How Smart People Can Stop Being Miserable

Arthur C. Brooks

The Atlantic

Originally posted 23MAR 23

Here are some excerpts:

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know,” an unnamed character casually remarks in Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Garden of Eden. You might say that this is a corollary of the much more famous “Ignorance is bliss.”

The latter recalls phenomena such as:

• the Dunning-Kruger effect—in which people lacking skills and knowledge in a particular area innocently underestimate their own incompetence—and 

• the illusion of explanatory depth, which can prompt autodidacts on social media to excitedly present complex scientific phenomena, thinking they understand them in far greater depth than they really do.

The Hemingway hypothesis, however, is less straightforward. I can think of a lot of unhappy intellectuals, to be sure. But is intelligence per se their problem? Happiness scholars have studied this question, and the answer is—as in so many parts of life—it depends. The gifts you possess can lift you up or pull you down; it all depends on how you use them. Many people see intelligence as a way to get ahead of others. But to get happier, we need to do the opposite.

You might assume that intelligence—whether it be the conventional IQ kind, emotional intelligence, musical talent, or some other dimension along which a person can excel—raises happiness, all else being equal. After all, people with higher cognitive ability should logically have more exciting life opportunities than others. They should also acquire more resources with which to enhance their well-being.

In general, however, there is no correlation between general intelligence and life satisfaction at the individual level. That principle does mask a few wrinkles. In 2022, researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine and Fordham University looked at the association between well-being and various building blocks of neurocognitive ability: memory, processing speed, reasoning, spatial visualization, and vocabulary. The only components of intelligence that they found to be positively related to happiness were spatial visualization, memory, and processing speed—but those relationships were fleeting and age-related.

More interesting, the researchers also found a strongly negative association between happiness and vocabulary. To explain this, they offered a hypothesis: People with a large vocabulary “self-select more challenging environments, and as a result may encounter more daily stressors and reduced positive affect.” In other words, loquacious logophiles might have byzantine lives and find themselves in manifold precarious situations that lower their jouissance. (They talk themselves into misery.)

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I think there is a clear reason that something as valuable as intelligence, especially manifested in one’s ability to communicate, doesn’t necessarily lead to a higher quality of life.

One of life’s cruelest mysteries is why we are impelled to pursue rewards that bring success, but not happiness. Mother Nature drives us toward the four goals of money, power, pleasure, and prestige with the promise that these rewards will bring happiness. In truth, the correlation might be positive, but the causation is probably reversed: Happier people naturally get these rewards. But seek them for their own sake, for your own gain, and happiness will likely fall. Accordingly, if you aspire to use your cleverness for personal benefit—for the praise and admiration of others, or an advantage in work and dating—woe be unto you.

The smarter you are, the better equipped you should be to understand that well-being comes from faith, family, friendship, and work that serves others. Your intelligence is more likely to bring you happiness if you put it to use by chasing better ways to love and serve others, rather than elbowing others aside and hoarding worldly rewards.

In some ways, you can think of intelligence as a resource just like money or power. We know how to make the latter two sources of joy: Share them with others, and use them as a force for good in the world. To make smarts a fount of happiness, too, we can follow the same guide. Here are a couple of tangible proposals.

The article is paywalled here.

I’m a psychology expert in Finland, the No. 1 happiest country in the world—here are 3 things we never do

Frank Martela

CNBC.com

Originally posted 5 Jan 23

For five years in a row, Finland has ranked No. 1 as the happiest country in the world, according to the World Happiness Report. 

In 2022′s report, people in 156 countries were asked to “value their lives today on a 0 to 10 scale, with the worst possible life as a 0.” It also looks at factors that contribute to social support, life expectancy, generosity and absence of corruption.

As a Finnish philosopher and psychology researcher who studies the fundamentals of happiness, I’m often asked: What exactly makes people in Finland so exceptionally satisfied with their lives?

To maintain a high quality of life, here are three things we never do:

1. We don’t compare ourselves to our neighbors.

Focus more on what makes you happy and less on looking successful. The first step to true happiness is to set your own standards, instead of comparing yourself to others.

2. We don’t overlook the benefits of nature.

Spending time in nature increases our vitality, well-being and a gives us a sense of personal growth. Find ways to add some greenery to your life, even if it’s just buying a few plants for your home.

3. We don’t break the community circle of trust.

Think about how you can show up for your community. How can you create more trust? How can you support policies that build upon that trust? Small acts like opening doors for strangers or giving up a seat on the train makes a difference, too.

The details of the principles are here.

