Chicago Booth Review Podcast Does Choosing Your Friends Make You Happier?

Thomas Talhelm: I think that relational mobility can serve as a pruning process. So the idea is you might start your relationships off in a good place, but over time you learn more about people or your interests diverge. The mobility allows you to prune those relationships out and focus on new ones that might serve you better.

Hal Weitzman: In the West, we are more likely to choose our friends, and dropping them is relatively easily done. In other cultures, people tend to stick with the same social network for their whole lives. But does the ability to choose and to drop your friends make you happier? Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you groundbreaking academic research in a clear and straightforward way. I'm Hal Weitzman, and today I'm talking with Chicago Booth's Thomas Talhelm, about his research on social circles and happiness. Why do friendships endure more in Japan than in the United States? Who's happier and how important is happiness anyway?

Thomas Talhelm, welcome back to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Hal Weitzman: We wanted to have you back to talk about relational mobility and how it affects happiness. What is relational mobility?

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah. Relational mobility is this sort of new idea in the last 10 or so years from cultural psychology. The basic idea is that cultures differ in how mobile and flexible their relationships are. So cultures like the United States, relationships tend to be pretty flexible, people tend to have a lot of opportunities to meet people, and they feel like they have choice in their relationships. "I can choose who I hang out with. If I don't like people, I can leave them." Cultures like Japan is sort of the prototypical low relational mobility culture. People feel more often stuck in their relationships, "Even if I don't like these people, even if it's not making me happy. I don't know, you just don't leave." And people also don't feel like they have a lot of opportunities to meet new people. They feel like, "Even if I were to leave these people that I don't like, what would I do? It's not like there's a whole bunch of other people lining up outside the door." Or like speed dating events, or what have you. So that's the basic idea of relational mobility.

Hal Weitzman: So in cultures or countries with low relational mobility, do people tend to continue to be in relationships with the people they went to school with, or they grew up with?

Thomas Talhelm: So that's exactly right. I feel like as an American, it can be difficult to understand the idea that relationships would not be based on choice. If it's not based on choice, then what is it based on? And I often say it's context. I think about the kids that I taught in high school in Guangzhou, in China, this kid would be assigned to sit next to this other kid and they'd sit in the same desk for a whole day, Monday through Friday, for a whole year. And perhaps even the next year. And those kids, so they didn't choose each other. They don't have the same personality, they don't have the same preferences, but how do you not build a relationship over time when you've literally sat next to the same person all day, every day for at least an entire year? That's a context. That's the context choosing who we become friends with.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. But then you're saying that it's not just they're stuck together in school, they tend to spend their whole lives in the same network?

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah. So those relationships are much more stable over time. Whether we're talking about romantic relationships, or whether we're talking about friendships, sort of colleague relationships, those tend to last longer amounts of time in cultures with low relational mobility.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. And I know you've spent time personally a lot of time in China, and you started by focusing on China. So what did you find out about relational mobility and how it relates to subjective wellbeing in China?

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah. So we worked with some researchers at the Chinese Academy of Social Science who did a huge survey across all of China. And what they did is they measured relational mobility. So to measure relational mobility, you just ask people questions about their social environment. So you ask them, "Do the people around you, do they generally stick with their relationships even if they're unsatisfied? Or do they feel like, 'Hey, I can meet new people. I have a lot of freedom and choice in my relationships.'" And so what we could do with that data is map out down to the prefecture level, so that's roughly a county level, across hundreds of prefectures all around China. And we also have their happiness data. So they take just simple measure of happiness. So you ask people, for example, how much they agree with the question, "On the whole, I have a happy life." So super simple like that. And then you can just look at how those two variables relate to each other.

And what we find is that people in prefectures that tend to be more relationally mobile, so people meet more new people, they tend to leave their relationships if they want to, they tend to be happier. And that's even controlling for all the things that you'd think about: age, gender, income, economic development, urbanization, all those things. So this seems to be a separate sort of cultural factor, we sometimes call it socio-ecological factor. So the social environment that's around you that is influencing how happy people are.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. So the headline finding there is that the lower... Am I right in thinking the lower relational mobility, the less you feel stuck in those relationships, the happier you are?

Thomas Talhelm: So higher mobility, so I don't feel stuck, I feel like I can meet new people.

Hal Weitzman: Sorry, higher mobility. Okay, so the more I can move around.

Thomas Talhelm: Yep. So mobility equals more happiness.

Hal Weitzman: Yeah. Okay. So the more I feel that I'm not stuck?

Thomas Talhelm: Correct.

