So the big question is--where do you find the
happiest people in the world?
Overall, Scandinavian countries seem to be the happiest. Income
is very important to happiness up to a point, and it correlates with
democracy, human rights, infrastructure, longevity and other things.
But once you allow for that, cultural factors that have little to do
with income seem to make a big difference. If you take income out of
the equation--if you level the playing field, in other words--the
happiest people are Hispanic.
Why?
Hispanic people tend to look at what's going to go right. They
ask: "What can I do that's fun, what can I do that's interesting?"
Americans are like this, and Britons to an extent. They worry more
about what good things they can get rather than the bad things.
The other big question is, obviously, who are
the unhappiest?
Some of the former communist countries and the very poor
countries consistently show up as the unhappiest. But allowing for
income, the Pacific Rim countries are much less happy than you'd
expect. People from Japan, China and Korea tend to see the glass
half-empty. When you ask them how satisfied they are with their
lives, they look at what has gone wrong. If nothing big has gone
wrong, then they're satisfied. They are a little more tense because
they have to be on guard, they have to be careful to avoid making
errors and pay the right respect to people.
Why is it harder for Asians to be happy?
In the West the individualistic culture means that your mood
matters much more than it does in the East. When assessing life
satisfaction, Japanese and Koreans count what their parents think
about how they're living their lives more highly than their own
moods.
How does that work?
Take love. In the US, if you asked someone why they divorced
their wife and they said they didn't love her any more, you might
say: "That's too bad." In Korea, you'd say: "Are you crazy?" Your
personal feelings are much less important and not a justification
for your actions. Certainly the biggest cultural differences are to
do with pride and guilt. Hispanics report much more pride and Asians
much less pride, because of the stress on humility in their culture.
Asians report more of all the negative emotions, such as anger and
sadness. With guilt they report even more, and Hispanics report even
less.
Happiness is supposed to be everyone's goal.
Have you found that to be true?
Actually, no. We believe that people have all kinds of values,
and the value of being in a good mood, of having fun and feeling
joyful--that's just one value among many. It's not everybody's
ultimate value. Now, you might say satisfaction is a higher goal
because people would have that if they achieved something they
valued. We have found that Asian-Americans are more willing to give
up fun and enjoyment more frequently than white Americans to reach
some other goal.
So are Asians, or any others, worse off for
being less happy?
Asian cultures obviously work pretty well, and they've been
around a long time. The important thing is that all of us need all
the emotions. The dysfunctional thing is not only the inability to
feel happiness, but also the inability to feel some of the negative
emotions when they turn up. Those emotions do things for us. At the
same time, while you need to feel anger and fear when it's
appropriate, you don't want to be feeling those too much of the time
because it's unpleasant.
Happiness can mean different things to
different people. How do you know that people take what you say the
same way?
This can be a problem. The word "happy" doesn't have an exact
equivalent in some languages. In English, happiness has a number of
different meanings. It depends on the context. It might mean
"satisfied", it might mean "joyful", it might mean a longer-term
happiness. We try to break down what people mean by using a bunch of
different words describing emotions, including words from their own
language. We use these words in various different tests of
happiness.
How do you do that?
For example, we ask people how happy they are in general. Then we
do "experience sampling", where we contact them at random moments
over a period of time and ask them how they feel at that moment, and
then add up those scores. Finally, we do retrospective recall, where
we ask people how happy they were at a particular time. We use all
these so we know what we're asking them and to pick up any biases.
The only measures we haven't yet used are biological, such as
cortisol and immune response. We could use these to look at stress
and tension. People's reports of their feelings are crucial, but I
don't believe they should take priority over their physiology or
facial expressions.
What advantages does happiness bring?
In the West, if you're a cheerful, happy person, your marriage is
more likely to last, and you're more likely to make more money and
be successful at your job. Whether that's true because everybody
likes happy people in Western societies, so you get rewarded more,
we don't know. On average, happy people have stronger immune
systems, and there is some evidence that they live longer.
You've found that people have a remarkable
capacity to adapt emotionally to a terminal illness or debilitating
injury. Why is this?
