into a game.

[00:36:12.07] And one example-- he calls it the ESP game. You're shown an image, and you type in what you see in the image. And that gets matched with another player that you'll never meet. It's somebody online, maybe who isn't even playing contemporaneously, although he doesn't make that clear. And when you match the same word for the same image that you see-- there's a picture of a kid, and you say kid-- you win points.

[00:36:37.02] And it turns out the points are not good for anything. You can't cash them in. They're not like American Airlines points. But people love accruing points. And he found that people would play this game for as many as 40 hours a week.

[00:36:54.04] And when he tells the story, he says that his academic advisor made him put in a check in the game that if people were playing it coming from a domain ending in .edu, it would cut them off after 20 hours and say get back to work on your thesis.

[00:37:12.57] His conclusion from that was the ESP game is fun. I think fun might be not the right word. I think compelling is probably the right word. And thinking about happiness versus compulsion might be really important.

[00:37:26.16] Because as we build systems, either like the ESP game, which it turns out is an image labeling tool-- it gets images labeled through people playing the game. If it's in the service of something else, you might find our own penchant for fun to be exploited to that end. And we may feel differently about it once we know that.

[00:37:45.84] But even if it's aimed to make us happy, as measured through continued engagement, it may not really be the right metric for what we're aiming for. And that's also why it's probably right to call these smartphones rather than happy phones. And it might be right to ask what would a happy phone be like. It be one that shuts down at around 10:00 and is like, go out and play.

[00:38:15.40] I want to just say a word about technology as an end unto itself, the gateway to knowledge it might represent, the relationship you feel you're having with the world of cyberspace, versus technology as a mediator to engage with other people.

[00:38:30.59] And the latter, I think, for a while-- if you'd asked me in 2005 or 2006, I would have said it would be important to see the second aspect of technology is that which might bring us together as important and helpful.

[00:38:44.05] I think since then, a lot of realization has happened across many people studying this that we worry about technology in connecting people-- in impelling us to try to present our best selves. And if we're not showing big smiles on Instagram, that we don't feel like we're leveling up with the number of likes that we're receiving.

[00:39:10.00] And at the same time, if we see everybody else having a delightful time on Instagram, and we're just like-- I don't know. It's a Friday night, and I'm just kind of sitting around, that might not make us feel so good.

[00:39:23.11] And of course, it's also about our relationship to ourselves. And there are now a range of meditation apps so that you can take even meditation and appify it. And I'm not ready to say that's a bad thing. It might turn out that it's quite good. It's just interesting to see us relying on leaning on our technology for the things that we normally thought of as completely technology free.

[00:39:47.16] A last note about happiness versus helplessness. I think in the list that Laura was saying of qualities that have been discovered to be associated with, in her words, well-being-- and I do like that phrase more than happiness, if only for the reason that it's a gerund. It suggests a verb rather than-- it's a noun hiding as a verb.

[00:40:10.27] It suggests it is a process, a continuation, a vector, rather than an equilibrium, a static kind of state. But helplessness does seem to me a real source of feeling not in well-being. And to the extent that our technology makes us feel helpless and overpowered rather than enabling, that might be something to keep an eye out for. And it may even be that our previous analog feeling-- fighting against helplessness, we might even do it and seek it, even as against our own health.

[00:40:47.65] I'm reminded over in Inman Square, there used to be a restaurant called Jay's. It was a sushi restaurant. And it said at the top, eat at Jay's and live forever. And next door to Jay's was the East Coast Grill, the Cajun barbecue place. And it said at the top-- literally right next door-- eat at the East Coast Grill and die happy. And that seemed to point at a weird form of unhealth as a form of happiness.

[00:41:16.84] So I'll just close by saying I think it's worth contemplating not only the science of happiness-- which there really is such a thing, and it is something we can study-- but the humanities of happiness and the ways in which we might use that science to reflect on something like Aristotle's idea of the golden mean of virtue and perhaps fulfillment coming from being in between two extremes.

[00:41:45.67] And is there a way to quantify that operationally is a scientific question, and inform the kind of philosophizing that also seems so valuable. And this which makes us different from inanimate objects-- the idea that we have a self, we have a consciousness, and we experience ourselves and the world-- is a way that could be less or more fulfilled. Thank you.

[00:42:11.59] Thank you, Jonathan. That was great.

[00:42:13.27] So the program is that I will ask the panelists a question, each maybe just a minute or so, and then we will open it up for the audience. I'm sure you have a lot of questions.