No Peace for the Wicked? Immorality is (Usually) Thought to Disrupt Intrapersonal Harmony

Prinzing, M., & Fredrickson, B.

(2022, November 28). 

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ug8tk

Abstract

Past research has found that people who behave morally are seen as happier than people who behave immorally—even when their psychological states are described identically. This has led researchers to conclude that the ordinary concept of happiness includes a role for moral factors as well as psychological states. In three experiments (total N = 1,185), we found similar effects of moral evaluations on attributions of a range of psychological states, including positive attitudes towards one’s life and activities (Study 1), pleasant and unpleasant emotions in general (Studies 2-3) and life-satisfaction (Studies 2-3). This suggests that moral evaluations have pervasive effects on the psychological states that people attribute to others. We propose that this is because immorality is seen as disrupting intrapersonal harmony. That is, immoral people are thought to be less happy because they are thought to experience less positive psychological states, and this occurs when and because they are seen as being internally conflicted. Supporting this explanation, we found that immoral agents are seen as more internally conflicted than moral agents (Study 2), and that the effect of moral evaluations on positive psychological state attributions disappears when agents are described as being at peace with themselves (Study 3).

Implications and Conclusion

We set out to better understand why moral evaluations affect happiness judgments.  One possibility is that, when people judge whether another person is happy, they are partly assessing whether that person experiences positive psychological states and partly assessing whether the person is living a good life. If that were so, then people would not consider immoral agents entirely  happy—even if they recognized that the agents experience overwhelmingly positive psychological states.  That is, morality does not affect the experiential states the people attribute to others—it affects whether they consider such states happiness.  Yet, this research suggests a more striking conclusion.  Our results indicate that people attribute experiential states, like pleasant emotions and satisfaction, differently depending on their moral judgments.  Moreover, we found that this occurs when and because immorality is seen as a source of intrapersonal conflict. When people do not see immoral agents as more conflicted than moral agents, they do not attribute less happiness (or less positive emotion or less life-satisfaction) to those immoral agents. On the lay view, immorality typically means betraying one’s true self, disrupting one’s inner harmony, and leading to at best an incomplete form of happiness.  However, this is not always the case.

Hence, the ordinary concept of happiness appears to be similar to ancient Greek conceptions  of eudaemonia (Aristotle,  2000;  Plato,  2004).  Roughly  speaking, Plato believed that eudaemonia consists in a kind of intrapersonal harmony.  He also argued that moral virtue was necessary for such harmony. Our findings suggest that 21st century Americans similarly see happiness as involving a kind of intrapersonal harmony. However, they don’t seem to think that harmony requires morality. Although immorality is usually a source of intrapersonal conflict, someone who behaves immorally can be happy so long as they can still find peace with themselves.  Hence, according to folk wisdom, there may be very little peace for the wicked. But so long as they find it, there can be happiness too.

The research is here.

Wealth redistribution promotes happiness

R. J. Dwyer and E. W. Dunn

PNAS, 119 (46) e2211123119

November 7, 2022

Significance

We took advantage of a unique experiment, in which anonymous donors gave US$10,000 to each of 200 recipients in seven countries. By comparing cash recipients with a control group that did not receive money, this preregistered experiment provides causal evidence that cash transfers substantially increase happiness across a diverse global sample. These gains were greatest for recipients who had the least: Those in lower-income countries gained three times more happiness than those in higher-income countries. Our data provide the clearest evidence to date that private citizens can improve net global happiness through voluntary redistribution to those with less.

Abstract

How much happiness could be gained if the world’s wealth were distributed more equally? Despite decades of research investigating the relationship between money and happiness, no experimental work has quantified this effect for people across the global economic spectrum. We estimated the total gain in happiness generated when a pair of high-net-worth donors redistributed US$2 million of their wealth in $10,000 cash transfers to 200 people. Our preregistered analyses offer causal evidence that cash transfers substantially increase happiness among economically diverse individuals around the world. Recipients in lower-income countries exhibited happiness gains three times larger than those in higher-income countries. Still, the cash provided detectable benefits for people with household incomes up to $123,000.

From the Discussion section

This study provides causal evidence that cash transfers substantially increase happiness across a diverse sample spanning the global socioeconomic spectrum. By redistributing their wealth, two donors generated substantial happiness gains for others. These gains were greatest for recipients who had the least: Those in lower-income countries gained three times more happiness than those in higher-income countries, and those making $10k a year gained twice as much happiness as those making $100k. Still, the cash provided detectable benefits for people with household incomes up to $123k. Given that 99% of individuals earn less than this amount, these findings suggest that cash transfers could benefit the vast majority of the world’s population.

