I recently read this blog post by Justin Wolfers defending the use of United States gross domestic product rather than measures of subjective well being (e.g. gross national happiness) to measure how well our country is doing.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with this debate, you can see this below video or this link to the Sarkozy Commission Report which prompted the French president to similarly question whether the French are using the right indicators to measure societal progress in their country.

Personally, I think this ends up being a subjective rather than an objective question and I think it's likely that people who are productivity oriented will never be convinced to use happiness measures primarily and that those who are care oriented will never be convinced to use GDP.  I'm currently working on a paper detailing why I think that this question of the 'right indicators' is a subjective rather than an objective question that depends on one's goals, warmth or competence.

Using more objective criteria, Wolfer's argument is that perhaps gross domestic product and measures of subjective well being are so highly correlated that there is no need to use new measures of psychological well being.  If they are so highly correlated, maybe there is no need to measure both.  I disagree for 2 reasons:

1.  The correlations he uses are with log transformed values of income and most people care about actual dollar values rather than log transformed values.  Consider this excerpt from the paper referenced:

Most early studies considered the relationship between the level of absolute income and the level of happiness, and thus often found a curvilinear relationship.In some cases the lack of evidence of a clear linear relationship between GDP per capita and happiness led to theories of a satiation point, beyond which more income would not increase happiness. A more natural starting point might be to represent well-being as a function of the logarithm of income rather than absolute income. And indeed, recent research has shown that within countries "the supposed attenuation at higher income levels of the happiness-income relation does not occur when happiness is regressed on log income, rather than absolute income." However, if happiness is linearly related to log income in the within-country cross section,then cross-country studies should also examine the relationship between average levels of subjective well-being and average levels of log income.

This is a very good academic point about satiation points, and it may be true that doubling the income of someone who makes a million dollars a year produces the same increase in happiness that doubling the income of someone who makes $20,000 a year.  But for the same million dollars that it takes to double a rich person's salary, we can create the same amount of subjective well being in 50 people who make $20,000 per year (50*20,000=1 million).  That fact is lost in a log transformed graph.  Real world allocation decisions are made with actual dollars, not log transformed dollars, which removes the skew that represents the United States' actual distribution of wealth.  (ps. feel free to correct me if anyone reading this knows more about log transformation than I and I'll edit this)

2.  Life Satisfaction, Happiness, and Smiling/Laughing are different things and the fault may be in the measurement of subjective well being failing to tap what Kennedy was talking about in his speech.  If I ask you how satisfied you are with your life, a large part of your answer may have to do with your current economic circumstances.  Wolfers and Stevenson do a good job in their paper of examining questions about life satisfaction and happiness separately and conclude reasonably that the measures are similar if we throw out outliers.  However, when we look at a question like "Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?", the correlation goes down to .27 from .82 (which was the correlation between log GDP/capita and life satisfaction).  

Try answering this question-> "Taken all together, how would you say things are these days-would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?"  What did you base your answer on?  Was it somewhat about your economic circumstances or work goals?  

Now ask yourself if you smiled or laughed a lot lately.  What was your answer based on? 

If you are like me, these questions tap very different parts of my life.  My thoughts naturally go to my progress with goals in question 1, whereas when asked about smiling/laughing, I tend to think of my day-to-day experiences.  There is a big difference between remembered happiness and experienced happiness.  General global assessments may indeed be related to economic well being, but perhaps the fault lies in the blunt ways we measure happiness where we don't really know whether the person is talking about being satisfied, joyous, lacking anxiety, feeling engaged, etc...  When asked about things which tap these more discrete constructs, GDP doesn't seem to capture them very well at all.   According to the Gallup World Poll data reported by Wolfers, having learned something interesting was uncorrelated with log GDP.  Feeling love is correlated .14.  Smiling/laughing, with a correlation of .27 with log GDP/capita, leaves a lot of unexplained variance that ought to be considered in policy making. 

To be fair, Wolfers himself acknowledges that "we can do a lot better" in measuring well being in previous posts and his defense of GDP is more to play devil's advocate as he states that he agrees with criticisms of the over-use of United States Gross Domestic Product to measure our country's progress.  I learned a lot in writing this post and will be following his well written blog and research closely in the hopes that it spurs more thought elaboration.