[00:42:27.98] So let me start with Laura. So you study happiness, well-being, and you have made it complicated by identifying a number of factors. So here is some evidence on social media that shows that-- so in fact, Jonathan mentioned this notion of self-disclosure, disclosing one's emotions. Apparently, in this study, the large majority of people, if there is a lot self-disclosure, actually, it increases a feeling of well-being.

[00:43:10.25] On the other hand, the other two functions of social media-- informational and entertainment-- are not necessarily related to well-being. So the question is what is it about this idea of relationships and disclosure of emotions that seems to lead to well-being and happiness, but not about seeking information out of the things. Do you have any speculations on that?

[00:43:37.69] Those are interesting questions. So there is a whole line of research that talks about the importance of acknowledging and recognizing your own emotions, particularly when you've had difficult experiences as a way to process and think about what's happened, and put order on it, and make meaning out of it, and that people who are able to make meaning out of their experiences tend to have much higher levels of well-being, even when they're faced with very difficult circumstances.

[00:44:09.25] So I'm not familiar with this particular research, but I do think that it probably speaks to this idea of both having a sense of connection-- so being able to self-disclose means, in some sense, you feel some trust. You are going to share how you feel with other people, and someone is going to greet it in a way that is supportive and make you feel like you've been understood.

[00:44:35.14] So there's a lot of research that suggests that it's really important to feel like someone has heard you, that someone understands who you are and what you're feeling, and even when it's a really difficult time, to just feel hurt.

[00:44:49.75] In fact, there's some really interesting research that when there's a natural catastrophe, or when many, many, many people have experienced a terrible event, this is one of the things that gets very difficult. People want to talk about their difficult experiences and process them, but everyone around them has had their own difficult experience, and they don't want to hear it. And in fact, then you end up with a lot of people really struggling, because there isn't that natural way of sharing those feelings.

[00:45:18.71] So there's some really interesting research that suggests that being able to process these emotions, both good and bad, is a really important outlet. And so that would be one explanation for why you would find benefits.

[00:45:33.13] And one thing I will say is that I think we do tend to have a lot of fear about the effects of social media. It's not clear how much we have actually looked for potential benefits other than this idea of social connectedness. And are you more connected because you think you have 500,000 friends on Facebook, or are you actually more isolated because, in fact, you never talk to a human being? You've done everything in your room, sitting in bed.

[00:45:55.00] And I think the jury is out. And my bet is going to be that there is reasons to think that both sides could have effects. And one thing that will be really important for us to think about is are there ways that we can nudge the use of technology so that it is more health beneficial and make it harder, like putting these limits-- you can't spend 40 hours playing this game-- that shuts down certain functions and so forth. So that would be my hunch.

[00:46:27.07] That's a great answer, Laura. I think it also speaks to the issue that you raised earlier. We always seem to focus on the bottom half and not the top half, the negativity rather than the assets. That seems to be the trend with our technologies, as I said earlier with comics or movies.

[00:46:47.94] But the evidence clearly-- at least as clear as it can get-- does show that social media could potentially be helpful and beneficial. But of course, we always focus on that one case, the cyberbullying or whatever it is. So I think it's important to know that. So thanks for that response.

[00:47:07.18] So JP, I have a question for you. Again, this comes out of left field. But hey, you're jet lagged. So if you don't know the answer, make it up. So it's very exciting to see you can do this kind of micro-moment data collection that is very helpful, particularly in small contexts where you can treat people or help people immediately, understanding-- and collecting data with a great deal of integrity and reliability.

[00:47:38.19] So there's a two-part question on this one, all in one minute. And my question will be longer than your answer. One is how do we talk about protection of data in terms of-- as we collect these data. This is an issue that came up when we were doing-- using smartphones with urban poor. And most of our research is with the urban poor.

[00:48:03.26] Second-- also, most of our research found out that when it comes to urban poor, working poor, they have new challenges in terms of paying bills, bandwidth as well as the hardware of their phone. So a lot of people don't even bother to recruit a number of people from a certain lower social economic position into these studies, as a result of which much of what we know seems to be from a certain class of people, the same people who have been studied, I think.

[00:48:34.81] And our research was very telling in terms of how difficult it is for them to hang on to their phones in terms of paying their bills, having connections, et cetera. So how do we overcome those things to really get to the promise that you claim with smartphones?

[00:48:52.51] That's a challenging question for one minute. So let me give you-- I'll actually answer three different parts. So I'll start by you alluded to the idea that this is a way how we can study small groups, precisely.

