The Pursuit of Happiness
"New research uncovers some anti-intuitive insights into how many people are happy -
and why."
A.
Compared with misery, happiness is a relatively unexplored terrain for social scientists.
Between 1967 and 1994, 46,380 articles indexed in Psychological Abstracts mentioned
depression, 36,851 anxiety, and 5,099 anger. Only 2,389 spoke of happiness, 2,340 life
satisfaction, and 405 joy.
B.
Recently we and other researchers have begun a systematic study of happiness.
During the past two decades, dozens of investigators throughout the world have asked
several hundred thousand Representative sampled people to reflect on their
happiness and satisfaction with life or what psychologists call "subjective well-being". In
the US the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago has
surveyed a representative sample of roughly 1,500 people a year since 1957; the
Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan has carried out similar
studies on a less regular basis, as has the Gallup Organization. Government-funded
efforts have also probed the moods of European countries.
C.
We have uncovered some surprising findings. People are happier than one might
expect, and happiness does not appear to depend significantly on external
circumstances. Although viewing life as a tragedy has a long and honorable history, the
responses of random samples of people around the world about their happiness paints
a much rosier picture. In the University of Chicago surveys, three in 10 Americans say
they are very happy, for example. Only one in 10 chooses the most negative
description "not too happy". The majority describe themselves as "pretty happy",
D.
How can social scientists measure something as hard to pin down as happiness? Most
researchers simply ask people to report their feelings of happiness or unhappiness and
to assess how satisfying their lives are. Such self-reported well-being is moderately
consistent over years of retesting. Furthermore, those who say they are happy and
satisfied seem happy to their close friends and family members and to a psychologist-
interviewer. Their daily mood ratings reveal more positive emotions, and they smile
more than those who call themselves unhappy. Self-reported happiness also predicts
other indicators of well-being. Compared with the depressed, happy people are less
self-focused, less hostile and abusive, and less susceptible to disease.
E.
We have found that the even distribution of happiness cuts across almost all
demographic classifications of age, economic class, race and educational level. In
addition, almost all strategies for assessing subjective well-being - including those that
sample people's experience by polling them at random times with beepers - turn up
similar findings. Interviews with representative samples of people of all ages, for
example, reveal that no time of life is notably happier or unhappier. Similarly, men and
women are equally likely to declare themselves "very happy" and "satisfied" with life,
according to a statistical digest of 146 studies by Marilyn J, Haring, William Stock and
Morris A, Okun, all then at Arizona State University.
F.
Wealth is also a poor predictor of happiness. People have not become happier over
time as their cultures have become more affluent. Even though Americans earn twice
as much in today's dollars as they did in 1957, the proportion of those telling surveyors
from the National Opinion Research Center that they are "very happy" has declined
from 35 to 29 percent.
G.
Even very rich people - those surveyed among Forbes magazine's 100 wealthiest
Americans - are only slightly happier than the average American. Those whose income
has increased over a 10-year period are not happier than those whose income is
stagnant. Indeed, in most nations the correlation between income and happiness is
negligible - only in the poorest countries, such as Bangladesh and India, is income a
good measure of emotional well-being.
H.
Are people in rich countries happier, by and large, than people in not so rich countries?
It appears in general that they are, but the margin may be slim. In Portugal, for
example, only one in 10 people reports being very happy, whereas in the much more
prosperous Netherlands the proportion of very happy is four in 10. Yet there are curious
reversals in this correlation between national wealth and well-being -the Irish during the
1980s consistently reported greater life satisfaction than the wealthier West Germans.
Furthermore, other factors, such as civil rights, literacy and duration of democratic
government, all of which also promote reported life satisfaction, tend to go hand in
hand with national wealth, As a result, it is impossible to tell whether the happiness of
people in wealthier nations is based on money or is a by-product of other felicities.
I.
Although happiness is not easy to predict from material circumstances, it seems
consistent for those who have it, In one National Institute on Aging study of 5,000
adults, the happiest people in 1973 were still relatively happy a decade later, despite
changes in work, residence and family status.
[ From "The Pursuit of Happiness" by David G, Myers and Ed Diener. Copyright © May
1996 by Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved. ]
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