The Roots of Happiness

The Roots of Happiness: An Empirical Analysis Text New Words Exercise Text 课文 Pre-reading questions 1. What is happiness? List some popular sayings on the definition of happiness. 2. What do you think are the ingredients of happiness? Make a list of the determinants of happiness. What exactly makes a person happy? This question has been much of speculation. Commonsense hypotheses about the roots of happiness abound. For example, you have no doubt heard that money cannot buy happiness. But do you believe it? A television commercial says, "If you have got your health, you've got just everything." Is health indeed the key? What if you're healthy but poor, unemployed, and lonely? We often hear about the joys of parenthood, the joys of youth, and joys of the simple, rural life. Are these the factors that promote happiness? What Isn't Very Important? Let us begin our discussion of individual differences in happiness by highlighting those things that turn out to be relatively unimportant determinants of subjective well-being. Quite a number of factors that one might expect to be influential appear to bear little or no relationship to general happiness. Money. There is a positive correlation between income and subjective feeling of happiness, but the association is surprisingly weak (Myers & Diener, 1995). For example, one study found a correlation of just .12 between income and happiness in the United States (Diener et al., 1993). Admittedly, being very poor can make people unhappy, but once people ascend above the poverty level, there is little relation between income and happiness. On the average, even wealthy people are only marginally happier than those in the middle classes. The problem with money is that in this era of voracious consumption, most people find a way to spend their money and come out short, no matter how much they make. Complaints about not having enough money are routine even among affluent people who earn six-figure incomes. Age. Age and happiness are consistently found to be unrelated. Age accounts for less than 1 percent of the variations in people's happiness (Inglehart, 1990; Myers & Diener, 1997). The key factors influencing subjective well-being may shift some as people grow older — work becomes less important, health more so —but people's average level of happiness tends to remain remarkably stable over the life span. Gender. Women are treated for depressive disorders about twice as often as men, so one might expect that women are less happy on average. However, like age, gender accounts for less than 1 percent of the variations in people's subjective well-being (Myers, 1992). Parenthood. Children can be a tremendous source of joy and fulfilment, but they can also be a tremendous source of headaches and hassles. Compared to childless couples, parents worry more and experience more marital problems (Argyle, 1987). Apparently, the good and bad aspects of parenthood balance each other out, because the evidence indicates the people who have children are neither more nor less happy than people without children. Intelligence. Intelligence is a highly valued trait in modern society, but researchers have not found an association between IQ scores and happiness (Diener, 1984). Educational attainment also appears to be unrelated to life satisfaction (Ross & Van William, 1997). Physical Attractiveness. Good-looking people enjoy a variety of advantages in comparison to unattractive people. Given that physical attractiveness is an important resource in Western society, we might expect attractive people to be happier than others, but the available data indicate that the correlation between attractiveness and happiness is negligible (Diener, Wolsic, & Fujita, 1999). Community. According to Freedman (1978), when asked where they would most like to live, people show a clear preference for the stereotype of tranquil, pastoral life believed to exist in rural areas. However, when actual happiness is related to community type, people living in suburban and rural areas are found to be equally happy. What Is Somewhat Important? Research has identified four facets of life that appear to have a moderate impact on subjective well-being: health, social activity, religious relief, and culture. Health. Good physical health would seem to be an essential requirement for happiness, but people adapt to health problems. Research reveals that individuals who develop serious, disabling health conditions aren't as unhappy as one might guess (Myers, 1992). Furthermore, Freedman (1978) argues that good health does not, by itself, produce happiness, because people tend to take good health for granted. Such considerations may help explain why researchers find only a moderate positive correlation (average = . 32) between health status and subjective well-being (Diener, 1984). Social Activity. Humans are social animals, and people's interpersonal relations do appear to contribute to their happiness. People who are satisfied with their friendship networks and who are socially active report above-average levels of happiness (Cooper, Okamura, & Gurka, 1992; Diener, 1984). At the other end of the spectrum, people troubled by loneliness tend to be very unhappy (Argyle, 1987). Religion. The link between religiosity and subjective well-being is modest, but a number of large-scale surveys suggest that people with heartfelt religious convictions are more likely to be happy than people who characterize themselves as nonreligious (Argyle, 1987; Poloma & Pendleton, 1990). Researchers aren't sure how religious faith fosters happiness, but Myers (1992) offers some interesting conjectures. Among other things, he discusses how religion can give people a sense of purpose and meaning in their lives, help them to accept their setbacks gracefully, connect them to a caring, supportive community, and comfort them by putting their ultimate mortality in perspective. Culture. Researchers have found some modest cultural variations in average subjective well-being and in the key sources of happiness (Diener