[00:49:06.37] But I would actually make the opposite argument-- that this is a way to study very large groups at scale. So the instrumentation, which is essentially a smartphone, iOS or Android-- these are not measurement instruments we have just here in Cambridge or Boston. So we can use the same instrumentation almost everywhere in the world.

[00:49:27.68] So we could easily recruit-- and have some plans to do so-- to have a large international study where we can recruit people in Germany, Sweden, India, the United States, and everybody has identical instrumentation. So I think for me, the biggest appeal is actually the scalability of this technology, which is interesting.

[00:49:47.53] Now, to your actual first question on the prediction of data-- so of course, this is nothing new. We've always had this idea that-- people have been studying for a long time how do we protect data. How do we guard against intrusion of privacy?

[00:50:04.37] And I think that these techniques have also developed as is the nature of data has developed. This is not really a one-minute question. But one useful way, potentially, to think about this is the probability of re-identifiability. So the idea is not whether you can re-identify someone in data, because you always have a tiny probability of doing that.

[00:50:28.69] But a more productive way of framing that question can sometimes be what is the probability of re-identifying somebody in the data set that has been anonymized. And so this is an area where people are doing a lot of work. And it gets very complicated, very technical, very quickly. But that's a great question.

[00:50:50.00] The second part on the idea that-- are we only studying a small subset of individuals? And this certainly used to be the case when the prevalence of smartphones was maybe 5% or 10%. But my prediction is that in the next few years, we're going to hit maybe 95% or 99% prevalence for smartphone ownership, if for no other reason than the fact that these are the only kinds of phones that are made today. So eventually, almost everybody is going to have one of these phones.

[00:51:21.90] But there are still important differences. So for example, one of my favorite statistics is that-- think about a family where everybody has an Android phone, and think about a family where everybody has an iOS phone. Think about the annual income of these families. What do you think? Is there going to be a difference between the incomes of these two families? And the answer is, there is a $40,000 difference in the median incomes of these families.

[00:51:49.84] So this is to say that although we can use this technology today to study 80% of all families, there are still huge differences in what types of phones are owned by people, depending on their socioeconomic standing, and also how people use this technology. Because to get the most out of your phone-- well, your smartphone or your happy phone-- there are costs associated with that. But I think this digital divide is probably getting less. That's my sense.

[00:52:24.73] Thank you. So Jonathan, last question for you, I think, before we open it up. So you have written-- and I may be wrong, but I'm making up maybes. And also, in a number of your writings, one of the themes that comes through is the notion of control. Who controls these things?

[00:52:45.91] And you and others have argued, in your group, that the control seems to be lying in a small group of corporations and companies as opposed to individuals or families, or whoever it is, groups controlling the technology. And I think that has significant implications in the way we design architecture and systems in place.

[00:53:07.12] Do you have some thoughts on how do we-- because that has an impact on not just psychological well-being, but I might say even social well-being and how we use this technologies to our advantage.

[00:53:17.85] Yes. And I think that's a worthy question to ask to amplify the question you asked JP about privacy. And if you look at it from the lens of control and autonomy, first it's worth noticing, for example, I have no doubt that JP is extremely sensitive to privacy issues for the folks from whom he is collecting data-- data that he's going to use to have insights about what makes people happy and how to pursue that.

[00:53:51.00] Now compare that to the usual data and telemetry that's being collected through the corporate vendor. And the corporate vendor has no such obligation to be thinking about the social good of the experiments they're running or the interventions they're making.

[00:54:07.51] And it's kind of funny to think that an academic might have to spend a couple of months dealing with an institutional review board, an IRB. And it's like-- because of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo and the Stanford Prison Experiment, this is why we can't have nice things. But because of that, we have to be really careful.

[00:54:31.98] And Facebook is like, this is what they do on Wednesday morning before 8:00. And it's like, on to the next thing. So it's a weird imbalance and asymmetry that really doesn't make much sense to me.

[00:54:44.78] And the weird dividing line on policy is Facebook is allowed to do what it does so long as what it's learning is not to advance general knowledge. So long as it's just for Facebook, go to town, Facebook. Milgramize yourself. Whereas if it's to advanced general knowledge, well, now the Common Rule applies, and you've got to think about the experiment. It's a little bit weird. And so as we're bolting the front door, it might be worth looking to see the back door that's wide open.

[00:55:16.89] The other point to make that has to do with control and respect for people is when you think about data protection, often the touchstone-- with a tip of the hat towards autonomy-- is choice, so presenting somebody with a list of how they'd like their stuff to be shared or a question about-- who knows? It's a long question.

