Daniel Kahneman (Nobel prize winner and Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at the Woodrow Wilson School as well as the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University) talks about the complexity of happiness and how it is different for the ‘experiencing self’ and the ‘remembering self’. With the aid of a story about colonoscopy, he explains why the way events or experiences  end is so important to happiness.  He also reminds us that the money-doesn’t-make-you-happy argument is not as straightforward as many Positive Psychologists believe.

Thanks to Yechezkel Zilber for the link

Here’s my latest article on Positive Psychology News Daily on that age-old subject of wealth and happiness. It seems to have caused a bit of a stir with some readers, judging from the number of comments (32 as of today), although maybe not for the right reasons!

Never mind, I’m sure you’ll find the recent research interesting. Feel free to write your comments on the Positive Psychology News Daily site itself.

Image: thisduck

On Monday evening I heard Ed Diener (aka Smiley Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois) present at the 4th European Conference on Positive Psychology in Croatia on the subject of Well-being on Planet Earth. Leaving aside the fact that Diener works for the Gallup Organisation, he presented some curious findings about the predictors of life satisfaction and positive and negative emotion, and the relevance for policy use.

Life Satisfaction vs Emotion

Diener’s ‘happiness formula’ is one of the most well-known in Positive Psychology:

Subjective Well-being (i.e. happiness) = Satisfaction with life + Positive Emotion – Negative Emotion.

This means that happiness is not a simple measure of how good you feel (emotion) but also includes a cognitive element of what you think about your life (satisfaction with life). Still with me? Great!

This explains why countries like Denmark can feature at the top of some happiness scales, but not others.

For example, when asked “on a scale of 0-10 how satisfied are you with your life?” Denmark comes top of the league table. But when you look at which countries are high in positive emotion, New Zealand, Honduras and Panama come at the top.

But happiness is even more complex than that – the presence of positive emotion is not the same thing as the absence of negative emotion (in the same way that health is not the mere absence of illness).

So countries which are high in positive emotion are not the same as those which are low in negative emotion (e.g. Denmark, Sweden and Australia).

Diener’s research with Gallup has also found that the top two predictors of satisfaction with life and positive emotion are not the same:

Predictors of satisfaction with life:
1. Money (as measured by GDP per capita)
2. Optimism
3. Whether I can count on other people

Predictors of positive emotion:
1. Whether I learned something yesterday
2. Freedom to choose
3. Whether I can count on other people

Relevance for Policy Use

According to the Gallup data, 94% of Danes score more then 8/10 for happiness, whereas 97% of Togolese score less than 3/10. Not surprisingly (because this is where Gallup’s interests lie), Diener used these extraordinary findings to argue that we should pay more attention to country-level well-being, since the way in which individual countries are run must be what makes the difference to these overall happiness scores. His suggestion is that societies would do well to use well-being measures in their creation of country-wide policies, as well as the more traditional economic and social measures.

It’s difficult not to disagree with him when you look at the data*; however, the question then arises as to whether it’s the government’s role to make people happy. My own perspective is the government does have a role to play in creating the right environment, although I think we could do a great deal more to improve people’s lives by spending the resources on treating mental illness effectively.

* Sadly the data Diener presented isn’t in the public arena since it belongs to the Gallup Organisation.

Can Gross National Happiness ever be an accepted substitute for GDP?

The Kingdom of Bhutan, a predominantly Buddhist country of approximately 750,000 inhabitants in the Eastern Himalayas, has been measuring Gross National Happiness since the late ’80s. The King, Jigme Singye Wangchuk, was concerned about the sorts of issues affecting countries which focussed only on increasing economic prosperity, and as a result, he declared that GNH (Gross National Happiness) not GDP, was the priority for his people. “The ultimate purpose of government”, he said, “is to promote the happiness of its people”. This, of course, was more than a decade before Martin Seligman launched the Positive Psychology movement.

Now, says writer, analyst and UN Editor Rasna Warah, GNH vs GDP has become an issue in the upcoming Kenyan elections (December 27th). In this article on the All Africa Global Media website, Warah explores the background to GNH, and why it matters. It’s the case that back in 2006 presidential candidate Dr Raila Odinga, cast doubt on the accuracy of Kenyan economic growth figures being quoted by other candidates, and proposed that a GNH survey be carried out instead. In an interview with Nation Magazine, Odinga is quoted as saying: “People are happy when they put food on the table, feed and educate their children.” However I haven’t been able to find any mention of Gross National Happiness on Odinga’s election website. Could it be the case that when the chips are down (and when votes are needed) what people really want to see is good old-fashioned economic growth?

Image: New Scientist

This Radio 4 programme today is a great introduction to the pros and cons of measuring happiness, and whether it’s possible, desirable or indeed useful to do so, with Professor of Economics, Paul Omerod, one of the principals of Volterra Consulting, Lord Richard Layard, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, and Professor Paul Dolan, Chair in Economics at the Tanaka Business School, Imperial College London.

I think this is a great starting point if you’re unfamiliar with the finer points of happiness research and measurement.

Whose perspective do you agree with?

Source: D.G. Myers, Happiness, 2004