Of course, some caution is necessary in interpreting these findings, given that the study did not include nationally representative samples and focused on a limited time period. Although all participants were English-speaking Twitter users who were relatively liberal-leaning and well-educated, this sample was more economically diverse than any previous cash-transfer studies, enabling us to estimate the happiness benefits across a wide range of incomes. That said, our finding that cash transfers improved SWB—but less so for people with higher incomes—is consistent with the law of diminishing marginal utility in economics and with large-scale studies documenting the concave relationship between income and self-reported happiness.

The research is here.

America Is Pursuing Happiness in All the Wrong Places

Arthur Brooks

The Atlantic

Originally posted 16 NOV 22

Here are two excerpt:

As a social scientist, I believe that happiness should be understood as a combination of three phenomena: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Enjoyment is pleasure consciously and purposefully experienced, so it can create a positive memory. Satisfaction is the joy of an achievement, the reward for a job well done.

And then, there’s meaning. You can make do without enjoyment for a while, and even without a lot of satisfaction. But without meaning, you will be utterly lost. That is the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s argument in his classic book Man’s Search for Meaning. Without a sense of meaning—a sense of the why of our existence–our lives cannot be endured.

Here is a quick diagnostic tool I sometimes use to find out if someone has a good sense of their life’s meaning. I ask them two questions:

1. Why do you exist?
2. For what would you be willing to die?

There is no greater joy than seeing someone you love find their answers. I remember this in the case of my son Carlos. He struggled in high school, like so many adolescents, to find a sense of his life’s meaning.  After high school, he joined the military. Today, at 22, he is Corporal Carlos Brooks, Scout Sniper, Third Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, Weapons Company.

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But my goal is not just to tell you our troubles. It is to suggest solutions. Let me propose three that we all can undertake.

First, share your secrets of meaning. When I explained the importance of faith, family, friendship, and work, perhaps you said to yourself, I practice those things! That’s great. But it’s not enough to practice these things in our own lives—we need to celebrate them openly and recommend them to others. We all need to preach what we practice. To keep quiet about your sources of meaning because you are worried about looking judgmental is an act of selfishness.

Second, go out of your way to reject identity politics, and tell our shared story as Americans instead. If we want to find our way back as a nation, we must repudiate the poison of grievance and victimization and work instead to reestablish a healthy sense of meaning by constructing a narrative for our country that includes all of us.

Please don’t dismiss this as impossibly idealistic. On the contrary, some of our most successful presidents, from Washington to Lincoln to Franklin D. Roosevelt, did exactly this in times of crisis and trouble—they told a shared story to unite Americans against a common threat rather than balkanizing our people against one another.

The info is here.

What Makes a Great Life?

Jon Clifton

Gallup.com

Originally posted 22 SEPT 22

While many things contribute to a great life, Gallup finds five aspects that all people have in common: their work, finances, physical health, communities, and relationships with family and friends. If you are excelling in each of these elements of wellbeing, you are highly likely to be thriving in life.

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Gallup's research as well as research by the global community of wellbeing practitioners has produced hundreds, if not thousands, of discoveries.

One of the most famous discoveries is the U-curve of happiness, which shows how age is associated with wellbeing. Young people rate their lives high, and so do older people. But middle-aged people rate their lives the lowest. This trend holds every year in almost every country in the world. It is nicknamed the "U-curve" of happiness because when you look at the graph, it looks like a "U." Some jokingly say that the chart is smiling.

Some discoveries are astonishing; others feel like they reveal a "blandly sophomoric secret," as George Gallup referred to some of his longevity findings. For example, you could argue that the U-curve of happiness simply quantifies conventional wisdom -- that people have midlife crises.

Here are a few of the discoveries that are truly compelling:

• People who love their jobs do not hate Mondays.
• Education-related debt can cause an emotional scar that remains even after you pay off the debt.
• Volunteering is not just good for the people you are helping; it is also good for you.
• Exercising is better at eliminating fatigue than prescription drugs.
• Loneliness can double your risk of dying from heart disease.

We could list every insight ever produced from this research and encourage leaders to work on all of them. Instead, we took another approach. Using all these insights from across the industry combined with our surveys and analysis, we created the five elements of wellbeing. And our ongoing global research confirms that the five elements of wellbeing are significant drivers of a great life everywhere.

The info is here.

The Age Trajectory of Happiness

Kratz, F., & Brüderl, J. (2021, April 18).