[00:55:38.52] And at the end, it's like, OK or cancel. And so I don't even-- irrespective of what the words say, how many people click OK? How many people click Cancel? The Cancel people, it's like, that's why Friday night is Yahtzee night. Because it's like, you're not doing the thing you were going to do. It's like, I'm out of here.

[00:55:59.73] And I think that's an illusion of choice. That is itself a form of nudging people the way you want them to nudge if you're the person asking for the consent. And it's why, ultimately, I'd push a model-- and the word is not the best word, but fiduciary, a fiduciary model.

[00:56:19.86] And it's a word that basically means a duty of loyalty and care to put the interests of the person that you're in privity with, and whom you're learning a ton about, and you're filling their news feed with news that might excite them or depress them-- to do that in a way that puts their interests ahead of yours.

[00:56:42.99] And it may be hard to know when you're doing it. It's easier to know when you're not doing it. And if you're doing something that's designed only to elicit the people on Facebook that might vote the way that Mark Zuckerberg wants them to vote, hypothetically speaking, and only alerting, say, those folks that it's election day, and for the others, you show them the picture of the cat-- that's not being a good fiduciary.

[00:57:08.46] And I think if we introduce that concept, it may be a way to start thinking across the board-- not just for academics, but for everybody in a position of power running a platform-- handling this data stream, thinking about how it's serving the person you're working with. And as we-- this is now to answer your question originally, Vish, about what's different-- what's different is the prospect of what we loosely call AI.

[00:57:35.23] And I mean it in the narrow sense, not the general AI sense of Her or HAL 9000. But I mean in the narrow sense of an AI that can exquisitely find out when somebody is feeling really down. And a fiduciary would say, you're feeling down.

[00:57:54.36] First you should be aware of that. Just so you know, we've noticed this is not your baseline. And you might not notice that, too, because you're in a fog, and here are some options. That's meant to look out for the person that you've become aware of how they're feeling.

[00:58:09.12] If, instead, you're like, this is the perfect time for a payday loan-- we're just going to send you an ad right now to unload at 9% interest. And no one else will see it. This is a special offer just for you. Ralph Nader isn't there to vindicate your interests, or the attorney general. That's not being a good fiduciary, even though you're likely to click. So that's how I'd think about autonomy in power.

[00:58:37.57] Wonderful. Thank you, Jonathan. That's great.

[00:58:39.82] So I believe microphones are in the audience. We can take, Jen, maybe five minutes. Is that OK?

[00:58:46.01] Yeah, five or 10.

[00:58:46.96] Five, 10 minutes. Great. I was able to buy five more minutes. Thank you. That's good. So there are some hands up here.

[00:58:58.84] I wonder if the panel members might comment on the concept that it's sometimes perceived that people use social media to not just share about themselves, but to validate their own view of the world, and that there's this duality, this concept that we're all going to learn from one another globally and be so informed, but there's also this dynamic where we like to hang out with people who think like us.

[00:59:24.75] And we've seen a lot of evidence of that on the micro and macro scale of late. So how does that play into well-being and mental states of happiness? Is there this cognitive dissonance that if we engage with people who see the world very differently, is that going to make us unhappy? And does that then result in self-reinforcing behavior, or not even being aware of undercurrents that change the world?

[00:59:49.26] Anyone? It's about echo chambers and the algorithms. And I think that's a significant issue.

[01:00:00.38] The evidence-- again, I hate repeating myself, but what the heck? I can do that. So the evidence is all over the board again. I think that there is actually-- the literature on political science which actually looked at people being exposed to opposing points of view, and how that actually influences their own ideology and then voting behavior-- I think I don't recall exactly all the studies there.

[01:00:26.67] But I think increasingly with social media, this has become the big issue. I think there is that part where, with these algorithms, that you are only exposed to people or ideas or opinions that validate your own position, validate your own self. I think there are both good and bad about it.

[01:00:47.29] On the other hand, it does raise a significant issue of are we becoming increasingly so polarized that when the country doesn't vote the way we want to vote, then we get shocked, which affects our well-being. So I think this is a big issue. I don't know whether there is a specific answer, easy answers to these questions.

[01:01:09.52] But I think-- I also study vaccinations in the area of social media. And I can see-- I think the echo chamber effect actually leads to unhealthy outcomes in terms of well-being, I think. So that does raise some issues.

[01:01:26.91] I think you have written some on this.

