Happiness is…?, Part One
July 17th, 2008(This week’s post is the first in a two-part series on what makes people happy, why, and what to do about it. The first part, as usual, is an explanation and summary of the relevant data. The second part will suggest ways, in light of these data, to be happier.)
Happiness is a big deal to me. I’ve read a couple of books on the topic already, and both were quite enlightening. The first, “Stumbling on Happiness” (Daniel Gilbert), was about how bad we were at predicting how happy things will make us. The second, “The How of Happiness” (Sonja Lyubomirsky) was about how much of our happiness is under our control (about 40%) and how we can use that to be happier.
But neither of those books tell us who, in fact, is happier. They’re mainly concerned with the reader. Thus, the obvious question: do happy people have anything in common, and why? That’s the main question answered by another book I just finished reading, “Gross National Happiness” by Arthur C. Brooks. It’s the third book I’ve read on happiness so far, and like the others, it doesn’t disappoint.
Brooks suggests that happy people do actually have a number of things in common, and what they share might surprise you. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though. What does Brooks mean by “happiness”? Well, whatever people want it to mean, really. (Try not to roll your eyes.) That is, the studies Brooks cites rely on self-reported levels of happiness. Some studies ask people once; others ask them more than once, or even throughout a day, how happy they are. (Reminds me of the “Can you hear me now?” Verizon ads. “Are you happy now?”) You might wonder, though: are self-reports of happiness accurate? Another study showed that your friends will generally say that you are as happy as you self-report, so it’s likely that self-reports of happiness are in fact correct.
What do the data on happiness say, then? Certainly not what Brooks or I suspected, at the very least. Let me warn you, I’m about to delve into some sensitive and difficult topics here. Like Brooks, I urge you to simply look at what the data say and save the reactions for later on if you can. (I plan to address these concerns more in part two.)
There are four basic points. Conservatives (Republicans) often say they’re much happier than liberals (Democrats). Religious people often say they’re much happier than secular folk. People who like their jobs often say they’re much happier than those who don’t. Married people often say they’re happier than singles (and the divorced/widowed/cohabiters). And those four things are very much found together instead of by themselves, so they often have a multiplier effect one way or the other. If you’re like me and Brooks, these are shocking findings (except for maybe the one about jobs).
I had the same opinion Brooks did. I figured that these socially conservative folk were unhappy in general (or at least moreso than social liberals), and that they simply believed these things because of the status quo, or to keep other people in line. But it turns out that if you’re socially conservative, you’re also much, much more likely to be happy than if you are not. I’m willing to admit I was wrong here. It’s a refreshing viewpoint, actually.
Allow me to give you some background. In case you haven’t figured it out, I am (or was) socially liberal, agnostic, and single. This, as I have come to find out, is a singularly bad recipe for being happy. (I’m actually happy at work, though.) Thanks to the two previous books on happiness, I’ve gone a long way towards increasing my personal happiness. (It takes work, believe it or not.) But “Gross National Happiness” showed me that I’m simply running against the wind. It’s like trying to pedal faster in first gear. Far better to switch gears first. It’ll make your effort much more worthwhile.
I haven’t been very specific, though. Here’s some specific happiness figures:
- 44% of conservative or very conservative people say they’re “very happy” vs. 25% of liberal or very liberal people
- 9% of conservatives say they aren’t too happy vs. 18% of liberals
- 50% of religious conservatives say they are very happy; 5% say they are not too happy
- 22% of secular liberals say they are very happy; 22% say they are not too happy
- Three times as many married conservatives as secular liberals say they are very happy
- A conservative who is in the same circumstances as a liberal (except for political orientation, obviously) is 10% more likely to say they are very happy
- 43% of religious people (the faith in question doesn’t matter) say they are very happy vs. 23% of secular people
- 42% of married Americans say they are very happy vs. 23% of never-married Americans, 20% of widowers, 17% of the divorced, and 11% of those who are separated (but not divorced)
- A married person who is in the same circumstances as someone who is single (except for marital status) is 18% more likely to say they are very happy
- A person who’s satisfied with their job, but is otherwise in the same circumstances as someone who is not satisfied is 28% more likely to say they are very happy
And so on. I think those are some striking and overwhelming facts, some of which may be counterintuitive, at least for some folks. (Guess the phrase “ball and chain” is often more bluster than anything.) Brooks goes on to detail many more statistics as well (too many to cover here). Conservatives give a lot more to charity, and those who give to charity are much more likely to say they’re very happy. People who find “flow” (an uninterrupted state of focused high productivity, also known as “being in the zone”) are much more likely to be satisfied with their work and say they’re very happy. Conservatives are much more likely to have kids than liberals, and they often have more of them. (Kids make you less happy, actually, but this effect is dwarfed by many of the others.) Political extremists (on both sides) are much more likely to say they are very happy than moderates. Finally, money has a small effect on how happy you say you are. “Gross National Happiness” is a font of great data like this. I’ve merely hit the highlights and provided a sample of the other tidbits.