et al., 1995). These variations have mostly been related to cultural differences in individual versus collectivism. Individualism involves putting personal goals ahead of group goals and defining one's identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group memberships. In contrast, collectivism involves putting group goals ahead of personal goals and defining one's identity in terms of the groups one belongs to (such as one's family tribe, work group, social class, caste, and so on). In comparison to individualistic cultures, collectivist cultures place a higher priority on shared values and resources, cooperation, mutual interdependence, and concern for how one's actions will affect other group members. Consistent with these realities, relationship harmony appears to be a more important determinant of happiness in collectivist cultures than in individualistic cultures (Kwan, Bond, & Singelis, 1997). Interestingly, people from individualistic cultures report somewhat higher average levels of happiness than people from collectivist cultures (Diener et al., 1995). Researchers have just begun to analyze the causes of cultural disparities in subjective well-being. What Is Very Important? The list of factors that turn out to be very important ingredients of happiness is surprisingly short. Only a few variables are strongly related to overall happiness. Love and Marriage. Romantic relationships can be stressful, but people consistently rate being in love as one of the most critical ingredients of happiness (Diener, 1984). Furthermore, although people complain a lot about their marriages, the evidence indicates that marital status is a key correlate of happiness. Among both men and women, married people are happier than people who are single or divorced (see Figure 1.10; Myers & Diener, 1995). However, the causal relations underlying this correlation are unclear. It may be that happiness causes marital satisfaction more than marital satisfaction promotes happiness. Perhaps people who are happy tend to have better intimate relationships and more stable marriages, while people who are unhappy have more difficulty finding and keeping mates. Work. Given the way people often complain about their jobs, we might not expect work to be a key source of happiness, but it is. Although less critical than love and marriage, job satisfaction is strongly related to general happiness (Argyle, 1987). Studies also show that unemployment has devastating effects on subjective well-being (Diener, 1984). It is difficult to sort out whether job satisfaction causes happiness or vice versa, but evidence suggests that causation flows both ways (Argyle, 1987). Personality. The best predictor of individuals' future happiness is their past happiness (Myers, 1992). Some people seem destined to be happy and others unhappy, regardless of their triumphs or setbacks. The limited influence of life events was apparent in a study that found only marginal differences between lottery winners and quadriplegics in overall happiness (Argyle, 1987). Several lines of evidence suggest that happiness does not depend on external circumstance — having a nice house, good friends, and an enjoyable job —as much as internal factors, such as one's outlook on life. With this reality in mind, researchers have begun to look for links between personality and subjective well-being, and they have found some relatively strong correlations. For example, self-esteem is one of the best predictors of happiness. Not surprisingly, people who like themselves tend to be happier than those who do not. Other personality correlations of happiness include extraversion, optimism, and a sense of personal control over one's life (Myers & Diener, 1995). Conclusions We must be cautious in drawing inferences about the causes of happiness, because most of the available data are correlational data (see Figure 1.11). Nonetheless, the empirical evidence suggests that many popular beliefs about the sources of happiness are unfounded. The data also demonstrate that happiness is shaped by a complex constellation of variables. In spite of this complexity, however, a number of worthwhile insights about human adjustment can be gleaned from research on the correlates of subjective well-being. First, research on happiness demonstrates that the determinants of subjective well-being are precisely that subjective. Objective realities are not as important as subjective feelings. In other words, your health, your wealth, your job, and your age are not as influential as how you feel about your health, wealth, job, and age (Argyle, 1987). Second, in making the subjective assessments that shape a person's happiness, everything is relative (Myers, 1992). In other words, you evaluate what you have relative to what the people around you have and relative to what you expected to have. Generally, people compare themselves with others who are similar. Thus, wealthy people assess what they have by comparing themselves with their wealthy friends and neighbours. This is one reason why there is little correlation between wealth and happiness. You might have a lovely home, but if it sits next to a neighbour's palatial mansion, it might be a source of more dissatisfaction than happiness. In addition to comparing themselves with others, people compare what they have with what they expected to have. Those who exceed their expectations are more likely to be happy. Thus, people living in a lonely home next to a much lovelier mansion could still be quite happy — if they never expected to live in such an affluent neighbourhood. To a large degree, then, happiness is measured on a relative, rather than an absolute, scale. Third, although there is no simple recipe for happiness, research shows that the quest for happiness is never hopeless (Freedman, 1978; Myers, 1992). The evidence indicates that some people find happiness in spite of seemingly insurmountable problems. There is nothing, short of terminal illness —no setback, shortcoming, difficulty, or inadequacy —that makes happiness impossible.