Friday, February 02, 2007

Today, however, the problem of happiness has attracted the attention of empirical social scientists. They proceed more directly: they ask people whether or not they are happy and try to discover what traits happy people share.

The goal of positive psychology, as the field is known, is analogous to that of medicine. Physicians use the results of scientific inquiry to tell us how to live longer, healthier lives. The positive psychologists use the results of their scientific work to tell us how to live happier lives -- and their work is beginning to catch on. For example, at Harvard, a positive psychology course designed to teach happiness was the most popular course on campus last year.

The goal of positive psychology, as the field is known, is analogous to that of medicine. Physicians use the results of scientific inquiry to tell us how to live longer, healthier lives. The positive psychologists use the results of their scientific work to tell us how to live happier lives -- and their work is beginning to catch on. For example, at Harvard, a positive psychology course designed to teach happiness was the most popular course on campus last year.

Some of the empirical data on happiness confirm what common sense would tell us, but others are a bit surprising. Consider, for example, the results of the Pew Research Center's study on happiness, released last year. It asked three thousand adults whether, in general, they judged themselves to be very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy, and correlated these answers with the respondents' answers to a variety of other questions about themselves and their regular activities.

The Pew Center's study found that married people are happier than the unmarried and that people who attend church more frequently, regardless of denomination, are happier than those who attend less often. More people with college degrees report being very happy (42 percent) than people with only some college (33 percent) or a high school diploma or less (30 percent).

Not surprisingly, health correlates very strongly with happiness: 48 percent of people with excellent health say they are very happy, and 55 percent of those who say their health is poor report being not too happy.

Whether or not money can buy happiness, people with higher incomes report a greater degree of happiness than people with lower incomes: 49 percent of respondents claiming a family income over $100,000 per year said they were very happy, compared with only 24 percent of those with family incomes under $30,000.

It turns out, however, that (for citizens of developed countries, at least) it is not so much the amount of income that matters for happiness as whether one has more or less than the average income. Although average incomes have trended steadily upwards for decades, people in the top quarter of income have consistently reported a greater degree of happiness than people in the bottom quarter of the income distribution. The higher social status that high incomes bring seems to contribute more to happiness than the goods those incomes enable rich people to buy.

My favorite finding in the Pew study is that Republicans are happier than Democrats and Independents -- and have consistently reported being so for as long as the data are available (since 1972). This finding holds independently of both income and ideology: poor Republicans are happier than poor Democrats and Independents; liberal Republicans are roughly as happy as conservative Republicans, and both are happier than liberal and conservative Independents and Democrats.

Before you try to increase your happiness by getting married or registering Republican, bear in mind that the science of happiness is primitive. Survey- based studies, like the Pew report, tell us what is true, on average, of large numbers of people, but what works for many or even most people may not work for you. More importantly, such studies do not tell us why any of these traits, such as being Republican, correlate with happiness.

The biggest weakness with the science of happiness, however, is that it studies happiness as if it were only the present feeling of contentment. But people are more than creatures who feel: we also reflect, think, and judge. True well-being requires more than that we feel happy. We must also be able to reflect upon our lives and judge that we have used our limited time on earth well. No science can tell us what is worth doing and striving for and what is not, which is why we should be wary of letting the lessons of positive psychology displace those of religion and philosophy.