[01:01:28.65] I was going to say in the study of the First Amendment-- so we're talking the local ordinance for the United States-- the general view of it is it's about the right of a speaker to speak and a listener to listen, and maybe to hear what you want to hear. That's the right.

[01:01:47.34] But there's another view of the First Amendment that people like Cass Sunstein talk about, which is from society's point of view, trying to grease the skids as much as possible so that people are confronted with views they don't agree with and can't readily turn to the law to prevent that.

[01:02:08.25] And you see it come up in cases about if there's a protest of a particular activity, like a political convention is in town, under the second view, giving the people their own protest pen several miles away is not conducive to confronting the people at the convention with speech that they might not like on first blush, but that could actually change their minds.

[01:02:33.60] And that's putting society's interests to the fore rather, maybe, than the comfort of the person doing it. And you might ask, then, if you're Google or Facebook or somebody else capable of constructing what Eli Pariser calls a filter bubble around somebody-- would it be helpful to construct something that really confronts people with stuff they might want to hear? Is a good fiduciary somebody who, when you-- Google, should I vaccinate my child, one that's like, let me show you what you want to hear, or let me show you what we know? In that case, I think it's the second.

[01:03:10.05] And how do you reconcile that with wanting to be empowering to the individual? It's a dynamic system for which I think asking people about would you like to be challenged, would you like to hear from somebody that might genuinely disagree with you-- I think a lot of people would say yes.

[01:03:27.36] I've pushed Facebook, in addition to the Like button, which then means I'd like to say stuff that earns the most likes, which means that people are agreeable to-- I think there should be-- and I'm not a good ad man, so it shouldn't be named this-- the Voltaire button, after the idea of "I completely disagree with everything you say, but I defend your right to say it." In this case, it would be I completely disagree with that, but that was really interesting and well put. Thanks.

[01:03:53.34] And if you create such a button, it creates an extrinsic motivating system for people to post Voltaire-like things, which could then naturally get us into a zone where, as I think we experience in academia, we cherish the opportunity to hear from people that don't agree, and possibly to change our minds.

[01:04:10.92] And I think the ideal academic is one that's like, god, I was completely wrong about that. That's somewhat embarrassing, but I'm better now. And that's good. That's what humanity should be aiming for.

[01:04:24.24] And I have hope that that-- I was just talking to a friend about friendship, actually. And luckily, the discussion affirmed that we were, in fact, friends. And his view of friendship was it's a relationship whose aim, mutually, should be to help the other become their best self and to grow in that. And it would be great to see the technology aiming for that, too, which generally would be confronting us with stuff that doesn't merely affirm who we already are.

[01:04:58.46] Thank you, Jonathan. So maybe 30 seconds, and then we have--

[01:05:02.13] He had a minute and a half. I'm feeling competitive. So just one other--

[01:05:06.16] 45 seconds since I work with Laura.

[01:05:08.81] Because you're going to hear about it tomorrow.

[01:05:10.17] So one other point that I think is interesting-- so I'm not actually aware of any research that's looked at this directly in terms of emotional states and so forth. But there is some interesting research that suggests that when people are in very negative mental states-- so fear, depression, anxiety-- their focus gets very narrow, and they become very attention deficit. So it's very hard for people to see anything from a bigger picture.

[01:05:35.48] Whereas when people are in more positive emotional states, they have a much broader perspective on the world. They're more creative. They tend to be better problem solvers, and so forth.

[01:05:44.99] And so in that sense, it would argue that the more fear and anxiety you induce in people, the more likely they are to only seek the echo chamber. They just want the stuff that's going to confirm what they think because they're so afraid. It's hard to think big. It's hard to problem solve and look outside your own little world view. Whereas if you have people in more positive states, they may be more open to thinking about different ideas and trying to incorporate them in their current worldview and maybe changing how they think.

[01:06:17.12] So I don't know of a research that looks at the question that you ask. But I do think it's really interesting to think about when people are trying to influence other people, the effect of putting people into negative states versus trying to keep a more positive state to allow people to think more broadly.

[01:06:36.15] Thank you, Laura. That was 50%, by the by. We can take one more question, right, Jen?

[01:06:44.90] So what is the impact of advertisements that we are all forced to see daily, Including social media-- there are so many on every page, we almost see on the internet-- on well-being, happiness?

[01:07:09.14] Anybody want to take that on, advertising? It is so important. We need that money.

[01:07:17.72] Ethan Zuckerman calls advertising the web's original sin. And it's interesting, because it really is a somewhat Faustian bargain. It's advertising that provides the basis of free services. Also calls to mind the quote-- I think originating from Hippie Bear on MetaFilter-- that says that if something is free online, you're not the customer. You're the product.