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/d8f2z

Abstract

A large interdisciplinary literature on the relationship between age and subjective well-being (happiness) has produced very mixed evidence. Virtually every conceivable age-happiness trajectory has been supported by empirical evidence and theoretical arguments. Sceptics may conclude that the social science of happiness can only produce arbitrary results. In this paper we argue that this conclusion is premature. Instead, the methodological toolbox that has been developed by the modern literature on causal inference gives scholars everything they need to arrive at valid conclusions: the causal inference toolbox only must be applied by happiness researchers. We identify four potential sources of bias that may distort the assessment of the age-happiness relationship. By causal reasoning we derive a model specification that avoids these  biases.  For  an  empirical  illustration,  we  use  the  longest  running  panel  study  with information on happiness, the German Socio-Economic Panel (1984-2017; N persons=70,922; N person-years =565,703). With these data we demonstrate the relevance of the four biases and how combinations of different biases can reproduce almost any finding from the literature. Most biases tend to produce a spuriously U-shaped age trajectory, the most prominent finding from the literature. In contrast, with our specification we find a (nearly monotonic) declining age-happiness trajectory.

Summary and Conclusions

How aging affects happiness is an important research question for the social and behavioral sciences. Our literature review demonstrates that many conflicting age trajectories have been reported in the literature. As this state of research is quite unsettling for the science of happiness, we  discuss—informed  by  recent  advances  in  the  methodology  of  causal  analysis—model specifications used by researchers in this field. Altogether, we identify four main biases that may distort the age trajectory of happiness. By using the German SOEP data, we show that distortions may be huge producing even qualitatively different conclusions. We demonstrate that by using different combinations of mis-specifications it is possible to generate (almost) every trajectory that has been reported in the literature. With a model specification that avoids these four biases, we find an age-happiness trajectory that declines slowly over adulthood (altogether about half a scale point). The decline comes to a halt and we observe even a small increase (about one tenth of a scale point) during the golden ages. Afterwards, in old age a very steep decline in happiness sets in.

The research is here.

A psychologically rich life: Beyond happiness and meaning

Oishi, S., & Westgate, E. C. (2022).

Psychological Review, 129(4), 790–811.

https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000317

Abstract

Psychological science has typically conceptualized a good life in terms of either hedonic or eudaimonic well-being. We propose that psychological richness is another, neglected aspect of what people consider a good life. Unlike happy or meaningful lives, psychologically rich lives are best characterized by a variety of interesting and perspective-changing experiences. We present empirical evidence that happiness, meaning, and psychological richness are related but distinct and desirable aspects of a good life, with unique causes and correlates. In doing so, we show that a nontrivial number of people around the world report they would choose a psychologically rich life at the expense of a happy or meaningful life, and that approximately a third say that undoing their life’s biggest regret would have made their lives psychologically richer. Furthermore, we propose that the predictors of a psychologically rich life are different from those of a happy life or a meaningful life, and report evidence suggesting that people leading psychologically rich lives tend to be more curious, think more holistically, and lean more politically liberal. Together, this work moves us beyond the dichotomy of hedonic versus eudaimonic well-being, and lays the foundation for the study of psychological richness as another dimension of a good life.

Summary of Empirical Evidence

A psychologically rich life, filled with a wide variety of interesting and perspective-changing experiences, is distinct from a happy life and a meaningful life. Psychometrically, a 3-factor model, in which happiness, meaning, and psychological richness each constitute discrete constructs, fits the data significantly better than 1- or 2-factor models which conflate richness with happiness or meaning.  Likewise, people with psychologically rich lives differ in personality from people leading happy or meaningful lives. Openness to experience, in particular, as well as extraversion strongly predicts psychological richness. Finally, leading a psychologically rich life predicts important outcomes above and beyond a happy and/or meaningful life, including system justification, political orientation, attributional complexity, and challenge-seeking.

In sum, the building blocks of a psychologically rich life are different. Particular life experiences and situational factors uniquely contribute to psychological richness, without increasing happiness or meaning. For instance, students’ lives were psychologically richer after a semester studying abroad, but not happier or more meaningful. In experimental work, we likewise find that perspective change uniquely predicts psychological richness. Figure-ground illusions consistently evoke more psychological richness than comparable drawings (but do not increase positive moods). Shifts in perspective increase how psychologically rich (but not how personally meaningful) people find cognitive activities, and perspective-changing information (e.g., learning that a pianist is blind) enriches a musical performance. Finally, perceived difficulty is uniquely associated with psychological richness and (independent of outcomes) predicts how rich, but not how happy or meaningful, people find escape rooms. This is clearly illustrated in the obituary studies: Dramatic (and mostly unpleasant) life events such as unemployment and bereavement are positively associated with richness but negatively associated with happiness.