At this point, you might dismiss these findings, especially if you have a strong liberal bent like myself. Again, like Brooks, I ask you to look at the data. You might respond, then, by saying “ignorance is bliss” and these conservatives are ignorant. Brooks doesn’t address this question. He’s not trying to say whether it’s “right” that conservatives are happier. He thinks that’s for the reader to decide. As for me, I’ll wait until part two to address this point more fully.
You might also say that conservatives are deluded in how happy they are, or feel pressure to lie about it. If so, their friends (some of whom may not be conservative at all) must be deluded or feel pressured too, because they often say a person is as happy as the conservatives themselves self-report (as I mentioned before).
Another counter-argument is that while we might be happy, people in other (often more liberal) countries are happier. The data don’t bear that out, though. The U.S., in almost every study, is either the happiest or one of the happiest nations on Earth. Those countries that are more liberal, secular, like their jobs less/work less/take less vacation, and those countries where people marry less say they are much less happy than the U.S., usually in proportion to the difference in their responses from ours. (Cuba and Japan, for example, say they are much less happy than the U.S.)
I first stumbled on this research some months ago, but I’d only scratched the tip of the iceberg. It has haunted me - in a good way - ever since. Now I know why. The data (and my own experiences) seem to back up the claims of conservatives. That leaves me (and maybe you) in a quandary. However, it’s too much to try and deal with this in this post. Thus, I’ll attempt to address this more next week in part two. See you then!
| | | del.icio.us |
July 18th, 2008 at 12:49 am
“You might respond, then, by saying “ignorance is bliss” and these conservatives are ignorant.”
Not exactly what I was thinking as I read this, but along similar lines. If ignorance is bliss, then there are sacrifices I’m unwilling to make for the sake of what I perceive as a shallow sense of happiness.
Beyond that, how quantifiable can something as subjective as happiness truly be? Who’s to say that if your experience mirrored that of a self-described happily married church-going conservative, that you would judge your own level of happiness similarly to theirs?
Is their sense of happiness shallow or undeserved? As far as I can tell, the biggest difference between these two camps is that conservatives are much more sure of everything, feel like they’re more in control, and do more to personally improve themselves, rather than waiting for someone else to help. These kinds of feelings, from what I’ve read, seem genetically hard-wired to make us more happy. Is their happiness so easy to dismiss?
We’re not trying to quantify happiness, anyway. We’re just hoping people mean the same things when they say they are “very happy”, “somewhat happy”, and “not too happy”, the three possible responses in these surveys. One would hope that self-reports combined with corroborating reports from one’s friends would be accurate. Otherwise, people seem to live in very convenient and consistent “happiness silos” that you can’t compare across groups. Can this be true?
- Dave
July 18th, 2008 at 1:12 am
PS: The link in your disclaimer regarding “sensitive and difficult topics” specifically mentions sex, but in the text that follows, the closest you come to the topic is marriage. I hope the implication is not that they are equivalent
Ha ha yes, you’re correct. It was a little tongue-in-cheek, and the best I could find on the spur of the moment.
- Dave
July 18th, 2008 at 1:17 am
I don’t think the relative happiness of people cannot really be measured. It’s like asking two people that are in love which one loves the other most? There is simply no way to compare. If each person is happy enough to consider themselves happy, then all is well.
The fact that one person finds happiness in circumstances in which you would not, does not mean his happiness is shallow.
Happy people, I think, are most happy when they are in the present, not dwelling on the past or worrying about the future.
Perhaps we can think of it more in terms of “acceptance is bliss”, as opposed to ignorance.
In that case, a liberal might wish for a better future (they want change - Yes WE Can!) and a conservative may be quite content with the status quo. A religious person find contentment in releasing his fate to a higher power, whereas an agnostic will struggle with questions of faith. A married person has settled and committed to one other, a single is faced with uncertainty of finding Mr/Mrs Right. A person who has decided to live within his financial means will not be so worried about how to fund the next material acquisition, or about chasing the next promotion.
