The Science of Happiness
Details
We're currently hosting our discussions at Café Walnut, not too far from our summer We're currently hosting our discussions at Café Walnut, not too far from our summer meeting spot in Washington Square Park. The cafe is near the corner of 7th & Walnut in Olde City. The cafe's entrance is below street level down some stairs, which can be confusing if it's your first time. Our group meets in the large room upstairs.
Since we're using the cafe's space, they ask that each person attending the meetup at least purchase a drink or snack. Please don't bring any food or drinks from outside. If you're hungry enough to eat a meal, they have more substantial fare such as salads, soups & sandwiches which are pretty good and their prices are reasonable.
The café is fairly easy to get to if you're using public transit. With SEPTA, take the Market-Frankford Line & get off at the 5th Street Station (corner of 5th & Market), and walk 2 blocks south on 5th and then turn right on Walnut Street and walk 1 block west. With PATCO, just get off at the 9th-10th & Locust stop and walk 3 blocks east. For those who are driving, parking in the neighborhood can be tough to find. If you can't find a spot on the street, I'd suggest parking in the Washington Square parking deck at 249 S 6th Street which is just a half block away.
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THE SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS:
The "science of happiness" is an emerging interdisciplinary field - or rather several fields, notably positive psychology & happiness economics - that have grown significantly over the last two decades. This growth in the science(s) of happiness has occurred in spite of the fact that happiness is often considered the ultimate slippery subject by many scientists, and even though the field has produced some highly lauded results that later failed to replicate (e.g. the "critical positivity ratio") and has continually been vexed by having its more rigorous results on happiness get mixed up with the self-help pseudoscience of "positive thinking" in the popular press coverage.
Positive psychology began as a new domain of psychology in 1998 when Martin Seligman chose it as the theme for his term as president of the American Psychological Association, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Christopher Peterson are regarded as co-initiators of this development. It is largely a reaction against older paradigms in psychology which focused on studying and trying to cure or alleviate "mental illness", i.e. maladaptive behavior and psychosis, as opposed to studying & enabling human happiness & flourishing. While many laypeople are skeptical that something as nebulous as happiness can be studied scientifically, psychologists are accustomed to studying mental states and this emphasis in positive psychology is not very controversial within the field.
Many laypeople also assume that positive psychology's study of happiness must be fairly shallow and focus merely on achieving & maintaining a positive mood, and people often question whether something as transitory as positive emotions is alone sufficient to consider a life well-lived. Martin Seligman argued that it was in his 2003 book, Authentic Happiness. He claimed that the quest for happiness (or positive emotions) was the ultimate reason for most of the things people do. However, after an additional decade of research in positive psychology and his own observations, Seligman proposed a broader idea, presented in his 2011 book, Flourish, a Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being. Happiness and positive emotions are still a central component of this new theory, but he added four other elements that independently contribute to well-being and are worth cultivating.
Seligman’s Five Elements of Well-Being - the "PERMA" model:
(1) Positive Emotions (P) – Feeling positive emotions such as joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe and love.
(2) Engagement (E) – Being fully absorbed in activities that use your skills and challenge you.
(3) Relationships (R) – Having positive relationships is a universal requirement to well-being.
(4) Meaning (M) – Belonging to and serving something you believe is bigger than yourself.
(5) Accomplishment (A) – Pursuing success, winning, achievement and mastery for their own sake.
. Seligman has found that different people put different weights on these five elements of well-being based on their personality & values, and that many of the apparent paradoxes of happiness can be understood as being produced by the inevitable tradeoffs we face when pursuing some of these elements at the expense of others. Positive psychology tends to rely on self-reporting via surveys & questionnaires for its empirical basis, although "positive neuroscience" - the attempt to link subjective states of happiness with measurable brain activity - is starting to play a role in research as well.
A parallel shift has occurred in the field of economics, where the subfield of "happiness economics" has grown substantially since the late 20th century, with the development of new methods, surveys and indices to measure happiness and related concepts. Its findings have been described as a challenge to the economics profession, which traditionally dealt with human needs through abstraction of the pricing mechanism that emerges in market economies to help allocate scarce resources to satisfy theoretically unlimited human demands. As in positive psychology, happiness is typically measured using subjective measures – e.g. self-reported surveys – and a major concern has always been the accuracy & reliability of people's responses to happiness surveys. Objective measures such as lifespan, income, and education are often used as well as or instead of subjectively reported happiness, with the assumption that they generally produce happiness, which while plausible may not necessarily be the case. Happiness macroeconomics - the study of the average happiness of large populations - is faced with the additional problems presented by trying to aggregate the happiness of many individuals and also the problems that reported happiness may be partly a socio-cultural construct which makes it difficult to compare happiness across cultures. Many happiness economists believe this comparison problem can be solved by analyzing cross-sections of large data samples across nations and time which demonstrate consistent patterns in the determinants of happiness.