As a liberal social psychologist who has helped create a science of positive psychology course at the University of Southern California, I could not help but be interested in Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book, Bright-Sided, which states how the positive psychology approach (in academia, business, health, and economics) has undermined America. First, I would think we would have a lot in common given her unabashedly liberal bent and my generally liberal orientation. The fact that an intelligent liberal person would be so upset by one of my primary chosen areas of research, and that enough others agree with her that a book got published, bears noting. As well, one area that I’ve always been interested in researching is the idea of expanding our moral imagination. Along the lines of Robert Wright’s idea that confrontational zero-sum situations lead to more misery in the world, it seems important that I practice what I hope to eventually preach and attempt to actually learn something from her book, rather than dismiss it. For those of you who haven’t read the book, here is an entertaining interview that summarizes many points.

There are some definite points to agree upon in her interview and the book. She was clearly negatively impacted by those who somewhat forcefully put forth the opinion that she should adopt the positive psychology approach given her cancer diagnosis. “The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease,” she writes (p.43). Some people believe that there is a connection between having a positive attitude and cancer outcomes and Ehrenreich goes on to dispute this. A review of the literature on health and happiness is beyond the scope of this post and really should be beyond the scope of her book, let alone the few pages she devotes to serious study of it. She is a journalist not a scholar and she touches on only a brief part of this immense literature, with a lack of depth that would never work in a scholarly setting. Her book does not have the kind of literature review that really can get at complexities and she seems to have relied on “a list of articles…compiled for me by Seligman” rather than doing her own in-depth research. She ignores a large literature on stress as having no relationship to happiness research and intermixes research on the effects of feeling happy on cancer vs. other health outcomes. People who study cancer and positive illusions agree that “there is no evidence that positive illusions can cure cancer,” but that is not the only health-happiness relationship worth studying. Ehrenreich herself writes on p. 162 “The evidence that positive emotions can protect against coronary heart disease seems sturdier, although I am not in a position to evaluate it.” It certainly is more complex than “being positive”=”being healthy”. But the health-happiness relationship is also not as simplistically non-existent as she represents in her media interviews, and she is possibly doing harm to others by representing the research as simplistically (the very charge she levels at others).

That being said, positive psychologists and those they inspire likely were doing harm to her and others like her. On page 42 of her book (my hardcover edition), she writes that “without question there is a problem when positive thinking fails and the cancer spreads or eludes treatment. Then the patient can only blame herself.” This is an important point that advocates of positivity should learn note. It may work for some people, but it doesn’t work for everyone and if someone wants to be grumpy because they have cancer, they should feel supported in those feelings, not attacked. As Ehrenreich puts it, “She took it personally.” A more complex reading of the psychology literature would lead Ehrenreich and positive psychologists to the conclusion that acceptance of feelings (e.g. meditation) is important. Perhaps some of the error lies in the idea that “positive psychology” is a separate discipline from psychology when in reality, there are no clear distinctions.

The fact that Ehrenreich is able to caricature positive psychology as “be positive” is unfortunate. It would be easy to place the blame on Ehrenreich for failing to dig much deeper than the works cited by Martin Seligman, who has his own detractors in academia. But it is certainly true that positive psychology would do well to examine the ways that it can get it’s findings out without being so easy to caricature. How was Ehrenreich so easily able to dismiss the robust research on stress and health? Perhaps because positive psychology overly focuses on activated emotions such as joy rather than deactivated emotions such as contentment? Or perhaps positive psychology needs to incorporate previous research on stress and not pretend that it is a completely new discipline?

Ehrenreich seems to have a particular concern about synthetic happiness vs. real happiness, feeling as she states in her interview with Stewart, “I never believe delusion is ok.” In the personal realm, I have to side with positive psychologists as the evidence is overwhelming that circumstances matter less than we think in terms of our own happiness. Human beings get used to things and those that don’t are who we call clinically depressed. Dan Gilbert puts in best in this video:

However, even if synthetic happiness is the same as real happiness, there are kernels of wisdom in Ehrenreich’s criticism. Believing that one can synthesize money is different from changing one’s perspective toward money (e.g. being grateful for the comforts we have) and some new age interpretations of positivity are a bit ahead of the curve of what can be called science. It is true that people are attracted to happy people, wanting to be around them in business environments, which likely leads to a link between happiness and wealth. Ehrenreich acknowledges this, but calls this a bias that needs to be corrected. That seems more like an opinion, as I think it’s reasonable for many to prefer the company of happy people, both in dating and in the workplace. However, I can see how those who are naturally less positive might feel discriminated against or even feel like something is wrong with them as a result.

