From a book review:
Those sky-high happiness surveys, it turns out, are mostly bunk. Asking people “Are you happy?” means different things in different cultures. In Japan, for instance, answering “yes” seems like boasting, Booth points out. Whereas in Denmark, it’s considered “shameful to be unhappy,” newspaper editor Anne Knudsen says in the book.
When you ask me to report my happiness, what do I report?
1. How I feel compared to one minute ago.
2. How I feel compared to yesterday.
3. How I have been feeling on average this week with how I remember feeling some time in the past.
4. How I feel about my life as a whole compared to other people’s livs.
5. How I think other people think I am feeling.
6. How I think other people expect me to feel.
…
The one thing I know about my happiness is that it is reduced when people produce charts that are derived from data that lacks reliability. It is hard to get less reliable than a survey that asks a question that does not have a precise interpretation.
Are you sure they only asked “are you happy”?
But of course, they don’t just ask “are you happy?” Serious research into happiness and life satisfaction has a decent amount of sophistication to it. For example, here is Gallup talking about their use of the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale, one of several widely-used and well-respected tools: http://www.gallup.com/poll/122453/understanding-gallup-uses-cantril-scale.aspx
I clicked on the link and found a survey in which I am supposed to relate my current situation to the best, and the worst, possible life for me, both now and in five years. I do not understand this. In a sense I am doing the best I think possible or I would already be doing something differently. So a better possible life must mean possible given some change–but a change in what?
I’m not trying to be difficult; I don’t understand the question. I don’t know how to answer it. The fact that the question is followed by several paragraphs of bureaucratic/social science argle-bargle about “datasets” and “construct validity” does not convince me that the thinking behind this must be rigorous.
Although the question strikes me as meaningless, more “positive” responses to it are allegedly correlated with such things as reporting fewer health problems. What should I conclude from that? (Not necessarily a rhetorical question.)
I would treat possible as imaginable without constraint. Everyone has their own ideal of happiness and aspiring to perfection of it would be part of it for me. Everyone also has their own interpretation, yet language is as common as can be achieved for something subjective. If I were .., I would be the happiest I could be (until of course I were and then would wish something else).
Correlations are just associations but the stronger the association the more likely affecting one may affect the other and the more valuable we should find it.
Thanks for the link, Oliver, it’s very interesting. I think it makes Arnold’s point, though.
The survey on that link to asks participants to rate their life scale from 0 to 10. A 10 is defined as the “best possible life for you”.
That sounds like exactly the sort of question Arnold (and many, many others) complains about. What on earth does it mean, and why should we assume that people in different cultures will interpret it the same way?
Lost in translation, but probably still useful for comparison between common language countries and over time. This isn’t unique to happiness research though. Even seemingly objective terms are often treated subjectively as that is point of surveys.
And who said “happiness” or even “life satisfaction” are the goals?
In the face of the great selection filter called natural selection, happiness means very little. In the face of the great selection filter called human society, happiness means very little.
Exactly. I think happiness is overrated. Some of the most valuable things in life are arrived at after pain and anxiety. Checking to see if you are happy diverts you from attending to living. I must say that I was driving to the gym this morning, on a dreary winter’s day, and spotted a brilliant red male cardinal on the side of the road and that made me happy. Reminded me how beautiful the world can be.
Daniel Kahneman has covered how absolutely terrible people are at remembering their happiness over a time interval.
Don’t have time to summarize the issues his work exposes, but they are pretty damning.
I’ve always been skeptical of these surveys. My reaction has been, “Happy compared to what?” What I mean is that the surveys are asking people who have not lived in or maybe even have never visited another country so they don’t have a way of comparing how happy they are in, say, Italy versus living in Germany. I think it would be more useful to poll people who have lived in more than one place or visited other countries. Of course, that means your pool of candidates shrinks drastically.