Hal Weitzman: That part was right.

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: All right. And just to go back to the feeling of being stuck, I certainly know people who feel stuck in social relationships and find it hard to get out them. But having low relational mobility, in other words, still being friendly with the person that you went to school with when you're 60 years old, doesn't necessarily mean that you feel stuck. One doesn't necessarily follow the other.

Thomas Talhelm: That's right. There's a great experience I had that I feel like really encapsulated this. So back to when I was living in Guangzhou, my roommate, who's also from the US, had a girlfriend who was from Guangzhou. And one day she went out to dinner with her high school classmates. She was now in college, she went to hang out with her old high school classmates. When they found out that she was dating my roommate, they didn't like that. They said, "Oh, he's probably only going to stay in China for a few years. He's probably going to leave you. You should just break up right now." And so she came back from that really upset. I mean she was crying, just really felt awful about that. And my roommate and my reaction was, "Well, they aren't your friends. If they made you feel so awful, then they're just not your friends." That thought had not occurred to her. So when you're talking about the feeling of feeling stuck, I don't even think that idea had occurred to her before we said it, because you just don't leave people. I mean if you're in a social ecology, if you're in a culture where relationships are just stable, you almost don't even feel stuck because the idea of leaving may not even cross your mind.

Hal Weitzman: Right, exactly. I mean it's like being with family.

Thomas Talhelm: That's right.

Hal Weitzman: They drive you crazy, but what are you going to do about it?

Thomas Talhelm: That's exactly it.

Hal Weitzman: Yeah. So I'm just wondering that the sense of being stuck is almost like something that people... Those of us who are in high relationship mobility culture think about and impose onto other people. "Oh, you're stuck."

Thomas Talhelm: Uh-huh.

Hal Weitzman: But they might not think about that. And similarly, it makes me think that if you heard about two people who are 60 who've known each other since they were three years old and say, "Oh, what a wonderful, what a rich relationship that you have." We value that.

Thomas Talhelm: That's right.

Hal Weitzman: At least we pretend that we value it. So you started in China, and then you scaled this up and you looked at 34 global cultures. So what's the big global picture that you found?

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah. So we replicate the same thing we find in China. So around the world, cultures that tend to report more relational mobility, also tend to be happier. So as you might suspect, relational mobility tends to be higher in individualistic cultures. So places like the US, UK, France, for example. Tends to be lower in East Asia. So I mentioned Japan before, Malaysia is another place, Indonesia. Middle East, North Africa also tends to be fairly low relational mobility. And actually Latin America is an interesting case. It's generally considered not as individualistic as the US or Canada or UK, but it scores quite high on relational mobility. So people report having a lot of freedom and choice and opportunities to meet new people in Latin American culture. So people in Mexico actually report more mobility than people in the United States, which is kind of interesting.

Hal Weitzman: Hmm. Okay. So what was the relationship... So that was the relational mobility. What about the happiness and the wellbeing?

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah, so relational mobility... So places that tend to be more mobile tend to be happier. So we're finding that same relationship. And the-

Hal Weitzman: So Mexicans are happier than Americans?

Thomas Talhelm: Oh, I can't remember those two cultures specifically. Although I will say, Latin America, there's a fun sort of happiness paradox with Latin America. If you plot out GDP and happiness for countries around the world, there's a line. Wealthier countries tend to be happier. Most Latin American countries tend to be above that line, meaning that for their GDP per capita, they tend to be sort of happier than they "should be" based on their GDP. So if you compare Latin American cultures to other cultures that have similar amounts of economic development, the Latin American cultures tend to be happier. Maybe relational mobility could be one of those explanatory factors.

Hal Weitzman: This is a big variation in different cultures that you've got across these 34 countries. How do you control for all the variations that you're finding between those countries?

Thomas Talhelm: So that's the value of the China data, I think. One thing that's really nice is that when we are comparing counties or prefectures in China to each other, you get rid of a lot of the other sort of extraneous alternative explanations. Religious history, economic institutions, political situations. One thing people often worry about with measuring happiness around the world is things like response style. "What does happiness mean? How do I report on that?" And if you're holding constant the language, and at least the national culture, you can kind of rule out a lot of those alternative explanations. People, for example, often talk about, with East Asia for example, middle response bias, where people tend to hang towards the middle of the scale thinking that's kind of a safe zone. Don't be too high, don't be too low, the safe is in the middle. Well, if people are doing that on happiness, maybe we're underestimating their happiness because they're sort of stuck in the middle. But if we're only comparing nearby counties in China, that would be hard to explain that sort of difference. And so it suggests, yeah, I think relational mobility really is playing a role here.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. And then just one other question about relational mobility. When you listed those countries, it makes me think that family ties tend to be very strong in many, and maybe Latin America's the counter case. But in many of those cultures that you mentioned, extended family is more of a tie than it is in advanced western country like the UK or the US. So what's the relationship between family, big extended family, and relational mobility?