Positive psychology and spirituality is not for everybody. Ehrenreich admits to being an atheist in her book (p.17 – “atheists pray in their foxholes”). I, on the other hand, often attend a new age church where the preacher was actually in The Secret. Still, I have always been uncomfortable with the idea that people use spiritual principles to manifest wealth, as many at my church believe, and instead choose to interpret wealth as meaning the inner wealth that we all have. Getting off the treadmill which says we constantly need more money is the key to wealth, not having more stuff. That’s my opinion, but I don’t feel particularly upset that others around me might feel something different. If you watch Stewart’s interview, you’ll notice that he tries to frame positivity similarly saying that if it works for other people, why does Ehrenreich have a problem with it? Ehrenreich doesn’t give an inch. The anger she feels for her cancer experience is palpable (and legible in her book). Isn’t it just as wrong to try to force everyone to be ‘realistic’ (put in quotes as one person’s realism is another person’s delusion) as it is to force everyone to be positive? I often write about moral confabulation in this blog and I would hypothesize that Ehrenreich’s moral outrage about positivity is somewhat more about her personal feelings than her research. I say that not to dismiss her book, which gives voice to a very real sentiment shared by many, but rather to point out a very real hazard of the phenomenon of studying happiness. Specifically, it can wound people when forced upon them and cause a great deal of psychological reactance. Advocates of the science of studying happiness and the positive psychology approach to health maintenance would benefit from reading her book and learning about her perspective. It’s not the only perspective, but it’s an important one to listen to.

People who study happiness can be annoying in their pollyannish prescriptions to just look on the bright side of life.  Just ask Barbara Ehrenreich, who wrote Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.  So it's always refreshing to see someone put basic research findings (being grateful is important) into more common sense language as in the below video.

Louis CK “Everything’s amazing, nobody’s happy” - Watch more Sports Videos at Vodpod.

Exercise is one of the most robust ways that people can increase their happiness.  The problem is that it’s just not that much fun.  Enter “Fun Theory”!  By making the stairs into a piano, they increased usage of the stairs by 66%, which means increased happiness now AND increased happiness later (due to the exercise).  Watch the video!

Facebook just launched a gross national happiness index which uses analysis of words used in Facebook posts to measure the country's mood. I'm sure those who study the taxonomy of emotion would love to see more complex measures included. However, this is a potentially wonderful tool and the fact that Facebook is willing to publish this data means that someday they could end up allowing the research community to examine their data. The possibilities are endless.

Some interesting trends from their limited graph....

Thanksgiving (2 years running) is the most positive day of the year...social pressure to be thankful?  Does it mean people are happier or not?

Why is the day after Father's day the least positive day (they have separate indexes for positivity and negativity)?

Why is the 4th of July the least negative day?

Click here to view the index

Facebook just launched a gross national happiness index which uses analysis of words used in Facebook posts to measure the country’s mood.  I’m sure those who study the taxonomy of emotion would love to see more complex measures included.  However, this is a potentially wonderful tool and the fact that Facebook is willing to publish this data means that someday they could end up allowing the research community to examine their data.  The possibilities are endless.

 Some interesting trends from their limited graph….

Thanksgiving is the happiest day of the year (or the day we all feel we have to say something positive…:)).

 Why is the day after Father’s day the least positive day (they have separate indexes for positivity and negativity)?

Why is the 4th of July the  least negative day?

 Click here to view the index 

This article talks about the reasons why women have sex.  Men are obviously less of a mystery.  I haven’t read the book, but perusing the reasons offered in the article, it would seem reasonable to group many of the women’s reasons into categories of emotion management.  Sex appears to be a way to alleviate guilt (feeling sorry for someone), anger (revenge), or anxiety (pre-emptive protection).

In their new book, Why Women Have Sex,University of Texas psychologists Cindy Meston and David Buss aim to illuminate the complexities of women’s sexual motivations through women’s own words—an important step, they say, to better understanding how women can achieve sexual satisfaction. Based on five years of research and an online survey of 1,000 women, the authors consider motivation ranging from altruistic sex (“I felt sorry for the guy”) to revengeful sex (“I wanted to get back at my partner”) to palliative sex (“I had a migraine”). We hear from women who’ve had sex to boost their confidence, even if it’s with a man (or woman) they find repulsive, and from those who’ve used sex to barter for gifts or household chores (9 percent of us have used this form of economic sex, according to a University of Michigan study). We learn that 31 percent of women have had sex to evoke jealousy in the ones they love, while others have done it to protect themselves from getting hurt. Some, like the 25-year-old woman we described earlier, have had sex to boost their self-esteem, and 84 percent of women report they’ve done it simply to “keep the peace” at home.

