The summary of happiness research is good, and the links are good. But one or two parts, mostly the 1st paragraph, seem cliched and preachy.
How, exactly, do I avoid this pitfall of seeking happiness? Should I deliberately take a boring job instead of a fun one? Spend money on things I don't want rather than things I do? The end of the article seems to rephrase this as "seek happiness from eudaimonic pursuits instead of hedonic pursuits, because you get more of it that way", which I would be more on board with.
One thing that bothers me about some happiness research is the very muddled definition of happiness; it seems to switch from "pure pleasure" through various emotions all the way to "utility" at times. In fact, the whole happiness-utility relationship is one I've never seen fully clarified (though this thread makes a really good start). Talking about how much better it is to "live life in accordance with your desires and values" could mean that people should care about utility more than happiness, that utility is equivalent to some kind of happiness, or that increasing utility automatically leads to increasing happiness.
Thanks for the critique. You're definitely right about the first paragraph - rereading made me cringe a little bit. And overall, the level of analysis is fairly weak, something I probably prevented myself from seeing before because I was tired of writing the damn thing. I probably bit off more than I could chew trying to analyze an entire field of psychology in a 1000 word essay, but at least I learned not to do that for next time.
There's a lot of counterevidence to most claims about X making people happy.
For example 1:
Most people were no more satisfied with life after marriage than they were prior to marriage [...] Study results, for example, showed, spikes in respondents' happiness levels both before and after marriage, but the increase was minimal—approximately one-tenth of one point on an 11-point scale—and was followed by a return to prior levels of happiness.
Also 2 (which is mostly about children of single vs married parents, but the same story - getting married doesn't improve anything).
Getting married doesn't make you happier; being the type of person who gets married (and stays married) correlates with being happier. From the linked article:
Data from the 15-year study of over 24,000 individuals living in Germany also indicates that most people who get married and stayed married are more satisfied with their lives than their non-married peers long before the marriage occurred.
I've heard somewhere that after you exclude divorced and widowed people, the correlation between being married and happiness entirely disappears. I tried regoogling it without success, but maybe more effort will get you the original research.
Interesting. All the other evidence I've seen suggest that committed relationships do make people happier, so I'd be interested to see how these apparently conflicting findings can be resolved.
Part of the difference could just be the focus on marriage vs. stable relationships more generally (whether married or not): I'm not sure there's much reason to think that a marriage certificate is going to make a big difference in and of itself (or that anyone's really claiming that it would). In fact, there's some, albeit limited, evidence that unmarried couples are happier on average than married ones.
I'll try to dig up references when I have a bit more time. Don't suppose you happen to have one for the actual research behind your first link?
"All other evidence" being? I a priori doubt all the happiness research as based on silly questionnaires and naive statistics (and most other psychological research). Is there any good metaanalysis showing anything like that?
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you (in fairness, you didn't get back to me either!). A good paper (though not a meta-analysis) on this is:
Stutzer and Frey (2006) Does Marriage Make People Happy or Do Happy People Get Married? Journal of Socio-Economics 35:326-347. links
The lit review surveys some of the other evidence.
I a priori doubt all the happiness research as based on silly questionnaires and naive statistics
I'm a little puzzled by this comment given that the first link you provided looks (on its face) to be based on exactly this sort of evidence. But in any event, many of the studies mentioned in the Stutzer and Frey paper look at health and other outcomes as well.
Thanks.
By doubt I just mean it's really really easy to get it spectacularly wrong in a systemic way in too many ways, so I'm only going to believe the result if it's robust with wide variety of tests and situations. Not that there's no value in it.
Fair enough. My impression of the SWB literature is that the relationship is robust, both in a purely correlational sense, and in papers like the Frey and Stutzer one where they try to control for confounding factors like personality and selection. The only major catch is how long it takes individuals to adapt after the initial SWB spike.
Indeed, having now managed to track down the paper behind your first link, it seems like this is actually their main point. From their conclusion:
Our results show that (a) selection effects appear to make happy people more likely to get and stay married, and these selection effects are at least partially [emphasis mine] responsible for the widely documented association between marital status and SWB; (b) on average, people adapt quickly and completely to marriage, and they adapt more slowly to widowhood (though even in this case, adaptation is close to complete after about 8 years); (c) there are substantial individual differences in the extent to which people adapt; and (d) the extent to which people adapt is strongly related to the degree to which they react to the initial event—those individuals who reacted strongly were still far from baseline levels years after the event. These last two findings indicate that marital transitions can be related to changes in satisfaction but that these effects may be overlooked if only average trends are examined.
we tend to end up liking what we get.
Disliking something less than expected is not liking it.
Hey, you know how we have happiness set points? Mine is about average, and I was thinking: Wouldn't it be nice if my set point were a little higher?
One solution I am going to try is to take Adderall once or twice a week, because it makes me more productive as well as making me feel great for the day.
What do you guys think?
Instead of replacing links to popular sources with links to academic publications, I would add the latter and retain the former.
I think part of the problem with hedonia is it has a shorter duration, and after it's over you're usually not better off for all your efforts. Eudamonia gaurantees future happiness and brings more of a sense of accomplishment.
Good summary of happiness research and good links, but I don't know about the hedonism versus eudaimonia part. Unless I've missed lots of hedonists, the position is mostly a straw man, and although people make a token attempt to define "eudaimonia" (and this is less a criticism of you than of the field in general) it's not a natural category. More of a matter of calling short-lived shallow kinds of happiness we disapprove of "hedonist" and long-lasting kinds of socially acceptable happiness "eudaimonia" (okay, there are some things that fit squarely in one category or another, but also a lot of gray area). That makes a declaration like "eudaimonia is better than hedonism" less interesting than it might otherwise be.
Whenever the topic of happiness is mentioned, it's always discussed like it's the most important thing in the world. People talk about it like they would a hidden treasure or a rare beast - you have to seek it, hunt it, ensnare it and hold it tight, or it'll slip through your fingers. Perhaps it's just the contrarian in me, but this seems misguided - happiness shouldn't be searched for like the holy grail. Not that I don't want to be happy, but is that really the purpose of my life - to have my neurons stimulated in a way that feels good, and try to keep that up until I die? Why don't I just slip myself into a Soma-coma then? Of course, anything I do boils down to a particular stimulation of neurons, but that doesn't mean there's not something better to aspire to. To pursue happiness as an end itself I think, is backwards. It wasn't built into our brains because evolution was being nice - it's there because it increases our fitness. Happiness is designed to get us somewhere, not to be a destination in itself.