Thomas Talhelm: That's a really good question. On a sort of cultural level, you're right, those tend to go in the same direction. So cultures where people tend to say that family ties are really important, then relational mobility tends to be lower. There's an interesting question there. When we measure relational mobility, we don't ask about the family per se. So none of the items mentioned leaving your parents for example, or abandoning your children or anything like that. Or maybe a more realistic thing might be to not contact your cousin or something like that.

Hal Weitzman: Right.

Thomas Talhelm: That might be a huge cultural difference. We don't ask about family, but it's entirely possible that people are using the family as a metaphor. Obviously family relationships are really central, and perhaps the way that the family is structured might also bleed out into friend relationships, coworker relationships, how you relate. Do you see your boss as sort of a parent figure? I feel like when I've worked in China as a researcher, I think the professor-graduate student relationship is a little bit more like a parent-child relationship than it is in the United States. So it's possible that the family, as a metaphor, is stronger in some cultures. The extent to which the family spreads out and is used as a metaphor for other relationships, maybe that's a cultural difference?

Hal Weitzman: [inaudible 00:13:21] family is sort of an obligation, like we said earlier.

Thomas Talhelm: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: So friendships can also be an obligation.

Thomas Talhelm: Right, yeah. So do people see friends as obligations, but also like a rock that holds over time? Or do they see them as a free market, "It's nice when things are going well, but if it's not going well then I'm going to find somebody better."

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Thomas Talhelm, in the first half we talked about your research about relational mobility and happiness, and how cultures where you have higher relational mobility, where people don't feel obliged perhaps to stay with the same friends over time, are generally happier. Why? Let's get to the question of how you explain this.

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah. I think a lot about pruning. I think that relational mobility can serve as sort of a pruning process. So the idea is you might start your relationships off in a good place, but over time you learn more about people or your interests diverge. The mobility allows you to prune those relationships out and focus on new ones that might serve you better. One of the things about relational mobility is it has this element of choice, right? I'm choosing who I get to hang out with. One consequence of that is what researchers call homophily. So how similar are people who are friends, versus people who are not friends. And so paradoxically, it's actually individualistic culture, so places like the US or the UK, homophily tends to be higher. People tend to be more similar to their friends like where you and I are talking, and people in say for example China, Japan, India, they tend to be actually less similar to their friends.

I feel like that's a little counterintuitive. I think people have this idea of interdependent, collectivistic cultures having a sort of... Like people are more similar to each other. But that's actually a more sort of western phenomenon. And the reason that is because people are choosing, in the US, people are choosing their friends, their romantic partners, more based on their personal attributes. So do you have similar attitudes as me? Do you like the same things? Do you like NASCAR? Do you like football? Do you like hiking? Or do you like going to the movies? Those choices are actually driving more of our friendships in the United States than they are in say China or Japan. And so what you get is more similarity in friendships. And that can make people happier. I mean being around people that do the same things as you or hold the same attitudes as you can make people happier.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. But talking again about happiness, again I'm coming back to this cultural question about... And I think you and I have talked about this in the previous podcast. Happiness. Whether happiness is... We think it's so important, it's the be all and end all. And maybe it ain't.

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: Maybe we think this research is significant because happiness, therefore everyone else should care about happiness. But actually maybe they care about other stuff more. So they're answering the questions in the research, but really that's not what's top of mind for them. What do you think?

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah, I think that's 100% right. We need to think about the questions that aren't being asked. One clue you can get into this is by looking at the things that might cause cultures to be low in relational to mobility in the first place. And so some of the things that I've looked at in my research, one is rice farming, which we've probably talked about before. Cultures that have a history of rice farming tend to be lower in relational to mobility. The idea there is that rice farming required more working together, and relationships were serving the purpose of putting food on the table, not of making me feel good. Another thing that we found in our research in the past is that cultures that faced more threats, so things like natural disasters, things like warfare, things like starvation, those places also tend to have lower relational to mobility. And you can see in that sort of a context why you might want to preserve relationships over a longer period of time. They're helping you do things like survive, be secure, have people that you know are going to be there for you, and not who are going to say, "Well, you don't like the things that I don't like. So bye." Right? I mean if you're in an environment that's threatening, relationships might be serving those purposes rather than the purposes of making you feel good.