A pdf of the research is here.

A Little Good Goes an Unexpectedly Long Way: Underestimating the Positive Impact of Kindness on Recipients

Kumar, A., & Epley, N. 

(2021, November 15). 

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/3yast

Abstract

Performing random acts of kindness increases happiness in both givers and receivers, but we find that givers systematically undervalue their positive impact on recipients. In both field and laboratory settings (Experiments 1a-2b), those performing a random act of kindness predicted how positive recipients would feel and recipients reported how they actually felt. From giving away a cup of hot chocolate in a park to giving away a gift in the lab, those performing a random act of kindness consistently underestimated how positive their recipients would feel, thinking their act was of less value than recipients perceived it to be. Givers’ miscalibrated expectations are driven partly by an egocentric bias in evaluations of the act itself (Experiment 3). Whereas recipients’ positive reactions are enhanced by the warmth conveyed in a kind act, givers’ expectations are relatively insensitive to the warmth conveyed in their action. Underestimating the positive impact of a random act of kindness also leads givers to underestimate the behavioral consequences their prosociality will produce in recipients through indirect reciprocity (Experiment 4). We suggest that givers’ miscalibrated expectations matter because they can create a barrier to engaging in prosocial actions more often in everyday life (Experiments 5a-5b), to the detriment of people’s own wellbeing, to others’ wellbeing, and to civil society.

General Discussion

Prosocial actions, such as performing random acts of kindness, tend to improve wellbeing for both those who perform prosocial acts as well as for those who receive them.  Indeed, those who performed a random act of kindness in our experiments reported feeling significantly more positive than they normally do, and two of the experiments confirmed that performers felt better than participants who were not given the opportunity to perform a random act of kindness. Another found that performers of acts of kindness felt more positive after being kind than they reported feeling at the beginning of the experiment.Being more prosocial did not come at a cost to people’s own wellbeing; it enhanced it.  Daily life, however, affords many opportunities for engaging in these sorts of prosocial activities that people do not seem to take.  We believe our research suggests one possible reason why: that those performing random acts of kindness undervalue the positive impact they are having on recipients.  People’s choices are often guided by either an implicit or explicit calculation of expected value (Becker, 1993).  Underestimating how positive a recipient would feel after even a small act of kindness could lead people to engage in prosocial actions less often than might be optimal for both their own and others’ wellbeing.

Across many different actions, with many different participants, and in many different contexts, performers systematically perceived their random act of kindness to be a more minor action than recipients perceived it to be, and also systematically underestimated how positive recipients would feel afterwards.Performers were not confused, of course, that recipients would feel good about their experience.  In all cases performers expected recipients to feel more positive than they normally do.  Nevertheless, performers were still systematically miscalibrated as recipients felt even better than expected.

The research is here.

Population ethical intuitions

Caviola, L., Althaus, D., Mogensen, A., 

& Goodwin, G. (2021, April 1). 

A pdf is here.

Abstract

We investigated lay people’s population ethical intuitions (N = 4,374), i.e., their moral evaluations of populations that differ in size and composition. First, we found that people place greater relative weight on, and are more sensitive to, suffering compared to happiness. Participants, on average, believed that more happy people are needed to outweigh a given amount of unhappy people in a population (Studies 1a-c). Second, we found that—in contrast to so-called person-affecting views—people do not consider the creation of new people as morally neutral. Participants considered it good to create a new happy person and bad to create a new unhappy person (Study 2). Third, we found that people take into account both the average level (averagism) and the total level (totalism) of happiness when evaluating populations. Participants preferred populations with greater total happiness levels when the average level remained constant (Study 3) and populations with greater average happiness levels when the total level remained constant (Study 4). When the two principles were in conflict, participants’ preferences lay in between the recommendations of the two principles, suggesting that both are applied simultaneously (Study 5). In certain cases, participants even showed averagist preferences when averagism disfavors adding more happy people and favors adding more unhappy people to a population (Study 6). However, when participants were prompted to reflect as opposed to rely on their intuitions, their preferences became more totalist (Studies 5-6). Our findings have implications for moral psychology, philosophy and policy making.