I don't want to make the case that health problems don't matter.
People with multiple, severe problems do report lower levels of
happiness. For others, when they realise they can't be on the
basketball team any more, for example, they see there are new things
open to them. They realise there are positive things in their lives,
such as social support and love of family, that they hadn't noticed
very much before. But there are some things in life that knock you
down from which you don't come back fully. One of those is
unemployment. Unemployed people show a big negative drop. They come
back, but not to where they were before. Widows and widowers come
back, but it takes them quite a few years.
So does winning the lottery really make you
happy?
This does push up your happiness level, as does marriage, but it
doesn't last forever. It can last for a year or two.
Does it help to be well-off?
Every study that's ever been done on this has always found that
happiness increases with income, but in the West the effect is
always a small one. Elsewhere, among slum dwellers in India, for
example, the effect is much more substantial. There's quite a
difference between making $1 and $5 a day--for one thing, it
dictates whether you get to eat that day. In the US, too, it's much
more likely that a poor person will be unhappy. We studied people
from the Forbes list who were worth more than $100 million.
Most were slightly happier than the average American.
Can science really add anything to our
understanding of happiness, beyond the analyses of philosophers?
Bertrand Russell, certainly a great intellect, wrote a book about
happiness in which he stated that having children was one of the
most important keys to gaining happiness. But research has shown
that this is simply not true. People with and without children are
about equally satisfied with their lives. We find that people become
more satisfied with life when they have a baby, but then drop back
to their previous levels after a year or two, and perhaps even go a
bit lower than their previous baseline. So as smart as Russell was,
pure thought is not always a match for careful empirical study.
Are there any gurus who have got it right?
There are certain things the Dalai Lama says about not stressing
yourself out and approaching life with a good mental attitude that I
think are probably true. I do agree with a lot of common-sense
recipes. The Stoics of ancient Greece said a lot of things that were
sensible, such as the need for calm.
How do you explain the explosion in the market
for self-help books?
Part of it is the realisation that you're responsible for your
own happiness. You're not going to learn about it at school. There
they teach you how to add up, but they tell you very little about
how to live your life. So there's a vacuum. But it's also because
people's expectations are higher.
How?
People think they should be living on the edge of joyfulness all
the time. You get people who are actually happy, but they think
happiness is so important that they strive to be even happier. Yet
we're not built to be joyful. We're built to be positive, but not to
be stuck in a kind of euphoria. We should be in that mid-range so
that when something good happens, we can go up. This desire to be
always euphoric is a product of medicine, of standards of living,
but also of individualism, where the emphasis is on you
individually, your emotions and feeling good.
Why did you decide to study happiness--or
subjective well-being, as you call it?
Around 1980, I had just finished a study on aggression and crowd
behaviour and was looking for a new area. I thought, happiness is a
wide-open field, not much has been done in it apart from a few
sociological studies, and it's what people are worried about. People
are not just worried about getting rid of depression, they're
worried about living a happy, fulfilled life. So it's a big issue.
And it's positive, it's interesting. I had wanted to do a study on
happiness when I was an undergraduate, but my professor wouldn't let
me. He said it was too fuzzy.
Do you want to increase the sum of people's
happiness?
I would like other people to take on that mission. I see myself
as a more basic scientist, where my major concern is to define the
components of subjective well-being and see if we can measure them
reliably. As a scientist, those measurements are crucial. That's a
pretty big undertaking by itself. People ask me if I feel bad about
the fact that I'm not actually doing anything to make people
happier, but it's like a physicist studying basic particles: they're
not doing anything to make energy. Some people have to do the basic
stuff and that's what I'm doing. The intellectual questions are
really exciting.
Do you think it's possible for everyone to be
happy?
I think it's possible for most people to be happy most of the
time. I also believe that there's a small proportion of society who
are so predisposed to depression that drugs are necessary to prevent
it. But we find that the majority of people in the West are mostly
happy, certainly above neutral. I find it interesting that
reporters, especially those from New York City, cannot believe that.
I don't know whether reporters from that city are particularly
unhappy, but they find it fantastic when I tell them that most
people are, on average, happy. |