Now a big question is are all values equally valuable? Because when we're talking about these values that people are affirming, some people might be affirming values like, I have a value of having a sports car and another person may say, I value my family or my community or love or compassion. So there are different kinds of values and a group of researchers wanted to ask whether these values are equally valuable in a super cool study. And we might call these different kinds of value self-transcending values and we've talked about this before in an earlier week versus self-enhancing values. Remember Aristotle and Socrates called these you eudaimonic values, that would be self-transcending values versus hedonic values, self-enhancing values. So I'd like to show you this cookie study. This is an awesome study that was done at the University of Michigan. And in this cookie study, they took 92 University of Michigan college students and they first of all had them write out information about themselves. And they said, okay, we're going to share this information that you wrote about yourself with groups of students who are all working on a task. And undoubtedly, one of these groups will pick you, they'll look at your information sheet. You might be picked by more than one group. By the way, there were no groups, but the feedback that they provided back to the student was, none of the groups picked you. That's odd but yeah, you weren't picked, sorry about that. So this was purposely designed to threaten their ego, make them feel sad basically. And we know that when people's egos are threatened that they tend to eat more food. Or if they have an alcohol issue, they tend to drink more alcohol. Or if they're a smoker, they might smoke more. When our egos are threatened like, boy, nobody else likes you and by the way, we've all experienced something like that, right? We're not picked for a softball team or a basketball team or whatever those things are, if we're not picked for something or we were rejected by somebody, then our egos are threatened and then we tend to engage in unhealthy behaviors. So, they purposely did that. Then what they did was randomize these students into three different groups. One group, they just ask them, write down your daily routine. This is a control condition. The second group, they said, write down what it would be like if you had a lot of power or status, write down what it's like when you're thinking about being rich or having a lot of possessions or being super attractive and super popular and everybody loves you. And by the way, none of the students assigned to this group had any trouble writing about those self-enhancing values, nobody. And then they had it this third group randomly assigned where they said, write down what you're like when you're at your most empathic, your most compassionate, your most supportive, how you contribute to the community, trusting. What's interesting is that none of the students randomized to this group had any trouble writing these down either. We have both of these things, Aristotle said we have both you eudaimonic values and hedonic values and they can live together. I think that's really true. We all at certain times of a day or a week are more self-transcending and other times we're more self-enhancing. So you see these three groups, one was a control condition, one was priming self-enhancing values, one was priming self-transcending values and then is a really cool part of the study. They took eight minutes to do this and then they said, well since you weren't picked, we'd love to have you participate in this other study. It's a cookie study and we'd love to have you rate the taste of these cookies and the aroma of these cookies and just give this overall rating to the quality of these cookies. And by the way, eat as many cookies as you like. Now, you're probably guessing, I know what they're going to be looking for. They're going to look at how many cookies each of the groups ate and you'd be absolutely right. That's just what they did. So, I'll ask you guys, how many cookies on average do you think each of these groups ate? Here's the result. And by the way, they had eight minutes to eat as many cookies as they wanted as they were rating them. In the control group, those University of Michigan students ate eight cookies, eight cookies. I'd like to ask my students at the University of Michigan, these leaders and best students, when you have your ego threatened, you eat eight cookies on average? That seems like a lot of cookies. The self-enhancing group asking to affirm their self-enhancing purposeful core values ate five cookies, roughly five cookies on average. The self-transcending group, the group that was writing down their self-transcending purposeful core values eight roughly three cookies, a lot less. All of that by the way, eight cookies, really eight cookies in eight minutes? That just seems like a lot but it shows even students from mighty University of Michigan when their egos are threatened, we kind of lose it, we lose our will power to restrict what we're eating. So it's a really cool study in my mind. You just see how thinking about self-transcending core values seems to reduce our defensiveness, seems to in a way help us transcend our ego, our ego defenses. So I wanted to ask Jim Loehr about this. We've already met Jim Loehr, this amazing founder of the Human Performance Institute. I asked Jim Loehr about types of purposes. >> So there are a couple things to consider, one is you have to have a deep sense of purpose or what you get is emptiness. It's like, if you don't have hope, there's nothing to fill that void. It's hopelessness is depression. And so the first thing you have to have is a purpose, but you also can have the wrong purpose. Your purpose has to be the right purpose. So I spent a lot of time with a lot of athletes and they were chasing fame, money. And some of these athletes achieved such extraordinary success, number one in the world and what came with it was unbelievable, money, all the money, they could never spend it in their lifetime. Unbelievable fame and every title, all the titles they ever dreamed of having and all the privileges. >> Adulation. >> Adulation and they are in many ways or became almost as bankrupt emotionally and mentally and spiritually as a lot of the kids today. They began to question, what is this all about, this is it, this is what life is about? And it was because this preoccupation with themselves, this is the danger. You can have a purpose but if it's the wrong purpose, it can lead you just as powerfully in a direction that will lead to almost as detrimental as having no purpose.