From the Discussion

Suffering is more bad than than happiness is good

We found that people weigh suffering more than happiness when they evaluate the goodness of populations consisting of both happy and unhappy people. Thus, people are neither following strict negative utilitarianism (minimizing suffering, giving no weight to maximizing happiness at all) nor strict classical utilitarianism (minimizing suffering and maximizing happiness, weighing both equally). Instead, the average person’s intuitions seem to track a mixture of these two theories. In Studies 1a-c, participants on average believed that approximately 1.5-3 times more happy people are required to outweigh a given amount of unhappy people. The precise trade ratio between happiness and suffering depended on the intensity levels of happiness and suffering. (In additional preliminary studies, we found that the trade ratio can also heavily depend on the framing of the question.) Study 1c clarified that, on average, participants continued to believe that more happiness was needed to outweigh suffering even when the happiness and suffering units were exactly equally intense. This suggests that people generally weigh suffering more than happiness in their moral assessments above and beyond perceiving suffering to be more intense than happiness. However, our studies also made clear that there are individual differences and that a substantial proportion of participants weighed happiness and suffering equally strongly, in line with classical utilitarianism.

Want to be Happy, Be Grateful

David Steindl-Rast

Ted Talk

Originally presented June 2013

The one thing all humans have in common is that each of us wants to be happy, says Brother David Steindl-Rast, a monk and interfaith scholar. And happiness, he suggests, is born from gratitude. An inspiring lesson in slowing down, looking where you're going, and above all, being grateful.

Machine learning uncovers the most robust self-report predictors of relationship quality across 43 longitudinal couples studies

S. Joel and others
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 
Aug 2020, 117 (32) 19061-19071
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1917036117

Abstract

Given the powerful implications of relationship quality for health and well-being, a central mission of relationship science is explaining why some romantic relationships thrive more than others. This large-scale project used machine learning (i.e., Random Forests) to 1) quantify the extent to which relationship quality is predictable and 2) identify which constructs reliably predict relationship quality. Across 43 dyadic longitudinal datasets from 29 laboratories, the top relationship-specific predictors of relationship quality were perceived-partner commitment, appreciation, sexual satisfaction, perceived-partner satisfaction, and conflict. The top individual-difference predictors were life satisfaction, negative affect, depression, attachment avoidance, and attachment anxiety. Overall, relationship-specific variables predicted up to 45% of variance at baseline, and up to 18% of variance at the end of each study. Individual differences also performed well (21% and 12%, respectively). Actor-reported variables (i.e., own relationship-specific and individual-difference variables) predicted two to four times more variance than partner-reported variables (i.e., the partner’s ratings on those variables). Importantly, individual differences and partner reports had no predictive effects beyond actor-reported relationship-specific variables alone. These findings imply that the sum of all individual differences and partner experiences exert their influence on relationship quality via a person’s own relationship-specific experiences, and effects due to moderation by individual differences and moderation by partner-reports may be quite small. Finally, relationship-quality change (i.e., increases or decreases in relationship quality over the course of a study) was largely unpredictable from any combination of self-report variables. This collective effort should guide future models of relationships.

Significance

What predicts how happy people are with their romantic relationships? Relationship science—an interdisciplinary field spanning psychology, sociology, economics, family studies, and communication—has identified hundreds of variables that purportedly shape romantic relationship quality. The current project used machine learning to directly quantify and compare the predictive power of many such variables among 11,196 romantic couples. People’s own judgments about the relationship itself—such as how satisfied and committed they perceived their partners to be, and how appreciative they felt toward their partners—explained approximately 45% of their current satisfaction. The partner’s judgments did not add information, nor did either person’s personalities or traits. Furthermore, none of these variables could predict whose relationship quality would increase versus decrease over time.

Why Being Kind Helps You, Too—Especially Now

Elizabeth Bernstein
The Wall Street Journal
Originally posted 11 August 20

Here is an excerpt:

Kindness can even change your brain, says Stephanie Preston, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan who studies the neural basis for empathy and altruism. When we’re kind, a part of the reward system called the nucleus accumbens activates—our brain responds the same way it would if we ate a piece of chocolate cake. In addition, when we see the response of the recipient of our kindness—when the person thanks us or smiles back—our brain releases oxytocin, the feel-good bonding hormone. This oxytocin boost makes the pleasure of the experience more lasting.

It feels so good that the brain craves more. “It’s an upward spiral—your brain learns it’s rewarding, so it motivates you to do it again,” Dr. Preston says.

Are certain acts of kindness better than others? Yes. If you want to reap the personal benefits, “you need to be sincere,” says Sara Konrath, a psychologist and associate professor at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, where she runs a research lab that studies empathy and altruism.

It also helps to expect good results. A study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology in 2019 showed people who believed that kindness is good for them showed a greater increase in positive emotions, satisfaction with life and feelings of connection with others—as well as a greater decrease in negative emotions—than those who did not.