Hal Weitzman: Right. Or there could be other things like fulfillment or loyalty.

Thomas Talhelm: Intellectual exploration. Things like that, yeah.

Hal Weitzman: Right. Okay. So I wanted to dig into something that came out of your Chinese study, very unexpected findings. People tend to be happier in places with more extreme climates and air pollution.

Thomas Talhelm: That's right.

Hal Weitzman: Explain that.

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah. I think this is a classic example of a confounding third variable. So basically air pollution in China tends to be worse in the north. And also demanding climates, extreme climates, that's also kind of a northern thing in China. They get the colder winters, but their summers are also quite hot. The south tends to be not quite tropical, but that's sort of more or less similar climate all around the year. I think these are both confounds of actually what I was just talking about, rice and wheat. So the north of China farms wheat historically, the south of China farms rice. Rice is lower in relational to mobility, and so that's one reason that we found in our previous research. Rice areas also tend to report less happiness than wheat areas in China. And so the wheat areas tend to be more polluted, partly because of the climate and the industries that tend to be there historically, and they have more demanding climates. And so what it looks like, "Oh hey, pollution is good for your happiness." I don't think that's really the case. I think it's because pollution tends to be confounded with a history of rice farming versus wheat farming. Wheat farming, by the way, people relied on each other less, more mobility, more sort of freedom of movement. People tend to be happier.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. So I want to ask you about you suggest that organizations could foster happiness and trust by creating environments that allow for more relational mobility. What would that entail?

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah. I mean that could be something as simple as a mixer. So one element of relational mobility is the feeling that you have many opportunities to meet new people. And so even having a monthly mixer, having something like... I'm thinking back to when I was in the dorms as a college student. They had us every once in a while say, "Okay, everybody from the third floor go up to the fourth floor and just knock on doors and say hi to people." Those sorts of institutional things would be a way of shuffling up relationships, letting people feel like there are more opportunities to meet new people, and that could raise the relational mobility. Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: And just the active meeting more people could help them be happier, you think?

Thomas Talhelm: That's exactly it. Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. I mean should organizations care? Given what we said, if you organize an international organization, how should you think about happiness? I mean is happiness important?

Thomas Talhelm: Well-

Hal Weitzman: It's obviously important to people in western cultures.

Thomas Talhelm: That's right.

Hal Weitzman: But if you are a global organization, how important is prioritizing happiness?

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah. I mean I remember I was inspired by some of the work of my colleague Nick Epley. He has an intervention where he asks people to write gratitude letters. So I write a letter saying, "Here's all these things that I appreciate about you." And I actually run a social enterprise, a company in China called Smart Air, we manufacture low-cost air purifiers, we teach people about air pollution. And I was in the office in Beijing, and I was inspired by Nick's intervention. And so I put a little gratitude box and put little letters out, and you can put the gratitude letters in that box. And then I came back to the US, then I went back six months later, and not a single person had used that box. And I thought I still believe in this intervention on some level, but I just think it's a bit too much of an ask. I think what I'm asking people to do is too weird of an intervention. So actually Nick and I are currently we're-

Hal Weitzman: Too weird, you mean too odd? Not too weird as in western?

Thomas Talhelm: Either way. Either way you want to take that. Very western idea that you'd write a... I don't want to say stranger, but not a super close person a letter and sort of secretly put it in this box for them. It's a little too direct.

Nick and I are actually running a study now where we're replicating some of his studies about where you randomly assign people to talk to strangers, in China. So we're seeing whether there are cultural differences in how much-

Hal Weitzman: And that found that people are happier when they strike up conversations with new people?

Thomas Talhelm: And people underestimate it. People think like, "Ah, it's not going to be that fun to talk to the stranger." And then they come out going, "That was great." And so we're replicating this in China, just taking a bunch of people in China and saying, "Does it work in China as well?" So we're exploring that.

Hal Weitzman: Okay, excellent. Well, we'll have to be back to talk about that research. But for the moment, Thomas Talhelm, thank you so much for coming on the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Thomas Talhelm: Yeah, happy to do it.

Hal Weitzman: That's it for this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. For more research, analysis, and insights, visit our website at chicagobooth.edu/review. When you're there, sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss the latest in business-focused academic research.

This episode was produced by Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe, and please do leave us a five-star review. Until next time, I'm Hal Weitzman. Thanks for listening.