So i doubt it’s the demographics directly, they are just indicators perhaps of the level of “acceptance” one has, which in turn determines one’s happiness.
Greg makes much the same point. And you’re right, a common theme is that those who feel sure and in control are much happier than those who aren’t. Thanks for the good insights, Tim.
I will say, though, that even if you can’t compare relative happiness, you can see that if you’re liberal, unmarried, secular, and dislike your job, you are 3-6 times more likely to say you are “not too happy”. (The most unhappy response in that survey.) You’re also much more likely to say you felt “inconsolable” over the past month or “worthless”. These numbers have stayed constant over time, for at least the last 35 years. Whatever it is they are looking for to make them happy, liberals haven’t found it (unless they became more conservative).
- Dave
July 18th, 2008 at 9:37 am
Maybe being happy makes you more conservative, not the other way around. After all, if you are very happy, you probably don’t want to change things much since that might affect your happiness. On the other hand, if you are unhappy, you’d probably prefer change since it can’t really make things worse.
This is an excellent point, and I think it goes a long way to explaining the divide. I’ve often said that the basic difference between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives prefer the status quo, while liberals want change. That’s why Obama’s message of change has such power when people are unhappy. However, I don’t think this is the full story, which I’ll get to next week.
- Dave
July 18th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Dave, I didn’t suggest that the happiness of conservative folks is shallow - rather, that the happiness of ignorant folks is. I wasn’t making the leap of suggesting that all conservatives are ignorant.
Greg, since I personally know that you’re not conservative and you talked about yourself in your comment, I made the leap myself since I thought it was implied. However, I see you meant something lesser, so thanks for clearing that up. Of course, if ignorant folks and conservatives are happy, that raises the obvious association. I certainly don’t think that association is true, but there is probably some overlap.
- Dave
July 19th, 2008 at 3:24 am
I know you’re dancing around the issue of “ignorance is bliss” but perhaps some data on comparative predictive abilities of persons with varying degrees of happiness would be useful. I seem to recall one of my philosophy professors pointed out that people with mild depression do better at prediction tasks. Here’s a link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism
In the interest of full disclosure, I’m an unhealthy single left-leaning libertarian agnostic and I’m unhappy with my current job, but I did recently get a kitten (supposedly owning pets can add years to your life).
This is an excellent point. I’ve actually seen the data on this topic (in “Stumbling on Happiness” and “The How of Happiness”, two books I mentioned in my post). There is evidence that “depressive realists” predict their own positive events and how they’ll do better than optimists. However, in exchange for this they are excessively pessimistic about how unhappy negative events will make them and how poorly they’ll perform. The only way to be a “realist” about everything is to rely on data rather than optimism or pessimism. Such data-driven behavior is not natural for most, though. (Guess I’m a weirdo.)
There was in interesting point made in “The How of Happiness”, I think. It said that there isn’t an objective reality when it comes to optimism and pessimism. These are two perfectly consistent takes on the same situation, both equally valid. It’s like how people say the glass is half-full or half-empty. Both are correct. It’s up to you to say how you describe it. This is not to say that morals are relative. I despise “moral relativism”. But in terms of optimism, it is. Optimism is in the eye of the beholder, it seems.
Ever since I read that, it’s had a powerful effect on me. I decided to start seeing things in an optimistic light as often as I could. The trick is to balance that with a watchful eye, so that you’re not blind to circumstances. It’s actually not that hard. Once you learn this fine balancing act, your daily happiness will probably increase by an order of magnitude. I know mine has.
You know from the data here that being unhappy (”unsatisfied”) with your job is a huge predictor of overall happiness. If you can start viewing your job in a more positive light (while possibly looking for even better jobs), you’ll be a lot happier person. Just thought I’d mention it.
- Dave
July 22nd, 2008 at 2:08 am
Here is a good article from Australian point of view.
http://www.australianunity.com.au/au/lifeplus/20080301/workwealthandHappiness.asp
Here are the details of the data that backs it up.
http://www.australianunity.com.au/wellbeingindex/
I wonder if we can have access to the database? It’s worth asking… what if I tell them i cancel my policy if they won’t share
Tim, I’ll finally have time to check this out this weekend. I’ll look over it then and get back to you. Thanks for this!
- Dave
Actually, I was able to look at this just now. It appears that your links actively support many of these same conclusions, which is heartening
Except they call “happiness” “well-being” instead.
I’m with you, I’d love to have access to the database instead of a couple of tables too!
- Dave