How can you be kind even when you may not feel like it? Make it a habit. Take stock of how you behave day to day. Are you trusting and generous? Or defensive and hostile? “Kindness is a lifestyle,” says Dr. Konrath.

Start by being kind to yourself—you’re going to burn out if you help everyone else and neglect your own needs. Remember that little acts add up: a smile, a phone call to a lonely friend, letting someone have the parking space. Understand the difference between being kind and being nice—kindness is genuinely helping or caring about someone; niceness is being polite. Don’t forget your loved ones. Kindness is not just for strangers.

The info is here.

Workism Is Making Americans Miserable

Derek Thompson
The Atlantic
Originally published 24 Feb 20

Here is an excerpt:

The decline of traditional faith in America has coincided with an explosion of new atheisms. Some people worship beauty, some worship political identities, and others worship their children. But everybody worships something. And workism is among the most potent of the new religions competing for congregants.

What is workism? It is the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.

Homo industrious is not new to the American landscape. The American dream—that hoary mythology that hard work always guarantees upward mobility—has for more than a century made the U.S. obsessed with material success and the exhaustive striving required to earn it.

No large country in the world as productive as the United States averages more hours of work a year. And the gap between the U.S. and other countries is growing. Between 1950 and 2012, annual hours worked per employee fell by about 40 percent in Germany and the Netherlands—but by only 10 percent in the United States. Americans “work longer hours, have shorter vacations, get less in unemployment, disability, and retirement benefits, and retire later, than people in comparably rich societies,” wrote Samuel P. Huntington in his 2005 book Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity.

One group has led the widening of the workist gap: rich men.

In 1980, the highest-earning men actually worked fewer hours per week than middle-class and low-income men, according to a survey by the Minneapolis Fed. But that’s changed. By 2005, the richest 10 percent of married men had the longest average workweek. In that same time, college-educated men reduced their leisure time more than any other group. Today, it is fair to say that elite American men have transformed themselves into the world’s premier workaholics, toiling longer hours than both poorer men in the U.S. and rich men in similarly rich countries.

This shift defies economic logic—and economic history. The rich have always worked less than the poor, because they could afford to. The landed gentry of preindustrial Europe dined, danced, and gossiped, while serfs toiled without end. In the early 20th century, rich Americans used their ample downtime to buy weekly movie tickets and dabble in sports. Today’s rich American men can afford vastly more downtime. But they have used their wealth to buy the strangest of prizes: more work!

The info is here.

Has capitalism has turned us into narcissists?

Terry Eagleton
The Guardian
Originally published August 3, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

In our own time, the concept of happiness has moved from the private sphere to the public one. As William Davies reports in this fascinating study, a growing number of corporations employ chief happiness officers, while Google has a “jolly good fellow” to keep the company’s spirits up. Maybe the Bank of England should consider hiring a jester. Specialist happiness consultants advise those who have been forcibly displaced from their homes on how to move on emotionally. Two years ago, British Airways trialled a “happiness blanket”, which turns from red to blue as the passenger becomes more relaxed so that your level of contentment is visible to the flight attendants. A new drug, Wellbutrin, promises to alleviate major depressive symptoms occurring after the loss of a loved one. It is supposed to work so effectively that the American Psychiatric Association has ruled that to be unhappy for more than two weeks after the death of another human being can be considered a mental illness. Bereavement is a risk to one’s psychological wellbeing.

It is no wonder that the notion of happiness has been taken into public ownership, given the remarkable spread of spiritual malaise around the globe. Around a third of American adults and close to half in Britain believe that they are sometimes depressed. Even so, more than half a century after the discovery of antidepressants, nobody really knows how they function.

The article is here.

Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Subsequent Happiness

Steven D. Levitt
NBER Working Paper No. 22487
Issued in August 2016

Abstract

Little is known about whether people make good choices when facing important decisions. This paper reports on a large-scale randomized field experiment in which research subjects having difficulty making a decision flipped a coin to help determine their choice. For important decisions (e.g. quitting a job or ending a relationship), those who make a change (regardless of the outcome of the coin toss) report being substantially happier two months and six months later. This correlation, however, need not reflect a causal impact. To assess causality, I use the outcome of a coin toss. Individuals who are told by the coin toss to make a change are much more likely to make a change and are happier six months later than those who were told by the coin to maintain the status quo. The results of this paper suggest that people may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing choices.

The paper is here.