[01:07:42.56] And the thing I worry about most with advertising is that the models are tending first towards more integration. I don't know how you would feel, for example, if it turned out the panel tonight was sponsored by Twitter. Social media isn't as awful as you think. That would give you a different gloss on some of the findings that have been presented tonight.

[01:08:08.07] And it gets back to-- I was talking about fiduciary as an agent that is acting in your interests. It would be nice to know, online, when you are communicating with somebody or experiencing information, is it at the behest of someone else? Or are you connecting with another human that has a view about something, and you're talking about it?

[01:08:33.70] And in our current situation, we're thinking about Russian trolls and pay bots and stuff like that. A nice start would be am I talking to a bot or not. Am I bot or not would be a great service.

[01:08:48.01] And it's one that-- even Facebook has, in Messenger, something called M, and it's their AI. It's like, hi, I'm M. I'm here to help. And it's completely unclear if it's a person that's just punching in or if it's just an AI bot. And if you ask it, it gets very cagey.

[01:09:06.91] And I think it would be nice to know are you a bot or are you a person. And if you are a person, is this your job? Because if it's your job to say what you're saying, there's no persuading you. It's like a CNN panel or something. It's a panel of surrogates, and it's like, now say the thing you're supposed to say.

[01:09:25.99] It would be much better to have people that present a view and might change it. And advertising is generally not conducive to that. So that's a problem.

[01:09:37.21] Thank you, Jonathan. This is certainly not like a CNN panel, I can assure you.

[01:09:41.67] I wasn't meaning to suggest that it was.

[01:09:44.59] That's great. So we are 15 minutes past our time. We can have one more question. Great. Yes, please.

[01:09:52.72] So I love the idea of fiduciary, but it sounds like you would need somebody to actually be sitting behind all of this technology and deciding what to push out. My understanding, which is simple, is that this is all automated, and that really, the ads you see are the ads that we know are likely to be products that are likely to be purchased just by the data that you've provided.

[01:10:20.35] And so it's-- there's really no fiduciary where you'd have to get in there and actually figure out how to stop the ones that might not be good for you, which is a real point. Because the payday loan is a real issue. It's getting pushed out to you just because you're likely to take it.

[01:10:37.69] Yes. Well, one crude answer to start with is to maintain the availability of so-called incognito mode across platforms. So you can say-- I'm asking you, platform, and you're committing, if I choose-- not to be personalizing stuff. I realize that that means that if I have a cat, I might still get ads for dog food, and that would be tragic.

[01:11:03.97] But that might help with my autonomy because of the way in which advertising is, of course, meant to be a form of manipulation. So maintaining that distinction might be helpful. And then more subtly, I think my example of a payday loan was picking out something that society has generally agreed-- and in fact, so has Google and Facebook under pressure-- they reject those ads now-- that however precisely targeted and successful, they're not appropriate, because they are preying on vulnerable people.

[01:11:36.85] I would just add to that. There's also the idea of educating people on what's happening digitally. And so one of the, I think, really underappreciated facets of how we understand the world is how important emotions are.

[01:11:52.33] And so I have a colleague who is always talking about how ads that want to make you buy their product-- so their cigarettes or their alcohol-- are always showing really happy people who are leaping into the air and looking like life is just so much better because now they're smoking Winston or whatever it is they're smoking.

[01:12:11.66] And I love how it still says at the bottom-- actors, dramatization.

[01:12:16.50] Whereas the public health messages are often very fear-based and very negative. And so we tell people, if you smoke, your lungs are going to turn black, and that's really bad, and so forth. And so whether or not it's appropriate, whichever emotion you're using that you're trying to induce-- just having people understand that these kinds of messages are designed to help them feel one way or another, and the importance of those emotional states for driving both behavior and health and all kinds of things, would be useful to be an informed consumer of digital of activities and so forth.

[01:12:55.12] And certainly, there's a lot of discussion about how do we do that. Now, the technology is always racing ahead, and everybody is trying to come up with new strategies. But I do think that some element of understanding how these things work is also potentially useful. It won't solve everything, but it's a useful strategy.

[01:13:15.85] Wonderful. Thank you. Let me thank the panel.

[01:13:18.98] [APPLAUSE]

[01:13:26.18] That was great. And let me thank Howard Museums for inviting us, and let me thank all of you for taking this evening. Thanks. Thank you.

[01:13:33.79] [APPLAUSE]