Following on this study and this article which show that women are less happy than men, I thought I would examine some of the data from our website, YourMorals.org.  Clearly our data is not representative of the population, so we cannot make any claims as to the validity of the trend which the authors describe.  The trend they established, whereby women, who were once happier than men, have become less happy than men over time, is very well researched.  What we can potentially do is examine whether one distinctive group of women, women who visit our website, happen to report more or less life satisfaction than men who visit our website.

As you can see, women actually report more life satisfaction (which is different than happiness, but the authors of the study use both life satisfaction and happiness questions to make their point) than men in our sample and the trend is robust across questions, meaning that women score as ‘more satisfied’ on all five of the questions on Diener’s Satisfaction with Life Scale, the measure we use on YourMorals.org.  Further, the graphs below, broken down by the source of visitors to our site, show that the effect is somewhat robust, meaning that it’s likely not just an oddity of traffic from one particular source.  Women who come from search engines (eg. by looking for ‘morality quiz’) or who read the NY times or who read BeliefNet’s conservative blog site all seem to be more satisfied than their male counterparts.

So what does this tell us?  Obviously since our data is non-representative and non-longitudinal, we can’t say much about the original hypothesis.  However, if we believe the original hypothesis that women are generally less satisfied with life than men, we can perhaps learn something from this group where women seem to do relatively well on scores of life satisfaction.  The authors didn’t really come up with a mechanism for the decline of happiness measures among women and so perhaps inspecting a group that does relatively well can give us clues to the mechanism in the same way that observing that people who have darker skin have less risk for skin cancer can tell us about the mechanism of skin cancer.

What do the women who visit yourmorals.org have in common?   Measurably, our sample is liberal (2.5 on a 7 point scale with 1 being very liberal and 7 being very conservative), younger (mean age = 37.6), very well educated (mean education is somewhere between college educated and having completed some graduate school), and politically attentive (the great majority either pay some attention or a lot of attention to politics).  Less measurably (we do have measures, but not for all visitors), our visitors likely have curiosity (see Todd Kashdan’s book), intellectual desire, and the time to explore those interests.  Perhaps the clue to increasing the subjective well being of women lies somewhere in there.

Most of the data from this article is taken from the General Social Survey, a representative sample of 1,500 Americans done each year.  The pattern is replicated in several other datasets with a general trend that Women used to be more happy than men and have since (1972) become less happy.  Why?

Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice gives me the most plausible answer.  I would be interested in looking at the data further to prove it, but it seems plausible that women are encountering more choice, while men don’t feel the pressure to choose among as many things (eg. taking care of children).

Here is the original article.

It looks like the government of France is following in the footsteps of Bhutan and the United Kingdom and is taking the idea of using happiness as a national indicator more seriously.

The article from the Telegraph is consistent with a growing drumbeat among academics and politicians to consider national indicators of well being.  The challenge is to convince those in policy positions of two things:

-  It's important to remove concerns that productivity goals will be sacrificed. There is research (Deutsch 1975; Hofstede 1980) that indicates that well being and social goals form a distinct cluster from agentic goals like productivity.  How can advocates of well being measures avoid this traditional tension and the inevitable backlash from those who are more productivity focused?  This is especially difficult in times of crisis as research suggests that feelings of threat increase the desire to focus on productivity.

- It’s important to show the scientific validity of measures of happiness.  I am not sure what the right balance is, but on it’s face, “happiness” is not something that can be measured well.  It is too multi-dimensional.  Would it be better to measure more discrete emotions such as societal anxiety, depression, joy, and satisfaction (based on Feldman-Barrett and Russell’s taxonomy of emotions)?  Would it be a more convincing argument if we tried to support the basic psychological needs (from Self Determination theory) of relatedness, autonomy, and competence?  Perhaps adding meaning/curiosity?  My gut tells me that some amount of nuance needs to be added to the word “happiness” to make it more face valid to the general public and that there is room for improvement from calling it “subjective well being”.