On the misguided pursuit of happiness and ethical decision making: The roles of focalism and the impact bias in unethical and selfish behavior

Laura J. Noval
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
Volume 133, March 2016, Pages 1–16

Abstract

An important body of research in the field of behavioral ethics argues that individuals behave unethically and selfishly because they want to obtain desired outcomes, such as career advancement and monetary rewards. Concurrently, a large body of literature in social psychology has shown that the subjective value of an outcome is determined by its anticipated emotional impact. Such impact has been consistently found to be overestimated both in its intensity and in its duration (i.e. impact bias) due to focalism (i.e. excessive focus on the desired outcome). Across four empirical studies, this investigation demonstrates that reducing focalism and thereby attenuating the impact bias in regards to desired outcomes decreases people’s tendency to engage in both unethical and selfish behavior to obtain those outcomes.

Highlights

• Individuals engage in unethical and selfish behavior to obtain desired outcomes, such as monetary or career rewards.
• The anticipated emotional impact of the outcomes individuals seek to obtain is overestimated (i.e. impact bias).
• The impact bias results from focalism (i.e. excessive focus on an outcome).
• In four studies, focalism and the impact bias about desired outcomes were experimentally reduced.
• The focalism reduction resulted in a decreased tendency of individuals to engage in unethical and selfish behavior.

The article is here.

Why Aristole Wants You to Be Good

By Kristjan Kristjansson
Big Ideas at Slate.com

Here is an excerpt:

Many social scientists consider this philosophical question quirky at best. The reason? An abundance of psychological evidence demonstrates the extrinsic benefits of moral choices over immoral ones, even for psychology’s Eldorado: subjective well-being. Of course, even though social scientists pride themselves on their value-neutrality, they are rarely neutral with regard to what they consider the “ungrounded grounder” of all human strivings, namely happiness, and they typically understand happiness as subjective well-being.

A case in point here is the copious literature on the benefits of the moral emotion of gratitude for subjective well-being. We now know with certainty—at least the sort of certainty to which any social scientific inquiry can aspire—that grateful people are in general happy people. Over and above that, meticulous empirical research on gratitude has shown all sorts of instrumental benefits for what social scientists call “pro-social ends.” Thus, as a moral barometer, gratitude attends affirmatively to a positive moral change in our environment; as a moral motivator, gratitude urges us to contribute to the welfare of our benefactor (or even third parties) in the future; as a moral reinforcer, gratitude makes benefactors more likely to replicate their benevolent acts at later junctures and in different contexts.

The entire article is here.

How Should We Make the Most Important Decisions of Our Lives?

By L.A. Paul and Paul Bloom
Slate.com
Originally posted on March 5, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

Of course, introspection might be a terrible guide to what we really want from our lives. I suspect that it is. But while rejecting introspection might be rational, we rarely want to abandon it completely when making important personal choices about how to live our lives. Instead, we tend to mix it with evidence in rather unstable ways. We’re often surprised at our own experiences and rueful about what we now see as our earlier, deluded predictions of how things would go. But at the same time, we’re confident about our current views.

So when I consider the major, irreversible, long-term and life-changing decision to have a baby, of course I should weigh what other people tell me about it, and I should also attend to what the best science says. But I also want to consider what I think it will be like for me. After all, I’m the one who will be spending the next 18 years raising my child. I want to base my decision, at least partly, on what I think it will be like to be a parent, and I want my thoughts and feelings about it to play a central role in what I decide to do. If becoming a parent is transformative, I can’t rationally do that.

The entire interview is here.

Beliefs About the True Self Explain Asymmetries Based on Moral Judgment

George E. Newman, Julian De Freitas, Joshua Knobe
Cognitive Science (2014) 1–30.

Abstract

Past research has identified a number of asymmetries based on moral judgments. Beliefs about
(a) what a person values, (b) whether a person is happy, (c) whether a person has shown weakness
of will, and (d) whether a person deserves praise or blame seem to depend critically on whether participants themselves find the agent’s behavior to be morally good or bad. To date, however, the origins of these asymmetries remain unknown. The present studies examine whether beliefs about an
agent’s “true self” explain these observed asymmetries based on moral judgment. Using the identical
materials from previous studies in this area, a series of five experiments indicate that people
show a general tendency to conclude that deep inside every individual there is a “true self” calling
him or her to behave in ways that are morally virtuous. In turn, this belief causes people to hold different intuitions about what the agent values, whether the agent is happy, whether he or she has
shown weakness of will, and whether he or she deserves praise or blame. These results not only
help to answer important questions about how people attribute various mental states to others; they
also contribute to important theoretical debates regarding how moral values may shape our beliefs
about phenomena that, on the surface, appear to be decidedly non-moral in nature.

The entire article is here.