This meetup will concentrate mostly on positive psychology and happiness microeconomics and the research on what makes individuals happy, but our discussion will be immediately followed by a discussion by the Philadelphia Political Agnostics meetup that will address happiness macroeconomics & its research on what increases overall happiness for entire societies & countries. To view the outline for that discussion and RSVP, go here:
https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/events/gqxkvnyxcbcc/
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DIRECTIONS ON HOW TO PREPARE FOR OUR DISCUSSION:
The videos you see linked below are intended to give you a basic overview of the scholarly debates surrounding these issues. As usual, I certainly don't expect you to read all the articles prior to attending our discussion. The easiest way to prepare for our discussion is to just watch the videos linked first under each topic, which should take about 32 minutes total to get through. The articles marked with asterisks are just there to supply additional details. You can browse and look at whichever ones you want, but don't worry - we'll cover the stuff you missed in our discussion.
In terms of the discussion format, my general idea is that we'll address the topics in the order presented here. I figure we'll spend about 20 minutes on the first section and about 25 minutes on each of the following sections.
I. HEDONIC SET POINTS, HEDONIC ADAPTATION & SLOWING (OR ESCAPING?) THE HEDONIC TREADMILL:
1a) Julia Wilde, "Is Happiness In Your Genes?" (video - 3:16 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd7ffDXrw5U
1b) Raj Raghunathan, "Would Winning the Lottery Make You Happier?" (video - 4:36 min.)
https://ed.ted.com/lessons/would-winning-the-lottery-make-you-happier-raj-raghunathan
- Stephanie Pappas, "Don't Worry: Happiness Levels Not Set in Stone" (article)
https://www.livescience.com/10783-worry-happiness-levels-set-stone.html
- John Tierney, "How To Win The Lottery (Happily)" (article)
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/27/science/how-to-win-the-lottery-happily.html
II. WEALTH & HAPPINESS - UNDERSTANDING DIMINISHING MARGINAL UTILITY & SUBJECTIVE WELL-BEING VS LIFE SATISFACTION:
- Anthony Carboni, "Can Money Really Buy Happiness?" (video - 2:48 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3SyhT1Gl38
- Dylan Matthews, "Angus Deaton's badly misunderstood paper on whether happiness peaks at $75,000, explained" (article)
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/20/8815813/orange-is-the-new-black-piper-chapman-happiness-study
- Doug Short, "Happiness Revisited: A Household Income of $75K?" (article)
III. THE PARADOX OF CHOICE & WHY SATISFICING (SETTLING) WORKS BETTER THAN MAXIMIZING (HOLDING OUT OR CONTINUALLY TRYING TO TRADE UP):
3a) Trace Dominguez, "Why It Sucks To Have Too Many Choices" (video - 5:18 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD7la282Y_Y
3b) Mark Pennington, "Can Government Solve the Paradox of Choice?" (video - 2:27 min.)
http://www.learnliberty.org/videos/can-government-solve-paradox-choice/
- Olga Khazan, "The Power of 'Good Enough' - How settling can make people happier and more satisfied than gunning for 'the best'" (article)
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/03/the-power-of-good-enough/387388/
- Paul Soleman w/ Barry Schwartz, "Is the famous ‘paradox of choice’ a myth?" (article)
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/is-the-famous-paradox-of-choic
IV. FRIEND NETWORKS, THE FRIENDSHIP PARADOX & "F.O.M.O." (A PERFECT STORM OF SAMPLING BIAS & POSITIONAL GOODS):
4a) Trace Dominguez & Sapna Parikh, "How Many Friends Do You Really Need?" (video - 4:25 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuVMl7Oxcdw
4b) Anthony Carboni, "Social Media Gives Us Anxiety" (video - 3:14 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj3ujfOGqjs
- Chris Weller, "A neuroscientist who studies decision-making reveals the most important choice you can make [i.e. who to be friends with]" (article)
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/neuroscientist-most-important-choice-in-life-2017-7
- Guillermo Paz-y-Miñoc, "The Friendship Paradox vs. the Happiness Paradox" (article)
https://evolutionliteracy.com/2016/02/22/the-friendship-paradox-vs-the-happiness-paradox/
V. THE MARRIAGE PREMIUM, THE PARENTING PARADOX & RETROSPECTIVE HAPPINESS:
5a) Dan Gilbert, "Are Married People Happier?" (video - 3:53, start at 0:25)
https://youtu.be/LvTVotrr4FM?t=25
5b) Tara Long, "Does Having Children Make You Happier?'" (video - 2:34 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE_KLkmc2Bk
- Bella DePaulo, "Marriage and Happiness: 18 Long-Term Studies - Getting married does not make you happier" (article)
- Dylan Matthews, "People who marry young are happier, but those who marry later earn more" (article)
- Bryan Caplan, "What Is The Female Marriage Penalty?" (blog post)
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/02/what_is_the_fem.html
- Tanya Basu, "Does Having Kids Make Parents Happy After All? New research overturns the decades-old belief that having children is a downer" (article)
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/do-kids-make-parents-happy-after-all/361894/
- Curiosity, "The Parenting Happiness Gap Is Real, But Your Kids Aren't To Blame [It's The Lack of Child-Friendly Work Policies In The U.S.]" (article)
The Science of Happiness