This is fascinating, thank you. I think you're insufficiently sceptical about the research, though. It's not just that it doesn't establish a casual relationship, it's that the questions asked are unlikely to yield any useful information.
Is someone rich supposed to be happy, do you think, or do you think other people are likely to think? If you're asked if you're happy by a stranger, what answer would you feel is most appropriate for someone in your position in life? If asked by a variety of different types of stranger, of varying levels of status and connection to yourself, how would your answer alter? What role do guilt, entitlement and shame have in your answer?
This research is like trying to work out whether an animal is currently on fire by asking people what they think others might say about how red the animal looks as compared to any other animals they can think of. It's stupid on so many levels that any results you get will be self-evidently worthless.
That’s a great point and thanks for the comment Nick! The jargon for what you’re describing is ‘demand characteristics’, i.e. what the participant thinks the researcher would want to hear from them. One strength of Kahneman’s original work is that it asks about positive and blue feelings and stress without naming happiness explicitly, which might reduce such demand characteristics—the Killingsworth follow-up is a bit more on the nose. The real kicker in my view though is that asking people if they’re happy might be the best we can do. There’s no way to measure happiness from the brain (barring some very basic pleasure responses in the striatum) so if not with a straight question, then how should we measure happiness?
This is fascinating, thank you. I think you're insufficiently sceptical about the research, though. It's not just that it doesn't establish a casual relationship, it's that the questions asked are unlikely to yield any useful information.
Is someone rich supposed to be happy, do you think, or do you think other people are likely to think? If you're asked if you're happy by a stranger, what answer would you feel is most appropriate for someone in your position in life? If asked by a variety of different types of stranger, of varying levels of status and connection to yourself, how would your answer alter? What role do guilt, entitlement and shame have in your answer?
This research is like trying to work out whether an animal is currently on fire by asking people what they think others might say about how red the animal looks as compared to any other animals they can think of. It's stupid on so many levels that any results you get will be self-evidently worthless.
That’s a great point and thanks for the comment Nick! The jargon for what you’re describing is ‘demand characteristics’, i.e. what the participant thinks the researcher would want to hear from them. One strength of Kahneman’s original work is that it asks about positive and blue feelings and stress without naming happiness explicitly, which might reduce such demand characteristics—the Killingsworth follow-up is a bit more on the nose. The real kicker in my view though is that asking people if they’re happy might be the best we can do. There’s no way to measure happiness from the brain (barring some very basic pleasure responses in the striatum) so if not with a straight question, then how should we measure happiness?